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→Armor Types
==Armor Ratings and Stats==
Little is known about how defense, blocking, resistance, and other defensive stats work in Diablo III.
===Defense==
[[File:Buckler1.jpg|frame|Buckler, August 2010.]]
Most items of armor that have been seen thus far have vastly higher defense ratings than comparable items did in Diablo II. A plain buckler in D3 has 78 defense, in one item hover from August 2010. To get that high in base defense on a {{iw|Shields#Elite Diablo II shield}}, you've got to go up to the highest quality Exceptional versions of shields. The Elite version of D2's buckler, the heater, has 95-110 Defense.
Seemingly high defense on D2 shields means nothing though, out of context. It will simply take some mental recalibration for players to get used to thinking of 78 defense as what to expect from crappy low level items. A normal buckler in Diablo 2 has 4-6 Defense, so scale up all Defense values in your head around 20x.
===Blocking===
One big difference is that Diablo III [[shields]] list a value for blocking. The buckler in the shot to the right lists 6-10 blocking. This seems to be how much of the incoming damage such a shield will absorb, on a successful block. This is a huge change from Diablo 2, where successful blocking (which was fairly easy to raise to the maximum of 75% with good equipment and points in dexterity) absorbed 100% of the incoming physical damage.
This made a shield enormously useful for almost any melee character, far outweighing the lower damage dealt with a one-handed weapon. The Diablo III system seems likely to make two-handed weapons far more viable, if only because using a shield will not be such a huge defensive bonus.
See the shields page for more details.
===Resistances===
Nothing has yet been revealed about resistances, absorption, immunities, and other related issues. It's assumed that the Diablo III developers will try to make all the elements dangerous, forcing players to strive for high, balanced defense. (Unlike Diablo 2, where Lightning resistance was far and away the most important.)
