Light armor needs some direct spell damage and damage shield strenght or duration instead of spell resistance und medium armor might want penetration.

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

I'm glad currently it's possible to make a viable character with any of the four classes and your choice of light, medium or heavy armor. This was not the case at launch, and for a long time heavy armor was not viable in PVP except for certain extreme builds.

At this point, however, it's not hard to achieve extremely high physical / spell resistance, while still maintaining high burst damage and decent sustain in combat. Some large guild groups now push for most of their members to wear heavy, which is sort of a flashback from launch when everyone was pressured to use light armor and staff.

I wonder if there should be a bit more of a tradeoff when opting for the tankiness of heavy armor - so that you can get very high mitigation in heavy with reasonable sustain, but not so easy to get high damage, sustain and resistances at the same time. Or perhaps higher penetration passives with light and medium.

What do you think?

Honbestly PVP should have never been about stats . PVP should have had damage and mitigation caps and killing a player no matter the style should have been extremely hard requiring long fights. The PVP design of this game has made the PVE side amassive travesty of face roll playstyle ill never play another MMO where they split focus design . Neither community ever agrees and the game turns to garbage.

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

Knightpanther wrote: »

Heavy Armor should be for Tanking, although stop nerfing the bugger for us PVE just because of PvPer.

Does a PVE tank need the damage though?

In PVP currently there is not much tradeoff if you choose heavy armor. You can have very high damage output, reasonable sustain and still get close to resistance cap.

Heavy armor, decent sustain ? It has by far the best sustain.
Compare light armor recovery with heavy armor constitution, that's not even compareable because Heavy outperforms it so much. I have strong magicka regen sources with the Atronach stone and blue witchmothers regen drinks.

And the regen granted by light armor is merely 249 with 5 pieces light and it will be muuuuuch lower for pve DDs and most other people who don't use this food and maybe not even the Atronach. Constitution gives me 470 magicka regen and not only that, stamina regen as well and that's without blackrose in which dimension or realm in existance is this "decent" ? It's overperforming or light armor underperforming, that's up to everyone to decern.

It only procs when you take damage, but I think this is provided as long as you are in combat.

Valencer wrote: »

You shouldnt even have to explain why that passive is too good. It's basic math and it's kind of disappointing that it needs to be explained to people at all.

Heavy armour was already the meta before procs sets became this widespread, and there's a reason for that.

I know..... I just tried.
It's interesting to see how the meta shifts. Just a few patches ago, everyone was in medium armor and now medium armor has become so unviable, despite that it never received any nerfs or so.

Heavy armor offers just the best out of all worlds. Sustain, damage and survival. Medium and light offer only a bit more damage but not more survival and this is because constiution outperforms them all and Wrath competes with Penetration and this 12% damage from medium armor.

Jamini wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

Im running 7 heavy black rose on my stam DK and sustain is so braindead easy it's not even funny. And 38k max stamina and 3600 weapon damage doesnt exactly result in "trash tier" damage numbers either. Permablock for days, even against 2-3 enemy players, and still doing the same damage as my old medium armour spec.

Would you be so kind as to link your build to back up your numbers?

Why does this show my name ? It was not me who wrote this
This was @Valencer
But I can confirm what he's saying, I know him. No need for any links, believe it.

That's not how it works.

If someone makes a claim they need to back it up with evidence. Otherwise it's just screaming to the breeze. I'm not contesting that it is impossible, I'm just curious how he managed it. Is that buffed or unbuffed? Is that while under attack and utilizing full stacks of Wrath, or before? Does this include CP? Is he using a WD mundus, or thief/shadow?

Jamini wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

Yea cost reduction is the only thing keeping light armor relevant. But heavy armor also has rapid mending, which increases your restored ressources with heavy attacks.

Cost reduction and penetration.

4884 Pen is not something to sneeze at. Especially considering the popularity of spinner's and spriggan's.

Penetration is nice, but is useless against damage shields and enemies who have already lost too much resistance for this penetration to get its full effect or any effect at all.

Heavy armor gives straight spell damage and this always works.

Valencer wrote: »

Jamini wrote: »

Valencer wrote:

Im running 7 heavy black rose on my stam DK and sustain is so braindead easy it's not even funny. And 38k max stamina and 3600 weapon damage doesnt exactly result in "trash tier" damage numbers either. Permablock for days, even against 2-3 enemy players, and still doing the same damage as my old medium armour spec.

Would you be so kind as to link your build to back up your numbers?

Ill get you a Superstar screenshot later, if you really want that. Char is in PvE spec atm but can make one when I go for some PvP.

