Originally, I thought the damage types were opposites.
Normal <-> Piercing and Elemental <-> Shadow

If you had high Normal Defence, Piercing stuff would smash straight through your armour.
If you had high Elemental Defence, Shadow stuff would eat you alive.

But apparently Normal is the norm.
Everything else is just specific.

Now, I don't know what they're trying to achieve with armour.

It doesn't protect you from damage passively. At least not to any noticeable degree.
Wearing the maximum amount of Normal Defence and getting attacked would reduce damage by like, three bars.
And it wouldn't even reduce damage from any other types.

Shields are probably even more imbalanced, since they have two stats, Health and Defence.
Some shields have more health than others, some have no defence in a stat and still absorb more damage than other shields with more defence.

Armour has gone from being well rounded to trivial with the armour update.
And with the monster damage upgrades have made it even more useless than before.

Of course, I've said all of this before, but whatever.

Bump.

Two star: Spiral Demo helm/armor seems to start around 30 normal, and goes up to 40 normal. It also has elemental defense, about 20 to 30. And 20 points of fire resistance. Health bonus +1.

So that's what two star gear is. Firebreak and Jelly are similar.

Another two star: Cobalt. You know, the Spiral vendors that sells competent equipment and recipes appropriate for any star level? Cobalt is normal 30 to 40. Same. Also has the health bonus. But no elemental, piercing, or shadow.

Well, Cobalt is the "basic". It's supposed to be enough, and there's better out there. Ok, fine. The "Basic" at 2 star seems a little weak, that's all.

Now, lets go to three star.

Solid cobalt? 32 up to 40, with +2 health. Wait, it doesn't get any better? Nothing but normal?

What are the shields like? Defender: Basic 2 star: Normal 30 to 40, piercing 15 to ... 28?.

Great Defender: The 3 star version: Normal maxes at 40, piercing at 30.

Odd, but the 2-star and 3-star armors are almost identical. Something seems off here.

I don't have any other 3-star items or recipes, and the wiki doesn't have any numbers for them. So all I can say at the moment is, at 10 heat the two star seems just about as good as the three star. And, the two star Spiral Demo stuff is strictly better than the 3 star "standard", and most of the 2 star stuff seems better overall.

Armours that have high damage bonuses should not also have high defences and resistances and other good bonuses.

This seems like a no-brainer, really. It shouldn't need to be mentioned.

But compare Seraphic Mail to Sinister Skelly Suit. Same star level. Same normal defence. Skelly has slightly higher shadow defence, and isn't vulnerable to fire, but it has some other small status vulnerabilities. Seems balanced so far.

But wait! Seraphic has high poison resist. High curse resist. Low bonus damage to fiends. And high universal bonus damage, which is also applied in pvp. And the 5 star versions are even more overpowered.

Is about ten extra dimensionless units of shadow resistance really worth all that much? Really?

Armour balance really needs to be looked at. It is not hard to compare two items of the same star level and actually make them similar in power.

I question whether ANY armour should get a universal damage bonus. Even if you reduce all its resistances to 0, it would still be overpowered. That is how little resistances are worth compared to bonuses.