Heavy Armor vs. Light Armor

Pmarsico9 · June 2014

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but simply put, there's very little reason to wear anything but Light Armor. Medium Armor's passives that grant Stamina regen bonuses is largely worthless. Heavy Armor's health regen passives are also worthless. However, Light Armor's regen bonuses are massive.

Due to actives available, there's very little reason to wear heavy or medium. Ever.

Here's a suggestion:

Move Light Armor's overall maximum damage reduction down to cap at 40%. Make Medium's cap at 50%. And for Heavy move it up to 65%. Then make things one shot people so that tanks wearing defensive loadouts are required for bosses.

I see VR1 Sorcs soloing Craglorn bosses in bathrobes............

Wifeaggro13 · June 2014

Yes its very very discouraging. My VR 12 DK is shelved. I rerolled a Sorc in light and by VR 4 i had cleared every single VR dungeon as a tank. As well as tanking some of the first trial. Healers say they sorc mitigates better because of lightning form putting mye 1200 over armor cap and spell resistance. combine that with spell crit and the massive reduction and regen of light armor its a no brainer. Broken Armor system completely

ZoM_Head · June 2014

Pmarsico9 wrote: »

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but simply put, there's very little reason to wear anything but Light Armor. Medium Armor's passives that grant Stamina regen bonuses is largely worthless. Heavy Armor's health regen passives are also worthless. However, Light Armor's regen bonuses are massive.

Due to actives available, there's very little reason to wear heavy or medium. Ever.

Here's a suggestion:

Move Light Armor's overall maximum damage reduction down to cap at 40%. Make Medium's cap at 50%. And for Heavy move it up to 65%. Then make things one shot people so that tanks wearing defensive loadouts are required for bosses.

I see VR1 Sorcs soloing Craglorn bosses in bathrobes............

since all the tanking skills use stamina, in theory tanks should wear medium and gain more benifits over heavy.

You will not notice the health regen bonus, and 3% more melee damage (as tank? you want to deal more damage?), yeah some blocking here or there...

But veteran bosses require quiet a bit of dodging and rolling, even for tanks.....

Makes me think, how viable would medium armour be in veteran tanking.....

Lol imagine just sneaking with a raised shield to a boss

Pmarsico9 · June 2014

Elmojito1000eb17_ESO wrote: »

Pmarsico9 wrote: »

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but simply put, there's very little reason to wear anything but Light Armor. Medium Armor's passives that grant Stamina regen bonuses is largely worthless. Heavy Armor's health regen passives are also worthless. However, Light Armor's regen bonuses are massive.

Due to actives available, there's very little reason to wear heavy or medium. Ever.

Here's a suggestion:

Move Light Armor's overall maximum damage reduction down to cap at 40%. Make Medium's cap at 50%. And for Heavy move it up to 65%. Then make things one shot people so that tanks wearing defensive loadouts are required for bosses.

I see VR1 Sorcs soloing Craglorn bosses in bathrobes............

since all the tanking skills use stamina, in theory tanks should wear medium and gain more benifits over heavy.

You will not notice the health regen bonus, and 3% more melee damage (as tank? you want to deal more damage?), yeah some blocking here or there...

But veteran bosses require quiet a bit of dodging and rolling, even for tanks.....

Makes me think, how viable would medium armour be in veteran tanking.....

Lol imagine just sneaking with a raised shield to a boss

Um, what? Sword and shield abilities use stam. There's one active per armor type. There's little reason to use stam for more than just keeping your shield up.

jesterstear · June 2014

Firstly, I'd say that spell resistance should mirror protection level - with heavy armour giving the most and light the least - the opposite to how it is now. When all is said and done, combat spells are not draining life force directly, they are a novel means of directing thermal , kinetic or electrical energy at an opponent to cause injury. Armour should protect against incoming kinetic/thermal energy whether muscular or magical in origin - without this it is useless.

Similarly, spells should be blockable, like ranged attacks. A bolt of energy that hits your shield does a lot less damage than one that flies up the left nostril.

unless your name is Lindsay Lohan

OTOH, blocking with a weapon as opposed to a shield should be largely ineffective against magic/ranged. You're not a Jedi knight with the ability to parry laser beams incoming at the speed of light. Holding your dual wield daggers in front of you won't stop as many arrows as a shield, hate to say.

Next, we need to get rid of these silly armour buff spells. They had a place in other MMOs where casters were restricted to only wearing light, but in this game i'd say that if you want heavy protection you should equip heavy armour, end of story.

