Diablo – At level 60, when does Seize the Initiative outperform The Guardian’s Path

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I am interested in the breakpoint at which the bonus armor from Seize the Initiative will outperform The Guardian's Path 15% dodge bonus, at maximum level. This is so I can choose the best defensive passive for reducing incoming damage in situations where I can only pick one of them.

I am aware that dodge is more random than armor, and can lead to damage spikes or lulls, but I'm really just concerned with the average expected damage reduction.

At what amount of Dexterity/Armor does Seize the Initiative offer more damage reduction than The Guardian's Path?

Best Answer

It's complicated for a number of reasons, but here's some things I learned from fiddling in Excel.

  • For starters, Dodge will mitigate 100% of any hits you dodge, but you'll only Dodge D% of the time.

  • Armor will mitigate A% of every hit, but that value is dependent on the level of the enemies attacking you (see this question).

So the basic question is "what has to be true for D to be greater than A?"

At level 60, my calculations show that 520 Armor will give you just over 15% damage reduction from armor. So you only need 520 Dexterity for Sieze the Initiative to start being better.

However, this is only true if you have 0 base Armor and 0 base Dodge, which is probably not true! If you have 100 Armor you only need 420 Dexterity - unless you have 5% base Dodge, in which case you'll need 700 Dexterity on top of your 100 Armor...

You can use this table to estimate how much mitigation you'll get from armor when fighting level 60 monsters:

Armor       Mitigation
500         14%
600         17%
700         19%
800         21%
900         23%
1000        25%
1100        27%
1200        29%
1300        30%
1400        32%
1500        33%
1600        35%
1700        36%
1800        38%
1900        39%
2000        40%

If you look up your base Armor + Dexterity here and compare to your base Dodge + 15% you should be able to tell which is better in a given situation.

Overall it SEEMS like it's pretty easy to stack Dexterity and have Sieze The Initiative outperform The Guardian's Path, but I tend to stack Dex anyway and definitely have not attempted to stack Dodge, so I'm not sure which is more viable in the long run.

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