What to do about light armour?

LittlePinkDot

I think everyone knows that light armour needs a buff.. the only question is what type of buff? I have my own ideas, but I would love to hear your ideas too.

I'm thinking light armour should have a movement speed increase passive per piece of light armour worn.

Soarora

I'm going to say weapon and spell damage. Medium armor has weapon and spell damage along with critical damage. Light armor has penetration and critical chance. Penetration is a moot point outside of solo content because of sources of resistance removal, so light armor has 1 bonus while medium armor has 2. If light armor then had penetration, critical chance, and weapon and spell damage, then maybe it can compete on builds that hit crit cap without using medium armor (such as khajiit, frost wardens, and nightblades).

Turtle_Bot

I'd make the following changes to the passives:

Ideally it would be the following:

1. Remove the reduced block cost from medium armor and give it to heavy armor (why does the best DD armor that buffs the only truly uncapped DPS stat, also come with a tank buff).
2. Remove the sprint cost reduction and the CC immunity speed bonus from medium armor and give them to light armor.
3. Halve the values of the athletics passive (3% speed + 4% roll cost reduction per piece is insanely strong)

This seems like a lot to take away from medium armor, but medium armor has literally zero drawbacks to using it. There is no reason is should also have all of the passive buffs that are supposed to be for the more specialized weights that have drawbacks for getting those types of unique buffs.

However, if they for some reason don't want to nerf medium armor, then do the following changes instead:

1. Remove the martial damage taken penalty (no reason to have this penalty on top of the already lower base armor values).
2. Increase the crit chance from 109/219 to 164/329 per light armor piece worn to have it be comparable to medium armors uncapped weapon/spell damage buff.
3. Buff the spell resistance passive to also grant healing done (1/2%) and a small amount of crit resistance (33/66 or 0.5/1%) per piece worn.

I would also look into reworking the active skills to be more useful. Being able to be used as long as you are wearing 1 piece of the respective armor weight, but increasing in value the more you lean into that armor weight.
For example:

