In a purely physical damage build… how much does this -% armor actually increase your damage? It’s honestly hard for me to tell. It sounds like it would be a lot but doesn’t seem to be to me.
When hitting the dummies without vs with using maul, I think I can see a slight increase in damage, but it feels pretty small. The stats seem pretty decent for the whole constellation, but seems like I could probably use them else where…
I recall a discussion here on the forum that for the player first comes physical resistance as a layer of defense and then comes the armor. In other words, having high physical resistance protects more than armor. I can only assume that the same order of protection is for the monsters as well. That is why most builds go for resist reduction even for physical builds, which is in concord with the result you got with the dummy.
Regarding the devotion, I mainly pick Maul for aoe life leech, as it carried my build when I had no other life leech source, not even a ghoul. However, I do have to say I built it to be a tank with high block and recovery rate and with a bit of regeneration, so I had less reason to rely on life leech. If you have enough sustain then maybe put the devotion points somewhere else.
Have to warn you internal trauma damage bypass through armor. So if you’re doing lots of trauma, you gonna skip entire armor check of enemies. From the other perspective there are the physical (converted) projectile based attacks, which have to go through separate armor check per every projectile. So how useful the armor decrease by Maul is depend on your particular build.
But overall Dire Bear have some armor shred, great healing proc and decent stats. Unless you have some crafty devotion map, where isn’t fitting, just take it.
Also yes, physical resistance reduction is very important.
however, what makes maul somewhat valuable to phys builds is the way phys dmg is calculated against armour
each source of flat phys dmg is checked against armour individually, it’s isn’t combined in one big pool and then applied to power through armour
so when you have 12 flat dmg on a ring, 15 on a weapon, devo etc etc etc, they all go through armour individually, which lower the applied phys dmg, even more on something like ex EoR that does many small hits
so when you go strip 500-800 armour from the enemy through maul, that’s X amount of dmg that will no longer be held against all your individual sources of flat phys
in the end it will come down to several factors if your build, how much flat phys you have and how much of it comes from sources here and there (rings dvso etc), and how much %phys dmg you have vs which enemy you’re fighting
so it can def be some dmg increase
that said, if maul didn’t have the leech to help make it worthwhile to spend all those devo points on, i don’t think i’d take it as often, as it can be quite a costly tier 2 devo on a phys path
It strongly depends on the build you’re using.
Each source of physical damage (including each flat physical damage bonus on your gear) is mitigated by armor separately. If you build is about swinging a big badass 2-hander with huge base damage, or uses a single skill with big damage for that, then enemy armor doesnt matter much. However, if you deal a multiple smaller damage sources, like a physical retal Drain Essense build, then enemy armour will eat a very significant portion of your damage, and a Maul proc would be very handy for extra DPS.