PvP armor! :D

Ugh. This all sounds great, but I sure hope Anet goes along with Gaile's armor storage idea. I'm already out of room as it is...

bah and i just got 1000k for guild wars!

Cant wait to see the sentinels 15k

I sure hope so: with all of these options, I want multiple armour sets, and I wont have room! Give my character an extra set of storage slots for armour... like a suitcase please!

lol my storage is full! my inventory is full! I need more armor storage!!

omg i can't wait till' GW:F comes out!

*droolz over new Ranger armour*

I hope they change the generic warrior helms also. Getting preety bored with everyone helm looking exactly the same.

I would like Weapon Skill Helms that don't look like cheap buckets.

looking at the armors it seems to me that the best new warrior one is legionaires.
the vast majority of warrior builds use speed-buffs, which just happen to be stances, which basically ups their armor from 80 to 90, virtually 100% of the time.
yes, sentinels has 100 all the time, but it comes at the cost of 13 str, so either you will need 12 points and a minor rune, or you can sack 50-75 hp to get to that number; either way its a rather substancial downside. though some builds shouldsnt have a problem with it, warriors that like to diversify their skills will be better off with legionaires. and if you fight physical vs physical, legionares is hands down superior.

i have to say the armor types i am overall least impressed with are the ones increasing HP.
that having been said; i think its a tad unfair that warrior HP armors give the same HP bonus as caster HP armors, when warriors and casters have the same base HP, but not the same base mana.

id have to say in comparing the armors with new stats to GW1 armors; i think still the best alternatives remain energy increasing armor for monks/necros/mesmers/rangers and glads for warriors...eles on the other hand are finally getting an armor that doesnt suck.


i would like to point out the following though:
platemail is, however, officially useless; and heres why.
the new HP armors have a base defense of 80, with an additional bonus of +35 HP.
platemail has a base armor of 85.
so, get a +5 armor pommel on your sword/axe/hammer instead of an HP pommel and get the +35 hp berzerkers armor, and you have a base AC of 85, with +35 hp, compared to platemails 85 AC and +30 hp.
aka, GG platemail.

and this isnt even taking into account that legionares or sentinels are pretty much 100% superior to platemail.

WOW!!! I am sooooo getting that Berserker's Armor!!! WOOT WOOT!!!!

Where do you base this on, situational bonusses thus far allways apply overal (e.g. mesmer performer's gloves give a +15 AL on all locations when casting a spell, ascalon/knight's boots give overal damage reduction etc.)

Now that A-net has a glimpse of the meta-game, there are finally some interesting armor choices. Conditionals are actually relevant with casters getting hexes, monks getting condition help and rangers getting stances. Charles is probably right about health armor being the real winner, but since there seems to be one real pvp choice for armor in most classes this is an improvement.

This is unbalanced in the sense that there is more choice, but many people will stick with their energy making all of this useless. Armor now borders on relevant for people other than warriors. I could see pme pf my trappers using sentry armor since I'm almost constantly in one stance or another. Tanks have some intesting options now.

One theme of Factions seems to be "Save the Elementalist".

Problem is, Armor alone cannot save them...

Darn that armor looks cool!

I forsee many new buffs for elem, notice the ranger +30AL vs elemental?

that totals to 100AL, for ranger, woot, against elem.

thats, uh, always been there.
every ranger armor has it, even now.

lol you got pwned

I can't wait to get Tempests armor too

Depends on the metagame and how important that +health armor is. If the environment is spike-driven (as it has been for virtually the entire retail existance of the game) then those +health armors are potentially huge. Basically even small increases in HPs have a pretty significant effect upon the success or failure of spikes, making them more prone to disruption and giving you a larger margin for error.

In general I think the +health armors are reasonably balanced against the +energy armors (I prefer +energy in a vacuum), and since that's the high end the two chapters are pretty balanced on armor. The bigger problem is that chapter 1 armors are terribly balanced, so you either have to obsolesce some of them at some point or hold yourself hostage. Sets like Platemail or Wanderers are garbage statistically, and the only reason you'd ever use them is because they 'look good'. The conditional armors from chapter 2 don't impress me terribly for general use, but they are at least, *coughs*, conditionally better than the alternatives and somewhat interesting because of it.


Well one reason is because Rogue's is poorly designed to encourage people to only use the vest and potentially the pants, but never the gloves or boots. The other reason is because, bluntly, Rogue's armor is bad the vast majority of the time. Giving up energy for a bit of conditional +armor wasn't a great trade, especially for a mesmer and all of his energy management skills (the more expensive your skills and the more you actively manage your energy, the better max energy capacity is.) You'd occasionally use it on very efficient builds, say signet-heavy ones where you had minimal active energy management, where max energy wasn't important. But otherwise it just wasn't an interesting set.

The chapter 2 sets look like they're trying to avoid those problems and actually be balanced against each other. All of the sets are interesting, and should at least see play in PvE where things are more controllable. If some of the chapter 1 sets look awful by comparison, well, buff those up, they're terrible as is right now.


Well the real problem is that, at least at the top of the PvP ladder, the damage that you're really afraid of, the stuff that kills people, is largely armor-ignoring. If you're trying to avoid killing spikes you want +health, not +armor, because the stuff doing the killing is lifesteal, shadow damage, mesmer DDs, deep wound reductions, and attack damage bonuses that ignore armor. Armor helps a bit, sure, but health is much more important to surviving those.

Armor bonuses help against 'pressure' spikes where a team tries to beat the energy out of monks with warrior trains and statters on defenses. Those make stance or +vs physical armors interesting. Enchanted armor is sketchy there because if your enchantments are sticking the train should be breaking anyway. Of course stance becomes moot if the warrior train knows what they're doing and packs the Wild Blow.


Eh, I wouldn't go that far. The value of armor, at least in PvP, is discouragement. If a target is suitibly hardened against the damage that matters (physical) then that target will largely be ignored in favor of softer targets, outside of overextension and armor-ignoring spike situations. I don't feel that an additional +10 armor is going to suitibly discourage warriors from training on a softie when charging adrenaline. A few extra armor points are irrelevant compared to a block/evade effect or just kiting the warrior. I'll happily beat on a ranger if he doesn't throw up a block stance or start kiting, so a caster with (conditional) ranger armor doesn't exactly thrill me.

At least in PvP. In PvE armor becomes much more relevant because the pace of the game is much slower, physical pressure (from high level warriors and elementalists) becomes much more relevant, and efficiency becomes key. If a team breaks in PvE it's likely not because of a spike or someone not being fast enough, but because the monsters managed to beat the energy out of the party's monks or they simply overwhelmed the rate monks could heal. I'd expect a lot of PvE armor diversity in the expansion because of this.

Armor as a way of fighting distributed pressure in PvP isn't nearly as relevant for two reasons. First, any sort of distributed pressure build in PvP requires a heavy degen component, and, well, that ignores armor. But more importantly that sort of strategy loses singlehandedly to a */Mo with an energy elite and Heal Party. You need to be able to deal damage like iWay does if you're going to overwhelm a powered Party. It might be possible to pull it off, but I haven't seen anyone do it without taking out their backline.


That has to come through skills, not equipment, of course. We'll have to see what the expansion brings, of course, but with the publicity around 'multi-line elementalists' I'm not encouraged.

But, hey, if I can harden my Blinding Flash turret in the expansion to piss off warriors even more, well, that's enough reason to upgrade to the expansion right there. =)

Peace,
-CxE

Still no elementalist energy armor though? Are they kidding?
So they want to make using cross-elemental skills more viable while still we're what, the only class that can't pump up energy a little more through armor?