End-Game Armor Choices

Having played at max tier for a little while now, I've experimented with all three paths, Manipulator, Accelerator, and Separator. While they all certainly have their clearly defined merits, there is one interaction that the armor sets have that greatly favors the Manipulator and Accelerator sets, and that is the energy pools.

"But if you're using your energy for your weapons, you can't use it for tech!" True enough, but what about when I'm not in combat? Or, as I've been experimenting around with, if you're good enough at melee combat mechanics, you don't really take that much damage anyways, so why not just wear Manipulator armor for the energy, and then use melee weapons anyways?

I did a little stat crunching here, using Energy Dash as a basis. From full energy to none, I can Energy Dash 18 times with the Manipulator set, and only 6 with the Separator. By the powers of logic and deduction, I can only assume Accelerator would be able to dash 12 times.

While this does introduce some interesting interactions of its own, I felt the need to address it because I don't know about other players, but I'm a tech junkie. I'll gladly ignore the supposedly correct roles for armor sets to play if they give me another, unintended benefit, which currently, they do.

I'm not sure how you would go about addressing this. Where I'm at right now (Ship T3), the best mobility tech for me is actually well-timed Targeted Blinks, which is a little lame, but they are relatively cheap compared to the (painfully draining) Rocket Boots. Equalizing energy on armor sets doesn't quite make sense because then I'd take the one with the highest energy regen, and equalizing both, you may as well just make one best armor set again, but that's not fun and denies choice.

The other option would be to change the way in which tech works, or change the way in which energy works. I do want to be a manipulator, staves are awesome, but seeing how I can empty my energy tank in .8 seconds with a gun at the moment, and psy-staves are supposed to be even more intensive than that... Maybe I'll just go melee so I can jump around mid-fight. If tech had it's own, separate energy bar, maybe? But that's a little convoluted and strange. Either way, something to think about!

 

This reinforces my desire to have a team of burly Apex bodyguards to do all my fighting for me, leaving to my preferred activities: cobblestone mining.

 

That would definately be bad unless the melee armor has something else added to it to help it compensate, like a TINY regenerative effect or tiny increase to energy regeneration. Something large enough offset the energy pools of the other two armors but small enough not to overshadow them..

 

I choose a middle ground between protection and energy and used the tech that lets me regen my energy pool faster.