In the latest patches, IMC changed many things, including elevating the base defense of leather type armors by 50%. In return, all that was done for plate and cloth was a 5% increase in damage mitigation
Now, if we look at the new leather armor, it just has too many advantages, it adds 50% more defense to your lower defense type compared to plate/cloth, but in return you only lose 25% overall defense on your higher defense type.
This is because in contrast to cloth, which has 200% magic def and 100% physical def, you have 150% magic def and 150% physical def [150%/200%=75%],
This wouldn’t be as problematic if leather didn’t have 3 mastery effects, one increasing physical and magic damage dealt by 15%, one increasing the maximum crit chance by 10% and one adding an 1.2 multiplier to your crit chance.
If IMC was consistent with leather being a middle thing between cloth and plate, the consequence would be that plate armor mastery would boost physical damage by 30% and cloth armor mastery would boost magic damage by 30%.
Instead, leather is now way too good not be chosen, and classes that have an armor-related mastery that is not working with leather armor, IMC tells you : “tough luck, better chances in your next life as a different class/build”.
Plate and cloth armor mastery need a rework to be worth using once again, best would be the increased damage boost for magic and physical damage of 30% each, with leather being in between,but viable for both attack types with 15%.
From base armor we come to the next topic,being shields. With the recent updates,shields became pretty obsolete,because IMC once again backed down on harder content they introduced as a DPS race( slowly but surely I believe this is all they can come up with for new content, DPS against the clock,genius).
Weekly boss raids are a genuine example of such contents, where you can actually buy a potion to boost your defense to 30k so you don’t have to use a shield or cloth/plate armor.
I ask IMC: Where is the potion to boost your attack to 30k and your crit to 4k if you don’t use leather armor and two hand weapon+trinket?
Why do you compensate for 2hand users & leather users lack of defense, but at the same time not for one hand users lack of attack and plate/cloth armors lack of crit?
After nerfing passive block to only 30% damage reduction while not touching evasion at all (hail all the Scouts and leather gears with evasion boost) you now make shield completely obsolete by compensating people for their lack of defense on content.
There are even those nifty recovery nodes everywhere so you don’t need to be tanky or invest in SPR as a Cleric.
Great job here IMC.
Looking at what two hand can now achieve with little danger because of evasion and free defense, shield needs a huge boost to be worthwhile using again, and the best choice would be to stop buttering up to certain classes/equipment types.
Remove the heal nodes from the game. Instead, help mitigating damage by allowing a focus on HP recovery via equipment as the current formula allows up to 20% of max HP recovered naturally every tick.
Boost the damage mitigation from shield again so you take a lot less damage when using a shield.
A good example would be like this :
Plate armor mastery :
when using a shield together with 4 pieces of plate armor, decrease the physical damage taken by an additional 15%[35% total]
Leather armor mastery:
when using a shield together with 4 pieces of leather armor, decrease the chance to be critically hit by 30%
Cloth armor mastery:
when using a shield together with 4 pieces of cloth armor, decrease the magic damage taken by an additional 15% [35% total]
Disable auto-weapon swap with a shield equipped and only give this ability (to auto-swap with a shield equipped in a slot) to the defensive classes (Peltasta,Paladin,Quarrelshooter) via attributes or arts to promote defensive classes and prevent abuse of shields on autoswap in any content.
