The Hidden Forest

I hadn't really compared the 2 armors until tonight and I was a little disappointed. I got a leather boots pattern and of course I was curious about what I was getting to replace my Slippers of the Traitor. After comparing the 2 it's apparent that the Powerful Leather Boots are not an upgrade at all. There is now way that 45hp is worth losing 22hp.

The Powerful Metal gear appears to be an upgrade in both AC and HP, but the leather AC sucks badly for a tier 4 item. Can you take a look at that?

The tier 4 stuff is the elemental set, not the powerful stuff ;P Take another look and ya might be surprised !

Powerful Leather = Elemental armor. Unless there is some armor set I don't know about. I'm talking about the armor that is made from dropping PoFire bosses - Recipe : Ele leather boots

Tier 3 Leather - Slippers of the Traitor, 500hp, 50AC
Tier 4 Leather - Powerful Leather Boots, 545hp, 22ac

Tier 3 Plate - Boots of the Traitor, 500ac, 80ac
Tier 4 Plate - Powerful Metal Boots, 545hp, 90ac

Take a look for yourself, plate is an upgrade in HP and AC. About 10ac/45hpper item. The leather on the other hand is still the same 45hp upgrade, but the AC is a massive down grade - in the case of the boots it's a 22AC drop. This is common across the board for the leather set with the single exception of the robe that drops off Xeg which would technically be a 2 tier upgrade.

Leather of the Traitor set -
Cap - 55ac
Gloves - 52ac
Leggings - 110ac
Robe - 65ac
Sleeves - 50ac
Slippers - 50ac
Wrists - 2x 47ac

Elemental Leather set -
Skullcap - 45ac
Gloves - 36ac
Leggings - 55ac
Robe - 75ac
Sleeves - 40ac
Boots - 28ac
Wristwraps - 2x 38ac

By "upgrading" to a full set of elemental leather my monk would lose 121 AC. If you discount the robe, I would lose 131 AC. Seems like to me, going from a full set of Tier 3 to Tier 4 should be an upgrade.

I think we had this discussion before, but I looked at the whole set, and it appears that the powerful armor is more DPS oriented (for leather). Has stats like +combat effects and what not. Now I'm not sure what +combat effects does but I hope it makes you proc more?

Combat effects does indeed make you proc more, but at this level of the game, how much difference is that really going to make? With 6+ procs and Weapon Affinity 5 your already a proc machine. At this level, this is a ridiculous choice to have to make. Presumably you are preparing to fight mobs like the Avatar of Wind that can 1 round you with his AE rampage everyone needs as much AC/HP as possible. A dead monk has a lot less DPS than a live one. I haven't looked at the silk or chain, but the plate classes are an upgrade across the board. It's not even a question that my warrior will make Powerful Plate and wear it. My monk on the other hand will not bother making the boots he looted last night and I'll be going back to ST to replace the Powerful Leather wrists and arms. Many of the other monks I talked to have also passed on the Powerful Leather when they had of the Traitor. That this is even a consideration seems a little off balance to me. I'd even be happy if the AC stayed the same instead of being such a severe downgrade. Losing 120ac when upgrading is not a trivial loss. That'd be like tanking with no BP on.

The same situation exists for chain DPS. Significantly less ac, but more HP. For my berserker, I have decided, other than for rots to remain in my TOV gear (farm out the balance of ST augs). Once guild has a good amount of "of the traitor" I will start boxing warders and that being my zerker's final set of gear, with elemental chain filling in slots that I cannot seem to get to drop in ST.

Shammy's on the other hand are best served by getting elemental gear, as the added mana means much more than the loss of ac if they are in a demanding healing role. It would be nice to have the same AC, or greater AC than "of the traitor"

Dammur

I have to agree, the powerful armor isn't so powerful against the traitor armor. Look at the legs, losing ac stinks and even with the royal legs aug, you still fall behind.

just a fyi, we plan to slow down with item upgrades so if something will be changed it's most probably will be a nerf. thanks for reporting tho, we'll look into it.

Here's some more info that might be helpful when deciding what to do with these sets and future upgrades. BTW - I am not necessarily advocating increasing the Powerful armor stats, maybe Traitor armor needs nerfed. I just want to be excited that I got an elem armor drop instead of banking it in hopes that it's an upgrade some day.

I ran the stats totals on my monk to see if it made sense to use the Powerful armor with the intent of increasing DPS. My monk is an alt so he doesn't get preference on loot, he's missing a lot of augs, and doesn't have any ST augs or slot 30 augs yet. He does have a donator weapon and CotH ring, but neither has that many effects on it that the numbers are all that off. Here are my totals, cap in paranthesis -

Shielding - 36 (35)
Avoidance - 345 (100)
Spell Shielding - 29 (35)
Dot Shielding - 20 (35)
Stun Resist - 35 (35)
Combat Effects - 140 (100)
Accuracy - 290 (150)
Strikethrough - 25 (35)

As you can see, even with the lack of decent augs, virtually none of these are even a consideration when upgrading. I could use some Spell Shielding, Dot Shielding, and Strikethrough, but I would guess that simply filling in the augs that are empty and upgrading some of the sub-tier 1 augs would max all of these. Avoidance, Combat Effects, and Accuracy are complete non-factors.

Would it be possible to increase the caps through the higher end gear? That would make it worth losing some AC/HP is I could get an item that increases the Avoidance/Combat Effects/Accuracy caps to take advantage of the abundance.

As a side note, on my warrior main that does get proper attention, the worst stat from the list above is Strikethrough, which is at 44, or 125% of the cap. Most everything else is more like 175-300% of the cap. There isn't a single stat that would drop below the cap by REMOVING a single piece of equipment.

Based on these numbers (that I had not honestly even considered before today) the only stats that I am even going to look at are AC/HP, focus, and clicks.

Thank you for doing the analysis that I myself was too lazy to do.

Sticking to of the traitor for now.