Armor 3.0 replaced "look at the total" with a system where archetype, artifice slots and tuning decide what a piece can become. Judging armor by its stat sheet alone throws away keepers and hoards junk.
Every Armor 3.0 piece has an archetype that concentrates its stats into a themed spread (a grenadier piece leans toward grenade-relevant stats, and so on). The archetype is a property of the piece's sockets, not a label in its name — which is why an appraiser has to read sockets, not stat totals.
Artifice armor carries an extra mod slot that can push stats around, and tuning mods shift a piece's spread further. One physical piece therefore represents many possible stat mixes. Two pieces can have identical totals while one reaches mixes the other never can — that one is strictly better.
A piece is redundant only when another piece you own equals or beats it in every stat mix it could be tuned to, compared at assumed masterwork so unmasterworked drops are judged on potential. This is the rule Shard or Keep applies before it ever suggests sharding armor — "lower total" is never the reason.
Armor sets grant bonus perks for wearing multiple pieces, and event armor picks its set through a socketed selector mod rather than the set printed on the item. A statistically dominated piece can still be worth keeping if it completes a set bonus you use — check the set section on any armor page in the database.
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