ruthless changes to determ/grace

Context: Determ no longer gives flat armour in ruthless.
TLDR: Ruthless tree needs to change armour nodes to provide flat armour in addition to the increase armour.

For a while I was undecided. I felt Kripparian was correct that flat armour/evasion given by these auras was stupid, as aura effect would enable witches/shadows to get obscene armour too easily, without taking a single armour node on the tree, or even wearing gear with armour.

However, taking away the flat armour, without also providing nodes on the tree to give flat armour (existing ones are too low to be meaningful), means that the only way to get high armour is oddly to wear full evasion gear, and go IR, running both grace and determ.

And when I say high armour, I mean armour comparable to values pre-changes. And when I say comparable, I mean less. A lot less. Combined with the difficulty of gear obtainment in ruthless, you'll be delving for fossils and spamming all currency to try to get the highest base evasion possible, running IR and taking all the inc armour/evasion nodes you can before you find your grace/determ. And grace ends up being better for armour than determ. This is just bad.

Being motivated to wear evasion gear and skip armour nodes on tree in order to get armour is bad. There are only 2 nodes with flat armour on the tree - soul of steel (and its only 150!) Equivalent to the SMALL NODE next to inexorable.

This is a big problem, because you can't really get armour at all without wearing well rolled armour gear, even if you spend ALL your passive points going into all the armour nodes on the tree.

This change in it's current state really screws with the balancing of a lot of the game/ascendencies, and essentially kills the defense of 50% of builds that relied on the flat armour from determ.. which ok, is expected and maybe good - full es characters having armour equal to juggs who are wearing armour is bad and those builds needed to be killed, so great. But alongside that culling, many more things were badly hurt. If you're taking armour nodes on the tree, they should give you value even if you're not wearing armour.
soul of steel should give like 500, and all the other small inc armour nodes should give 150 along side their increases. Essentially, characters on the left side of the tree should be able to wear ES gear, and still get armour to not be one shot by phys in red tier maps.

Forcing the right/topright tree enjoyers to go into evasion and run essentially 0 armour is fine, but forcing the left side to go into evasion also, in order to get respectable armour is not fine.


Last bumped on Sep 19, 2023, 2:28:55 PM
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