Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Why armor is a failure and how to fix it

How about instead of fully split armors, each armor takes a percent damage based on whatever the armor was hit took.

For example, say an enemy has 100 physical armor, 200 magical armor, and you do 50 physical damage. You hit the Physical armor for 50% of its maximum, so the Magic armor ALSO takes 50% of its maximum, or 100 damage.

Your solution would only make things more convoluted. Phys gets a bonus against phys armor and does less to magic armor? So you're telling me that my mace is more effective against that guy stacking plate than the one in robes? No, the problem with armor isn't that it failed to accomplish what it was trying to do, it's that it accomplished way more than what it should of done.

The point of armor was to prevent hard CC being king. The way they fixed it however does two things that don't make a whole lot of sense.

1. The armor system replaced the old one in it's entirety: The shield armor system makes sense when you talk about it from the standpoint of removing CC, but when you start applying it to all attacks at the expense of the old system, it feels one dimensional and boring. Having the shields be reduced exclusively by attacks with hard CC effects in combination with the old system from D1 OS would make much more sense. As of now you save your knockdowns for after you standard attack the enemy's armor off, leading to a hilarious amount of back to back stuns. Having to actually use multiple knockdown skills before you could get one would better balance the amount of effort needed to obtain the powerful effect of skipping an enemy's entire turn. It wouldn't even be hard to do, just keep D1 os's system and just make the willpower and bodybuilding skills grant the CC armors, which would only be reduced by the means stated above.

2. Non turn skipping effects are also blocked by armor: Many effects in divinity are very interesting to use and can provide interesting ways to fight a battle. They are rarely, if ever used. An ability that makes the enemy bleed fire or unable to move sounds nice, but it's decision between those skills and skills that simply skip the enemies turn in it's entirety. Because the armor system blocks these attacks evenly, the lesser effects see little use. I find it strange that the armor applies to them in this way, as I don't really recall anyone saying that shackles of pain or burn DOTs were overpowered in Divinity 1 OS. Just let these abilities go through armors, them being actually useful would add immeasurably to the variety of the game.

Overall, the idea of these armors is a good one, it was just applied with way to broad of a brush and needs to be tightened in scope. As of now it suffocates many other systems in it's current bloated form.