The fact is: acquiring gear is fun, and if the game doesn't give plenty of opportunity to feel stronger than other players or dominate PvE then something is wrong.

I believe that the issue is less about gear disparity and more about weapon and armor scaling disparity. Simply put: you die way to fast in DaD. I often see people compare the combat of DaD and Chivalry by pointing out that DaD is NOT a combat simulator and therefor shouldn't have or doesn't need the intricate combat system. I agree, but I then pose a question: why is it, that if we're okay with our combat system being far simpler than Chivalry and mostly a hold left click hit trader, we are ALSO okay with the lethality being either the same, or in some cases HIGHER than Chivalry.

In this game with an depth blocking, parrying, feinting, and stamina system getting the 2-3 (or in a few cases more) hits you need for a kill is quite difficult, and often requires a decent expression of skil to achieve. Yet the average ttk in DaD is exactly the same, you're looking at roughly 2-4 hits to bring someone down.

DaD doesn't have an intricate combat system. Currently the ONLY expression of skill in it are hitting skill shots such as bows or spells, and move speed manipulation. The only way to out skill an opponent is to be faster than them. If you can dip in and out of their two hander or other slow swing weapons like the falchion, you can outplay them, but otherwise it's a smack fest where the blue weapon beats the green 90% of the time and that's all there is to it.

Because of the move speed importance in this system and the fact that weapons scale absurdly better than armor, it's often better to wear no armor at all than the starter or low tier gear. Gray or white plate usually won't even allow you to survive an extra hit, while imposing a move speed penalty that makes it FAR more likely you take that hit. Base wizard or rogue gear quite literally doesn't do anything at all and the only reason they wear anything at any time is for damage stats. In conclusion: the ttk in this game is ridiculously low for how simple the combat systems are. Keeping it simple is fine, but it shouldn't then have the same lethality as games with more complex systems. Gear disparity only feels as bad as it does because fights are over in 1-2 hits, and you have very little time to try and outskill or outmaneuver opponents before you're simply deleted. The issue is less that a gear disparity exists, and more that you are given little to no opportunity to play around or address it. Fights just end too quickly.

My proposal: flatten the armor curve by buffing all armor from green down, and slightly nerfing all armor of blue and up. The intention is to add about 2 hits to the average combat, for all classes. So long as you aren't down by more than two rarities, you should survive longer than you do now.

This way a fighter might be able to easily obtain 50-60% physical resistance without having to really try, but 70% should be very hard to obtain, and anything much above that should be impossible. A rogue or a ranger might sit where fighters do now, at a pretty common 30% physical resistance, or maybe more, but shouldn't ever really be able to go beyond 50%.

Tanky classes still feel tanky, squishy classes still feel squishy in comparison, but everyone is taking roughly 4-5-6 hits to kill now, assuming at least relatively close gear(within two levels) gear, and combat feels significantly better. If need be you also buff monster damage to keep pve relationships the same.

I believe this armor experiment should happen and before any testing of the trading post removal or tweaking so that people can more easily obtain gear for data purposes. I thought I'd make this lost since I've seen so much conversation about the trading post and, in my opinion, it shouldn't be touched for the moment so that the data pools stays strong for testing such as this.