Heavy armor is grossly overpowered compared to medium. It sustains just as good thanks to the rapid mending resource bonus, it has access to shuffle like medium and it can provide you with a bunch of damage thanks to an array of offensive heavy armor sets.
Fighting some of these characters becomes impossible when they're dealing more damage than you, sustain better by abusing a resource mechanic and can take 3 times more punishment before going down.
If anyone over there cares about PVP balance, I propose the following;
- Consider tuning down offensive heavy armor sets, there should be no reason for me to run heavy armor and have more damage overall than in medium.
- Restrict armor actives to their armor tree, 5+ pieces required to use that active ability. No more shuffle on heavy armor, in fact, major evasion in heavy armor probably shouldn't be allowed at all.
- Remove the resource sustain from rapid mending, in what world does it make sense to wield a two handed massive weapon in FULL heavy armor and actually replenish your resources at an increased rate? If you were worried about pve tanks not sustaining as well, don't - they sustain perfectly fine in dungeons, and the ones that don't, need to work on their builds a bit.
If you want to see more balanced pvp gameplay in ESO, you really need to look into this heavy armor meta, it will only get worse in time.
Oh and btw since I'm here, get rid of those proc sets, no one asked for them, no one competent likes them, having your armor do damage for you is incredibly stupid. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm starting to miss the good old 1.5 pvp days too.
Have a good day.
Read the spoiler for more details:
DDuke: Mathematical facts? This should be fun.
Let's start with dodge roll. What's the problem with it?
Well, here's a list of basic skills that you cannot mitigate with dodge roll - they will hit you:
Puncturing Strikes (and morphs), Dive (and morphs), Radiant Destruction (and morphs), Dark Talons (and morphs), Petrify (and morphs), Aspect of Terror (and morphs), Daedric Curse (and morphs), Daedric Mines (and morphs), Lightning Form (and morphs), Spear Shards (and morphs), Backlash (and morphs), Scorch (and morphs), Impaling Shards (and morphs), Ash Cloud (and morphs), Wall of Elements (and morphs), Drain Essence (and morphs), Trap Beast (and morphs), Fire Rune (and morphs), Trapping Webs (and morphs), Caltrops (and morphs), Path of Darkness (and morphs), Agony (and morphs), Rune Prison (and morphs), Lightning Splash (and morphs), Volley (and morphs), Magicka Detonation (and morphs), Explosive Charge, Lotus Fan, Streak, Dark Flare (heal debuff portion only), Ritual of Retribution, Arctic Blast
And here's a list of skills that you can't mitigate with dodge once they've been applied:
Mages' Fury (and morphs), Sun Fire (and morphs), Eclipse (and morphs), Swarm (and morphs), Searing Strike (and morphs), Fiery Breath (and morphs), Cleave (and morphs), Twin Slashes (and morphs), Poison Arrow (and morphs), Arrow Spray (and morphs), Soul Trap (and morphs), Infectious Claws (and morphs)[Note: Infectious Claws is very, very difficult to dodge, but it's possible as per my tests], Entropy (and morphs), Volatile Armor
Bad huh? Gets worse:
Ultimates - Soul Strike (and morphs), Dawnbreaker (and morphs), Elemental Storm (and morphs), Meteor (and morphs), Dragonknight Standard (and morphs), Bat Swarm (and morphs), Consuming Darkness (and morphs), Soul Shred (and morphs), Summon Storm Atronach (and morphs), Negate Magic (and morphs), Radial Sweep (and morphs), Nova (and morphs), Sleet Storm (and morphs), Soul Harvest
And one ultimate which you can't mitigate by dodging once it has been applied: Lacerate (and morphs)
That's not all.
DW/2H Bleeds, Skoria proc, DoT set bonuses, lightning/resto heavy attacks - all undodgeable as well.
No matter how you put it, the vast majority of damage in the game is undodgeable. Worth noting though is that somewhat ironically stamina builds (apart from Warden & Templar) have the least amount of undodgeable attacks.
So based on this, we can lower any perceived practical value granted by medium armor's dodge roll cost reduction (20% with 5 medium). Not that it really matters, since the cost is stacking exponentially.
Just using the build I'm experimenting with atm (5 Hundings 5 Sheer Venom 2 Selene), here's an example of how many times I can dodge roll in a row (dodge roll cost 2585 with 56 points in Tumbling & 5 medium): 2585(+33%)->3438(+33%)->4573(+33%)->6081(+33%)->8088(+33%)->10 758
6 dodge rolls in a row and that's 35 523 stamina spent.
