Item Bases Complete Reference

Weapons

Weapons are a category of equipment that are equipped to deal damage with attacks or provide various modifiers that modify a character's damage.

Weapon sets

Characters can equip two one-handed weapons (dual wielding), a one-handed weapon and an off-hand, or a two-handed weapon. Weapons can only be equipped directly into the off-hand slot while dual wielding. Additionally, Bows can be equipped with a quiver.

Characters can equip two sets of weapons, and switch between them through a keybind for weapon swapping. Each of your skills can be assigned one or both specific weapon sets; if a skill is assigned to the opposite weapon set only, weapon set is swapped automatically when using that skill. It is possible to lock one weapon to be used on both sets.

Martial weapons

Martial weapons are weapons that are used to attack with directly. Martial weapons have base physical damage or elemental damage, critical hit chance, and attack time. These can be directly modified with local modifiers. Additionally, each melee weapon item class has an innate weapon range, which determines the distance from which they can physically strike enemies.

Weapon range

Martial weapons have the following base ranges:

Caster weapons

Caster weapons are weapons that give bonuses to spells or minions and are not used to attack with. All caster weapons come with an inherent skill. They also have different pools of modifiers that suit their archetypes.

Wands, staves, and sceptres are caster weapons.

Sceptres have the distinction of being able to be wielded in either the main hand or off hand slot. It is not possible to dual wield sceptres.

Traps

Traps have no base attack stats and cannot be used to attack directly. Traps are used exclusively for Trap skills and have stats that determine the trap's arming time and type of detonation (Manual or Proximity).

Summary

b Requires Instruments of Power

Claws were originally planned to return as the main weapon of the Huntress, but was scrapped during development. Several unique claws from Path of Exile 1 have been added as unique gloves instead.

Armour

Armour is a defence that provides damage reduction to incoming physical damage from hits. The % of damage reduced depends on the size of the incoming hit relative to the armour value and cannot exceed 90%. Armour is associated with strength.

Mechanics

Armour grants physical damage reduction, with the exact amount of damage reduction depending on the ratio of armour to the physical damage of the hit. If the armour value is significantly larger than the damage, most of the damage is prevented. If the armour value is similar to or less than the incoming damage, only a small percentage of that damage will be prevented. As a result, armour is more effective against many smaller hits rather than fewer larger hits, even if the total damage dealt would be identical.

Armour never mitigates damage over time, as armour only applies to hits. Bleed is an ailment that deals physical damage over time that is based on the physical damage dealt by a skill before mitigation; armour will reduce the hit damage but not the damage over time. However, both the hit damage and the damage over time can be mitigated with sources of #% additional Physical Damage Reduction. The maximum total physical damage reduction from all sources is 90%.

Normally Armour only applies to physical damage; however, it can be made to apply to other damage types through items or passive skills, such as BlackbraidBlackbraidFur PlateArmour: (100-120)Movement Speed: -5.0%Requires Level 4, 10 Str+(40-60) to Armour+(5-15) to Strength+(5-15) to Intelligence+10% to all Elemental Resistances+(40-60) to Stun Threshold+(100-150)% of Armour also applies to Elemental DamageAn Ezomyte endures. or Doryani's PrototypeDoryani's PrototypeScale MailArmour: (187-250)Evasion: (168-224)Movement Speed: -4.0%Requires Level 37, 34 Str, 34 Dex(50-100)% increased Armour and Evasion+(60-100) to maximum Life+100% of Armour also applies to Lightning DamageEnemies in your Presence have Lightning Resistance equal to yoursLightning Resistance does not affect Lightning damage taken"This was the first step in some grand design,lost to the ages, now ours to decipher."- Dominus, High Templar. In such cases, the armour value applies independently to each damage type. The maximum elemental or chaos damage reduction is also 90%.

Armour cannot reduce an instance of damage to below 1.

Rule of thumb

• To prevent one third of damage (33%), you need armour 5 times the damage (e.g. 500 armour for 100 damage)
• To prevent half of damage (50%), you need armour 10 times the damage (e.g. 1000 armour for 100 damage)
• To prevent two thirds of damage (66%), you need armour 20 times the damage (e.g. 2000 armour for 100 damage)
• To prevent three quarters of damage (75%), you need armour 30 times the damage (e.g. 3000 armour for 100 damage)
• To prevent 90% of damage, you need armour 90 times the damage (e.g. 9000 armour for 100 damage)

When the damage of a hit significantly exceeds Armour, it will never prevent more damage than the armour value divided by 10 (e.g. 1000 armour will never prevent more than 100 damage at its minimum percentage prevention).

