So looking at PVE and PVP the discrepency is pretty high in terms of how things work. People have to sit and wail on enemies, but can kill players in one or two swings.
So I am going to propose some changes (because changes are fun.)
So firstly we are going to look at armor.
Armor is bad the way it is set up now, it is just scaling bonuses to mod slots, which is either really good or really bad depending on the armor. Some armors far outstrip others in terms of pvp/pve.
So the first part of this is going to be about Armor.
We currently have three armor types.
Light
Heavy
Force
Light armor is for yellow slots, it helps in pve with groups.
Force has blue slots, these help with force things, and will probably get better after the force rework
Heavy armor, heavy armor has red slots, these are just hands down the best in terms of combat, and since gear is made to make you better at combat it makes them just the best armor overall, even if some perks donât work them them it is still a very strong option.
So well keeping these flavors for them I think first and formost mod slots need a redressing.
So we have green for trade skills, I am not sure what even has green mod slots but this is wasted in a lot of gear unless it is used exclusively for crafting.
Red for pure combat, this has your ac, ab, eb, ect.
Yellow is more utility, with controling agro, luck, and few other things like that.
and finaly blue which is your force stuff.
Blue: should remain a goto for force stuff absolutely, keeping that all consolidated into one is good for slot balance.
Red: Red should become pure offence, str, bab, ab, ect should all remain here, dex, ac, ect should move.
Yellow: Utility is a weird role for a single slot, it should become defensive in nature, it should gain dex, con, ac, and lose the luck boost, and any other wierd off the wall skill boosts, this one should become the defense focused mods.
Green: Green should retain itsâ weird skill boosts, but it should also gain the other skill boosts like luck up, ect, outside of crafting focused items green slots should be pretty rare, I am not even sure if they are needed they might need a redressing into general utility but I am not sure what that should look like at this time, perhaps some cooldown reduction or some other such to make them valuable since they are not common, and will probably take things like special materials or prismatic slots.
Now we need to move onto armor, the slots on them now are boring first off.
Heavy: Red go go combat.
Light: Yellow, hope you get a lot of benefit from your perks, or have a group and focus on pve.
Force: Force powers activate.
I donât like the way they are set up currently all getting one slot, also the linar progression is just⌠not that great?
I would propose something looking like this
Basic Heavy Armor: 1 Red Slot
Heavy Armor 1: 1 Red Slot 1 Yellow Slot
Heavy Armor 2: 2 Red slots 2 Yellow Slots
Heavy Armor 3: 3 Red slots 2 Yellow Slots 1 Green Slot
Heavy Armor 4: 3 Red Slots 3 Yellow Slots 1 Green Slot 1 Prismatic Slot
Basic Light Armor: 1 Yellow Slot
Light Armor 1: 1 Yellow 1 Red
Light Armor 2: 1 Yellow 2 Red 1 Green
Light Armor 3: 2 Yellow 2 Red 2 Green
Light Armor 4: 2 Yellow 3 Red 2 Green 1 Prismatic.
Basic Force Armor: 1 Blue
Force Armor 1: 1 Blue 1 Yellow
Force Armor 2: 2 Blue 1 Yellow 1 Red
Force Armor 3: 3 Blue 2 Yellow 1 Red
Force Armor 4: 3 blue 2 Yellow 2 Red 1 Prismatic
I feel a change like this would have build armor identity and give a better reason to upgrade your equipment for the slots as well as giving more mod diversity well still retaining focus.
(If this change is wanted/accepted I can do the edits and send an erf as this is just toolset work)
Now then we come to what armor does, currently it is pad out your ac/stats/damage which is good but we should look beyond that.
I would propose to use DI/DR to help give EHP to players (This could be extended to mobs as well)
I would say for basic stuff, armor should not give ac baseline, instead they should give DR/DI, having mods/mats to raise AC is fine, but I think DR/DI is better for core armor stats (But nothing should further upgrade DI without some serious limitations to avoid unkillable pcs such as maxing at 50% overall or some such)
I would propose it looks something like this, Force Armor 1% per item, Light 3% per item and Heavy 5% per item, combined with a scaling Damage resistance on the chest (Damage resistance only takes the highest property so keeping it on the chest means the core part of the equipment is the focus.)
Something like 5/10/15 for force, light, heavy respectively. This would give you the ability, in fully heavy armor to have a DI of 30% with a DR of 15 (the dr could be tied to tier as well but this is simpler for our example) This would bring, lets say a 100 damage hit, from 100 to 55, a pretty big reduction, overall, but gets better against smaller hits, a damage 50 hit, would deal, 20 damage, the biggest issue would be things with around 20 damage would do nothing, so the DR may need a lot of tweaking, or perhaps lowering and tieing it to tier as previously suggested. something like Basic-tier 1 5, tier 2-3, 10, tier 4 15.
This would also give belts, necklaces, ect a core value beyond what mats/mods you jam into them.
Overall this would just help survive in cvc with a lot of effective defenses, and help the armor identity in terms of how protective they are to the player, the current system of small ac bonuses are really meaningless on the grand scale of things.
I will attach some more information later and some alternate proposals.