I think ultimately it still depends on your build and playstyle. I used to run heavy reinforced on big pieces and impen on all of the rest. Lately, I’ve been running two impen, three divines (if using a damage mundus), or two impen, three well-fitted. Personally, I don’t feel a big difference in survivability when going from five-six impen down to two 🤷‍♂️

Here’s what I’ve switched to recently and like:

For builds running 1heavy, 6light/medium, I go 1heavy reinforced chest and 3 impen, 3 divines/well-fitted (personal preference)

For builds running 2 heavy reinforced chest and legs, then you’d go 3divines/well-fitted, 2 impen. That’s what I’ve been liking anyway. Here soon I’m going to try my builds with no impen at all and see how it feels 🤞

I play in BGs and IC only I run 5 heavy, 2 Medium on Brawler blade. Reinforced chest, rest Well Fitted. Heavy Armour active ability (Brute morph). Gives me over 20k resistance, around 1500 critical resistance and I don't die much 1v1 and have even started to 1vX a little bit. My stuns and burst combos help me kill non tanks and I only really lose out against super mobile builds I can't chase down but if Ambush and Stampede weren't so clunky I'd have almost no major problems.

Impen is a little weak IMO.
5 medium and a couple of divines pieces would give me more WD but i feel that 6k is alright on a Brawler. I have 10k penetration

Yeah I love well fitted way too much. No impen for me

I roll with 0. You get plenty of free crit resistance, and I find traits are better spent on reinforced and well fitted. All it takes is malacath to make all your impen useless. At least with more armor you know it always amounts to some mitigation. Just my personal preference…

divnyi wrote: »

Zero. Because Well-Fitter or Sturdy makes you much much more resilient. Especially Sturdy.

Now if you don't plan to roll or block (low stamrecovery char in Gaze of Sithis for example), and you roll heavy, you can go for nirn/reinforced (whichever is more in full gold), to push for extra ~3k of armor, which is at least 5% - but since it's 5% mitigation that is close to finishing armor cap, it's even more.

Impen only matters in small amount of matchups and I don't really care about outlier cases.

Hey Divnyi. Do you bother with getting crit resist from the star or sets or just roll with base? I've usually try to get some extra somewhere but really starting to wonder if it's worth it. I honestly don't notice much difference. Just for comparison I think 1 line of crit resist is 424, 1 line armor is 1487. And I think 68 crit resist is 1% off crit damage. My math sucks but Id guess that's something like 6% reduced damage on a crit hit vs 2.25% on all hits? So, um, works out a good deal if you assume >30% crit chance? Feel free to say the answer is, who cares, its all in the margins...

edit to add a @divnyi thingy

@Larcomar Star gives -10% crit damage in mitigations. But that's like difference between, say, 140% and 150%, which would be 6.5% mitigation, and add crit chance on top, which would be ~40% for builds that don't invest in crit gear but invest in crit sources - you'll get 2-3% mitigation.

Now, when we say about playing vs NBs and their guaranteed crit on incap, in might be worth it, but on the other side, why would you just incap and not HA+incap? HA would eat damage boost then, if HA is made with DW only first hit will guaranteed-crit.

What else crits in the meta? Acuity isn't in the meta really, you can put it on plars but even there it is questionable, increased cooldown hits hard.

Crit build like what I'm assembling? Eh I never seen anyone doing anything like that.

Just natural crit chance? Well some people say that crit heavy-hitters like ults -> whip are what really kills in duels. Maybe true, maybe not. Idk, but I'd still boost active defences any day so I can block heavy hits.

And speaking about stars, those ones that give 10% mitigation from direct/AoE/single target are much better and much more reliable, as well as healing stars if they fit you.