Buff gear with high Strength requirements

General Discussion
1

Please buff heavy weapons/armours

TL;DR
Weapons and armours requiring more than 118 Strength are seriously underpowered.
Evaluate raising defense considerably and giving damage reduction. Possibly reconsidering “-- defense when running” mechanic.
This should be applied to:

  • all medium armours
  • all heavy armours
  • all medium shields
  • all heavy shields
  • all 2H melee weapons, aside from spears and polearms

=== Long version ===
Since this is too long and probably Blizzard will never implement it, I’m only writing down some input ideas about heavy body armours, but similar concepts should be applied to all kind of medium armours/shields and 2H axes and maces (I think spears and polearms are powerful enough).

It’s something I’ve always thought, I’ve decided to open this topic after seeing this:

I think they should give interesting benefits in order to convince players picking them:

  • raise base defense value (50%?)
  • give flat damage reduction (from 1 to 25, based on normal/exceptional/elite tier)
  • revisit defense/block nullification/reduction when running in heavy armour

Heavy weapons and armours are largely inferior to lighter counterparts, which almost always get picked up over heavy items. Why even bothering with anything else than Dusk Shroud/Wyrmhide/Great Hauberk/Archon Plate?

Dusk Shroud
361-467 Defense
Str Req: 77

Archon Plate
410-524 Defense
Str Req: 103

Hellforge Plate
421-530 Defense
Str Req: 196
10% Speed Loss

Sacred Armour
487-600 Defense
Str Req: 232
5% Speed Loss

I think all heavy armours should have +50% extra defense and flat damage reduction (not % otherwise it may be overpowered), something like this:

Hellforge Plate
632-795 Defense
Damage Reduced by X
Str Req: 196
10% Speed Loss

Sacred Armour
731-900 Defense
Str Req: 232
Damage Reduced by X
5% Speed Loss

X = equivalent to magic suffix Health/Protection/Absorption/Life/Life Everlasting/Amicae, where:

  • normal heavy armours would have the lower level suffixes (Health/Protection)
  • exceptional heavy armours would have the middle level suffixes (Absorption/Life)
  • elite heavy armour would would have the top level suffixes (Life Everlasting/Amicae)

Now, Amicae has a higher level than Life Everlasting but a lower damage reduction, because they’re meant to spawn on different items; for body armours I’d obviously swap the two, with the damage reduction equivalent to Life Everlasting being the highest one.

I’d also evaluate giving a unique perk to heavy armours: when running, defense get halved, not nullified, but only for the part coming from heavy armour. So if a character is wearing all light armour with the notable exception of a sacred armour, his defense would be:
half defense of sacred armour (including Enhanced Defense from magical/rare/unique/set/runeword) plus the Enhanced Defense provided by skills, but only for the part concerning armour.

In the case of heavy shields, the mechanic could be halving, instead of reducing to 1/3. This would apply only to Tower Shield/Pavise/Aegis though.

NOTE: I know that defense is basically useless, but that’s exactly the point: everyone focus on block, life, damage reduction, FHR, always skipping defense apart from specific builds or when it’s free. But if all heavy armours (including gloves, helms, boots and shields) have +50% defense and damage reduction, we may start seeing new melee builds trying to push 60k defense, where maybe it matters.

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