Hi,
I think it is important to make each armor type different and unique, so for example, you could split the word armor into 3 different armor types, like Light Armor(so light gloves, light boots, light chest etc), Medium Armor(Medium gloves, Medium boots, Medium Chest etc), and Heavy Armor(Heavy gloves, Heavy boots, Heavy chest etc) . Then you could give these a fixed affix that always rolls a range like (100 – 300) on this type of armor. These are some examples of what each armor type could give you.
These are examples!
- Light/Cloth armor so could give you more magic resistance and it also gives you more Magic Penetration or Spell critical, but it has no armor instead.
- Medium/Leather Armor gives you more dodge/evade chance and it also gives you more critical strike chance or Armor penetration, but it gives you decreases your all resistance
- Heavy/Iron Armor gives you more defense than any other armor type and it also gives you more all resist, but it decreases your overall movement speed.
By doing it like this where you have a pro and a con for every item type, gives you more depth and complexity, it also gives the player more choices to pick from. So every class can use any armor type, the important thing is where you want to use it depending on what you are doing, and it also complements things that you are lacking, for example, defense or resists or spell critical
Let’s say that you have 2 heavy armor pieces and 2 Medium armor pieces and 1 light armor piece, you choose to have 1 light armor piece because you need more defense and you don’t need as much magic resistance or Magic penetration for your build.
You could also do this to weapons too where every sub-weapon types have their own fixed affix roll, so a Sword could also be:
Sword Examples:
- Cutlass gives you 1.25 Attack speed and it also gives you more weapon dmg, but your critical chance has been decreased by X.
- Long sword
- Scimitar
- Short Sword
Axe Examples:
- Hatchet
- Tomahawk
- Viking Axe
- Double axe
- Battle axe
- Tactical axe
This gives players more choices if each sub-weapon type has a pro and a con. This also gives the game more depth and complexity to choose what base weapon types to equip. The more depth and complexity the better the game stays relevant and fresh because it gives you as a player more things to consider into your build.
The reason why I think that you need pros and cons to items is that make these items more meaningful, and it also gives you as the player that decision. The more decisions that you have to make for your character the better replayability the game gets.
I saw that both Rhykker and Noxious gave similar feedback in their feedback videos for D4.
Rhykkers video Timestamp 34:30
Noxious Video Timestamp 30:15