Elemental Armor Level

After reading Ensign's article on how damage is dealt, I was wondering if default elemental armor level is just the same armor level as your physical armor level.

I'm not sure what you mean by "default armor level?" If you are asking what the 100% of listed skill damage value is on armor, I believe it is 60 for both elemental and physical.

If your armor says 60 AL then you have 60 AL against both physical and elemental damage. (not sure how chaos, dark, and holy damage work with this)

Chaos, Dark, and Holy ignore armor, which means they hit everyone as if they had an AL of 60 regardless of if they have armor higher or lower than 60. If your target has armor lower than 60, it is actually better to use skills that don't ignore armor because you will get a damage "bonus."


Edit: This only refers to Chaos, Dark, and Holy damage caused by spells, attacks with these damage types are effected by armor.

Same as a default physical armor level.

It's not likely that Holy damage ignores base AL raiting because there is a skill that converts damage to Holy and adds 20% armor penetration.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/content...ight-id655.php

Holy, Chaos, and Dark are just damage types. Most skills that use damage of one of these types ignore armor - there are a few exceptions, though. Also, wands that deal these types of damage are most certainly affected by armor, though there isn't anything that'll keep them from seeing something other than the base AL value.

Peace,
-CxE

So are these just horrible skills to use early in the game when mobs are running around with 5AL and 10AL ratings? Or is the damage scaled to still be effective at low level for these skills, even though you are treating a target with 5AL as if it has 60AL?

You aren't treating it as though it had 60 AL - you're ignoring that part of the equation entirely. Ignore armor skills deal what's listed in the skill description, period, end of story. If it says it'll deal 10 damage it deals 10 damage - if it says 50, it'll deal 50. Ignores armor does exactly what you think it does, ignoring everything having to do with armor entirely.

The only times you'll see an ignore armor skill deal damage other than what's listed is when a monster has a specific resilience or vulnerability. For example, undead and Necromancers in some armor sets will take double damage from holy attacks, even if those attacks ignore armor.

Peace,
-CxE

If your armour says "80 +20 vs physical attacks" it means 80 armour versus ALL attacks except those "ignore armour" ones that ensign explained above. It also adds an extra 20 armour if the attack was a physical attack so you get 100 vs physical attacks. Armour is applyed only to the part of the body you get hit on. So if you have a really crappy chest but everything else is good and you get hit in the chest, you're screwed. Shields on the other hand apply to wherever you get hit... But i think you might have to get hit from the front. Not exactly sure though.

shields will not protect the back

FROM ENSIGN
So, to the best of my knowledge, shields work on all attacks that 'autohit', and all attacks that come from the 'front'. Autohit is anything that'll hit the chest unerringly - either single target skills that can't be manually dodged, or area of effect skills that autohit if you're caught in the blast. Shields always apply their AL bonus to that.

Front is a bit more nebulously defined - there's some solid angle over which a shield works, and all attacks coming from directions within that angle are affected by a shield's defense bonus. Attacks from outside that angle ignore the shield entirely.