• Light Armor:
  • Annulment (Light armor active skill)
  • 4590 Magicka
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of Light Armor equipped
  • Convert a portion of your magicka into a protective ward, gaining a damage shield that absorbs 3718 damage for 8 seconds. The shield size is increased by 5% for each piece of Light armor you are wearing. Damage shield strength is capped at 50% of your max health.
    Note: The old Dampen Magicka effect has been added to the base ability. This allows a build wearing all light armor to have a shield that is ~8% weaker than regenerative ward, still comparable, but slightly less due to not being class locked. As such, Dampen Magicka has been changed to Reflective Magicka and has been reworked.
  • Reflective Magicka (Morph 1)
  • 4590 Magicka
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of Light Armor equipped
  • Convert a portion of your magicka into a protective ward, gaining a damage shield that absorbs 3718 damage for 8 seconds. The shield size is increased by 5% for each additional piece of Light armor you are wearing. Damage shield strength is capped at 50% of your max health. Each time the shield absorbs damage (once per second), it deals 3% of your maximum magicka as magic damage to the attacker. Each piece of light armor increases this damage by 5%. This damage cannot critically strike.
    Note: This means that with 7 pieces of light armor the shield will deal 4.05% of your max magicka as damage, so on a 60k mag build with 7 light armor equipped the damage return will deal 2430 tooltip damage. This reduces to 1215 damage after applying battle spirit, and would then also be further reduced by mitigations. So on a typical non-blocking PvP build this would average around maybe 600 damage.
  • Harness Magicka (Morph 2)
  • 4590 Magicka
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of Light Armor equipped
  • Convert a portion of your magicka into a protective ward, gaining a damage shield that absorbs 3718 damage for 8 seconds. The shield size is increased by 5% for each additional piece of Light armor you are wearing. Damage shield strength is capped at 50% of your max health. Each time the shield absorbs damage you restore 1% of your max magicka (up to a max of 3 times). Each piece of light armor increases the amount restored by 5%. The restored magicka is halved while under the effects of Battle Spirit.
    Note: This means that on a 60k max mag build with 7 pieces of light armor, the shield will restore 810 magicka (405 in PvP) up to 3 times while the shield absorbs damage for a total of 2430 magicka (1215 in PvP) restored per cast.
• Medium Armor:
  • Evasion (Medium Armor active skill)
  • 3213 Stamina
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of Medium Armor equipped
  • Surround yourself in mist to gain Minor Evasion for 20 seconds. This becomes Major evasion instead if you have 4 or more pieces of medium armor equipped.
  • Parry (Morph 1)
  • 3213 Stamina
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of Medium Armor equipped
  • You calm yourself, enhancing your reflexes to gain Minor Deflection for 20 seconds. This becomes Major Deflection instead if you have 4 or more pieces of medium armor equipped. If you have 7 pieces of medium armor equipped, this grants both Major and Minor Deflection
    Deflection is a new named buff that is basically evasion, but for single target attacks.
  • Elude (Morph 2)
  • 3213 Stamina
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of Medium Armor equipped
  • Surround yourself in mist to gain Minor Evasion for 20 seconds. This becomes Major evasion instead if you have 4 or more pieces of medium armor equipped. If you have 7 pieces of medium armor equipped, this grants both Major and Minor Evasion.
• Heavy Armor:
  • Unstoppable (Heavy Armor active skill)
  • 3213 Stamina
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of heavy armor equipped
  • Brace yourself to enhance your defenses, granting 850 armor per piece of heavy armor equipped. If you have 5 or more pieces of Heavy Armor equipped, you also gain immunity to knock back and disabling effects for 6 seconds, but your movement speed is reduced by 8% per heavy armor piece equipped.
    Note: This snare ignores snare immunity and cannot be cleansed.
  • Unstoppable Brute (Morph 1)
  • 3213 Stamina
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of heavy armor equipped
  • Bend, don't break, you prepare yourself enhancing your defenses, granting 640 armor per piece of heavy armor equipped. If you have 3 or more pieces of Heavy Armor equipped, you also gain immunity to knock back and disabling effects for 4 seconds, but your movement speed is reduced by 4% per heavy armor piece equipped.
    Armor gain, movement speed reduction, the requirement and duration for immunity to knock back and disabling effects has been reduced. You move faster to bend with the situation, but have lower penalties that would break your defenses.
  • Immovable (Morph 2)
  • 3213 Stamina
  • Requires minimum 1 piece of heavy armor equipped
  • Brace yourself with rigidity to become an immovable object, granting 1275 armor per piece of heavy armor equipped, you also gain immunity to knock back and disabling effects for 6 seconds, but your movement speed is reduced by 12% per heavy armor piece equipped. If you have 7 pieces of Heavy armor equipped, the next direct damage projectile will bounce off your armor, dealing 0 damage. You can only gain this effect once per 15 seconds.
    Become a truly immovable wall. You won't move much, if at all, but your defenses have been significantly increased.

All of the skills now do something when 1 piece of their respective weights are equipped, but you get the most out of them the more you lean into their respective armor weights.

Kelenan7368

The Tank Meta has for the most part killed Medium and light armor in PVP. If you want to be tanky DPS needs to go down greatly. No matter how you try you cant beat tanky builds or at times even hurt them.
Sorry but light and medium armor need to be DPS kings always.

Major_Mangle

Kelenan7368 wrote: »

The Tank Meta has for the most part killed Medium and light armor in PVP. If you want to be tanky DPS needs to go down greatly. No matter how you try you cant beat tanky builds or at times even hurt them.
Sorry but light and medium armor need to be DPS kings always.

I could interpretet your comment wrong, but heavy armor has very little to do with the high survivability of players, and if you wanna maximise dmg you will go for more medium/light armor pieces. If anything medium armor is more to blame due to how good its passives are. Most builds won't be using more than 2-3 pieces of heavy armor (same with medium armor, but obviously depends on what build/playstyle you go for). Light armor will usually go on the belt (again, it will obviously depend on your build) to maximise the undaunted passives.

I personally think that armor passives aren't too much of a balance issue as people make it, it's unironically one of the few good aspects of the hybridization I believe zos got right (could ofc do minor tweaks here and there).

Taril

For a start, removing the penalty from Light Armour (Also Heavy Armour too). Makes no sense that Medium is the only armour type that doesn't actively debuff you for wearing it.

