Like I said, if I keep subbed, I am gonna make all my cron into cron draco before they realize what they've done. lol.
Hard to make 30 armor niche when there are 3 defenses. There is blunt (risar, but it's worse blunt than banded??, ended up being the MID armor,) pierce (draco, which is good, does suffer from being weak to blunt, but... it makes sense,) and slash (Tin Knight.) The issue with Merc is that it's got no notable weakness while being close enough to / better than the others in everything except blunt, prol. It's the fourth set in a 3 type game. It should really just have been MID everything.
When cron Draco is like 45-77-70 at 19.5 weight I'm gonna die laughing.
So, you have an armor with no weaknesses that competes with every other set top-end, and the solution is to normalize all armors, not fix risar and give merc a weakness, heh.
You said "we only have 4 armor sets so all need to be good," no, they all need to have a role. If an armor set protects against slashing and nobody plays slashing anymore, then that's not a reason to change the armor set. It will become useful again as the game adapts. Again, having one set that is GOOD vs each type of dmg and one set that is MID against everything is the smartest choice, IMO. It's like that now, except they fucked up Risar and TN is kinda too weak vs slashing, but the main issue is just that Merc is THE BEST, and they thought it being heavy would balance it out, but now there is so much creep that anyone can wear it if they spec right.