Force Armor - Diablo Wiki
Open main menu

Diablo Wiki β

Force Armor

Force Armor is a rune effect in [Energy Armor]], a Utility Wizard skill.

  • This is an Armor spell. Only one Armor spell can be active at a time.

This rune effect grants a major defensive bonus, reducing the damage taken by the Wizard on incoming attacks.


Contents

Abused and Hotfixed

This rune effect was hotfixed shortly after release[1] since it was much too powerful as initially configured. The effect was not changed and still works as Blizzard intended, but they added a maximum damage absorb cap to prevent players from exploiting the effect with very low life and high regeneration builds.

To given an extreme example, imagine a Wizard with 100 hit points and 100 life regeneration per second. This rune would limit all incoming damage to 35, which would instantly refill. So long as the Wizard never took 3 hits simultaneously, she could never die. As this was rewarding players for creating low hit point/high regeneration builds, Blizzard felt that was an exploit and moved quickly to put a cap on the total damage absorbed by this rune.

For example, if a Wizard with 5000 hit points took a 25,000 damage hit:

  • Original rune function: 35% of 5000 is 1750, which is how much damage the Wizard takes. 23,250 damage is absorbed.
  • After the hotfix: The maximum damage mitigation is equal to 100% of the Wizard's maximum life, so 5000 points are absorbed, but the Wizard still takes 20,000 damage, and gets one-shotted.


Skill Rune Effects

Refer to the Energy Armor rune effects article for thorough descriptions of all five rune effects in this skill, including screenshots, videos, strategy tips, and other related information.

Name Level Description

<skill subcat="Armor spell" class="Wizard">Energy Armor</skill> <skill class="Wizard" rune="Force Armor">Energy Armor</skill>


Media

Screenshots and movies will be added post-release.


Development

Prior to the skill revision in February 2012, this rune effect was enabled by the Obsidian Rune, granting the following effect with a level 7 runestone:

IconObsidian.png
Force Armor

[e]

While Energy Armor is active, incoming attacks that would deal more than 26% of your maximum Life are reduced to deal 26% of your maximum Life instead.