The Problem
As it stands we have 3 different stand out stats for defense.
Defense, which grants bonus health.
Beast defense, which grants resistance to ‘physical’ damage.
Resistance, which grants resistance to damage from humanoid enemies.
All three of these effects were added ages apart from each other and thus do not tie into each other whatsoever.
This suggestion aims to change these stats to improve build variety.
1: Defense:
Frankly this one doesn’t need to change much, all I’d suggest doing here is renaming it to vitality because it doesn’t protect you from taking damage, therefore calling it defense can be misleading.
This would also allow for adding it to non-metal armors in the concept of a more magical effect than defense.
2: Beast Defense:
Out of the three, this one is the worst offender. Its implementation makes zero sense and this stat has been controversial since before it even released and that hasn’t changed at all to this day.
Beast defense should be completely separated from vanity and instead tied to your resistance stat.
Further details in the resistance section.
3: Resistance:
This stat’s core issue is its irrelevance outside of specific builds.
I believe resistance should become a more central stat found on most metallic armor pieces rather than defense.
You do not wear platemail to improve your vitality so you can take more hits, you wear it to avoid taking damage in the first place.
Additionally, its damage resistance capabilities should extend to all forms of damage, environmental, physical, percentage, and magical all in one concise and clean effect.
Admittedly this is a very large change and would be a nightmare for the people on the balance team since the way defense works would be fundamentally changed, however, I believe the game would be better off for it.
Tl;Dr :
Rename defense.
Merge beast defense into resistance, expand what it defends against, and take it off of vanity.
Make resistance equally important to defense.
Reworking defensive stats this way would also allow more to be done with armor piercing and possibly regeneration as concepts rather than their current questionable implementations, but that’s a conversation for another day.