Armour formulas

Relative damage reduction

The following is the base formula that can be used to calculate the damage reduction gained from armour:

D R ( A , D r a w ) = A A + 10 ∗ D r a w \color [rgb]{0.6392156862745098,0.5529411764705883,0.42745098039215684}DR(A,D_{raw})={A \over A+10*D_{raw}}

where A is the defender's armour rating and Draw is the raw physical damage.

To calculate the armour rating required to mitigate a given amount of damage at a specific ratio, the following formula can be used:

A ( D r a w , D R ) = D R ∗ 10 ∗ D r a w 1 − D R \color [rgb]{0.6392156862745098,0.5529411764705883,0.42745098039215684}A(D_{raw},DR)={DR*10*D_{raw} \over 1-DR}

Examples

Related mechanics

Armour Break

Armour Break is a debuff that reduced Armour by a specified amount. When a target's Armour is broken to 0, it has Fully Broken Armour, which interact with certain mechanics. Enemies (but not players) with Fully Broken Armour also take 20% increased physical damage from hits.

Bear form

While Shapeshifted into a Bear, you gain +10 Armour per character level and +30% of your Armour also applies to elemental damage.

Related skills

Persistent skills

Support gems

Related base items

Related unique items

Related passive skills

The following passive skills are related to armour:

Base armour rating

Increased armour

Armour applies to non-physical damage

Miscellany

Paths Not Taken passive skills

The following passive skills are exclusive the Oracle with The Unseen Path allocated:

Ascendancy passive skills

The following Ascendancy passive skills are related to armour:

Keystones

The following Keystones are related to armour:

Bows

Bow is an item class of two-handed martial ranged weapons that require strength and dexterity to equip. Bows can be equipped together with a quiver.

Mechanics

List of bows

List of unique bows

Passive skills

There are passive skills that grant bow bonuses.

List of active skill gems usable with bows

Staves

Staff is an item class of two-handed weapons that require intelligence to equip. They have no local attack stats, and instead roll modifiers for spells. Staves come with an implicit modifier that grants a specific spell; this spell is used instead of a default attack. This inherent spell will also receive any bonuses to skill level that correctly applies to that skill's tags.

A staff's level and intelligence requirement is based on the level of its granted skill implicit.

Mechanics

Modifier affinity

Explicit modifiers on staves (and wands) have some internal restrictions. Firstly, certain base types may have an "affinity" to a specific damage type which prevents certain modifiers without that affinity from being able to roll. The modifiers that are affected are:

• +# to Level of <Fire/Cold/Lightning/Physical/Chaos> Spell Skills (Modifier affinity: Fire/Cold/Lightning/Physical/Chaos)
• #% increased <Fire/Cold/Lightning/Chaos> Damage (Modifier affinity: Fire/Cold/Lightning/Chaos)
• #% increased Spell Physical Damage (Modifier affinity: Physical)
• Ailment modifiers #% increased chance to Ignite (Modifier affinity: Fire+Physical) #% increased Freeze Buildup (Modifier affinity: Cold+Physical) #% increased chance to Shock (Modifier affinity: Lightning+Physical)

where X represents a damage type. For example, an Ashen StaffAshen StaffStaffGrants Skill: Level (1-20) Firebolt with a fire affinity can roll increased fire damage and chance to ignite, but not increased cold damage or chance to shock.

Other staff base types that do not have an affinity (e.g. Chiming StaffChiming StaffStaffRequires Level 25Grants Skill: Level (7-20) Sigil of Power), can temporarily gain an affinity if it rolls any of the above modifiers, restricting its modifier pool. This affinity can be removed by removing any related modifiers. The recombinator ignores temporary affinity, allowing a base without affinity to have non-matching mods, but respects item affinity and will not move a mod to a base it could not naturally roll on.

This affinity mechanic is unrelated to the modifier tags visible in the item's advanced description. It instead applies and uses spawn weight tags (e.g. "no_fire_spell_mods").

List of staves

List of unique staves