Armor
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
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.
- Helms
- Body Armor
- Shields
- Shoulder Armor -- A new type of armor added in Diablo III.
- Bracers -- A new type of forearm armor added in Diablo III.
- Gloves
- Belts -- These do not hold potions as in Diablo II. They're purely another piece of armor.
- Pants -- A new type of armor added in Diablo III.
- Boots
- Rings
- Amulets
Class-Specific Armor
Unlike the many Class-Specific Weapons, armor in Diablo III is not limited by class. All classes can equip all types and quality levels of armor (with possibly some exceptions for shields). [1]
- Bashiok: There still aren’t any armor restriction planned. Armor is a different issue as it’s shown in much the same was as Diablo II, so more types don’t actually increase the animation/modeling costs like weapon types would.
Individual Armor Appearance
The same piece of Armor in Diablo III will look very different depending on which class is wearing it. This was also true in Diablo II, in most cases, but the designs have been made radically more varied in Diablo III.
Another change is that there are no normal/exceptional/elite item types in Diablo III. In Diablo II the same piece of equipment existed in two different types, with a third (elite) added in the expansion. This meant that characters could find elite armor in Hell difficulty, and armor that looked like cloth would have far more defense than the normal or exceptional version of full plate mail. The Diablo III team didn't like this, and now there are 18 levels of armor to be found, stretching throughout all three difficulty levels. Each of these levels looks quite a bit different from the others.
Though there's alot of variety, there are consistent appearance themes.[2]
- The Witchdoctor’s thematic palette is proving to be very broad. He can wear a lot of cool armor and still look like a Witchdoctor.
Gear Sets
Gear sets are the term the D3 Team uses for the 18 different armor sets. These items look very different on each class, and 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 mail.
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
Little is known about how defense, blocking, resistance, and other defensive stats work in Diablo III.
Defense
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.)
