===Gear Sets===
[[Gear sets]] are the term the [[D3 Team]] uses for the 18 different armor sets. These items look very different on each classSee the gear sets page for full details. A few sample sets, and revealed by Blizzard showed off six of them prior to Blizzcon 2010. They did not identify the precise number of any of the gear sets, or let us known if any of the classes were wearing the same sets, but they did say that these were all fairly low level sets, somewhere around 4-7, in the 1-18 scale from light cloth to the heaviest plate mailcan be seen below.
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Above are the six gear sets Blizzard showed off pre-Blizzcon 2010. See the [[Gear Sets]] page for many more examples. This wiki will display detailed looks at all 18 gear sets for all five classes once the information is available.
==Armor Ratings and Stats==
The function of Armor is one of the bigger changes in Diablo III's [[combat ]] engine. In Diablo II, higher armor/defense (the terms were interchangeable) meant a character was less likely to be hit by a physical attack. A D2 character with very high defense could stand in the midst of swinging enemies and hardly be struck at all. As a result of this design feature, the developers had to make monster hits do very high damage, so when one did land, it hurt enough to matter. This resulted in characters taking no damage most of the time, with occasional spikes of very high damage.
In Diablo III, Armor does not reduce enemy to/hit. It reduces damage taken. Thus a D3 character with high armor will still get hit as often as a character with no armor; but each hit will cause much less damage. This, in theory, means that combat will result in a steady drain of hit points, which players must find ways to manage.
===Blocking===
Blocking is granted by [[shields]] and it works much like [[resistances]] and Armor do in Diablo III. A shield provides another form of damage mitigation, rather than a way to decrease enemy to/hit. All shields have a % chance to block, and an amount of damage they will absorb upon a successful block. A character's actual blocking % is determined by the shield's number, factored in with attributes, Clvl, and other values.
For example, here are the stats for a Buckler, the lowest level shield in the game:
===Defense==={{template:buckler}}
[[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 Note that high in base defense on a {{iw|Shields#Elite Diablo II shield}}, you've got many characters may choose not to go up to the highest quality Exceptional versions of use shields. The Elite version of D2's buckler, the heaterpreferring two-handed weapons, has 95dual-110 Defensewielding weapons, or off hand offensive-boosting items like [[orbs]] and [[mojos]].
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.
===Resistances===
===Blocking===Characters have resistances to [[fire]], [[cold]], [[arcane]], [[poison]], and [[lightning]] in Diablo III. There are other types of damage that can not be so directly resisted. Resistances provide another form of damage mitigation, one tailored to individual types of magical damage. The biggest change to resistances in Diablo III is that they are no longer percentage-based. They are instead like Armor; a number that increases with item and skill bonuses. The higher the number, the more damage they absorb.
One big difference is This means that Diablo III [[shields]] list a characters can always benefit from more resistance, rather than the value for blockingcapping off at 75%. 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 Items that add to the maximum of 75% with good equipment and points possible resistance are not found in dexterityDiablo III.) absorbed 100% of the incoming physical damage.
This made There is no global resistance penalty on the higher difficulty levels in Diablo III, a shield enormously useful feature change that allows for almost any melee charactermore consistent, far outweighing the lower damage dealt with a one-handed weapongradual difficulty changes. No more will characters enter [[Hell]] and find their resistances dropped to negative values. The Diablo III system seems likely Characters will just find that they need more and more resistance to make two-handed weapons far survive against more viabledifficult enemies, if only because using in a shield will not be such a huge defensive bonusmore linear difficulty increase.
See It is not known if any monsters have the shields page for more detailsability to lower character resistances, but it seems likely. Nothing equivalent to Diablo 2's Conviction Aura has been seen as a [[boss modifier]] in Diablo 3, but such effects might appear at higher difficulty levels.
Various class passive skills can directly increase or decrease character resistances. For instance, the Wizard's passive skill [[Glass Cannon]] lowers her resistances and Armor in exchange for greater offensive might.
===Resistances==={{Template:Wizard_Passive_Glass_Cannon}}
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.)
