Light Armor - Concentration: Increases your Spell Penetration by 4736 when a light armor set of 5 or more pieces is equipped.
Light Armor - Prodigy: Grants 10% chance for Spells to cause Critical Damage while a light armor set of 5 or more pieces is equipped.
Medium Armor - Agility: Increases weapon power by 12% when a medium armor set of 5 or more pieces is equipped.
Heavy Armor - Bracing: Decreases Stamina cost of blocking by 20% when a heavy armor set of 5 or more pieces is equipped.
I honestly do not know what this system is there for. What I can understand is having diminishing returns on these passive's effectiveness to make a mix of armor sets more appealing (if it should be, and I see no reason for that, but the Undaunted Mettle passive suggests this seems desirable to the Devs). But a bonus for wearing a lot of a specific type of armor would be there either way.
The first reason I am making this post is because I do not like how abrupt you gain or loose the argubly largest bonus of an armor type with adding or removing only one piece of that type.
The second reason is, that there is less choice in armor types than before 1.6 if you want to be efficient. In pretty much all situations, the best set consists of 5 pieces of your main armor type to benefit from one of these passives and one piece of each of the other armor types to maximize the amount of additional stats you gain from the undaunted passive "Undaunted Mettle". The only situation were a more homogenized setup would be desirable would be in the case that you are lacking magicka or stamina regeneration. Thus, 7 medium armor pieces or 5 heavy and 2 light armor pieces are common setup as well. Note that people still use at least 5 pieces of one armor type, using exactly 3 or 4 of one type of armor is not an option for an optimized build.
If you wanted to make it so that you can not benefit from 2 or more of these powerful passives, 4 pieces instead of 5 would serve the purpose better, but would arguably not make much of a difference to my concern.
That is why I suggest to simply completely split up these passives again when balance gets adressed again. Make them per piece.
Concentration at least actually was per piece before 1.6 hit the live server.
It hurts build diversity quite a lot in my opinion, that you are not able to use certain not-craftable sets to their full extent, simply because that would mean giving up on your playstyle (with using 5 pieces of the drop set's armor type instead) or damage your build more than an armor set 5 piece bonus is able to provide, loosing all the possible passives you'd get for 5 parts of the same armor type.
People who would give up more survivability for more magic damage would be able to do so instead of getting both, using 7 light instead of 5 light, 1 heavy, one medium. People who would like to balance their block cost reduction and roll dodge costs better for their medium/heavy stamina tank would be able to do so, using 4 medium and 3 heavy pieces, for example. People who would like to play their setup just like it is now would still be able to do so - if this was the only change, nothing would change for their builds.
And with all these passives scaling per piece of armor type equipped, it shouldn't be any harder to balance than it is now either.
If there are other arguments I do not see so far, that justify this loss of choice and diversity, please enlighten me.
Otherwise I would be very happy if this would be getting adressed in a future update.
Thank you if actually read this.
DAGON - ALTADOON - CHIM - GHARTOK
The Covenant is broken. The Enemy has won...
Elo'dryel - Sorc - AR 50 - Hopesfire - EP EU