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[[Image:Paper doll jan 12.jpg|left|thumb|250px|[[Paper doll]], Jan 2012.]]In Diablo III, "Armor" has two meanings. It can be a general term that refers to any type of non-weapon equipment worn by a player. It is also a specific term, a number found on every piece of armor. Heavier armor has a much higher Armor number, which translates to less damage taken by the character wearing it. The benefits of Armor are similar to the benefits of higher [[Defense]], the attribute.

As for armor in general, the # It's a common term used to refer to any sort of equipment is quite changed from Diablo IIIother than a weapon or shield. There are more types of armor and more slots on the [[paper doll]], but fewer individual kinds of armor; D3 offers just 18 pieces of torso armor, compared to 45 # It's a specific statistic that means what "defense" does in D2Xmost ARPGs. [[Higher Armor dyes]]means that characters take less damage from all attacks, through the [[craftingdamage mitigation]], [[socketing]], [[enchanting]], and many other features have also been added to extend the armor finding gameeffect.

==Armor Types's Function in Diablo 3== The armor stat works much like a resistance in Diablo 3. Higher Armor means that more of the damage from attacks is absorbed or mitigated. This is not how armor (defense) worked in Diablo 2; in that game higher armor worked against monster to/hit and made it less likely that they would strike your character with an attack. This design choice forced the developers to make monsters hit for very high damage since they so seldom connected, which lead to a boom or bust sort of combat.  Diablo 3 uses the resistance-like form of Armor to create a steady flow of damage that players can learn to mitigate with more Armor, higher hit points, blocking, life regeneration, life on hit/life leech, or other options.  ==Armor Damage Mitigation== [[File:Armor-tooltip.jpg|thumb|400px|Armor tooltip shows damage reduction.]]Every piece of armor (equipment) has an Armor value in Diablo III. These add up with Strength and may be modified by various skills and passives to arrive at a total Armor value which grants a substantial damage reduction. This figure is a key source of damage mitigation in Diablo 3 and has a major effect on a character's survival ability. Higher Armor values make a clear difference in the damage taken. Some stats, all for a level 60 character vs. level 60 monsters: * 1049 Armor = 25.26% Damage Reduction* 1987 Armor = 39.84% Damage Reduction* 3059 Armor = 50.49% Damage Reduction* 4024 Armor = 57.29% Damage Reduction* 4512 Armor = 60.06% Damage Reduction* 4963 Armor = 62.33% Damage Reduction* 5499 Armor = 64.70% Damage Reduction As with [[resistances]] (which function very similarly) there are diminishing returns on the benefit from higher amounts of Armor. The first thousand points of Armor effect a damage reduction of about 25%, while moving from 4500 to 5500 only yields about 4.5% damage reduction. That 4.5% might be of huge importance to a high level character taking on a dozen enemies at once, but it's clearly a lot less of a total change than the first couple of thousand points of Armor provide.   ==Equipment== The items (armor) worn by characters in Diablo 3 are hugely-varied and individually-designed. All pieces of equipment look different on all classes, and often vary between the genders of each class as well. This required a huge amount of artwork and animation, but is part of the fine polish Blizzard puts on all the components of their video games.  

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]]:

* [[Chest Armor]]:

* Off-Hand items:** [[Shields]]

* [[Pauldrons (item type)|Shoulder ArmorShoulders]] -- New in Diablo III.

While the developers initially planned not to include class-specific armor types, that changed during game design.[http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/bashiok-on-class-specific-items-part-two/] As of By the beta test, there are were numerous types pieces of armor that can could only be equipped by one of the character classesclass. The same goes for  [[weaponsWeapons]]are much the same, with a few types that are class-specific, and others that can only be used by some, but more than one, class.

The same piece of Armor in Diablo III will look looks very different depending on which class is wearing it, and often by the gender as well. This was also true in Diablo II, in most cases, but system expands on the designs have been made radically more varied in Diablo III.  Another change is that there are no normal/exceptional/elite item types basic component looks in Diablo III. In Diablo II the same piece of equipment existed in two different types2, 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 radically more defense than the normal or exceptional version of full plate mail. The Diablo III team didn't like this, variety 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.[http://diablo.incgamersdesign depth.com/blog/comments/wds-wont-just-wear-leaves-after-all/]

::The Witchdoctor’s thematic palette Another major change to Armor in Diablo 3 is proving to be very broadthe removal of repeating armor types on each difficulty level. Gone are Diablo 2's Exceptional and Elite armor/weapon classes, each of which repeated all the same item graphics, but with bigger stats. He can wear a lot This means that every piece of cool armor and still look like a Witchdoctorweapon in Diablo 3 is unique (by level and appearance) but also means there are fewer total items, since everything doesn't repeat 2 or 3 times.

[[Gear sets]] are the term the [[D3 Team]] uses for the 18 different armor sets. See the gear sets page article for full details. A few sample sets, revealed by Blizzard prior to Blizzcon 2010, can be seen below.

==Archive: 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.Defense Attribute==

In Diablo III<u>The following was applicable during development, Armor when the [[attributes]] were (briefly) changed from Vit/Str/Dex/Int. The information does not reduce enemy apply tothe final game, and is preserved here purely for curiosity/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 manageposterity. </u>

[[File:Defense-vs-armor-beta1.jpg|center|thumb|800px600px|Armor vs. Defense compared with item bonuses. Shot from the Diablo III beta.]]  ===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: {{template:buckler}} Note that many characters may choose not to use shields, preferring two-handed weapons, dual-wielding weapons, or off hand offensive-boosting items like [[orbs]] and [[mojos]].  ===Resistances=== 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.  This means that characters can always benefit from more resistance, rather than the value capping off at 75%. (Items that add to maximum possible resistance are not found in Diablo III.)  There is no global resistance penalty on the higher difficulty levels in Diablo III, a feature change that allows for more consistent, gradual difficulty changes. No more will characters enter [[Hell]] and find their resistances dropped to negative values. Characters will just find that they need more and more resistance to survive against more difficult enemies, in a more linear difficulty increase. It is not known if any monsters have the ability to lower character resistances, but it seems likely. Nothing equivalent to Diablo 2's Conviction Aura has been seen as a [[boss modifierbeta]] 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.