Ignore armor

DISCLAIMER: The information in this article is based on experimental research conducted by the community, and may contain inaccuracies and speculation. While we strive for accuracy in these articles, we make no claims of experimental rigor or unbiased conclusions. Caveat lector.

To ignore armor means to set the armor effect, a multiplier in calculating damage, to 1. Offensive skills and actions that ignore armor take away the same amount of health on all targets, regardless of their armor level. It is generally believed that when armor is ignored, armor penetration isn't relevant (for both technical and semiotic reasons).

Classification

Some skills explicitly state whether they ignore armor or not.

• Crystal Wave and Obsidian Flame are examples of skills that specifically mention that they ignore armor.
• Judge's Insight states, by way of implication, that attacks under this enchantment will not ignore armor.

Many people prefer to logically group skills based on skill properties and descriptions. One major point of view uses damage type, while another refers to the damage actuator mentioned in the skill descriptions. Both these prescriptive categorizations have flaws.

Because the number of skills in the game is fixed, one can simply enumerate all skills that cause armor ignoring damage. Although such an enumeration would be a completely faithful descriptive account of the game, as far as categorization goes it is somewhat arbitrary. It is, of course, possible that there is no golden rule, and the game creators simply choose for each skill whether or not it will ignore armor. There may be guidelines that usually apply, but these guidelines are only as valid as Arena Net chooses to make them, and there can always be exceptions.

Classification by damage type

This school of thought says that the type of damage caused by a skill or action determines whether the damage will be armor ignoring or not. Specifically,

• Ignores armor: holy damage, shadow damage, and damage with no specified type
• Does not ignore armor: physical damage, elemental damage, light damage, dark damage, and chaos damage

The major advantage is that using this categorization, players can quickly determine whether or not a skill ignores armor.

Criticism

Light damage and holy damage have substantial similarities. Likewise, dark damage is equivalent to shadow damage. Supporting facts include:

• Light and holy damage have the same effect on undead monsters (doubling the damage) and on Tormentor's Armor (adding +5 bonus damage per piece).
• Since holy and shadow damage are only dealt by skills, it is likely that the skill is causing armor to be ignored, not the damage type.
• The difference in wording (holy vs. light) is sometimes attributed to the same logic that early US translations of Final Fantasy 2 (Japanese IV) translated "Holy" to "Light" to avoid religous connotations. Refutations of this criticism are that it makes little sense to use "light damage" for weapons and "holy damage" for skills (avoiding religious connotations in one case but not the other).

Using Damage Type to determine if a skill ignores armor fails to follow the rules listed above in several cases:

• Dust Trap deals earth damage but ignores armor.
• Whirling Defense deals piercing damage but ignores armor. Additionally, this skill is also unaffected by Greater Conflagration.
• Attacks when enchanted with Judge's Insight do not ignore armor, despite causing holy damage.

Supporters of this theory claim that these three skills are simply anomalous, possibly a result of programming bugs.

Classification by damage actuator

Whether or not a skill ignores armor depends on the exact words describing how the damage is dealt.

• Verbs such as "deal" and "suffer" in the skill description signal armor ignoring damage.
• Verbs such as "take" and "struck for" in the descriptions signal armor respecting damage.

Criticism

This theory typically states only a two-verb comparison, making the theory less than complete. No one has presented a complete theory takes all (or even a majority) of the skills into account.

The existence of exceptions is a probably why a complete theory has not been proposed.