I simply removed the +50% to shields and took the +50% vitality and made it 75%. Really just moving bloat around, but at least it plays a little bit better and more in a way that feels like it's intended.
This is actually not a bad idea. I suppose removing shields entirely will make it too easy, but keeping them at Classic levels while bumping up their HP like you are doing might work. I'd also lower their damage to 20% increase, rather than 50%, but it depends on how much damage they are doing compared to your HP.
Yeah, I
think the game was made for the Classic in mind (either that, or Explorer/Story mode, but I honestly doubt that, joking aside), but the player's damage output doesn't actually scale, so the combat pacing - assuming that the
intent of the shields are to prevent
immediate lockdowns and to allow things like
Shield's Up, it throws the pacing of the combat off completely.
Meanwhile, while HP bloat is still just bloat, the principle idea of HP isn't as a combat pacing mechanic, but to increase the length of fights and the longevity of enemies, in turn making it more dangerous (which isn't always true, but let's stick to
intent here).
Therefore, especially since it's based on percentages, it's a bad idea to increase Shields, because it immediately fucks with the mechanical base assumptions necessary to gauge the intended flow of battle. I think they just created the difficulties as
"Yeah, that sounds about right", with extremely little actual play-testing (but instead focused on Classic as, let's be honest, they
should; it
is the baseline, or at least presented as such). So while +50% armour might sound OK in theory, like "Just scale the effective total HP upwards by a consistent 50%" (because let's be honest, if it acts like HP and is reduced like HP it's effectively just a separate HP counter) actually fucks quite a bit with the flow of combat in ways just increasing HP doesn't, especially with opponents that replenish their Armor in various ways.
Just look at the Armor restored by skills and shit, and it doesn't scale at all. Some things do only damage to armor, and that doesn't scale either. There's clearly an intended baseline that everything else has been measured to in order to fulfill the intent of the mechanic, and that gets the fuck thrown off when everyone suddenly has 50%; it could mean that instead of stopping someone from being CC:d for one turn, it might stop him for just two turns, which is enough for him to use some ability, and then two becomes three, and then when they're stripped, there's yet another fucker that's been replenishing after that. It becomes a quagmire that needs to be balanced individually.
That said, stripping +50% Armor of all kinds will effectively make the game easier. I think this may be somewhat balanced by the fact that most enemies usually have a lot more HP than they do Armor, so while they lose the bonus armor, that +25% health might still give more in terms of "effective" HP. Hard to tell.