If anything, it adds depth. I’d like to see them take it further, however. I think multiple ‘health bars’ is a brilliant idea, but that it should extend to fire/ice/electricity/etc. That way, you’d really have some multi-layered combat. Sure, your fighter might have the best 2-handed sword in the game and have maxed out all 2-handed damage, but what else have you done with him/her? Because the enemy they’re fighting has a massive physical damage HP bar, but extremely low fire HP. Suddenly you’re stuck, but only because you’ve been too single-focus to diversify your builds.
Total disagreement.
Splitting magic armor into 4-6 different shields would only serve to make each and every shield completely and utterly worthless.
Don't forget that 80% of your equipment will be coming from RNG loot (whether found or bought), so you have little control over it. Trying to balance 4-6 magical resistance meters plus one for Physical damage PLUS attribute bonuses, PLUS whatever else you are looking for in armor bonuses is a hopeless task.
Right now as it stands enemies do enough damage to wipe away all your magical armor in 1-3 shots.
I haven’t seen the physical armour and magical armour regeneration abilities/spells that were mentioned above, but I think they’d be a superb addition to the game, especially with a multiple HPs formula. So you can regenerate your fire/ice/electricity HP at any given time with different spells. To me, this would make for some truly creative combat – there’s huge scope here for evolving the elemental aspect of the game, and bringing it to a whole new level IMO.
It seems more like a recipe for constant, irritating, micromanagement. Trying to keep up several elemental shields on 4 party members in combat sounds tedious. And that's before getting into the 4 AP a turn and Memory issues.
