+1, need a nerf of the heavy armor (or total rework on the armors).
And a -20% is clearly not enough, I would say, 10sec cooldown between dashes in heavy, -75% mana regen, +50% parry resistant) kinda this sort of thing.
By the way, seen Ice Gauntlet bearers blocking spear controls with their right click.
Thats not playing as intended, thats playing like you want to play.
Its obvious that given the choice a higher damage mitigation will always win, unless the tradeoff would be onehit killing others.
Ok, you’re right, but there is just no tradeoff. I mean, 20% < the mitigation coming from heavy gear. It’s not balanced at all atm.
Balancing this is a very delicate things.
Having the balance that light vs heavy with same health and dps would create a draw still is at advantage for heavy (because easier healing).
You would need to put even more power into light so that light would always win over heavy if just the damage mitigation is the only difference, but that automatically creates a bias against healing gameplay.
Having it as it currently is is actually fine:
PVP play heavy (or try glasscannon)
PVE play light/med/heavy
That’s correct, but there should be a high-risk-high-reward thing going on anyway. At least would make sense for me. I don’t know, it’s hard I know, but atm it doesn’t feel right that healers simply can’t be killed 
Thats something that ever only would work in duels anyway, which this game is very bad at presenting.
As soon as it is group play, your risk multiplies over the possible reward 
And this is what would divide skilled players from the rest. Positioning, committing to using potions and having someone who would protect you etc. It would be a group effort to protect a healer, not like now, you can have him roaming around without being afraid that if he’s getting ambushed he will die, if you get what I mean 
Thats why I am running bow + shield and sword.
Sacrifice a few stats for providing +20% damage reduction onto the healer + having a real stun + decreasing enemy attack power 
There is actually a downside to healing in plate, but its not really seen at the moment, and that is that light has 20% more healing, and medium 10%, however these bonus are confirmed not working right now.
I do think light armor needs a light buff, and medium needs a very light buff. to put it in numbers of light is 2/10 on defense, it needs to come up to 4/10 on defense, leather needs to be 6 out of 10, and plate needs to be a minimum of 8 out of 10.
the other 2/10 should depend on gems and resil for damage reduction. Once this and the buffs happen, we will se loads and loads of light casters, and healers.
Currently it is around
40%
50%
60%
then add all other sources of damage mitigation
Your suggestion would increase the split towards heavy even further.
na, not even close.
Light armor can get a 6-7kcrit on it, while heavy is limited to max of 5k, usually not more then 4k. There is a massive difference, and thats around 30% DR from 4k to 7k (its almost double)
10k raw damage is
6k after mitigation on light (40% damage reduction, or 800 of armor value)
4k after mitigation on heavy (60% damage reduction, around 1500 armor value - guesswork)
Thats simply your numbers, thats already the case.
It doesnt matter if its crit or not, its all multiplications.
Your “raw” damage as you are implying it is a fictional number.
Light armor is no where near heavy armor on damage reduction, its well know and proven by the many people that spam it in pvp. Don’t play games, and if your ignorant, shut up.
I mean, the numbers might be right, but what I’ve experienced is that i’m in light gear with 850 armor and I can get for example a 2.2-2.6k crit from a great axe easily, however a heavy healer receives from 400 to 700, maybe 800. Compared to the (not working) 20% healing bonus this just doesn’t make any sense. If they’d balance it a bit more towards light it’d be more enjoyable in my opinion.
Its not fictional.
Its math.
Heavy armor reduces damage by around 60%.
if you say a heavy armor player is taking around 4k damage, then the unmitigated damage is (without any additional damage reductions) at 10k, because 10k * 0.4 = 4k
Now take a light armor player instead, damage reduction is around 40%, its 6k damage left.
There is no fiction other than the number used, but the relative values between both will always be the same, the light armor player will recieve around 50% more damage than the heavy armor player.
You may also add resilient and a crit if you so desire:
critical hit of 10k
40% reduction on light + 22.5% reduction by resilient = 4650
60% reduction on heavy + 22.5% reduction by resilient = 3100
that is again 50% more onto the light armor player.
Cant argue against personal enjoy factor.
The only question at hand is: why do you consider armor weight class anything meaningful?
If the game would offer only 1 type of armor or simply damage reduction by gearscore (which would be the same anyway you look at it), would this bother all the same?
I don’t know, just logics, or something. if you imagine any fictional movie, game, whatsoever magical beings like mages, priests etc. are mostly wearing robes and not heavy plate armors 
And I really miss the high-risk-high-reward gameplay being not present and worth at all, because there are no benefits atm (if there would be, 20% is regardless not enough imo). Tbh, I’d do -20% for heavy 0% for medium and +20% for light. That would be a great balance. So that ok, you can play paladin, you can be a frontliner, but you AoE heals are not that effective, yet you can pop big heals with a single target ability. Also, if you’re a priest than you’re abilities to keep your group alive are strong, but you’d need to avoid / get some protection from your teammates to stop possible assasinations towards you. I’d go with this approach. But obviously, this is only my opinion.
Ah, there are games where knight classes wouldnt go with plate armor, because magic damage or elemental damage was comparitively stronger or the even split between armor and magic damage made more sens.
The problem this game has in this regard is, that no matter the armor class, they all have the same 50/50 split between physical and magical damage.
But the other problem is the sheer amount of bugs and obviously badly designed perks.
Why would one try critical strike if the damage isnt significantly higher than a non critical strike (hello resilient), while pushing his normal damage when he ignores critical strikes.
I favor having a different critical strike system - like making it ignore armor (percentages) without increasing the raw damage.
Agree. Healers are RIDICOLOUS.
In outpost rush one heavy armored healer can stand in the middle of 5-6 players.
Completely dumb.
Decrease all self healing from the healing staff by 30% while wearing heavy armor.