Paper doll, Aug 2010.
Armor in Diablo III is greatly-enhanced and improved on what was found in Diablo II. There are more types of armor, more varieties of each kind of armor, and much improved graphical representations of armor.
Armor dyes, crafting, socketing, enchanting, and many other features have also been added to extend the armor finding game.
Little is yet known about armor values or modifiers. Some items have been seen in early testing, but as the itemization balancing process takes place late in a game's development cycle, nothing in screenshots seen much before the beta begins should be taken too seriously.
Contents
Armor Types
Various pieces of armor, by a master blacksmith.
There are more types of armor to be worn in Diablo III. All the item slots return from Diablo II, plus several new ones; shoulders, pants, and bracers.
Click the following links to learn more about each type of armor. Full listings of all the items in the game will be added once the information becomes available.
Armor Ratings and Stats
Little is known about how defense, blocking, resistance, and other defensive stats work in Diablo III.
=Defense
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 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.)