Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Suggestions and Feedback Armor needs some drastic changes. Here's my ideas

So, right now, armor is kind of... iffy. You wear armor so that you can avoid status effects for the first 2-3 rounds of combat before you can kill or CC everything on the field. Let's be real here, all battles are quick and strategy-less, due to the way armor works right now, this is just the way it is. Status effects are devastating, and enemies hit so hard and so many times per round that actually trying to allow yourself to take more then a round of attacks from anyone is suicide. After having beaten the content thats released right now, with a variety of character builds, these are my thoughts on how armor should be changed. This is especially important, because I definetly see things like Warfare 2h and pyromancy getting nerf'd to the ground, so to make up for the loss of nuke, we'll need reliable survivability that doesn't involve CC. (Remember, can't CC something through armor, and less damage means less likely to cut through it in time to get off a CC).

1. Armor types. The armor models in this game are...beautiful. Really well done. A bit more on the flashy/ornamental side, but I'm pretty sure Larian put the armor models that are in the game now as palceholders just to show off their designs, and in the full release, armor will look like rusted/torn crap and look steadily better as you get better quality/higher level stuff, but I digress. Right now, you will probably never actually want to wear a full set of armor on a character. Even braccus' set. If you do, you're doing it wrong. We never get to see these beautiful sets, because most people will be wearing a mix of heavy and cloth armor, even on casters. Franekensteining armor in this game looks just awful, especially on lizard characters who look goofy and stupid in mixed armor. Leather is pointless and the movement speed hit is negligible. There needs to be incentive to wear one type over the other, and armor should be tailored to specific class types/roles. This will also help cut down on the really stupid builds you can come up with too, like the Aeromancy/2h using warrior I have that can CC the entire battlefield with blind and stun with near infinite mobility.

2. Plate. Plate should give high amounts of both Physical and Magical armor. A tank, or even just a melee character in general, needs to tank all forms of damage, and will be a character in the frontline who will be wearing plate. To balance this huge increase in power, it should cut a users finesse (you can't be agile in 60-80 pounds of metal, can you?) or you can do it like how DnD does it, and just have a maximum finesse score while wearing plate. (No matter what your finesse is, only the first 8 points will actually affect your statistics if in full plate?) It should hamper casting ability, drastically increasing the AP cost. A talent should be available to cut or even remove this penalty, so that frontline clerics/battlemages are still viable.

3. Leather. Leather should give drastically less physical and magical armor, but still more then cloth. Leather armor, like plate, should also hamper spellcasting ability, but not effect finesse at all.

4. Cloth. Cloth should have no negative effects or penalties to wearing it, but grant a small (almost negligible, or even none?) bonus to physical armor, and a moderate bonus to magical armor.

5. Shields. The 11 magic armor added to shields is nothing. Even at low levels. This number should scale up with the shields level like physical armor does. There also needs, absolutely NEEDS to be a shield skill, or at least add it to the one handed skill (since no one is just going to use a one handed with an empty off hand, there's no point other then aesthetic.) The skill should boost the armor you get from shields, and add a damage reduction the character takes ONLY to armor (both types).

6. Memory. This actually doesn't have to do with armor, but I feel I should put my thoughts on it here anyway. When the inevitable nerf to spellcasting comes, there needs to be something done about memory. Spells do so much damage, that I didn't even bother putting points to intelligence except on my support character. My spellcaster had all their points in memory so that she had so many spells, that combined with warlord, her turns were literally endless. She never didn't have a spell off cooldown, because her entire action bar was filled with spells, I literally had like 15 slots full of spells. When magic or it's damage gets nerf'd (I assume Larian are going to do this, it needs it.) memory needs to have another bonus other then just skill slots. I can't think of anything useful off the top of my head, I'd like to say it should have something affecting cooldown times, or AP cost, but due to how different AP is in this iteration from the first one, reduced AP cost would be stupid good.