I get that it's trying to create a typical RPG design (Where Light Armour provides the best magic defence while Heavy Armour is better for physical defence) but all the theming is done via passives (I.e. Non-Medium armours don't get Medium armour's sneak passive so are less sneaky, so Heavy armour doesn't need the sneak penalty to be less sneaky)

The next thing to look at would be passives.

Light Armour provides Crit rating and Penetration... Both of these stats have caps, which are reachable without these bonuses.

While Medium armour provides Crit damage and W/S damage the former is harder to come by (Even if it does have a cap) and the latter is uncapped.

Adjusting the passives so Light Armour gets an uncapped stat instead of say Penetration (Which is nigh useless in PvE given Breach debuffs that provide the majority of necessary penetration) would help bring Light Armour closer to Medium (Though it will still be inherently squishier. And slower. And less sneaky (Especially since anyone who cares about sneaking is a vampire to ignore the movement penalty outright making LA's sneak bonus redundant))

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Light Armour got reworked into Companion style. Whereby its focus was more on being the armour type for Healers making its bonuses more focused on providing increased healing done. Making the armour types be Healer = Light Armour, DPS = Medium Armour, Tank = Heavy Armour. Which would alleviate the issue of trying to balance out Light vs Medium armour since they'd simply be tuned towards different roles.

Sluggy

Kelenan7368 wrote: »

The Tank Meta has for the most part killed Medium and light armor in PVP. If you want to be tanky DPS needs to go down greatly. No matter how you try you cant beat tanky builds or at times even hurt them.
Sorry but light and medium armor need to be DPS kings always.

I pretty much agree with this. It's easy enough to get 5k to 7k damage even when fully stacked into heavy. And penetration can be solved pretty easily with just a monster set or a craftable 5-piece that can be any weight.

So one thing about heavy armor that is often overlooked is that it is, and has been for several years, the best option for sustain in PvP. Squeezing out heavy attacks nonstop is pretty easy and on top of that you gain even more just from getting hit.

Medium armor arguably used to be the most worthless before they made the changes. The only reason people wear it at all now is because it provides the best source of damage since pen is easy to find without light peices and medium offers a percentage increase instead of flat values.

I'd say the biggest thing about light armor today isn't that it's bad when mixed in with equal amounts to heavy. I'd say it's more that there is no real benefit from stacking all-in with it. Is that a bad thing? I dunno. Maybe? Personally I'd like to see more reasons to NOT stack all-in with medium. So maybe a flat damage value per piece instead of percentages? But then again, given the state of the game that's only going to lean more into the bigger issues already present.

LittlePinkDot

Taril wrote: »

For a start, removing the penalty from Light Armour (Also Heavy Armour too). Makes no sense that Medium is the only armour type that doesn't actively debuff you for wearing it.

I get that it's trying to create a typical RPG design (Where Light Armour provides the best magic defence while Heavy Armour is better for physical defence) but all the theming is done via passives (I.e. Non-Medium armours don't get Medium armour's sneak passive so are less sneaky, so Heavy armour doesn't need the sneak penalty to be less sneaky)

The next thing to look at would be passives.

Light Armour provides Crit rating and Penetration... Both of these stats have caps, which are reachable without these bonuses.

While Medium armour provides Crit damage and W/S damage the former is harder to come by (Even if it does have a cap) and the latter is uncapped.

Adjusting the passives so Light Armour gets an uncapped stat instead of say Penetration (Which is nigh useless in PvE given Breach debuffs that provide the majority of necessary penetration) would help bring Light Armour closer to Medium (Though it will still be inherently squishier. And slower. And less sneaky (Especially since anyone who cares about sneaking is a vampire to ignore the movement penalty outright making LA's sneak bonus redundant))

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Light Armour got reworked into Companion style. Whereby its focus was more on being the armour type for Healers making its bonuses more focused on providing increased healing done. Making the armour types be Healer = Light Armour, DPS = Medium Armour, Tank = Heavy Armour. Which would alleviate the issue of trying to balance out Light vs Medium armour since they'd simply be tuned towards different roles.

I'm looking at it from a PvP point of view. I have nothing against the penetration because it's very important for PvP. The penetration sets it apart from medium armour, I don't want to lose it. I just want a little something extra.
Some classes have poor mobility.. it would be nice to have an option for more movement speed without having to use swift jewelry.