I gave some more thought to turn the original post's ideas into a more concrete proposal for changes. Here they are:

Light Armour
Concentration's offensive penetration is already one of the few real reasons to invest into Light Armour, but Prodigy feels very easy to ignore compared to what Medium gets offensively.

Prodigy: Increases your Weapon and Spell Critical rating by 219 329 (~1% ~1.5%) for each piece of Light Armour equipped.

This makes Light meaningfully better at crit without stepping on Medium's Weapon/Spell Damage and Crit Damage identity. 5 Light would be roughly 7.5% crit and committing to 7 pieces would get you around 10.5%.

Medium / Heavy Armour
I also don't think Heavy's current penalty:

"Increases damage taken from Magical attacks by 1% per piece worn"

makes much sense anymore.

If one armour weight is going to have Magical damage as its weakness, Medium seems like the more logical place for it. Heavy probably shouldn’t be the armour weight carrying an incoming-damage penalty, while Medium and Light still broadly occupy the martial/stamina and magical/magicka sides of the armour system, respectively. Light already gets:

Each piece of Light Armour increases damage taken from Martial attacks by 1%

I'd move Heavy's Magical damage penalty to Medium and make it Medium's first and only penalty:

Each piece of Medium Armour equipped increases your damage taken from Magical attacks by 1%.

Medium currently gets an extremely strong collection of broadly useful bonuses while also being the only armour weight with no penalties at all. Maybe that made sense when Magical vulnerability was put on Heavy as part of a deliberate rock-paper-scissors model where Light would perform well against Heavy, Heavy against Medium, and Medium against Light. However, I don't think that's really where the game has ended up.

I'm less attached to the exact numbers than the principle here. Light needs a stronger offensive reason to commit to it, Heavy should actually feel like the durable armour weight, and Medium probably shouldn't continue getting both an excellent general-purpose bonus package and zero drawbacks.

ceruulean wrote: »

Damage stats should be removed from armor passives period.

Make medium armor the option for stamina sustain and better block mitigation and defense. Remove crit damage and wpn/spell damage from it.

Heavy armor should have a damage done debuff since it gives extra healing taken, sustain, and defense. Magical damage taken penalty should be removed because it doesn't make sense. Perhaps replace sustain passives with 0.5 second CC immunity extension for each heavy armor piece. Or increase block mitigation with heavy armor slotted and slightly reduce the block mitigation from ice/sword and shield so other weapons become more viable for tanking as long as you wear enough heavy armor. Obviously keep sword and shield the best defensive option but it would be nice for people to roleplay as a 2h tank and not have their dreams immediately crushed.

Light armor martial damage penalty should be removed. Remove penetration, crit chance, and spell resistance. Increase the movement speed for each piece equipped so healers don't have to be slower than medium armor users (which makes 0 sense, why medium armor sprints faster than light armor?)

This way, people can pick the appropriate sets for defense, sustain resource and mobility/combat skill tradeoffs instead of damage. Offense should not be a consideration when picking an armor type. How does wearing light clothing make me better at noticing critical weaknesses (higher crit rate) and penetrating further? How does wearing leather make my weapon and spells more deadly?

This would help reign in the power explosion that has happened because of class masteries and subclassing. The only issue is that removing damage from armor passives will disadvantage low level players who can't select class masteries until their skill lines reach 50. The solution would be way too complex to address. Power could be transferred to the class passives or weapon passives to make up for the damage loss at low levels. For example, subclassing should never have swapped passive skills too, it should've only replaced the active skills. That way, class mastiers could've been more like side-grades that allow a class to specialize into a certain archetype instead of flat increases. I.e nightblade class masteries could boost siphoning and magic damage but decrease martial damage done, and another mastery that does the opposite and buffs Assassin line. A roleplayers imagination can fill the rest.

I actually agree with a lot of the underlying philosophy here, even though I think I'd stop short of removing offensive stats from armour entirely.

There's definitely a clean argument that armour weight should primarily determine things like sustain, mitigation, mobility and core-combat efficiency, while your weapons/sets/class are what determine your damage. Medium making your spells hit harder because you're wearing leather has always been a fairly abstract bit of game logic.

That said, I think removing damage bonuses from armour altogether would be a much bigger systemic change than is needed to address the current imbalance. You'd then have to rebalance damage elsewhere, account for levelling characters, reconsider weapon/class passives, probably touch a lot of existing builds etc. My proposal is deliberately more conservative: keep the existing identities, but make the tradeoffs between them competitive again.

I do really like some of your specific ideas though.

Heavy armor should have a damage done debuff since it gives extra healing taken, sustain, and defense.

A damage-done penalty on Heavy makes more intuitive sense to me than taking extra Magical damage. If you're wearing the heaviest armour in the game, the drawback probably should be that you're sacrificing offensive efficiency/mobility rather than somehow becoming especially vulnerable to magic.

And I hadn't really considered the movement-speed side of Light. You're right that it's slightly strange that the "lightest" armour isn't actually the most mobile armour because Medium gets the sprint bonuses. There could definitely be more room to differentiate Light through movement/casting efficiency instead of just stacking more raw offensive numbers onto it.

Where I disagree a little is tying the armour problem directly to the recent overall power creep.

I agree that subclassing, Class Masteries and some of the recent class/rework passives have introduced a pretty dramatic amount of power. Some of the newer bonuses are on a completely different scale to older class passives, and that's inevitably creating a growing gap between classes/playstyles that have had their modernisation pass and those still waiting for one.

But I think that's a separate balance problem.

If Class Masteries or newly reworked passives are overtuned, I'd rather see those specific systems brought back into line than compensate for them by removing power from armour across the entire game. Otherwise we're potentially using armour balance to solve power creep that originated somewhere else, while also affecting every character that isn't participating in those newer systems.

To me there are basically two questions worth separating:

1. Is the overall player power level getting too high after subclassing/Class Masteries/reworks?
Probably worth discussing, yes.

2. Given whatever the intended overall power level is, are Light/Medium/Heavy currently balanced against each other?
I don't think they are, and that's the more specific issue I'm trying to get at here.

Medium currently seems to occupy a particularly comfortable position: excellent offense, excellent mobility/core-combat economy and no inherent penalty. Whether the answer is my relatively conservative "buff Prodigy and give Medium a Magical vulnerability", or something more fundamental like what you're proposing, I think there's a pretty strong case that the three armour weights need another look.

Curious what other people think about the broader question too: should armour weight continue contributing directly to offensive power, or would people actually prefer armour to define defense/sustain/mobility while damage comes entirely from the rest of the build?