Season 11 Overview PTR Patch Notes
What is Toughness
Diablo 4 is getting a massive shakeup in the defense department. The short version? Armor affects all damage, and Physical Resistance is added on top of the other Resistances. This essentially makes Armor and Resistance equivalent stats, as they both reduce the same damage types. Another critical change in context is that Armor and Resistances will be converted to a rating system with diminishing returns, rather than the previous percentage reduction.
League of Legends uses a rating system for their Armor/Magic Resistance
Toughness is a simple stat, taking the average of Armor and Resistances and spitting out a number that reflects the total “defense” of a character. On first glance, Toughness is a great at-a-glance stat to give players an indication of how tanky they are, but on further inspection, there are actually a lot of issues with the new stat.
Toughness means nothing
Players in any ARPG, be it Diablo 4, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, or any other game, will die in similar ways. The primary cause of deaths in this genre of games is a gap in defenses or a damage type that is not well accounted for. Barbarians in Diablo 4 have a tremendous amount of Armor at their disposal and usually never need to worry about Physical damage. The downside is that reaching the Resistance cap can be difficult, and during the start of a Season, it’s common to see players struggling with one or multiple Resistances that are not hitting the mark. This is what results in deaths.
Toughness as a stat dilutes and obfuscates these issues, almost by design. There currently seems to be no weighting to the average that Toughness represents, which means defensive holes can be easily overlooked because of an abundance of Armor for our Barbarian friends.
The easy solution is to say “just check your resistances to make sure you have enough”, but isn’t the whole point of Toughness that players have an at-a-glance defensive value to rely on? What is the point of having a generalized defense stat if Deaths occur outside of the context of Toughness, and the solution to fix defensive issues is to not look at Toughness?
Defensive Clarity at an All Time Low
For Toughness to even exist in the first place as an average, Armor and Resistances had to be converted into ratings with diminishing returns. In doing so, Blizzard has turned back the clock and made these defensive stats more confusing than ever. In previous seasons, there was a clear goal. 1000 Armor is the cap, and a certain percent of Resistance is the cap. Hit both, and you have achieved the stated goal.
Path of Exile has a simple percent system for the basic defenses, which is similar to Diablo 4 currently.
In the future, with the new system, Toughness won’t remove these breakpoints, but simply make it more confusing for players to understand how tanky they are. Instead of having clear caps stated by the game, the burden is placed on Content Creators and Build Guides to provide numbers to aim for, recommendations that will vary from player to player and build to build, spreading nothing but confusion across the entire community.
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