Shattered Kingdoms

In my opinion PVP isn't more complicated, it's easier. The reason being equipment and how innate enchants and endowment enchants stack. Only people decked out in nice innate save gear are going to have good saves vs willpower/fortitude/reflex spells. Everyone else is going to have mediocre saves because endowments on items don't stack. For me personally, that makes it easy to decide what spells to use against what person based on what they are wearing. This is my point of view as a sorceror, which is admittedly the most broken class once again in the game. I will say though that melee classes with proper enchants on their weapons and armor are still very formidable.

My initial though on the new enchant system was that people are going to have a terrible time trying to save against a 14 art character. That does not seem to be the case for a "properly" enchanted kit. The system is, in my opinion, beautifully complex but simple enough to explain to a newbie.

Explain then, Opey? Depending on your sociability, you either have to know a Sorcerer, Cleric, or be one. And not to promote sharing mechanics within the forums, but what IS a good balance of enchantment(s)/consecration(s)?

In all honestly, most of the cleric/sorcerers don't know when asked...

Smoochy is still considered a newbie. Do tell the complexities. Cause honestly, the game invites PK. And given there is little room to avoid it entirely, some of us would like to gain some knowledge to infest in what SK has to offer...

Additionally, Smoochy is as dumb as a box of rocks~♫

Honestly, most people do not "know" what a good balance of saves is. Before the enchant changes, the general consensus was that 15 or so in a save will give you a -decent- shot at resisting spells, whereas the most paranoid of veterans would aim for 30 or so in a save in order to feel as safe as possible.

After the changes, no one knows for certain aside from the handful of people that have done their own testing. The fact that everyone should have all their corresponding save stats (Wisdom, Dex and Con) maxed most certainly plays into things and probably means that you don't need quite as strong saves as before, and with impairment lessened things may be less requiring: However, it's also important to bring up the fact that a lot of sorcs will have max ART now to save time while enchanting, and thus their art will increase the floor required to have decent saves against them specifically.

There's nothing ICly against the rules from doing your own testing: Wear some crappy storebought save jewelry and have someone cast sleep or blindness on you repeatedly, and see how reliable your armor is. That's the best way to see how fitting your gear is going to be in the PK/PvE arena.

You need to make friends with a priest, find armor with innate willpower and/or fortitude, and then add enhancement enchants for willpower and fortitude to one piece of jewelry. Fill in the gaps with stat enchants, MP or MR (augments that stack across slots) depending on the build you are doing and the stats you trained. Then find a source of bless, which is plentiful - from NPCs, scripts, or other players.

The system has shifted from an RNG crap shoot of hoping to get fortitude, willpower and MP (while not getting MR) on the highest AC armor you could find and/or use to enchanting armor that has innate willpower and fortitude.

TLDR: Find innate fortitude/willpower armor and get buffed with bless.

That's actually a good point. If art was created to deal with the high saves that were possible to get, has that also been scaled down like impairment was so everything would remain balanced now that saves are generally much lower?

Saves are not generally much lower - it is lower for people that are still clinging to the old model and haven't adapted yet.

Agreed. There just isn't enough of that kind of armor to go around, and certainly not enough for people who aren't veterans to end up with.

A lot of the stuff that was initially built to be "uber" was all built with innate MP on it, which now sucks. Some reworking of high end area armor needs to be done.

I seriously doubt that's how art already works. I think it is applying a save penalty when a caster's art is higher than a victim's saves. I also don't think impairment works like I suggested either; I think you can get impaired below a zero save. I don't think a zero art caster will have success with his spells against an unequipped opponent anywhere close to 100%, but I do agree it may be higher than 50%. Unfortunately, it's unlikely there are any zero art casters running around to test this out.

This is certainly true. What's cool now is there is a lot of room for variety in "uber" armor. Some could be pure AP, some could be AP/MP or AP/MR, some could go heavy on a specific save, and some could be a combination of AP/MP and saves. Different types of "uber" armor would be useful to different builds.