Heavy armor builds are not viable

@Chris

In some very early builds of the game, people complained that armor was too powerful at damage resistance and clamored for armor to be severely nerfed. I think since then, heavy armor/tank builds have been overly-penalized. And the funny thing is that even before the nerf, the heavy armor builds weren't really a problem since magic builds quickly outstripped them.

I've always gone with heavy armor + shield + blades. This combo seems like one of the most obvious builds to go with (especially as a solo build), but has some serious problems.

Heavy Armor + Shield should have massive damage mitigation, but the shield skill tree seems to be fairly worthless.

Passives are fairly weak, and active shield skills seem like a waste because you're not using that global cool down to deal damage or do much worthwhile. If you're a pure tank grouped with others, then perhaps the active heavy armor and shield skills might be more worthwhile.

You're also missing out on the opportunity to use far better two-handed weapons.

The blade tree has combos with fire magic. Blades + Fire seem to make sense, and I like the slow damage over time approach for a tanky build. Except it is hard to cast any magic other than Earth magic in heavy armor do to the fizzle rates. If you're going to take players starting in Highvale and give them a sword, can we perhaps create some Blades+Earth combos as well, or reduce fizzle rates for Fire magic in armor?

Magic does VASTLY more damage than melee, so damage avoidance means a lot more than damage resistance. With heavy armor and a shield, you're giving up magic and giving up melee DPS as well just for damage resistance, when we've made that fairly useless.

So you lose carry weight and you're encumbered. You do poor melee DPS. You can't cast magic. And the armor doesn't even help you much. There is no real advantage to this build at all and tons of disadvantages.

I'm a little surprised that with all the PvP and combat scrums that this hasn't come up. I think a lot of the players just shift to the best builds and then are happy to play those, so we don't hear the complaints from people who want to play other builds. I've seen repeated focus to make magic and ranged/bow builds better and better when they're already wiping the floor with heavy armor/melee.

Possible solutions:

1. Greatly increase damage resistance in heavy armor through gear and/or heavy armor skills by boosting the passives
2. Add enchanted armor or heavy armor skills that boost magic resistance
3. Less fizzle on Fire magic, or some nice Earth magic combos so a heavy armor build can at least put out moderate DPS.

 

As a wand shield mage, I think giving heavy armor some powerful active defensive skills might be best. Because any buffs to shield will make wand/shield mage even stronger, which I'm ok with obviously, but might be best to look at heavy armor actives first. People are going to hate me for saying this but making defensive stance require heavy armor would go a long way.

 

Melee is currently uber choppy. Not sure why. When I'm targeted on a character and trying to back peddle, it jitters me all over the place and I loose my anhle on the mob.

 

+1

Ender, I agree. The move of heavy lifter to a lower tier means that for many levels if you are in heavy armor, you can hardly carry any loot/harvest. The whole heavy armor tree seems very week. I can grind low level mobs all day and be happy, but I'd like to be able to hit something with my 60 bludgeoning that I can with my 30 fire. And don't bet me started on damage mitigation.

 

I still use heavy armor and think that it's fine. At high level it gets passed up since players become somewhat invincible at a certain point, but it has a big advantage at low level and pretty even at mid levels I think. One thing I would like though is if skill level didn't modify fizzle rates. It's logical for it to be a modifier, but it incentivizes players to switch armor to level up a skill and switch back. It would be easier to balance armor types if that wasn't the case.

OP, I think your issues are more rooted in how little damage 1h melee does vs. 2h melee. Not only is there a huge disparity in melee damage, but weapon damage is also a mod for weapon glyphs. The way it is now, there's no way that you could make shields strong enough that 1h + shield is as good as 2h without making shields over powered for less melee oriented characters. If 1h damage was increased significantly, then suddenly shields would seem fine imo.

 

If the shield mitigated enough damage it would be an interesting trade-off of losing the DPS, but 2h weapons are the only way to go for melee.

Two 1h weapons are also a somewhat broken build.

 

I play 1 hand and shield with light armor.... it's a really crappy build but it's what i want to play so im going to keep at it