Fixing the armour problem

Have some thoughts on how armour could possibly be fixed.

Armour for sure needs some inherent buffs to make it more effective. However, I think the real problem is armour based builds don't have near as much effective hit pool potential as energy shield and evasion.

Of course, one solution would be to add this in the skill tree. I understand GGG went away from this, but in doing so, ES became way better in comparison (scaling ES is much more impactful on effective hit pool and can be done in the tree much more effectively). It doesn't necessarily have to be life, but melee builds could benefit from more nodes that increase effective hit pool in the passive tree

Another solution could be to buff armour based gear entirely. What if armour based and armour hybrid based gear had higher life rolls compared to alternative?

For example, let's say you have equivalent tier armours. One is pure armour, the other is pure energy shield. Why not make it so you can get more life on the armour gear compared to energy shield. I think something like this could help level the playing field.

The only thing i can see that may be possible is giving phys taken as (before armour) to bottom left of the tree. Also the more titan node for armour should be endurance charges give you pdr/edr (before armour not in addition to armours "PDR"). Then a way to generate them in the node that isn't stupid.

From what i can tell is they don't want slams tankable. If you cant tank stuff you shouldnt be able to 1 shot stuff and ranged abilities shouldn't be able to off screen there should be damage fall off especially on bow skills.

The cast on skills should just be removed from the game, its kind of telling that there isnt one for physical builds. Physical skills probably dont sell mtx on average. I don't see the reason for no cast on stun. It would be a decent addition. I dont quite know what skill we would use as phys builds but there is currently no option or any parallel to that archetype. Instead you get crap like volcanic fissure where instead of getting an automated attack you get one that makes you attack 2x for it to even do anything at all. Then earthshatter where you have to also invest into warcries, or eq where you have to wait for it to do anything and go all the way to the top right of the tree to get less skill effect duration to make it work, but thats ok because you need 600 str anyways to be able to block because armour is so bad you will get rekt all the time without it. It feels like you lose 20% of your points when you're playing a warrior to completely make the skill feel "playable" by changing its functionality with skill effect duration and cooldowns. Then you still have to jump into the middle of packs to fight with worse defense than off screening builds.

If they don't want these archetypes to exist for bottom left/phys builds then what are we going to get in consolation. We already get shafted on defensive auras with scavenged plating being trash, nothing like ghost dance or grim feast. Why don't we get a life on block aura? Maybe time of need should give you overflow life when it procs at full hp.

Maybe the design philosophy is ok it just needs a ton of tuning. I just don't have any faith left at this point though.