Heavy armor balance concerns

It is my understanding and I could be wrong (please inform me) that a more "mature" character should have 40 in every magic school or tree ability for "resistance" to that school of magic. So even a plate user will want to train death and even chaos magic to 40 (or more) in each ability just for the resistance, regardless of armor being used.

Does that sound like an accurate statement?

 

AFAIK, this does not exist anymore, but there are innates in some trees that allow resistance to said tree. Correct me if I'm wrong anyone.. It used to behave how you describe, but there was a few changes and I think they dropped this?

 

That would be important to know

 

I've checked the manual, which I hope is up-to-date, but isn't always... so I think I've corrected myself somewhat!

So I'll back out here

 

You are correct. Attunement helps resistance. It's a check against the attacker's value. %added or subtracted is the difference.

I use a greatsword and epic plate chest. 55 in -fizzle talent and I have 18% fizzle for T4 spells. Not too shabby for a DK.

Remaining gear is spell crit/+focus cloth

 

As others have said, if what you're doing doesn't work, adapt. Mix armor type, swap out the shield for a wand or go 2h.

 

I would not say that heavy armor should provide best protection. It should provide best damage mitigation when you are hit. Light armour is all about not getting hit. The expectation is for you to be more active in it, I would say. You should not worry about having buffs on in the heavy armour. Of course, traditionally being hit in light armour was quite often deadly.

Then again it is a game. Armor piercing arrows would be quite deadly even when you wear plate. And those wolves should not be able to do much damage, unless they have diamond teeth.

 

I don't think you know the amount of buffs 'pure' mages need in order to have resistances like we do. That takes up quite a bit of our combat bars to sustain that. Not to mention having to refresh each one during combat if you are still fighting after it ends. Many mages are running shields now because it drastically helps our defenses. We use wands to mitigate any fizzle chance increase we get from the shield. So, we have no auto attack. If I run OOM during a fight, I have to stand there and take a beating while I wait for mana to come back, or kite it. Meanwhile, melee users can continue to whack stuff over the head. Now, I know, obviously that makes sense, right? No way my stick should hit like a real weapon; and I get that. It's a trade off I made. Where as the trade off for your plate armor is not being able to cast spells as easily as I do. That makes sense. Why should you get higher damage avoidance from all that armor, but STILL be able to cast spells like I do? If that were the case, many many mages would sway towards full plate outfits.

Now I have, and will again, say melee needs a buff. Something, anything, to help them in combat, especially PvP. Most of their 'engage' spells, i.e. engage opponent and charge, aren't working properly currently. This needs to be fixed. This would be a big step in the right direction for them imo.

At the end of the day though; mages are mostly balanced. There are some things that need work. But, melee. Melee needs SOMETHING. What that is? Unsure. But, be patient my friend. The devs have been pushing many, frequent updates to the game in preparation for launch. Expect changes.

 

I agree, melee as a whole is pretty gimped at the moment. A particular weakness for melee is our inability to protect ourselves effectively against Magical attacks, which forces us to train up all schools of magic as a necessity against magical mobs like Kobold Mages. Again, this isn't easy because of our high fizzle Heavy Armour.

On a related note, Melee weapons are also gimped compared to Ranged and Magical attacks. My hardest hitting skills are Obsidian Arrow and Searing Ray, which are Tier 2 Magic skills. I'm a two-handed Bludgeon user with 82 Bludgeon skill and a fully unlocked tree. Yes, even Ground Pound, the top tier skill in it's 50s, pales in comparison to the almighty Obsidian Arrow in it's 50s. That makes me a sad panda.

It's not easy being a melee focused Avatar these days . . . Please show us some love devs. Especially after the debacle that was Auto Attack Lunging (which caused me to curl up next to my crafting table and focus on churning out furniture rather than roam the free lands).

 

As a pure mage, I've always found the shield to be great. It gives me a little over 10 damage resistance. With that and defensive stance, I can reach 37 damage resistance with about 37% max damage reduction.

A guildy of mine is a mage/melee hybrid wearing chain with a shield. He has about 46 damage resistance and 66% max damage reduction. Archers hit him for less than 30 damage on crits now. That's a major difference.

So I don't really see the issue with heavy armor or shields personally. Maybe it's specifically plate armor that's lacking. Plus you get an extra strength buff through heavy which is great if you're an Earth mage.

 

It is a problem specific to Melee, as a caster you aren't giving up much to equip that shield, so a little bonus resistance is a win.
As a melee, your giving up almost half your damage you could do from 2 handed weapon for a tiny bump in protection.

Which makes the fights last longer, which ironically means while solo you take more damage with a shield equipped than you do with a 2 handed weapon, over the course of the fight.

 

I think that's more of an issue with one handed weapons personally. There doesn't seem to be any reason to not go two handed for damage since the attack speed boost of one handed weapons only affects your charged attack speed. This is the sole reason why I decided to play as a mage instead of the assassin type character I usually always start as in other games.

The issue with buffing shields then would be the compounding effect that would have for mages since, as you said, they benefit more from the shield already. They would have to further increases the fizzle chance on shields to deter it from becoming an essential to mages. Which would only cause more problems for melee characters that dabble in magic.

 

There is nothing I disagree with there.

 

I'm about one release away from giving up on heavy and swords altogether. Bout to join the gatherer profession for 90% of my play time until the game is balanced. 100% agree with OP.

 

Str is its advantage. Build on that.

 

If a high Strength stat meant that the character did high DPS perhaps, except you don't really. The highest DPS still comes from magic. One-handed weapons do particularly poor DPS.

One fix I've considered is that Dexterity improves your damage avoidance. What if high Strength builds boosted Damage Resistance as you shrugged off blows?

 

Ive only played with Heavy armor (chain) so I really dont know if light is any better but I also have GM's in blunt and I am utterly amazed that I can barely hit them. I can usually pound the craap out of people with stuns but I fought a guy in league 2 weeks ago that killed me and I whiffed on him like 8 times and hit him once for like 30 hp. I thought he was exploiting some how. This was the fight right after the one I will link below where I clearly didnt have a whiffing problem. But, that being said:

I generally am not unhappy with it, I have GM's deflection and all the other damage mitigating skills and am pretty hard to get hit by anything including npc's.

Do not under estimate the power of the heavy armor skill body slam, it is truly the equalizer to fast moving mages and archers. Im up to 79 now and 85+ in R31. This skill was just fixed (broken all R32 and didn't even work). I haven't been able to PvP with it yet, but it now has its 90% stun rate so they will not be able to get away from me.

 

I love the heavy tree, and honestly, if you are melee and not diversifying into magic trees, you are not going to have an amazing build or deck variety.


Just a matter of balancing mitigation & fizzle to match the tier of spells you want and maximizing the material bonuses associated with the components back into your build.

Glad to hear about Slam, haven't bothered since it was bugged from release. Will check it out.

Sorry about your guys bludgeon tree. My coup de grace lands for more than any spell can

 

Chain seems more feasible, but plate pretty much blocks off the magic trees.

 

The bonus mitigation for plate hands, boots and helm are crap relative to fizzle increases. With high focus tree talents you can get away with chest/legs with minimal T4 spell fizzle.