It is quite frustrating that IMC is not offering armor compensation like they did for weapons. Q1(https://treeofsavior.com/page/news/view.php?n=1541)
Time was spent into getting the velcoffer armor and a large amount of people rolled plate/cloth because the leather effect was rather awful in comparison. 50 crit rate, 50 accuracy vs 10% damage reduction of the respective type + double the base defense for the respective type.
The new changes to mastery makes a huge impact to how players will gear. Leather is clearly the offensive choice while cloth/plate is defensive. Before re:build, wizards/clerics did not even look at leather armor because they could not crit but now leather provides 20% increased crit rate which benefits any offensive builds. This is extremely important for classes like fencer who rely on crit due to epee garde.
There is an option of replacing the velcoffer armor which can be done, but then when we factor the ichor placed into the velcoffer equipment then there is a huge issue. It was really expensive and luck based to get the ichor you wanted. Since stats changed so much, some armor ichors stats have become low priority and others high priority. For example people made SPR ichors for the zealot cleric class since blind faith damage increased with the amount of SP you had. Cleric does not benefit much from stacking SPR ichors anymore and as a result that ichor is now no longer good. Not to mention that clerics no longer have an summoning classes in their tree so old bokor cleric mains get hurt as well.
For weapons, if you wanted to swap classes then you can choose to swap your weapon over but your ichor and armor stays the same. For instance, a wizard with int/spr velcoffer cloth armor wants to swap to a swordsman tree or any physical class. You can swap your staff into a rapier or whatever weapon which is fine but you are unable to swap your armor/ichors. This scenario gates people from swapping from a physical class to a magical because their old armor would not carry through. This also applies to other build that prioritize certain stats. Honestly, I would not swap over just because I would be stuck with this armor that I previously made before re:build.
Velcoffer/unique armors should be treated the same way as weapons in the current patch. They took as much or even more effort to farm as weapons and they gate people from changing their old choices.