Suggestion 1: make armor add a percentage of hp, not a flat number. It has been suggested multiple times already, but it would be a good fix in my opinion. As it is now, bronze, silver and gold will respectively add 100, 200 and 300 hp to a class. For a sniper and assassin, this means that a sniper or assassin gains 33%, 66%, or even 100% (double) health, while a tank or gunner gain 14%, 28% or 42% (and for a tank with lv3 passive, 10%, 20%, or 30%). The percentage values per endorsement are up for debate, but I'd say it's reasonable to have gold armor add 50% hp, and have none of the armor levels stack with the gunner's passive skill. The assassin and sniper gain 150 hp, support gains 200, assault gains 250, and tank/gunner gain 350. This way, the heavy classes (gunner and tank) remain strong (even have 50 more max hp with gold armor), while weaker classes remain weak, as they're supposed to be. An assassin shouldn't be able to grapplespam all day, able to tank any damage thrown at her because she has double health (don't turn this into an assassin is op/balanced/whatever thread, it was just an example). Suggestion 2: have armor regenerate very slowly, or not at all. Armor now shows up on the health bar as a colored extention, either as an extention to the max hp |=======| or overlapping the hp (like overheal) |=====| Once the hp is regenerated, armor starts regenerating at a slower rate, maybe somewhere between 10% and 30% the rate that hp regenerates at (regeneration endorsements speed it up). It should be regenerated with churro's and a support's heal gun/firebase as well. Let me hear what you think, I know I'm probably better off not suggesting anything at all, but it's worth a try.
I cast my vote as the Armor is fine, Suggestion 1 would make armor nearly useless for light classes and make Tank the only class that really benefits from armor. Suggestion 2 is pretty much what it currently is, but you want it to regenerate slower, which really wouldn't get us anywhere at all.
Suggestion 1 would be too game breaking, the game as is now is pretty balanced. Just this 1 change would ruin everything else. Suggestion 2 sounds like a decent idea but i'm not sure what impacts it would have on the game. I can see it helping people who don't need it and not being very useful for those who do. Changing health regen from decreasing the cooldown before it starts to increasing the amount healed per second would be a better idea than messing around with armor values.
The problem isn't armor. The problem is a defensive sustained damage JUICE rush based metagame. Eventually new strategies, some more "Broken" than others, will emerge and taking armor will seem silly. Until then just deal with it nerd.
Really the biggest problem with armor isn't the armor endorsement itself. It's the fact that the assassin's base health is so absurdly low that armor is basically required to make her worth a damn. I would support changing it to a % model IF the base health of the lower classes was also increased to compensate.
so you would want the assault to become a light class then? you would need to increase nearly all of the classes health if you did this
I've been a proponent of option one from the beginning of the beta period. Truth be told, the Assassin's does need more base health, however, before this can come to pass, just because she's entirely too easy to kill without armor, currently. The Sniper makes sense, since he's an extreme range kind of character and can fairly easily run for cover, but the Assassin's easily killed by even Blackjacks when she doesn't have armor. Also, it would require a rework of the passives for Tanks and Supports: As it is, Supports go from 400 to 600 health with Passive 3. If each level of armor were to go with 10% more health, then this would mean he'd go from 400 to 480 health, instead. With gold armor and an extra 30% more health, he would reach 600 health. The Tank has 700 base health, with Passive 1/2/3 increasing his health by 100/200/300, changed to 10/20/30%, meaning that without armor, he would reach 910 armor at Passive 3. With gold armor, that would mean a grand total of +60% base health, or 1120 health, down from the 1300 health he currently gets. As such, I don't think it would be unfair to institute this kind of change: it would make having armor go from a must-have in every build to something that would be competitive with the other survivability endorsements.