With the recent discovery, which was staring me in the face all a long, that you can give a player class an armor value as a permanent stat. I'm starting to rethink, or rather for the first time really think about how armor should/could/can work i TLA.
The ultimate goal is not to invent a new way of doing things, just for the sake of it, but to figure out the best possible and easiest way to balance damage and damage reduction in TLA.
Her are my notes and thoughts:
The classes in the game belong to an armor class, or armor tier. A pretty standard system with heavy, medium and light armor classes, where casters are light armor user, rangers/rogues are medium users and melee fighters are heavy armor users.
As the mod and the classes evolve there could be more nuanced armor classes, or rather the armor values give to classes. We might end up with say, five, but three is a good start for now.
Player classes can in addition to armor, have individual elemental resistance as part of their stats. This opens up for more things to consider for player classes, such as: Should heavy elemental users, like spell casters have more resistance to elemental damage than melee fighters? If so, should they have more resistance to all elements or just one or more individual elements, which they "belong to" or are "opposed to" ?
Once we've established the above, we can look at the armor pieces. Since the classes already have an armor value, (which scales with level) we can do away with having armor values on armor and just use affixes, which reduce damage taken and/or other effects. The armor can be at level 1 and still be useful for a level 21 player, since it doesn't have an armor value you want/need/can increase, it just has effects. That's not to say that different armor pieces can and will be available, just that the armor can grow with the player and be useful regardless of its level.
With this system all armor pieces can be useful and be used and reused by a player for different builds in more flexible way than with the vanilla approach, as the player is only after the effects and not its armor value, which is zero.
There's also the possibility to give player units different damage as stats, both physical and elemental. Default is 20, so there are things to explore here as well for classes.