Heavy armour already grossly over performs compared to medium in most ways and far exceeds the survivability that light armour can ever offer. Compared to medium it allows users to push not only far higher resistances but far better overall stats with the max health it offers, a far higher health recovery that has to make up the lack of healing everyone not using health based heals use. Whilst the lower crit is now completely irrelevant with how much better and consistent malacath is over using on anything other than a stamblade. For a mag users its day and night difference, light armour offers a fraction of the resistances for a bit more pen, why wear a set like swift when you can just use either a damage or regen based heavy armour set and slot ele drain?

Now with nerfs to nord, pushing a decently tanky medium or light armour build becomes even more difficult whilst heavy armour receives a huge buff to flat mitigation whilst CC immune. Heavy armour builds already make PvP a slow stalemate for many small scale encounters, whilst being the backbone of what enables the health based heal problem, Malacath and proc sets gives decent damage to the low damage tanks that currently plague PvP. I currently run around with over 5k weapon damage + balorgh and killing a decent player on a high health, high health regen stacked werewolf or warden is virtually impossible with arctic winds and werewolf heals criting for well over 10k, stopping you from bursting the comfortably large cushion of health they sit on. Other builds rely on other huge health based heals like dk with dragon blood or the shield granted from the mag morph or leap or necros using scythe which aren’t as effective but still a problem.

Now whilst my resistances and survivability lost from nord nerfs are impacting myself in medium and others in light, these builds are relatively unaffected and the reasons to continue running medium and light becomes less and less viable, I am at the point where I am essentially pigeon holed in to throwing on heavy and joining in on the heavy armour stalemate just to be able to survive. Heavy really needs a flat damage output reduction, 5 pieces of heavy should incur some huge reduction of spell and weapon damage, whilst proc sets should scale negatively based on overall stats, meaning that a pure DPS build should gain the max proc set damage tool tip, whilst these builds not heavily invested in to raw spell/weapon damage should get a severely reduced proc set tool tip. Malacath should not boost damage to anything other than skills and health based heals need to be severely reduced in PvP. Alternatively a hard cap of 30k health would greatly ‘pick up the pace’ of PvP and make these builds far less viable, however that option seems unlikely.