The problems:
> Once armor is gone, a player can CC, due to 100% chance when armor is gone, enemies to death, thus making HP moot.
> Skills that restore armor require an enemy to play defensively to use and/or take attention away from being aggressive. Aggressive strategies are the most effective in D:OS games, so the AI breaking from this just weakens their tactics.
> The above points will eventually also apply to players, hopefully, with strong AI in the future
> Powerful tactics, abilities, PC builds, grenades and consumables, and/or terrain advantages make it easy to destroy armor (ie Magical armour mostly)
> Patience and tactics make it easy to divide and conquer enemies and, effectively, avoid planned group encounters or turn group combat into 1v1, 2v4, and so on.
> The current defensive combat abilities hardly impact anything and are very underwhelming compared to other abilities. Players don't feel stronger by using them
> It's easy to gear towards a specific armor type to either hinder/overwhelm enemies, you know about ahead of time.
First off, I appreciate the well composed argument, that being said I don't view very much of this as being problematic. Everything you listed suggests that the solution is playing tactically around a limited resource. (in this case CC protection) Both iterations of the game are designed around tactical play and not necessarily a fine tuned experience. The volatility of the combat means that, at least on higher difficulties, thoroughly understanding the situation and taking control of it quickly is necessary for reliable success.
I think that a lot of your followup points make sense, I just remain completely unconvinced that there is a problem with the current system that needs addressing outside of tweaking the availability of access to it. (in this case making magic armor available earlier)
