Just wanted to inform the reddit community on a slight armor change for the next snapshot.

In 1.9, damage is calculated as "damage / (final armor value / 25)" (for a while armor was divided by 30, but we changed it back to the 1.8 ratio).

The "final armor value" is the armor points of all the item pieces you are wearing (shown as "+X Armor" in the tooltip), minus half the damage amount of the incoming attack. This makes hard-hitting attacks bypassing armor to a greater degree than weak attacks.

The new thing now is that the "half of the damage" is a ratio determined by the items' "armor toughness". Diamond armor pieces will add to the toughness value, which means that diamond armor will be better at protecting against hard-hitting enemies. Currently full diamond armor will change "damage * 0.5" down to "damage * 0.25".

This may sound a bit confusing, but the point is to make it worth the investment to create diamond armor instead of iron armor.