The game doesn't layer bonuses, it uses addition over multiplication.
Take health, for example. On normal you get +15%, glass cannon you get -50%, lone wolf you get 70%.
In total, you'd have 100% health plus 15 - 50 + 70 or a total of 135%, because the game takes your base, smooshes the other numbers together, then does a little dance and makes the sum.
For armor - armor specialist and thick skin are both added at the same time.
So with a base armor of 20, thick skin, man at arms and armor spec of 1 you'd see the following:
A regular guy has 20 armor
You get the 5% bonus on top of this, which is worth 1 more.
You get thick skin which is worth 5 + twice man at arms rating, so 7.
You smoosh it all together to get 20+1+7 or 28. You wouldn't get a 5% of the thick skin because nothing in the game has shown anywhere it layers bonuses, it just smooshes them together.
Obviously you'll wait for official response because you want to hope it's an error, but it's not. They don't layer bonuses.
That's all irrelevant (and, unless you're the developer on the team responsible for this, speculation on your part).
Either Armor Specialist improves your armor rating by 5% per point per point or it doesn't. The tooltip says it does (in fact, it says precisely that), but in practice it doesn't. Either the tooltip needs to be updated with the correct information (e.g.
"Armor Specialist adjusts your armor rating from gear by 5% per point"), or the calculation needs to be corrected to include all the modifiers that make up a character's armor rating score.
As I said from the start, one way or another there is an error that needs fixing. "Working as intended" isn't the correct response here.
I have to say, it's really strange to see people arguing against me on this. From the start I laid out both calculations (and thus I'm confused as to why people feel they need to provide a lecture on how it works when I already provided that information earlier in the thread). From there I simply pointed out that the current calculation being used does not match the tooltip description, noted that one of them was obviously in error, and asked for the error to be fixed (whichever error it may be).
There's really nothing to debate here, and yet people seem to want to do exactly that.
