Surface damage definitely seems quite low now, though I've always thought it was quite excessive before. I like how stun water/blood actually does damage now, though. Damage maybe could be bumped up a hair.
Contamination is cool, but seems weak. In general, those mass "cause burning/bleeding/poison status" skills just don't work out very often because generally you're not going to have several enemies without magic/physical armor at the same time. At least in my case, I tend to focus fire, and CC and control everyone else with positioning and whatnot.
In general, a big problem with the armor system is that the first half of a combat feels like a lot of skills (especially AOE effect-only ones) are kind of useless, and you have to just auto-attack through the armor to get to the fun part where your skils actually function. I still think that armor maybe shouldn't totally negate statuses, but only reduce their effect (reduced duration, less damage, or just a weaker effect in general.) For example, using knockdown on a character with physical armor would apply staggered instead of knocked down, and which could reduce hit chance and dodge chance, or something like that.
