armor and armor boosts irrelevant

[Fusionstrike]

I was using my 76 fox to do some Vampire Feast runs and I found that I seemed much more vulnerable than I'd expect. It didn't make sense why I was just as prone to dying now as I was back when I was "supposed" to be playing in Fang. So I started watching the numbers, and I came to the conclusion that armor seems not to be a factor at all, at least against some foes. Here's a good example case to help illustrate the point.

I fought Lofus using my fox, a pure dex build using crafted swift dragon helm and armor and a phoenix bow. This setup provides 199 armor and 552 health. In addition, I had a 3x combo daily blessing. At one point in the battle, I was at full health blasting away when Lofus fired off his super attack, one-shotting me to death. The damage that floated over my head was 580.

Let's calculate what hit Lofus must have generated in order to one shot me. The way I understand it, armor works by subtracting the armor amount from the incoming damage. (Someone correct me if this is wrong.) So, an incoming hit of 300 against a player wearing 100 armor results in 200 health being subtracted. In this case, I died to a 580 hit through my armor, so let's back calcuate the original hit he must have generated: 580 + (199*3) = 1177. He needed to have hit that hard in order to pound through my 3x combo enhanced armor.

Now, is Lofus even capable of dealing this much damage? I'm not sure, but if he is then he is incredibly overpowered for a level 60-65 boss. The best equivalent set that my character could wear at 65 would have been crafted sanguine bow set, which has an armor of 134, fully 65 armor units worse than what I had on at 75. So if armor is actually being taken into account the way it should, that means Lofus is capable of generating in a single shot 4 times more damage than is needed to kill a fox/bird/mage at level 65 wearing the best possible gear. That seems pretty crazy.

The alternative thought I had is that maybe armor simply doesn't apply to some hits. Foes like Vlod and Lofus seem just as able to one shot me whether I have a 3x combo on or not, and seem not to care that I now have 60+ more armor at 75 than I used to at 65. This just doesn't make sense, because the only explanation if armor counts is that they regularly do 3x more damage than they need to kill me (thus making my combo blessing armor boost irrelevant). However, if you instead assume that armor doesn't apply at all to their gigantic special attacks, then it makes a lot more sense. With armor out of the picture, I am literally the same at 75 as I was at 65, i.e. just my 550 or so health points up against the giant hit.

So I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect there are some damage attacks that completely ignore armor in the calculation. It's the only explanation that makes sense to me.