Finally, I'd say the incoming healing modifier needs to be much larger, perhaps 30% or so. It would give a meaningful incentive for using it in a tanking role, and would allow tanky types in heavy armour, with very limited Magicka, to do a meaningful amount of self healing when solo.

*

Pmarsico9 · June 2014

I don't know, buffing incoming healing would simply yield more overhealing than anything worthwhile. Which in turn would yield more binary damage income when tanks are needed.

Essentially, holding a mobs aggro should be necessary on at least some bosses. But the tank should have more CD's and have a smoother overall damage input than say, a clothy. That's why I think DR caps should be scaled up based upon how many pieces of heavy you are wearing.

Heavy should be able to hit DR caps of 65% against both spells and physical.
Medium should be able to hit DR caps of 50%
Light should hit DR caps of 40%.

Medium should passively gain dodge in conjunction with what it currently has.

Wifeaggro13 · July 2014

Pmarsico9 wrote: »

I don't know, buffing incoming healing would simply yield more overhealing than anything worthwhile. Which in turn would yield more binary damage income when tanks are needed.

Essentially, holding a mobs aggro should be necessary on at least some bosses. But the tank should have more CD's and have a smoother overall damage input than say, a clothy. That's why I think DR caps should be scaled up based upon how many pieces of heavy you are wearing.

Heavy should be able to hit DR caps of 65% against both spells and physical.
Medium should be able to hit DR caps of 50%
Light should hit DR caps of 40%.

Medium should passively gain dodge in conjunction with what it currently has.

The only thing that matters in mitigation currently is the armor Value in your CHR screen . you can literaly be 1200 to 3000 over soft cap in light armor with buffs from either your class or guilds. Heavy armor and the armor system in this game is completely busted. Ive been doing all VR end game in light armor on both my tanks. including COH V12 and AA trial. Game is broken plain and simple it was shortsighted to design it this way light armor is vastly , and i mean vastly superior to heavy and medium. Currently the most mitigation you can ever have is 50% and it is easily attainable in light.

GhostRunner521 · July 2014

Delete

jesterstear · July 2014

I googled up a few articles on the performance of the English longbow and it threw up some info about historic armour as well, which isn't entirely in line with MMO expectations.

1) Most combatants would be equipped with cloth armour, due to metal being very expensive

2) Plate mail varied in thickness from 1.2mm to up to 5mm on the breastplate. It was neither as heavy nor as impervious as assumed.

3) Cloth armour is far from normal clothing. Apparently there's an outer layer of leather and underneath, a minimum of 15 to a maximum of 30 layers of cloth. Thicker variants of this cloth armour are going to restrict movement and get very hot. Even at the lower end, and with only a warm English summer day of 25C/77F (wars usually took place in the summer, when food was sufficiently plentiful to press into service men who would otherwise be farming), sustained exertion cannot have been much fun. I imagine this cloth armour would easily end up weighing as much as metal armour, once it gets wet from sweat or rain.

4) Longbows had several different arrow heads. The famous "Bodkin" (needle) performed best against metal armour and was able to penetrate plate on their tests. However it was poor against cloth, barely penetrating 15 layers and being turned by anything thicker.

5) There was another version of the arrow with a bladed head - think -> which most people think of when you talk about an arrow. It was much better at cutting layers of cloth, but was ineffective against plate.

CapuchinSeven · July 2014

jesterstear wrote: »

4) Longbows had several different arrow heads. The famous "Bodkin" (needle) performed best against metal armour and was able to penetrate plate on their tests. However it was poor against cloth, barely penetrating 15 layers and being turned by anything thicker.

5) There was another version of the arrow with a bladed head - think -> which most people think of when you talk about an arrow. It was much better at cutting layers of cloth, but was ineffective against plate.

Historically nether head did THAT well against armour, metal arrowheads were different then and were normally fired from long range which made them even less effective than what you listed above. I'm not suggesting they couldn't kill, but their main aim wasn't to kill.

Arrows were historically used to harass the enemy, throw enough of them at the enemy and you're going to hit someone in the face, you're going to kill a Knights mount, you're going to at least slow them down.

Armour was effective against arrows, which is why armour was used for so long, once gunpowder became useful and made armour ineffective it was almost pointless to wear it. We'd have seen this happen much sooner if arrows were very effective at killing armored targets.