Too many medium armor damage option for PVE and not enough light armor options?

JN_Slevin · April 2022

Ever since we gotten the hybridization of everything an issue which i felt strongly about for quite some time as become even more apparent.
The medium armor sets are outclassing the light armor sets by quite a mile in PVE setups.
We have so many options now, it would be sad if those options would force is into a gear choice.
For comparison:
Medium Armor Sets which are currently being used which result in more or less acceptable damage output:

Arms of Relequen
Yandir's Might
Kinras' Wrath
Tzogvin
Aegis Caller
Pillar of Nirn
Briarheart (i guess)
Deadly Strike
Sul-Xans Torment

I understand some of these are situational but you see clear power in each of those sets

Now we do the same for light armor:

Bahsei
Burning Spellweave
Elemental Catalyst
Siroria
Master Architect
Mothers Sorrow

All of these are either rather complicated to keep up, are very situational, can / should only be used by one player in a party or a Medium choice exists with basically the same bonuses.
The situation becomes even more dire if we factor in Minor Slayer. So if you need to use Light Armor (for sustain reasons or want more crit, thankfully we will get an option for penetration next patch) you are forced to go Bahsei.
You can go support, but double Elemental Catalyst for example is quite redundant.

I see more and more people now go full on medium armor. With Relequen and Kinra or Tzogvin being a very popular choice for endgame players.

If you want to have clear boundaries (i.e. light = support, medium = damage, heavy = tank) then i believe you should communicate it this way.

An easy fix for this situation would be to buff / change Moondancer. Its a great set which is sadly outclassed by almost all other Trial sets.

I would suggest a change which would cause the shadow blessing (Weapon and Spelldamage) to always proc after using a synergy while you are over 25% Magicka and the moon blessing (Magicka Recovery) to always proc while you are under 25% magicka.
This would make it competitive with similar sets, while still being not too easy to use.

Now maybe this whole post is redundant if the new light armor set in the new trial will outperform other sets, but well have to see how it comes out.
For now i feel like this needed to be said and if you have any sets which i forgot please feel free to tell me

EDIT: Typos and forgot Mothers Sorrow

mocap · April 2022

use weapon + jewelry instead of armor

WrathOfInnos · April 2022

Good point. I'd like to see a system to transmute armor weight and give us more options.

mocap wrote: »

use weapon + jewelry instead of armor

That only works for one set, and often is used by AY since it is heavy armor. The 2nd set ends up on armor by necessity.

Pretty much every meta front bar set is medium or heavy (AY, Kinra, Pillar, Tzog). There just aren't good options in Light Armor since sets like Bahsei and Sorrow don't carry over to the back bar. Siroria has potential, but it has been underperforming since the max Spell Damage was reduced from 600 to 520 and it's max magicka bonuses were weakened when the resource multipliers from CP's were removed. This means that if you pair any meta set with a medium set like relequen and kilt you must run at least 6 medium.

I have high hopes for the upcoming Whorl of the Depths light armor set, but even then I'm not sure what Light set to pair it with. Mother's Sorrow is just so much worse than Advancing or Tzogvin, even when active on both bars. I might try Whorl + Frostbite on brittle warden, but this would not work on other builds or classes.

BXR_Lonestar · April 2022

I've been saying the same thing. Since hybridization became a thing, the medium armor damage sets are now outpacing light armor sets. So much so that your most optimized damage setups feature more medium armor pieces than light armor pieces, even if your a mag-oriented character.

As I see it, this is so because:

1. Medium armor passives are better for helping your character reach the 125% crit damage cap. If you instead take light armor, you may have to take the Fighting Finesse damage perk in the blue tree to make up for not having 5x medium armor pieces.

2. There is less need for characters to have more than 5-6k penetration on their DPS builds. I was calculating how much penetration my tanks can now provide the group with sets like Crimson Tide that provide additional penetration beyond the Sword/Board pokey pokey + having a infused crusher glyph on back bar. It's somewhere around 12-13k penetration, which makes it super easy to hit the penetration cap without having to run many pieces of light armor.

3. Regardless of the past differences, Stam and Mag characters basically follow the same DPS pattern of casting an ability and hiting a light attack between each ability - and maintaining high uptime on Dots/AoE's. And yet, the design of stam sets have had far more synergy into that kind of playstyle than mag has, meaning Stam just has better damage options overall.

IMO, because of all three of these things, they definitely need to either make it harder to accumulate crit chance without using light armor, or they just need to do a better overall job at designing mag sets. Don't cut/paste stam sets to mag, but just do a better job overall. Maybe give Mag a set that is like relequens, except instead of building stacks of a dot on a target, the stacks build on the player, and instead of it being a single target, it can be an AOE focused attack instead.