At first the idea of having separate armors for both physical and magical attacks intrigued me, then as I fought more and more battles, it annoyed me and I soon came to realize that overall armor is an interesting idea, but poorly implemented within DO2.
1) Team Build - Normally in a RPG you would want to build a diverse team, Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Archer, in order to best be able to deal with a wide variety of situations. With armor the way it is now, that is no longer the case. Why? Because if 3 of your teammates are doing physical damage, the mage becomes near useless as it will take multiple spells to bust through an enemies magic armor just to become combat effective, especially since statuses are blocked by armor as well. It would be far better for a team to be made up of 100% physical damage dealers or 100% magical damage dealers, which is just plain silly and completely not how you would want to have played DO1.
2) Statuses - Having armor block 100% of all statuses is ridiculous, especially since everyone and their mother seems to have both armor types. For example, in order for my mage to get a status effect going, it's best to hit an enemy with what ever spell does the most damage, then come in with the spell of the status effect I want. So I cast Fireball, then Winter Blast in order to freeze enemies. FIREBALL then WINTER BLAST... that literally shouldn't work, but thanks to armor it does! Then you've got statuses that shouldn't even be armor dependent, such as Knocked Down. Why would having physical armor prevent knock down? In some cases sure, but not 100% of the time.
3) Broken AI - One would think this topic is out of place when speaking about Armor, but it is not. Sadly the AI knows when it has a shit ton of armor to burn through and it ends up doing things that help it's cause but shouldn't be done in a combat sense, such as drawing multiple attacks of opportunity just to run next to my mage. This shouldn't be a tactic for either AI or Players, it shouldn't be possible to do, but thanks to armor it is. I've seen this multiple times, where an AI character just runs past my melee force drawing 2 attacks of opportunity, what's worse is that those attacks are physical based so my mage still has to blast the foe with multiple spells to hurt them... which is stupid.
4) Armor down, armor up, armor down, armor up - There are far too many ways and it's far too easy to bring someones armor back up after it's been depleted. It becomes an annoying tedium on the battlefield with spells and potions and skills all doing the same damn thing, restoring armor. It draws out the fight and just makes things feel less important/dire, it takes away from the terror/excitement of combat.
When the system was based around health it was terrifying in combat because of the status effects, the magic, the skills! You had to plan accordingly, think tactically, position your people well and come up with ways to counter the enemies abilities/magic. With the current armor system most of that goes out the window, it becomes a slug fest to knock out the enemies armor and then status them to death while your team remains practically invincible. I get that this whole system came about because DO1 had such a status issue (which could be frustrating at times), but that system made for terse, quick, intense combat exchanges. This new system, which handicaps diverse teams, is too extreme in the opposite direction.
I think, if armor has to stay, there should only be 1 type of armor and that armor blocks statuses but is degraded by all types of damage. Or magic armor has charges, each charge stops a status effect but once that is depleted it's done, this would not stop magical attacks from doing damage just status effects (and it wouldn't be set at 1000 charges, more like 2 or 3). Either way armor needs to change.
