One thing that I think is EXTREMELY important, and I'm not sure whether or not this is the intent, but it is EXTREMELY important that ALL changes to armor come out in the same publish. Whatever other phases are being worked on should be included in a single publish. Please DO NOT piecemeal what you're doing with armors. Let's work on it all together so we can see the bigger picture.
The danger of piecemealing it out is that the changes go in, people make presumptions about what's coming or what should be done next, and new suits are made based on the current rules that may become different decisions later on. Asking people to change their armor paradigm once a month or once every three months for the next 2-3 publishes is bad.
Additionally, one major item that I think many players will agree that needs to be addressed above and beyond what's being changed now is that base armor resists need to be fairly equal across the board -- perhaps tweaked one way or another to make a decision between armors proper. But you should be able to imbue as good a metal armor set as you can a leather or woodland armor set, and right now, that's very difficult because of base resist disparity.
Now, I will say, I think people are overlooking choice in this new Stamina mechanic in that perhaps metal armors will become more important to save from being affected as much by this new Stamina mechanic, but of course, time will tell by whatever else is coming.
I suppose in a perfect world, each armor type would have a benefit of its own. For instance, maybe dragonscale works with an average base equivalent to all other armors, but then if you wear all red, you could get 80 resist in fire, or all blue is 80 resist in cold, and you would have to wear a 5-piece suit to do so. Maybe woodland is medable as well, but has reduced fire resist cap and higher cold resist. I think there are acceptable ways to give each armor type its own dynamic so that in addition to the medable vs. stamina-mechanic benefits that there become reasons to choose things, and you can scale stuff so that no one is more powerful than the other.
But again, it is EXTREMELY important to handle this all at once, not piecemeal, because asking the playerbase to play guessing games until the entire armor revamp is out the door is both unwise and creates a greater armor disparity than needs to exist any given moment. Obviously, I have no insight into how the current schedule looks, but I wanted to raise this issue before we find ourselves with 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4 of an armor solution published in a couple of weeks and face months of incomplete armor solutions.
The danger of piecemealing it out is that the changes go in, people make presumptions about what's coming or what should be done next, and new suits are made based on the current rules that may become different decisions later on. Asking people to change their armor paradigm once a month or once every three months for the next 2-3 publishes is bad.
Additionally, one major item that I think many players will agree that needs to be addressed above and beyond what's being changed now is that base armor resists need to be fairly equal across the board -- perhaps tweaked one way or another to make a decision between armors proper. But you should be able to imbue as good a metal armor set as you can a leather or woodland armor set, and right now, that's very difficult because of base resist disparity.
Now, I will say, I think people are overlooking choice in this new Stamina mechanic in that perhaps metal armors will become more important to save from being affected as much by this new Stamina mechanic, but of course, time will tell by whatever else is coming.
I suppose in a perfect world, each armor type would have a benefit of its own. For instance, maybe dragonscale works with an average base equivalent to all other armors, but then if you wear all red, you could get 80 resist in fire, or all blue is 80 resist in cold, and you would have to wear a 5-piece suit to do so. Maybe woodland is medable as well, but has reduced fire resist cap and higher cold resist. I think there are acceptable ways to give each armor type its own dynamic so that in addition to the medable vs. stamina-mechanic benefits that there become reasons to choose things, and you can scale stuff so that no one is more powerful than the other.
But again, it is EXTREMELY important to handle this all at once, not piecemeal, because asking the playerbase to play guessing games until the entire armor revamp is out the door is both unwise and creates a greater armor disparity than needs to exist any given moment. Obviously, I have no insight into how the current schedule looks, but I wanted to raise this issue before we find ourselves with 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4 of an armor solution published in a couple of weeks and face months of incomplete armor solutions.
Thank you very much for the news!