Well, yeah. But couldnt that be solved if the designers scrapped regular armor and simply prevented most status effects from applying if magic armor is still up? Whats the game design benefit to implementing magic armor AND regular armor?
Right. I dont see how this distinction helps the game design though. At least when it comes to the armor mechanic. Why not just design the game so that theres only one armor mechanic and restrict virtually all status effects until its stripped?
In theory (I'm only a couple of hours into the game - this could change quite a bit as numbers scale up), I think that having 2 kinds of armour was a good design choice for a number of reasons:
1) If it were just one kind of armour, losing it would possibly be more devastating as both magical and physical skills could affect the character instead of just one. Loss of armour becomes an "execute" phase since all characters would be able to easily pile on the secondary effects and crowd control (CC). With 2 kinds of armour, there's more of a limit to the skills that could suddenly decimate the character. Worst case, all of your enemies use just physical or magical skills which would encourage equipment diversity where you might want different kinds of equipment against different opponents.
2) Armour in general allows for every skill to have interesting effects, and having 2 kinds of armour helps balance out these effects so that they aren't always powerful. Many games have basic skills that simply do damage that fill in the gaps between your more powerful and interesting abilities. Armour allows you to have every ability able to do something interesting without being overpowered since those powerful effects won't apply until you've burned through the enemy's armour... or used it on the environment for an indirect effect that is independent of armour. Since your damage abilities are also your CC/secondary effect skills, you now have the dilemma of deciding whether or not to use certain abilities now for their damage or save them for when their armour is down. Having 2 kinds of armour adds to this in that certain skills and combos might not always be the best solution depending on whether it's easier to bring down an opponent's physical or magical armour. This encourages diversity of skills.
3) With one kind of armour, there's an incentive for all characters to be on the offensive and for all of them to focus fire and burn down enemies since all skills are effective on all enemies. With 2 kinds, it may make more sense for some characters to either target other opponents, play more defensive roles, or find creative ways to indirectly affect opponents since their direct attacks would be relatively useless. Alternatively, you could diversify your skills or acquire items so that each of your characters has an offensive option against both armour types. You could opt for a party of all physical or all magical attacks but then you might run into a group that is particularly resilient against you... which might make for an interesting challenge itself. In fact, this might actually give you a reason to swap party members at times to make optimal groups for specific encounters. I've found that most RPGs never really give me a good reason to use other group members other than for story. Changing up your party for full physical or full magical groups to optimally tackle regions of the world might be a good mechanical consequence of having 2 armour types.
Overall, in theory from what I've seen in the first couple hours of the game, having 2 armour types should lead to more skill, item, and equipment diversity and different ways for combat encounters to play out depending on the composition of your party since you might not be able to use the same tactics against every group (barring the teleport cheese that I've read in this thread).
