User:Judas/Armor Issues

Many issues in the game regarding armor are unclear, bugged, or just plain weird. I'll dissect a few of those here.

I'm also writing an article on Armor Calculation, incorporating all known bugs.

Cracked Resistance!
Now here's a great topic to start, which shows how complicated armor calculation in Guild Wars actually is sometimes.

aRTy, from our friendly German wiki counter-part, and I have been doing a lot of armor research the last couple of days (and found several bugs).

Basic explanations first
Cracked Armor (CA) is bugged. On more than one issue. The bug that's important for this article, however, is that Cracked Armor stops functioning if you use a skill or combination of skills and effects that boosts your armor with +46 armor or more.

Physical Resistance (PR) (and it's counterpart, Elemental Resistance) has a function similar to Cracked Armor; that is, it can reduce your armor. Now you are probably thinking: ah they've seen the bug that PR does not lower your armor below 60. Well yes, but the bugs don't stop there. As we've seen the last couple of days with Cracked Armor, if you are wearing armor with a base armor value below 60, it does lower your armor to below 60, to a minimum of your base armor. This is the same for PR.

However, we've also found a bug similar to the one that stops CA from working: if PR does not lower your armor bonus to 25 or less, it does not function at all. For example:
 * If you use Armor of Earth at 8 Earth Magic, +43 armor, and PR at 12 Inspiration Magic, -14 armor: PR should reduce your armor to 29. However, because it does not reduce the armor bonus to 25 or less, it does not function at all, leaving you with the +43 armor bonus.

Combining the bugs, fun!
The most interesting part is how the CA and PR bugs interact with each other.

After a lot of testing, our results are:
 * If you have a bonus of +46 or higher, then use PR, but it doesn't reduce your armor to +45 or lower, neither CA nor PR function.
 * Example: Armor of Earth @ 15 for +60 armor, and PR @ 12 for -14 armor: you are left with +60 armor.
 * If you have a bonus of +46 or higher, then use PR, and it has the potential of lowering your armor to +45 or lower, both CA and PR function.
 * Example: Armor of Earth @ 15 for +60 armor, and PR @ 11 for -15 armor: you are left with +25 armor.

In that last example, neither CA nor PR would function on their own, but together they both work.

It seems that PR first reduces the armor, then CA checks if that is below +46 armor, and then PR decides if the result is below +26 armor for it to actually work.

Examples:
 * +60 armor, -14 PR: PR reduces the armor to +46 -> CA decides not to work so the armor remains at +46 -> PR decides not to work and it goes back up to +60.
 * +60 armor, -15 PR: PR reduces the armor to +45 -> CA decides to work and reduces the armor to +25 -> PR decides to work and keeps the armor at +25.

Of course, any time CA decides to work, PR will also work: the +45 barrier for CA to start working will have CA lower that to the +25 for PR to work.

In conclusion: if you are afflicted by both CA and PR, they will either both work or they both won't... makes quite a difference in armor.