Eeeeek, that was the only way many Nightblade base builds got any physical resist, as usually it was otherwise hard to get and harder once physical resist% was removed from Seal of Might etc.
And though armour stacking can help with that, a shield is far more effective and Nightblade is all about not using a shield unless you’re doing something weird. So unless this change is adding a ton of armour and allowing it to get to 4000+ I can only model it as a major downgrade to Nightblade tankiness.
Especially in Deep SR, where physical damage is still one of the biggest threats. Next to acid AoE ground effects 
Can’t speak to going too, too deep into SR, but I did run 19 DW melee nightblades through SR32 on hardcore when the playtest patch came out (though I believe some phantasmal armor buffs were reverted since which is IMO a mistake). My impression from looking at these numbers and playing the builds was that it wasn’t a nerf, though I believe reverting some of the phantasmal armor buff might change this (I don’t recall a bunch of discussion as to why this was done).
That said, I acknowledge that the higher you push, the more the loss of phys res could be a problem versus armor gains. Most builds aren’t meant to be pushing to SR36+ or so on HC IMO (some can of course, but you need very good piloting or to have gone fairly meta for the build concept versus doing something fun and creative in a lot of cases). My testing wasn’t “push characters until they RIP,” so it does have limitations.
to builds with 2k armour or less, getting hit for anything over 1-2k phys dmg it was a nerf, based on the armour values v gains i had on couple char (+200 armour straight up)
my issue i mentioned is it negative affects NB builds with low(er) starting armour, ie the sub 2k kind/“squish” NBs/“insert witch hunter memes”, while then seeming expecting you magically find the points to not only invest in Phantasmal armour now(where the builds didn’t before); and max/hardcap it
the % armour scaling on dual blades was so bad on some setups it wasn’t even wort keeping at their former max because the gains were so small, and then shift them into flat armour gains like phantasmal, which is ofc then a dmg tradeoff for something they might already have had defensively
*and that’s not considering the impact of armour interaction vs flat phys where phys res reduct prior to armour checks contributes different potentially
which is a number games i’m not even remotely going to begin speculate in 
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I’ll keep saying it, I hate this change.
You can have a ton of armor but you still need at least some physical resistance, specially for melee builds (which dual blades is supposed to support). It makes it even more restrictive to go for phys res on gear/devos which are fewer by the day, making the choices more lineal with less space for player choice.
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