How about same setup in 5 heavy instead?
Dodge roll cost only goes up to 2973 as medium armor & CP modifiers are multiplicative.
2973(+33%)->3954(+33%)->5259(+33%)->6994(+33%)->9302(+33%)->12 372
So we "only" end up spending 5k more stamina dodging 6 times in a row, all things considered that's not a pretty big loss, especially when you no longer have to dodge roll the few dodgeable attacks left in this game thanks to higher mitigation.
...which brings us to the next portion. How much does the extra mitigation and healing received affect actual combat in PvP? Let's take a 100k tooltip Soul Assault as an example.
5/1/1 Full Legendary medium nets you 19% Spell Resistance
A 100K Soul Assault tooltip->28 571 damage/second, which gets halved to 14 286/second in PvP. We reduce 19% from that (let's assume there's equal amounts of penetration & armor buffs) and we get 11 572 damage/second on average.
Let's assume we're blocking (because what other option is there): -50% to that equals 5786 damage/second on average.
Now, my Vigor tooltip with 4461 weapon damage and 34 059 stamina is 14 997 over 5 seconds, which is halved in PvP (7499) - meaning 1500 health/second on average. We deduce that from the Soul Assault damage, and we'll "only" take 4286 damage from it through block.
Health Recovery (at 367 with 5 medium) also reduces another 642 from the damage taken, so you end up taking 3644 damage/second through block.
Now let's look at heavy armor.
Assuming the same setup (which isn't BiS for heavy, far from it), your Spell Resistance will be 24%, but your weapon damage will drop from 4461 to 4296.
14 286-24%->10 857-50%(block)=5429 damage/second
Now Vigor. With 4296 weapon damage, Vigor has a tooltip of 14 676. The healing received gets increased by 8% from Rapid Mending, so you get 15 850 health over 5 seconds. Halved in PvP & divided by five, we get to 1585 health/second on average.
5429-1585=3844
Health Recovery (at 417 with 5 heavy) also reduces another 730 from the damage taken, so you end up taking 3114 damage/second through block.
So heavy armor is able to mitigate 15.6851% more damage on average than medium armor after you count in Vigor & health recovery (Rally and any other self heal would further widen the gap).
However, the real difference comes with the sets available to heavy & medium:
Legion+Fury for example will net you a Vigor tooltip of 16029(+8%)->17 311, or 1731 health/second on average (+some small heals from Legion) - this leads to Soul Assault dealing an average 3698 damage/second.
Health Recovery (at 587 with 5 heavy & a set bonus from Legion) also reduces another 1027 from the damage taken, so you end up taking 2671 damage/second through block.
30.8155% difference to what a medium setup that goes all in for high heals/dmg (at the cost of sustain) would give you.
Speaking of sustain, let's compare those next:
With the medium setup, I have 1391 Stamina Recovery & 1091 Magicka Recovery.
With the same buffs & CPs, Legion+Fury heavy armor build (with the same monster set) gets you 1257 Stamina Recovery (a 10% difference) & 1091 Magicka Recovery. However, with 5 heavy Constitution can be considered equal to 270 Stamina/Magicka Recovery, so in fact you get more stamina & magicka recovery in a heavy armor build (1527 "stamina regen" & 1361 "magicka regen") than you do in medium, unless you get multiple set bonuses from gear (in which case if you're medium, you're giving up damage/healing for sustain and thus further widening difference seen above between damage mitigated/outhealed).
Surprise Attack in 5/1/1 Heavy costs you 2250 stamina
Surprise Attack in 5/1/1 Medium costs you 2066 stamina
A difference of 184 stamina.
Assuming you manage to spam Surprise Attack once every 1,3s (weave time with GCD) with no downtime, you'd need 313 stamina regen to get even, which is covered by Constitution alone in the comparison I made above, so you don't even need cost reduction or regen on jewelry to get even.
So yeah, just some little maths detailing why heavy armor is significantly stronger at the moment. I believe that if dodge roll was a more reliable defense, the cost reduction on that with medium could be used as an argument.
But even so, the amount of times you can dodge doesn't really differ (see above), so I do think medium needs significant buffs to get on par with heavy.