Is light armor viable in pvp?

Castile · July 2015

Pretty much as the title says. I'm not very experienced in pvp yet, I was running light armor for leveling/questing and only after hitting VR rank 4 did I get around to comparing defense values. I wasn't aware spell resist was increased with a 1:1 ratio to your armor value which pretty much dumbfounded me. Anyway, does anyone have experience using it in pvp? What tactics do you use to overcome the massive decrease in survivability? Running solo is obviously never a wise choice in pvp, but how big of a group would you need to be running with to really reap the benefits of the light armor passives?

iseko · July 2015

Depends on class, build and situation. But yes people run around in full light succesfully. Especially sorcs since they can shield stack like crazy. When in light armor you need shields to survive. And big ones to negate all those high burst builds.

Templars also do it (or 5l 2h) with ranged attacks and also shield stacking. Hellseesyou has a good build for it. A lot of temps run heavy or medium as well tho.

Not matter what armor you run you need a way to mitigate dmg and heal urself. Short general introduction:
LA: shield stacking +range + mobility/heals
MA: dodge roll + heals (vigor/rally)
HA: old school tank + heals (+ mobility in form of mist)

Not always 100% true but general way to go as far as I know.

Edit: problem with going armor/spell resist (i.e.: heavy) is that there are people running around with 15-20k penetration. So to be effective u need resist well over the hard cap. Not all people have that high penetration values but still... Enough. It is why LA shield stacking is so effective I guess. Penetration does not matter since shields dont have mitigated dmg. 5HA for example is useful because of block cost reduction mostly. Blocking is a very good way to mitigate a butload of dmg. But.... Theyre gonna nerf a lot of what I just typed here so you picked a bad time to ask this question...

G0ku · July 2015

You should not really care about finding a good pvp gear combination right now. With the next major update coming many things will change. So writing a wall of text for you now would feel obsolete. You didn´t even mention your class.

In short you can:

- use crafted set with armor or mitigation bonuses
- enchant your rings/necklace with armor / resistance values
- whitestrake, histbark, 3 jewelry + 2 heavy armor footmans, etc.
- skills which provide resistances (boneshield, harness magicka, etc.)

Olen_Mikko · July 2015

With good build and gear sets, of course light armor is viable.

I have magicka NB, with 5 light and 2 heavy and with some shield / armor buffs i can survive decently.

Though you need to check on your health bar with keen eye, since light armor can't take much of beating.

Be ready to retreat and have some escaping abilities around.

Castile · July 2015

Thanks for the replies. Whether the strategies become obsolete or not, it helps a lot to have some of them explained. Makes it a lot easier to understand a lost battle in pvp compared to just having a list of attacks that hit you.