Apothic Attributes: 100 armour and you still get one-shot

The short answer

This pack replaces the game's armour formula. It is not a bug, an enchantment, or anything you did. Apothic Attributes overwrites the vanilla damage-after-armour calculation outright, so every hit in the game that goes through armour goes through the new rule instead.

The change that matters: armour has no floor any more. The old rule bottomed out at 80% reduction and stayed there however big the hit landed. The new one erodes with every point of incoming damage. At 100 armour you take 9% of a 10-damage hit and 67% of a 400-damage hit — better than the old rule against small hits, far worse against big ones, and the gap widens without limit. See Why 100 armour is not what you think.

And the stat everyone stacks for this is the one that stopped working. Armor Toughness no longer reduces damage at all in these packs. In vanilla it was precisely the stat that protected you from big hits. See What the game tells you.

Four things to check, in this order:

1. Are you on one of the packs this is checked for? Six are; two ship a different major version of the mod and are not claimed here. Which pack you are on.

2. Is Protection doing the work? It is the only reduction that does not decay with hit size, and it is the answer to a big hit. What actually helps.

3. Are you being hit by something that ignores armour entirely? A named list of damage types bypasses armour, and two of them bypass enchantments as well, so Protection does not help either. When it is not your armour at all.

4. Has your World Tier taken a cut out of both? From Ascent upwards every monster gets Armor Pierce. This is the one part of it the game does show you. Your World Tier is taking a cut.

If none of those fits what killed you, that is a real outcome and it is written down: Unresolved.

Applies to Apothic Attributes 2.10.1, Apotheosis 8.8.0, Apothic Enchanting 1.6.2, AttributeFix 21.1.3 and L_Ender's Cataclysm 3.33, Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge 21.1.251, as shipped in All the Mods 10 8.2 — and checked identical in five more packs. See Which pack you are on before you use any number here.

This page explains a class of complaint, not a particular death. Thirteen posts over nearly three years say some version of "im at like 100 armor and 100 max hp, is it normal that i get oneshot". None of them gives the gear, the armour value, the Protection level, the World Tier or the death message, so nothing here can tell you which attack killed you. What it can tell you is that the rule you are working from is the wrong one, and that the game never says so.

Which pack you are on, and which this page is checked for

Six packs were read, one by one, and all six run identical combat rules. All the Mods 10 8.2, All the Mods 10: To the Sky 2.0.6, All the Mons 1.3.0, FTB Skies 2 1.22.0, FTB Skies 2: Aero 1.10.0 and FTB StoneBlock 4 1.21.0 — every one on Minecraft 1.21.1 and on Apothic Attributes 2.10.1.

The mod reads its settings from config/apotheosis/apothic_attributes.cfg. All the Mods 10 and To the Sky do not ship that file at all, so the mod's own hardcoded formulas run. The other four do ship it, and all four carry the mod's defaults word for word:

S:"Protection Formula"=1 - min(0.025 * protPoints, 0.85)
S:"A-Value Formula"=if(damage < 20, 10, 10 + (damage - 20) / 2)
S:"Armor Formula"=a / (a + armor)
S:"Armor Toughness Formula"=min(toughness * 0.02, 0.6)
S:"Negative Armor Factor"=0.015

One thing is not identical across the six, and it is the Protection ceiling. The combat formulas above are the same in all six. The maximum Protection level is not. It is VIII in All the Mods 10, To the Sky, All the Mons and StoneBlock 4, which all leave Apothic Enchanting's own default alone, and V in FTB Skies 2 and FTB Skies 2: Aero, which lower it and enforce it with a Forced Level Cap. That moves the best reduction four pieces can give you from 80% to 50%, so if you are on either Skies pack, read Protection is the multiplier that does not decay before you plan a set.

Two packs are not covered, and this page does not claim them. All the Mods 11 ships Apothic Attributes 3.0.1 and Project Infinity ships 1.3.7 — different major versions of the mod, neither of them read. The formula may well be the same in both; nobody has checked. All the Mods — Gravitas does not ship the mod at all, so none of this applies there.

Why 100 armour is not what you think

The fraction of a hit that gets through is A / (A + armour), where A is 10 for any hit below 20 damage, and grows as 10 + (damage − 20) / 2 at 20 damage and above. Because A climbs with the size of the hit, your armour is worth proportionally less the harder you are hit, for ever.

At 100 armour, with no Protection:

The crossover is exactly 50 incoming damage. Below it you are better off than under the old rule; above it you are worse, and it keeps getting worse. The old rule would have held you at a flat 20% of any hit at all — which is why that column reads the same 20% on every row — while this one gives 9% at a 10-damage hit, 67% at 400 and 80% at 800.

Lower armour values behave the same way, from a worse starting point: at 20 armour a 10-damage hit costs you 3.3 and a 400-damage hit costs 363.6; at 50 armour, 1.7 and 320.0.

• "The old rule" means the replaced expression evaluated at the same armour value. It is a comparison of two rules, not a claim about what playable vanilla Minecraft would do — see the note in Unresolved about vanilla's own armour ceiling.

• There is no cap on armour getting in the way of this. AttributeFix sets the maximum for armour, armour toughness and max health to 1,000,000 by default, and All the Mods 10 ships no AttributeFix config, so those defaults stand. That is what makes "100 armour" a real number rather than something the screen is rounding.

• Armour can go below zero, and then it is worse than nothing. If enough Armor Shred and Armor Pierce are applied to push your armour negative, you take more than the raw damage — the raw hit plus 0.015 of the hit for each point of negative armour.

Sources: Apothic Attributes 2.10.1 api/ALCombatRules.java (getAValue, getArmorDamageReduction, getDamageAfterArmor, negativeArmorFactor) and mixin/CombatRulesMixin.java, which is an @Overwrite of CombatRules.getDamageAfterAbsorb, so no vanilla path is left; AttributeFix 21.1.3 RangeConfig. Every figure in the table is computed from the quoted formula, not measured in game.

What the game tells you, and the one line that misleads

Nothing in the game states the formula. Not a tooltip, not a quest, not a config comment. All the Mods 10's 66 quest chapters were searched for "toughness", for the armour formula and for "damage reduction", and they say nothing about any of it; the pack's own tooltip script says nothing either.

The only text on the subject anywhere is on the Attributes screen — the button Apothic Attributes adds to your inventory, labelled Show Attributes. Two lines matter, and they are exactly these:

Increases physical damage reduction.

Reduces the effectiveness of enemy armor reduction.

The first is the description of Armor. The second is the description of Armor Toughness, and it is the whole problem with this page's subject: it is true, and it is not what a player reads it as. Toughness does still reduce the effectiveness of an enemy's Armor Pierce and Armor Shred, at 2% a point up to 60%. What the line does not say — what nothing anywhere says — is that toughness stopped reducing damage. The mod's own source states it plainly and the game never repeats it:

So a player comparing armour sets in a recipe viewer, reading a wiki, or following any guide written for vanilla or for a pack without this mod is using the wrong rule and has no way to notice. That is the answer to "am I missing something": you are not missing something in your build. You were told the old rule by everything you could read.

Sources: Apothic Attributes 2.10.1 assets/apothic_attributes/lang/en_us.json (attribute.name.generic.armor.desc, attribute.name.generic.armor_toughness.desc, apothic_attributes.gui.show_attributes) and the javadoc in api/ALCombatRules.java; All the Mods 10 8.2 quest files and tooltips.js. Armor and Armor Toughness are Minecraft's own attribute names — the lang file carries only their description keys, so the mod is annotating vanilla entries rather than renaming them.