Defense/Armor is a stat for your heroes that indicates how hard it is to land a solid, damaging physical attack on them. The higher this number is, the more protection the hero possesses. Attack comes from your weapons while Defense comes from your armor.
Based on your feedback, we’ve changed Attack to only be found on weapons, Defense to being only on armor, and we’ve removed both Attack and Defense from jewelry entirely. The goal here is to better embrace the fantasy of each type of item.
We like the Attack and Defense stats as a way to convey power progression on items. A core part of any ARPG is the quest for more power. Just as we have skill ranks, talent trees, character levels, and so forth, Attack and Defense allows us to reflect your power growth in items as well.
To be clear, Attack/Defense is not the end of the story of an item’s power, but it does fulfill the “easy to learn, difficult to master” design philosophy by giving players a broad sense of whether the item is an upgrade. Players who are optimizing their character will still need to take the additional affixes on an item into account, as their benefit to your build can outweigh the raw Attack or Defense of an item. Solely picking your items based on Attack and Defense will almost never be the optimal way to play, but it does provide a good starting point for newer players.
It’s important to reiterate here that items are just one part of a character’s overall power. Our goal is to spread out power across different sources, including skill ranks, your character’s level, talent trees, items, and the endgame character progression system (which, like everything else, is still in development).
Life (also often referred to as Health, or Hit Points) represents the maximum amount of damage that a player character or monster will be able to withstand. Taking damage causes the Life Points to decrease (when all forms of protection are bypassed). When Life reaches 0, the player character (or monster) dies.
Barrier is a mechanic very similar to Life except it has no set maximum but only lasts for a certain duration. When you take damage, it first depletes your Barrier and then the remainder goes into Life. When you have multiple Barriers their amount is added together, but the duration of each Barrier is tracked separately and when one of your Barriers expires, your total Barrier goes down. So far we’ve found only 6 ways to gain Barrier:
Armor in Diablo 4 consists of five types pieces: Helm, Chest, Gloves, Pants and Boots. Each piece of armor can be equipped on their respective equipment slot. Armor provides defense, which decreases the incoming damage from Enemies, and they also provide with different fixed and random modifiers that affect the player stats.
Resistances are a set of values displayed on the Character Screen. They are numerical values that can resist a percentage of damage from various elemental attacks: Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, and Magic/Holy/Arcane.
Much like Armor, resistances lower damage dealt by the element they have control over, stacking with armor multiplicatively, and forming the character's toughness. Each resistance is specific to one damage type: Physical, Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison and Holy/Arcane (Holy counts as the same damage type as Arcane).
Damage Reduction refers to various magic suffixes or special modifiers that reduce the damage taken.
The effect given from this trait, depending on the level of the item and the suffix itself, is the reduction of physical damage taken from all sources.
Characters take 30% decreased damage until all of their fortified life is removed.
When you are hit by any attack you have a chance to dodge it, completely nullifying all damage and other harmful effects. You can’t dodge individual ticks of Damage over Time (DoT) effects, but you can dodge the initial attack and prevent the DoT from being applied to you in the first place. There’s a few ways to get dodge chance:
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