The hyper-armor changes are so bad that they roused Glatix from a 3-year slumber to pen this well-reasoned screed:
More discussion here:
I’m glad to see another thread. I hope the community never drops this topic until Funcom admits they were terribly wrong and undoes this senseless mistake.
It has been discussed that the hyper-armor changes apply to NPCs as well as players, as if there is some balancing aspect to that fact. There is not. NPCs do not have brains or emotions, NPCs derive no joy or pain from the game being played. Also the most common combat situation is one player versus multiple NPCs. As a result the hyper-armor reduction has a negligible effect to the NPC experience of combat and a tremendously negative effect to the player experience of combat.
To make the whole situation worse, since Funcom is incapable of making combat challenging in interesting ways they designed a new purge whose primary tactic is simply overwhelm. Overwhelm defenses with way too many attackers. It doesn’t matter that the attackers are weak because they are so ridiculously numerous and hyper-armor is such trash that they can lock up defenders and poke them to death. As if that wasn’t enough the game engine is not even capable of handling so much action at once and the sheer quantity of attackers will sometimes cause defender AI to simply shut down. They don’t even need to get staggered, they’ll just stop fighting because the game engine prioritizes NPC AI over follower AI.
Funcom needs to understand the limitations of its own game and stop making decisions that might be interesting in a game that didn’t have such limitations… because this is not that game. This game is full of years of poor decisions and buggy code that place severe limitations on what new changes can be introduced without having adverse effects.