blame the veterans who sold all their heirlooms
The vets who sold their heirlooms merely found a loophole to circumvent upkeep, we should blame the devs for that.
Pre-upkeep patch, plate/heavy armor here and there, it's cool, they worked for it and it's not everyone.
Post-upkeep patch, upkeep to prevent plate/heavy armor from being overused, make plate/heavy armor more readily available, everyone and their dogs are using plate/heavy armor.
Not to mention the heirlooms are OP as fuck, using heirloomed light strange armor and I believe heirloomed gauntlets to +3, you can get to 50 body armor while still staying under the weight limit for wpf reduction.
The heirloom bonus is just stupidly huge, +7 to armor and +7 to gloves? What the fuck, a fun thing to note is also how light armor have a shitty heirloom compared to heavy armor, because light armor obviously needs less bonus and heavy armor obviously need even MORE armor, genius.
How much STR and IF and armour do you have that arrows one shot you?
And it really depends, I have 0 IF because I run an agi build since it's the only build I enjoy because I don't like FOTM strength crutching.
But I found myself getting one hit killed as much with my Brigandine and Wisby red gauntlets than when I use my red tunic.
I mostly hate the fact that the game completely catters to having more strenght than agility, because WM and ATH will only get you so far compared to being able to take a shitload of hits and kill in a few hits.
I've honestly counted the average amount of hits I need to kill anyone that's using your average plate/heavy armor and it can go anywhere from 4 hits to 30, and I'm not fucking kidding, I've had to fight NeoQC once or whatever, not only did I have to whack 15 times on his shield between each hits I got on him, he took 27 hits because of his stupid ass armor, meanwhile I die in one, I won but it was the most boring shit ever and burned me out from the game.