Scavenged Plating, Armour, and Elemental Damage

Hello Path of Exile 2 development team and community, I would like to discuss the skill Scavenged Plating, as a defensive aura. This last league I did an off meta build that was very fun, though maybe not very "good" playing with heartbound loop and the new Iron Ward skill, I used avatar of fire to convert the damage to fire and scaled it with ignite, using minions with infernal legion to charge it. I'm fine with everything about this interaction, and think the slow charge and low damage are a reasonable price for something off meta. But in playing this combination I came to the realization, I was stacking quite a lot of armour and armour as elemental, as I like armour quite a lot, and wanted to use the Scavenged Plating aura to get the armour bonus from it, but found the skill very limited. It's very difficult to utilize scavenged plating on an elemental damage build, which feels bad considering all the fire damage and conversion in that area. It felt disappointing that I couldn't really use the aura as a defensive, and when I compare it to other defensive aura options it feels lacking in that way. Wind Dancer, Convalescence, Ghost Dance, and Barkskin serve a similar role as a defensive reservation, but do not have the same feeling of being "locked" into certain damage types or skills. I was wondering if there was any potential to either improve Scavenged Plating as a defensive and make it better align with the other defensive auras, or else give armour a more "pure defensive" reservation without the added thorns damage that is less restricted in what builds can use it. I understand you may think to yourself, "if you are doing an armour build you are breaking armour anyways, so what does it matter?" Or, "just take the passive that allows elemental damage to benefit from armour break and use a skill that can break armour", and I do understand that it's a niche complaint that comes from an off meta perspective, but it's just something I wanted to bring up, and share the comparison with the other "defensive" auras, and see what everyone thinks. I understand it's a minority perspective, and there are technically "solutions" that allow me to use the aura, but I felt they compromised the kind of character I really wanted to play this league, so I hope you will understand my perspective there. In the end I was able to get more than enough armour without the aura, but it was just disappointing to me that it was so difficult to use, especially when the other defensive auras are very "plug and play" regardless of the skill you are using to deal damage.

Maybe one solution is to split the thorns/scavenge identity from the defensive. Make scavenged plating into a more damage oriented thorns aura, keep the cooldown and "armour break gives stacks" bit replace the more armour with an increased thorns damage, or else increase the thorns gained per stack. Which keeps the skills identity, and allows for a better designed, and more general use, defensive aura for pure armour. Maybe something similar to Molten Shell from poe1, but probably a lot weaker. Some flat or increased armour, and a "guard" that protects some max hp according to a percent of your armour, maybe like 5% up to 1000 damage, that goes on a cooldown when it is broken. This actually would go a long way to making armour feel as "good" as other defensive, because the main thing it lacks is effective defense against very large hits and degens, so giving it a sort of "emergency" extra hp pool that it can use that goes on a cooldown really helps it feel like it's in a similar place to energy shield without I feel giving it too much power. Of course any numbers I gave above are meaningless per say, and just for the sake of giving an example. But like how Convalescence "bandaids" the main drawback of energy shield, it's recharge delay, I think it would be nice to have a defensive for pure armour that does a similar sort of thing for the drawbacks of armour.

Like the above poster I also don't really enjoy how thorns is tied to armour break and such a powerful armour-boosting spirit buff. 40% more armour makes it mandatory for an armour-centered build to the point where it's doing what you're complaining about, you are looking for a way to break armour even though you don't necessarily deal physical damage because you don't want to pass up a 40% more armour buff.

There's a few "warrior" centric things that I don't really agree with or at least find kind of counterintuitive and part of me is hoping to see adjustments as they release more classes, basetypes, and skills - including spirit skills.

In the current patch you've just gotta figure out how to break armour. There's literally an armour breaker skill that will do it as long as you're holding a mace no matter what damage type you're focusing on. You can use the support gem if you're doing physical damage. Or you can find convoluted methods like getting bonuses to "break % increased armour with critical strikes" up to 100% while being an oracle with inevitable critical strikes who also anoints the "break 50% of armour on stunning an enemy" node so that when your inevitable critical strike stuns an enemy it breaks all their armour. There's also just being Warbringer and taking the ascendancy node which lets all damage break armour regardless of damage type.