The current armour system is far from optimal and its glaringly obvious why, i am suprised they didn't see that. The idea of an armour system that require you to strip armour before u can CC is however exellent because DoS1 was completely broken in that regard. Rain-lightning and win until lvl 15, then it just became hailattack-arrowstorm and win.

What they should have done was to just make one armour that both physical and magic could dmg but made the armour pools bigger.

And yes, Adept was so horrible to play en ME2 on higher difficulties.