It's just 2 monster set + 5 black rose + agility jewelry + maelstrom 2H / night's silence 1H+S though. Pretty standard stuff (people have been running this since the dark brotherhood update) and the only thing that really matters is black rose + 7 heavy. You could even go for a more fancy spec with a 5 pc set on the jewelry + 1h/s.

The amount of times Ive died in anything resembling a 1v1 with this build has been exactly once, and that was a full-on procblade who had all his procs crit at the same time with his incap, resulting in me getting instagibbed. Too bad procs got nerfed so that probably won't happen anymore

Here's the Constitution tooltip pre-update with 7 heavy and black rose:


It'll be slightly lower now since BR got nerfed from +40% to +35% (should be about 1757 resources every 4 seconds now) but I really havent felt a noticeable difference in actual PvP.

That's almost like 900 magicka and stamina regen O.o and you can completely ignore regen food.
I need to sacrifise all my health in order to get 425 magicka regen only in order to have a chance to sustain and you get twice that on both stats for almost nothing yea balanced.

Dracane wrote: »

Valencer wrote: »

Jamini wrote: »

Valencer wrote:

Im running 7 heavy black rose on my stam DK and sustain is so braindead easy it's not even funny. And 38k max stamina and 3600 weapon damage doesnt exactly result in "trash tier" damage numbers either. Permablock for days, even against 2-3 enemy players, and still doing the same damage as my old medium armour spec.

Would you be so kind as to link your build to back up your numbers?

Ill get you a Superstar screenshot later, if you really want that. Char is in PvE spec atm but can make one when I go for some PvP.

It's just 2 monster set + 5 black rose + agility jewelry + maelstrom 2H / night's silence 1H+S though. Pretty standard stuff (people have been running this since the dark brotherhood update) and the only thing that really matters is black rose + 7 heavy. You could even go for a more fancy spec with a 5 pc set on the jewelry + 1h/s.

The amount of times Ive died in anything resembling a 1v1 with this build has been exactly once, and that was a full-on procblade who had all his procs crit at the same time with his incap, resulting in me getting instagibbed. Too bad procs got nerfed so that probably won't happen anymore

Here's the Constitution tooltip pre-update with 7 heavy and black rose:


It'll be slightly lower now since BR got nerfed from +40% to +35% (should be about 1757 resources every 4 seconds now) but I really havent felt a noticeable difference in actual PvP.

That's almost like 900 magicka and stamina regen O.o and you can completely ignore regen food.
I need to sacrifise all my health in order to get 425 magicka regen only in order to have a chance to sustain and you get twice that on both stats for almost nothing yea balanced.

Yeah. It works for both magicka and stamina too. Stamina chars get so much magicka sustain they can spam abilities like igneous shield and dark deal a lot more, resulting in even more stamina sustain. Magicka chars get so much stamina sustain they barely even have to pay attention to their stamina bar anymore, and can block whenever they want.

Now that Black Rose gives +max magicka I think there'll be a lot more magicka chars running this set too. The problem is people will blame it on Black Rose even though that set itself actually gives less sustain than Amberplasm does, even with 7 heavy. But somehow Amberplasm isnt OP and Black Rose is... I wonder why

Dracane wrote: »

Valencer wrote: »

Jamini wrote: »

Valencer wrote:

Im running 7 heavy black rose on my stam DK and sustain is so braindead easy it's not even funny. And 38k max stamina and 3600 weapon damage doesnt exactly result in "trash tier" damage numbers either. Permablock for days, even against 2-3 enemy players, and still doing the same damage as my old medium armour spec.

Would you be so kind as to link your build to back up your numbers?

Ill get you a Superstar screenshot later, if you really want that. Char is in PvE spec atm but can make one when I go for some PvP.

It's just 2 monster set + 5 black rose + agility jewelry + maelstrom 2H / night's silence 1H+S though. Pretty standard stuff (people have been running this since the dark brotherhood update) and the only thing that really matters is black rose + 7 heavy. You could even go for a more fancy spec with a 5 pc set on the jewelry + 1h/s.

The amount of times Ive died in anything resembling a 1v1 with this build has been exactly once, and that was a full-on procblade who had all his procs crit at the same time with his incap, resulting in me getting instagibbed. Too bad procs got nerfed so that probably won't happen anymore

Here's the Constitution tooltip pre-update with 7 heavy and black rose:


It'll be slightly lower now since BR got nerfed from +40% to +35% (should be about 1757 resources every 4 seconds now) but I really havent felt a noticeable difference in actual PvP.

