Oh, and another thought... I guess 1202 + robes may become problematic with the new spell stripping mechanics being contemplated? (And also problematic for me hunting in the Rift?)
Robes, light or full leathers just because the AP is better. If you want tank armor, go with leather breastplate the 6% is not bad at all, and you get all the extra TD via CvA of hard leathers. So doubles not even in the equation.
Last edited by phantasm; 02-12-2021 at 03:36 AM.
Honestly for a wizard it's not that big of a deal because of 520. The biggest advantage is the crit divisor from soft leather vs cloth on your head/neck area, which is the only reason doubles are more powerful overall. I use doubles on one wizard, who hunts with a tower shield & empty main hand, and robes on the 2nd wizard who hunts as a pure. Neither of them die nearly as often as my other pures because 520 and stop time are amazing.
You need 70 ranks of Armor Use as well to hit that minimum of 9% hindrance. Got my reduxmage running around in studded leather right now. He only needs to recast 506, 902 and 909 on a regular basis and generally he's only out for about 6 minutes a hunt to fill his mind. He recasts 902 maybe twice in that time frame and 506 6 or 7 times and 909 two or 3 times.
In all he casts around 12 times a hunt. Out of those 12 or so casts usually 1, sometimes 2 fail due to hindrance. In his particular case, it's not really an issue to have a couple of failed casts, even if they happen in a row. His DS is high enough to easily avoid hits from defensive stance and even if he's caught in offensive the creatures still need a 60+ roll to hit him.
Right now the only things that outright stop him from hunting (he has yet to die from hunting since level 35 or so) is an open roll maneuver that inflicts a solid rank 2/3 wound or if he takes a lot of minors that build up to a rank 2 range on the arms/hands/eyes/head - those keep him from being able to cast.
His only deaths in the recent year came from the DR Arena where claid wielding boss creatures trigger that crit threshold and a minor 109 or so endroll turns into a crit kill or puts him down, stunned and the next hit kills him. His nearly 15% redux and his scale armor with 5 CER crit padding and 4 CER damage padding isn't going to save him from a claid.
Learned a lot from these responses and there are many clever ideas here - thanks everyone. I’m going with doubles.