4zb4 wrote
chainmail [...] still heavy as anything to a point and it's susceptible to rust.
Again we come back to the jump between meteoric steel and adamant that causes a problem here.
It's a bit uncommon - in my experience - to get totally stuck in that gap. Arcanite plate armor is quite easily acquired from Atavus; though it doesn't come in a chain mail version, it's weight and penalties are still very low. Further, the Arcanite -> Mithril -> Octiron sequence is a good progression at middle intelligence levels. Achieving the 25 Int required to CM a set of chain mail into arcanite is quite reasonable for a PC who has cleared the Enner - and if you can CM to Arcante, you can harden directly to Mithril (though in the case of chain mail I don't personally feel that it would be worth it).
Now, if you aren't building your intelligence at all *and* are playing a mildly chaotic character without Atavus access, and as a result you are relying on Loricatus to do your hardening for you, then yes, the gap between meteoric and adamant is a bit broad. And yet, since (current versions of) the game ignore PC intelligence for Lorcatian hardening, the hurdle can be cleared with nothing more difficult than time and persistence.
I think one of the difficulties here is that due to the way the game works at present, any adjustment made to plate armor will also affect soft armor. (We can be pretty precise with chain mail adjustments, which is good, because I don't feel chain mail needs a lot of adjustment.) We can fiddle with the material attributes, but (with the exception of flexibility) anything we do here will also affect other items, such as weapons, made from the materials in question. Simply adding new materials is equally questionable in terms of balance. If we want to target *just* metal plate armor for balance changes, we might need to create a new item type, which of course presents complications with regards to item spawn rate weights...