That's almost like 900 magicka and stamina regen O.o and you can completely ignore regen food.
I need to sacrifise all my health in order to get 425 magicka regen only in order to have a chance to sustain and you get twice that on both stats for almost nothing yea balanced.

Its not for everyone though. Great for duellers/soloers/ tanks etc.. not so great for any ranged build played in many v many. You just don't get hit consistently enough to benefit. It also needs high-cp to work (didn't work on my stamsorc back when I was around 300cp) - and certain class passives/abilities help massively with sustain too which can go a long way to making constitution work much better in some cases than others.

Not all classes/playstyles/cp can just rely on constitution alone for sustain.

Penetration is a multiplier. You would gain similar damage boosts from Major/Minor Sorcery using pen as you would using raw spell damage.

2000 Base Spell damage
200 Fully Stacked Wrath
1.10 Penetration modifier with 5 light.
1.20 Major Sorcery Buff

(2,000 + 200) * 1.2 =2640
2000 * 1.1 * 1.2 = 2640

Heavy wins out if you have low spell damage values, but light still provides more damage if you have anything over 2k. Major Sorcery doesn't influence this.

Jamini wrote: »

2. Your Sustain is trash-tier, even with blackrose and desert rose. Without a sustain set like Lich a HA user will run out of stamina/magicka very quickly.

Let's break this down a bit, shall we?

Constitution provides 186 Magicka and Stamina every 4 seconds for every piece of Heavy Armor equipped. In 5 heavy, this goes up to 986 of each, effectively granting 493 Magicka and Stamina recovery.

Light Armor passives increase Magicka recovery by 4% and reduce the cost of Magicka abilities by 3% for each piece of Light Armor equipped, granting 20% recovery and 15% cost reduction in 5 light.

Medium Armor passives increase Stamina recovery by 4% and reduce the cost of feats by 4% for piece of Medium Armor equipped, granting 28% recovery and 28% cost reduction in 7 Medium.

For simplicity's sake, let's say that without any armor or enchantments, and no CPs assigned whatsoever, a character has 500 Magicka and Stamina recovery.

• In 5 Heavy, Constitution will grant an additional 493 of both, increasing Magicka and Stamina recovery to 993.
• In 5 Light, Recovery will grant an additional 100 Magicka recovery, increasing Magicka recovery to 600, while Stamina recovery remains at 500.
• In 7 Medium, Wind Walker will grant an additional 140 Stamina recovery, increasing Stamina recovery to 640, while Magicka recovery remains at 500.

Now to consider cost reduction. To calculate this, I'm just going to increase the recovery stat by the cost reduction percentage, since cost reduction functions by making every point of your resources more effective, and thus makes the same amount of recovery go further. So if we consider cost reduction as a direct, percent-based increase to recovery, then effective Magicka recovery for 5 Light becomes 690, while effective Stamina recovery becomes 819.2, both of which are still outpaced by 5 Heavy, which has the additional advantage of restoring both resources.

• Disregarding cost reduction, 5 Light builds would need 872.5 recovery (without armor) for their Magicka recovery to be stronger in Light than Heavy, while 7 Medium builds would need 775.78 recovery for Medium armor to outpace Heavy. Considering cost reduction, this becomes 750.7 for 5 Light and 606.08 for 5 Medium.

So, after doing all this math, I'm going to draw a few conclusions. Note that this is exclusively based on Magicka and Stamina recovery.

• Heavy armor is superior for builds that completely abandon recovery in favor of damage, since the flat value of Constitution is comparatively stronger at lower recovery levels.
• Light and Medium armor provide vastly superior single-resource sustain for builds that invest heavily in recovery.
• Heavy armor has the advantage of providing both resources; while sustain in your primary resource is likely weaker than it would be in light or medium armor, Constitution also provides a substantial boost to your secondary resource's recovery.

I think the bolded point is really the biggest draw of using Heavy Armor from a sustain standpoint. No, a Magicka build in 5 Heavy won't have as much sustain as they would in Light if both builds ran Seducer with recovery enchants on jewelry, but they will have substantially more Stamina to work with for keeping themselves alive.

This is why people say that the combination of Dark Deal and Constitution is overpowered. Dark Deal tops off their Stamina, while Constitution gives them a solid amount of Magicka to fuel their use of it. Since they can use the Magicka gained from Constitution to restore their Stamina, they can effectively double-dip in the Constitution passive by using it to restore their Stamina twice, and allowing them to have powerful sustain while completely neglecting recovery.

I hope this post provides some insight. If someone could double-check my math, that would be fabulous.

Until Light Armor and Medium aren't junk. Leave Heavy alone

How do you manage high damage output in Heavy though? Those 5pc Medium passive bonuses are essential for me.