I was doing some looking to see what my future investments in defense should be, and I came to realize that I want stuff to cover elemental, shadow, and pierce damage.
However, there were some interesting defensive items, like the Divine Veil and the Dragon Scale armor set that looks REALLY appealing, so it got me thinking: in all tiers, how important is it to have normal defense in comparison to the others?
How important is normal defense?
Sat, 11/12/2011 - 00:36
Generally, you'd meet about half normal and half shadow, elemental, or pierce in any given gate depending on stratum (T2 and T3 only, since T1 is pure normal damage) according to players and the wiki, so normal defense is pretty important. In T3 though, the armour doesn't matter quite as much as statuses and how well you shield, shield bump, or dodge. Of course, you also have to keep in mind the bonuses the armour gives you. If you don't use swords at all, Vog/Skolver probably shouldn't be your first choice.
If you are a swordsman, a very general set would be Skolver Coat and Divine Veil, where you cover all the defenses and have two bonuses. It's a jack-of-all-trades that you can wear everywhere, but isn't the best set for any stratum either. I started off with this set, and then branched out into more specialized sets.
I'm guessing that you're around T2. If you enjoy using swords so far, my advice is to invest in a Wolver set and build it up. It's piercing resistant, so you can farm JK a lot to increase your funds and energy, and when your Ash Tail set is fully heated, you can choose to go Skolver, Vog, or a combination. After you make T3, you can see which stratums you have the most trouble with and gear towards that (gearing towards FSC runs is another strategy at this point too). Of course, being a cookie-cutter swordsman myself, I go around in Vog Cub everywhere, because the ASI is invaluable to me. After I make my second sword speed trinket though, I'll probably branch out and try some other stuff.