Resists don't work the way you guys seem to think they work. There is a soft cap on them.
I quote:
Actually it's based off the way that MR and Armor are calculated.
The formula is:
% resist = 100*(AR/(100+AR)).
An armor rating of 16 then gives you a DR of about 14%, while an armor rating of 160 gives you a DR of about 61%. 200 is about 67%.
I could show you a graph but yeah :smallsmile: Basically anything above 200 is kind of a waste and you're better off with HP. I usually shoot for about 160-170 MR/AR and 4k hp with Shen just to keep my damage output high (Atma's and his passive).
ALso with regards to HP, Frozen Mallet is nice because it's a permanent red buff :smallwink:
Armor and magic resist don't have a softcap, a softcap is an arbitrary reduction when the amount goes over a certain value, like for movement speed.
And it does work like we say, because we used the very calculation you're showing us.
Let me explain : Take an imaginary situation, where you have no natural armor and you're stacking thornmails (not for the -unique- passive, but because it is a round number of armor : 100)
With one armor you have 100*(100/200) = 50% of damage resist. Thats like having twice the HP (in regards to physical damage anyway). You're halving the amount of damage, so the damage must be twice as high to kill you, so thats the same as twice HP, agreed ? Thats also like adding 100% HP, since you now have virtually 200%
Now with 2 armors, you have 100*(200/300) = 66.6% of damage resist. You now need 3 times the damage to die, since you take only a third of the damage. So you have virtually 300% HP, which means you added 200% to you base 100% HP.
Let's skip things a bit or it would be boring, and imagine you have 6 armors. Thats 100*(600/700) = 85.7% damage resist. You need 7 times the damage to die (you take only 1/7th of the damage). Thats like adding 600% HP.
As you can see, X points of armor/magic resist is the same, in regards to the source of damage, as having X% more HP. It feels like a softcap though, because at first you only need 100 armor to double your virtual HP, then you need to add twice as much (adding 200 for a total of 300) to double again. And you would need to add 400 for a total of 700 to double again.
Also, only stacking armor/magic resistance is countered by a last whisper/void staff so it is not really a viable option. (In the situation where you have 600 armor, Last Whisper reduces that to 360 armor, effectively dropping your virtual HP from 700% to 460%.)