u/Detton

I tried to look it up, but the main results I found were outdated, or were other threads. This will be a long read, I appreciate you in advance, and i'll try to TL;DR it at the end :)

Here is what I am aware of:

Armor has attunement pips; this means that you get more of a specific armor type (physical, magical, or stagger) for each point of a virtue that it's attuned to. E.g., if one piece of armor has 2 pips of courage, and another has 2 pips of grace, then the courage armor will be higher if you have a high courage, and the grace armor will be higher if you have a high grace.

So far, this is simple to understand. Don't wear grace armor if your stats are full-courage, and vice-versa (and the same for spirit-attuned armor.)

Here's my problem: I cannot seem to find a stat allocation where the Pensive's Armor is not the best.

Originally, my stats were in the middle, relatively equal spread, because I change weapons a lot as I level them up and figured I didn't want to think too hard. pensive's makes sense here, because they are hybrid: All three armor types scale off of all three stats (2 pips spirit, 1 courage, 1 grace). Leans slightly more towards spirit scaling, but overall, very good.

I recently made several heavy courage weapons and I need to level them up, so I figured for once, I would specialize: I set my virtue prism to be heavy courage (28 courage, 8 spirit, 7 grace, not completely in the red corner, but mostly there.)

Pensives armor is still higher armor almost across the board than anything else.

27/27/24 for a total of 78 armor. (not amazing by late-gate standards i'm sure). My 'balanced' virtue stats gave me a total of 87, so the amount went down as expected, but not by a lot.

Now maybe I just don't have the right armor, but i figure if I can find an armor that scales off of courage by 2 or more pips, it should be better overall... but i'm struggling to find that.

Fire King's armor is 2 courage, 2 grace physical, only 1pt magical, and 1c 2b stability. When I equip it, I only go up by 2 points of physical armor, and I lost a LOT of magic.

I have Circade's armor , which doesn't give ANY magical protection at all, but it has 3 courage pips which translates into... 5 higher armor.

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Here's my questions:

1. How good is one "point" of armor? Is 5 points a significant increase? Because it doesn't seem to translate into a noticeable practical survivability improvement. (especially if you have to tank 100% or nearly of magical protection)

2. Is Pensieve too good? A better question might be: Is every other armor just that bad? Pensieve scales off of four pips of stats, even if they are mixed, and that really seems to make up every advantage that a single-scaling armor gives.

TL;DR: I really want to equip any other set of armor because I feel like I should tailor my gear towards my build, but I can't find anything that's better than pensieve's, even if I completely change my stats to be opposite of what I would have expected it to be. Is this correct, or am I missing something? (and I really want to be missing something)

Thanks all,