I was thinking about Armor Reinforcement in another thread, and it's just not very good.
A 35% chance of not breaking your arm on a double minor is a nice passive bonus. If warriors had a spell circle, it'd make a perfectly balanced spell. If it was passive and you could still get Armor Support from another warrior, that might be a different story. But the opportunity cost for Armor Reinforcement is off-the-charts.
To be your sole armor spec, it'd have to be reliable enough that you could actually make the decision, "Nah, I won't chomp herbs; it probably won't cause a problem." I'd argue that happens at a minimum of 80% proc rate: at that point, you have about a 50/50 chance of stacking minors after 3 tries. Before that, I would just heal the wound, and why am I bothering to use Armor Reinforcement if my default is to spend 3-9 seconds healing minors after a combat?
For it to compete with the popularity of Armor Support, you'd probably want it at a minimum proc of 90%. That's a 50/50 chance of a stack after 7 stacked hits. You're giving up loot to use Armor Reinforcement. Any replacement for that has to be damn good. It'd also make Sunfist Berserker with the "power through minors" sigil a great - and thematic, since lore puts giantmen as the historial berserkers - build.
I'd consider making Reinforcement something like 30% + 3Ranks(Armor Group - 1)%. Flat 30% for robes, 33-45% for leathers, 36-65% for brig, 39-75% for chain, and 42-90% for plate.
Also, I've never seen Reinforcement proc when I tried using it, so I'm either very imperceptive or it doesn't have a message when it procs. Could someone share the message to put on the wiki if it exists? If not, it should exist.
Armored Casting is the same way.
It got buffed to 15% mana returned per rank, which is just not enough. It has to compete with Fluidity, which is still straight up better. Not failing a spell is better than "you failed the spell but didn't use as much mana".
At 20% mana per rank, I'd use Fluidity over casting. I failed the spell but didn't waste mana? Who cares, I still failed the spell.
At 30% per rank, you might have an argument. I failed the spell but actually got mana in the deal? That's interesting and definitely takes the edge off a failed spell.
At 15% per rank and -1 cast RT on failed spells on ranks 2 and 4, -1 hard RT (if you channeled) on ranks 3 and 5, then you'd have another thing. You failed the spell but can try again sooner/almost immediately and didn't spend as much? That's tempting. You're still failing more than you would with fluidity, but you can recover from the failures faster, which is a very interesting choice to make.
