Armor Tweaks

[nsrr]

Last nights random idea (which happened just before I went to bed, causing insomnia...) is to have a variety of Combat Training like categories based on different styles and stats, instead of having the boring general no-brainer one we have at the moment. Cos really, what's the point on having a talent point system if we are going spend a load on no-brainers?
General concept is that there are 6 categories and you can only invest in one of them. Each one would have a weapon mastery like talent that gives accuracy and something else, and an armour training like talent that gives hardiness and something else.

Examples:
Savage Style - strength based.
Weapon talent gives increased accuracy and base weapon damage.
Armour talent gives increased hardiness and resist all.
Graceful Style - dexterity based.
Weapon talent gives increased accuracy and a boost to your physical power scaling with dex.
Armour talent gives increased hardiness and increases your total defense by a percentage.
Arcane Style - magic based.
Weapon talent gives increased accuracy and increased weapon proc damage.
Armour talent gives increased hardiness and reduced non weapon damage by a fraction of your armour.

The other two talent slots would be filled with some sort of 'casting' buff talent and a utility.

I like this idea

These are things that would be useful regardless of weapon or armor type and could play to your own preferred style for a build rather than what a class type 'should' have.

So, when you saying 'casting' buff, do you mean like... Savage Style would have one that increases Mind and Spell Power by an amount based on Strength or Phys Power? Something along those lines?

Graceful Style's could increase Spell and Mind Speed based on... Accuracy or Dex?

Arcane Style's could increase Spell and Mind critical power based on... the higher of Spell or Mind power?

Just throwing out the first things that came to mind here to see if I'm thinking along the same lines, or if I missed your mark.

[HousePet]

For 'casting' I was referring to activated abilities in general, so as to be more class agnostic. So Savage Style is sort of themed around raw damage, so maybe something like increased all damage. Whereas Graceful Style could make your projectiles faster/more accurate. Arcane Style could refund resources when you use a talent.

But yeah, the basic idea is to give you another choice on how you play the class, rather than just some item specific point sinks. Could make for some interesting synergies.

[nsrr]

Gotcha gotcha. That makes more sense.

[bpat]

One of the reasons lots of people prefer heavy/massive armor to robes is because all the good robe egos were either nerfed to the ground or completely removed in patch 1.2 making their offensive advantage compared to heavy/massive much less than the defensive benefit of heavy/massive. Light armor has always sucked and that's largely because it has 30% hardiness and doesn't scale with armor training, so robes are just better. Imo buff robe and light armor egos and give light armor half benefit from armor training. Maybe cap armor hardiness around 90% as well.

[jenx]

I happen to like armor just the way it is. It is one of the few talents that works well from normal to madness imo.

[bpat]

Armor doesn't need any fundamental changes except for light armor which takes the bad aspects of robes and heavy armor and combines them for one really bad armor type. Robes just better egos to make them useful for glass cannon builds and light armor needs either buffs to hardiness or have significantly better egos that increase things like stamina regen, movement speed, evasion, etc.

[Sheila]

I think there's also a lot of massive fixedarts that are thoroughly overtuned, I'm fine with protection going up while the overall power of egos goes down, I think that amount of love should go to heavy since there's currently very little reason to use it over massive.

[Cat Zangetsu]

maybe if light armor and robes improved the cooldowns and energy cost of object abilities, or maybe even hosted a slot for an additional torque that would have a reduced cooldown while in that slot or maybe give that hosted item instantaneous cast speed.