I also don't like that no statuses work while armor is on.
If you're running a build that tries to do damage from Poison, Bleed, Burn, etc., you gain no bonus until you finally work through the armor. The armor prevents this damage, but you can't do a lot of your damage until the armor is off. A bit of a catch-22. This is made worse by the fact that elemental effects, (e.g. wands/spells/etc.) are heavily balanced around the assumption that they will inflict statuses (Burn/Poison/Stun/Wet) and for as much as the first half of their target's effective health they are unable to.
This reduction hits Magic attacks much harder than Physical, as attacks from Physical sources are largely pure damage anyway.
Perhaps if statuses blocked by armor caused some loss of armor; or if armor only blocked damage and loss-of-control statuses, then this problem could be alleviated.
I'm not a big fan of random chance mechanics myself. I'd prefer to know what will happen and make a plan for that, and not have to mentally weigh the percentages to get expected gains.
