Depending on the content you're running, Medium isn't always best. Medium is best in parsing/coordinated trial content, but small group/solo, Light Armor is almost always better for the Penetration and Critical Chance bonuses.

A mix of the two is also very viable. Unless you're in a group that is bringing you up to the penetration cap, the armor weight matters little. Most pug groups will not be set up for that, and Light Armor will most likely eke out the most as far as weight bonuses go.

Soarora wrote: »

While medium armor gets weapon/spell damage and critical damage, light armor gets critical chance and penetration. Penetration is the most important thing but major/minor breach + crusher already gets you pretty far, then theres force of nature as well. So, light armor’s more beneficial while soloing while medium armor’s more beneficial in a group.

Damage dealers being stam doesn’t have to do with medium armor but that the skills themselves are more effective in the stam variant. It’s a sustain thing.

A lot of the good sets are also medium armor.

Anyways, my frost warden is in all light armor and he does alright. Using light armor isn’t completely throwing, despite what some people say. I’d say start with light armor and if you want to use a medium armor set later on, you can switch a few pieces over to medium (such as chest piece for more health).

You can make a case for their damage effects being situationally balanced but Light needs to be more powerful given the huge losses that you take in terms of mitigation.

Consider, Medium gives you access to Evasion, the best Armor ability, and has no weaknesses at all. Vs. Medium which has the lowest Armor Rating and takes penalties against the most common damage types found in PvP.

The solution would be to either, a) give them equivalent Armor Rating and drop the penalties/strengths so that they are balanced purely around their damage passives or b) increase the damage passives of Light to compensate for the huge nerfs to defense that you take for wearing it (e.g. heightened risk vs. reward).

Radiate77 wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

The solution would be to either, a) give them equivalent Armor Rating and drop the penalties/strengths so that they are balanced purely around their damage passives or b) increase the damage passives of Light to compensate for the huge nerfs to defense that you take for wearing it (e.g. heightened risk vs. reward).

I’m a big fan of Option B.

Never quite understood why in Light Armor, you are pushed into drawbacks yet have similar damage to Medium.

Someone in Light Armor should do more damage up close than someone in Medium Armor, to compensate for how much armor they are giving away, and it’s silly that at present this isn’t much of the case.

This is how it used to be before ZOS gave the armor weights their own inherent buffs/debuffs and a few other game wide combat changes that indirectly affected the armor types.

Mages in light armor dealt more damage (mostly via max stats, ignoring armor and higher crit) and had better healing.
Tanks in heavy armor dealt less damage due to no passive buffs to damage, but were much sturdier with block, mitigation and resource restore
Medium armor used to be a mix of the 2, less damage (due to less stats/pen/crit) but better mitigation than light armor and more damage but less mitigation than heavy armor (due to actually having damage passives).

I'm a big fan of option B as well, but it would take a lot more than just increasing the damage passives to bring light armor up to be on par with medium armor.

Some external changes were made in the past that also massively nerfed light armor over the years. One being the changes to how damage/healing scales in the big rework to those formulae (instead of max stats being the main scaler it got changed to primarily scale off weapon/spell damage, which guess what armor type gives the most of) and another thing that made medium armor even better (mostly in PvP, but has niche uses in PvE as well) was the fact that medium armor now also gives movement speed (one of the best offensive/defensive tools in PvP allowing to avoid damage and keep on top of targets so they can't escape your damage).

So to address this imbalance there would need to either be massive numbers swings for light armor (see U41 sorc ward for why this doesn't work) or multiple indirect reworks to things like the damage/healing scaling formula and movement speed access paired alongside simple numbers changes.