So.........you rather get lots of specializing armors (deadly virulisk) than 1 set of general armor (mad bomber/volc demo/merc demo)?

your call. but the first choice is expensive

"Specialzed gear is fine for beginning players, or players who rushed to T3 without learning anything, skill-wise. Its a short term thing, but in the long term, you'll have paid for an extra set than people who went with weapon bonus gears."

Seems like it's also fine long-term, since in the long run, who cares about having spent CE and cr on one more set of gear? Unless you spend everything on amassing great UVs (whether by p2p purchase or mass-crafting/ticketing) or expensive costumes, you'll have CE/cr to burn. Buying one max anything (other than troll UVs) costs as much as crafting multiple clean sets. . . .

Perhaps not long run, when one has crafted multiple sets and has already amassed thousands of unused ce.

But, when you still only have 3-4 sets, and no real life fund to speed up the crafting of those last few pieces, the redundant specialized sets pale in comparison of that damage/asi bonus you really want to complete.

My point was, to complete the basic 3 defence set, having to spend energy crafting a few pieces of armour you will never use later is rather tim consuming. This is all compared to just sucking it up and holding out with the basic wolver/gunslinger/demo that has the wrong defence for the strat.

I find specialized sets to be viable in a bomber setup, since the only demo suit that gives dmg is an elemental with status weaknesses. And gunners too, to a lesser extent. Shadowsun gives the paltry low dmg bonus on both pieces, thus a dmg bonus could aid a gunner in dealing higher damage without sacrificing trinket slots.

For example, a full set of slime med bonus, gives you vh against them. Add on 2 asi, and you get vh asi/dmg. For comparison, a full set of shadowsun with 2 asi is only med damage with vh asi.

Of course, it is not optimal past a certain stage in the game, I am merely commenting on viability.

In practice, this specific gear isn't really that expensive, because you don't go and get one set for each enemy type, obviously. You gear up for tough fights and strata. So if someone wants to JK really effectively (for whatever reason), they get one Virulisk line set, and that's it--they don't also get a beast set, lol. Or if someone finds fiend strata tough, they get Angelic line, and that's it. So that's three armour sets at most (including the dedicated bomber gear = ele), which is far from excessive. Sword users commonly get 2-3; not that many use just Vog or just Skolver.