Suggestion: Fix armor by rolling Guard into it.

Above, it seems like this would be an easy fix for armor by offering Guard as an additional mitigation. It fits the fantasy imo, ie heavy armor can mitigate the kinetic energy of a spell strike, obviously you would have to tweak the numbers around with + and minuses on the trees but this would also open the potential of making a node that converts guard to extra life so you can throw a bone to people who want life stacking builds too. Offering a portion of armor conversion to guard as a built in mechanic seems like it would fit in this niche.