-to hit penalty too harsh ?

[Praxis]

Hi all I have a question. I just started this game(remix actually) on torment difficulty and can't figure out what's up with harsh to hit penalties on tanking equipment. Instead of being used it's just sitting in my backcap waiting for level 8 to be sold on. Both my tanks are already wearing "Iron Breastplate" with -10%. Main tank also using "Bronze shield" with -10%. From my experience so far if I start equipping heavier stuff on my tanks it becomes a whiff fest. It just doesn't seem mathematically efficient to go from pants with +3% def and 0% to hit to leather greaves with 4% def 1% evade an -5% to hit. Or iron shield over bronze shield for extra 3% parry and further -5% to hit. Or leather bracers over thick gloves... etc. On torment especially where I am forced to be much more defensive(ie more endurance and more hardiness/parry). I even took sure hand(which is not that great) to counter some of the penalty. Wondering what I am missing here.

[Lilith]

Yeah, hit penalties other than from body armour and maybe shields aren't really worth it early on, especially on Torment. Eventually if you keep pumping your primary attack stat you'll peg your hit rate at 95% even with penalties; this happens sooner on lower difficulties, so heavy armour is more worthwhile if you're not playing on Torment.

[Aleric]

I normally keep as few to hit penalties as possible except on chest armor until I start hitting 95% on most creatures. Then I start to layer on the other pieces, especially since by then I've found better pieces.

[RaustBlackDragon]

Generally, if you're not relying on strength, there are other methods of keeping yourself from taking weapon damage aside from armor, so if you're not putting everything into strength and thus aren't undermining the penalty to oblivion, you can survive with other means:

 

Say you go half strength and half dexterity. You can afford to have slightly lighter armor on because you'll be dodging a significant number of attacks that your armor would defend against. If you're going strength and endurance, you can forego the armor somewhat because your endurance keeps you from dying quite effectively as well. And if you're using intelligence, you've got magic you can rely on.

 

I mention this because I strongly discourage the practice of putting everything into one stat. I pretty much consider it to be an exploit, and it also makes "charm" the single most utterly ragequit-inducing status ailment in video game history. Trust me, you do not want a party of characters who can one-hit-kill eachother

[Aleric]

That's pretty much what I did on my first run through Normal.

Sword/Board Fighter-I pumped Strength to 30 and then Endurance the rest.

Dual Fighter-Strength, 10 or so dex, and Endurance

Mage-All Int, followed by End.

Priest-All Int, followed by Strength.

 

And I cursed everytime my dual fighter was charmed and killed the mage.

[Kestral]

It's worse if he's charmed and kills the priest. =P

[Aleric]

Touche. I'm relatively sure that never happened and I'm glad it did.

[Earth]

once my both fighters got charmed at Final Gauntlet's 3rd battle and they killed my 1st caster, that got me thinking to reload from autosave but decide to uncharm 1 fighter and next round brought 1st caster back and 3rd round uncharmed 2nd fighter, fighters mental resistance really suxors sometimes, few times both have got stunned on same round and few times 1 has got charmed and next round other got charmed so not much damage done to enemy, 1 of worst things is that both get terrorized and Giants start pummeling casters so no unterrorizing.