2017 Mitigation in 2021

Nagastani

Please note that I do agree with the apparent vision behind these changes and do not hate the idea itself. However sometimes you can have a good idea which itself is not a problem however the implementation of that idea from the paper to practicality, cause major problems or it's end result is otherwise notably flawed. I believe that could be the case here regarding armor mitigation.

In the title I reference 2017. Well, I remember back in 2017 that light armor was quite weak, in fact it was so brittle that most players I knew didn't bother with it. Everyone was going from medium to heavy in Cyrodiil and staying with medium for IC, for the most part. I realize this is conjecture yet to the best of my knowledge, this is true. And so, people stopped running light armor for a while and then eventually, separate from light armor, other mitigation solutions presented themselves, though not necessarily intended for light armor yet light armor benefitted and because of this, different light armor builds started to become viable again. Keep that in mind.

So as of the first of this month, my Mag Sorc had 20k Phy Resist and 20k Mag Resist. This wasn't great however this plus my hardened ward gave me enough time to be able to duel and in general 'do battle' reasonably well. Yesterday and tonight, I found time to fully test the new patch both in CP and non-CP Imperial City. The results are quite frankly frightening. I am finding now, that I'm losing almost every match to Stam 2H users, especially NBs. Fights with other Mag Sorcs or Mag NBs are normal for the most part however I'm CC'd and killed faster than I can react. After reviewing the patch notes again, I suspect that the loss of our ability to customize our mitigation combined with the new weaknesses woven into Light Armor, have resulted in an unnecessary buff to 2H spammers.

Please keep in mind, this is not about me losing a fight however there most def exists a correlation between buffed burst damage from 2H wields and light armor builds themselves being incompetent at providing enough resistance, under normal conditions, to make the fight reasonable. Now with all of this said, what should we do going forward...

1) If Light Armor is being made irrelevant yet again, are you asking us to move away from it, again, (for no real reason that I can see)?
2) If we move away from Light Armor, whereas Heavy was the big answer back in the day, why goto Heavy now with it's own serious problems? Furthermore... I understand Heavy Armor weighing more and maybe encumbering someone however Heavy armor is supposed to protect... does not make sense to make something that protects vulnerable. I mean, maybe it's heavy so you can't case spells as easily or load your bow as quickly, I mean yeah that's fine. But making Heavy Armor implicitly vulnerable to damage I think is not logical. Not to mention how it's been nerfed so hard over time it's like... I think if you want my advice, when you guys get a chance it might be best for everyone to sit around a kitchen table and revisit the vision for Heavy Armor in eso.
3) Vampirism and Mitigation. So a good solution for my vamp is to run light armor. Seeing how vamps have virtually no health recovery, it's nice to use a resto and restore health or use shields etc... But this Health Recovery penalty I think is too much. It all but forces vamps to choose light armor, especially because from having reduced or no health recovery, heavy armor isn't going to buff a vamp by too much, especially seeing how heavy armor does not even provide it's full functionality anyways from all the nerfs to it. So the vamps don't get as much out of it. And because of this vamps seem friendly to mag instead of stam, so no need to run medium. Therefore, this doubles the problem with light armor for vampires. Not only is light armor unable to protect as well as before, unless I am forced to go full armor builds (like Brass Forge), a vamp with reduced or no health recovery in your average light armor build, (think Bright-Throat or Julianos and we'll say Willpower with a Maelstrom staff) is going to get shredded. Extra damage from stam heavy burst hitters plus reduced or no health recovery for the vampire. I swear to God, since I've been running this new patch in IC it's just CC'd and dead from anything running 2H, esp NBs.

So these are just my thoughts on the matter, sorry the post is so large however I wanted to be certain to include everything. I guess I could just start running full armor sets for light armor however, you know, that's not really the point of wearing light armor. And hey, blame me if you like, however there were no problems until this update went live. And I'm not saying that this patch is bad, it's certainly not all bad. But I think on some of this stuff you might want to either have another look or watch for similar posts with same issues and see if a pattern develops.

Thanks again

Jacozilla

Obligatory....for PVP point of view for OP.

Light armor is getting a reason to go 7L in PvE, guess better enjoy it for the few short months till inevitable nerf due to PVP concerns.

And no, am not saying it’s wrong for PvP to want their options as well, but reality is zos just won’t balance PVE vs PVP separately. So given that, it is just matter of time before PvP complaints get light armor nerfed for PvE. (Because zos won’t just add some toughness to light, they’ll neuter the already lowered crit chance while tossing in some token armor buff. Congrats, now no one is happy - the perfect zos feature)

Araneae6537

I agree with your observations. While some of the changes to armor I feel make sense (not being able to sneak as well in heavy, for instance), the vulnerabilities to melee and magic damage do not in my opinion.