What does "armor" mean?
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If you have +30armor, you get +30 to all 3 resists (pierce / blunt / slash)?
/------------------/If so, at this point the tankiest character will be a mage with maxed out INT and some STR. The armor with best warrior stats is hide, which gives a total of (128+32+32+32=) 224 slash resistance and less to the other two. Meanwhile, a 18INT mage has 230armor and 39% magic res from this toggle. And of course, it doesn't have the durability problem you get with items: I completely burned a new hide armor set + bear necklace in 2h yesterday by playing with some people in goblin hills). All the items had a +50% durability enchant on them. The boots didn't lose durability, but I believe they are bugged.
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Armor stats are bound to get tweaked around between now and game release.
In my personal opinion, "cloth users" should have more various magic type resistance, and "heavy armored" characters more melee protection. Leather should be a bit of both. It's how it was usually done in some MMOs.
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I agree that Mage Armor is too strong, however I don't know what else the devs have planned for the game so we can't really compare it to the (starting) items we can currently craft. If those are end game items though then Mage armour is mandatory and anyone not using it is gimping themselves.
The spider silk scholar set is also strong as it gives evasion whereas the leather items give 8% resistance to ice or magic which is nothing considering you get all resistances much higher just by using the Mage Armor skill (So 260 to all physical resistances and 23% to all types of spell resistances @ 18 INT).
One thing to note though is that if using Mage Armor you don't get the items inherent Slash/Pierce/Armor stats. Which as said before is not a downside since spider scholar set gives evasion and more importantly you have space to enchant with something else than resistances like cooldown & crit.
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It doesn't seem too powerful to me. All its doing is moving cloth up to leather range of armor, if they add chain or plate armor than it will not compete. They could also add some other skills that harden leather armor and make that better.
The other thing you are not thinking of is that skill consumes 4 memory points and a slot on your skill bar all which are limited when building your character.
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It doesn't seem too powerful to me
This skill is affected by INT. You can create a 18 INT character with a lot of (ranged) damage, armor (thanks to the buff), magic res (thanks to the buff + int bonus) and extra memory points. If you roll 6CHA and put some points in STR/STA, you become really tanky. Meanwhile, a character with medium armor cannot cast spells and has evasion/mana cost penalties.
They could also add <...>
That's why I said that "at this point" the mage is without any doubt the strongest class.
The other thing you are not thinking of is that skill consumes 4 memory points and a slot on your skill bar all which are limited when building your character.
Memory points are affected by INT. As a mage whose main stat is INT, you're going to have the most memory points anyway.
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@Razvan said in What does "armor" mean?:
(...)That's why I said that "at this point" the mage is without any doubt the strongest class(...)
My blind guess would be that the mage armor was designed to last for a certain amount of time, in which case it would make sense to be 'better than normal gear, but for a short time', if there's a high enough cooldown and mana cost that prevents you from simply casting it over and over again.
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The map of Myr we are playing on this week isn't even finished yet. Its supposed to be 1/4 of the size of the total human planet. There will be 2 other entire planets in the game.
To me there is such an enormous amount of room for other skills and armor to be made for melee classes to balance out this Mage Armor skill. The question is, "is Mage Armor so good that it cannot be balanced by the time you are finished?" When the world is only 10% or so finished you shouldn't be balancing what little you have as you go. Each alpha and beta there will be back and forth between classes based on what they are working on at the time.
This skill takes a spot on your skill bar to move your armor class up one space. I am pretty sure the devs didn't set the bar too high with this skill.
