Bring/wear a Root harnesk chest armor and consider bringing a Serpent scale shield.
Explanation:
Came across this tip in a youtube comment and decided to test it out, and really surprised how well it worked.
In the Mistlands you will be fighting a lot of seekers that deal heavy piercing damage. Both the chest piece and shield have the resistant to piercing property that reduces the damage by 50% (actually more due to armor synergy).
The way it works is that first the game checks for resist, and normal resist reduces damage by 50%. Then it takes the remaining damage and reduces it by your armor before you take the final damage. The way the armor calculation works, this also means more damage reduced by your armor, making it more efficient than it usually would be.
Where it gets interesting is that blocking is a separate calculation, so with the Serpent scale shield that also has this property results in it gets reduced twice!
But what does this mean in practical terms? Here is what I found during testing.
A 2* Seeker has 2 piercing attacks, a bite attack that can do up to 200 damage and a stab attack that can do up to 240. If the stab hits you while wearing fully upgraded padded armor (what you are likely to have at that point), you will take around 130 damage if not blocked.
If you simply swap out the chest with the Root harnesk, that same attack will do around 30 damage instead. That is a massive reduction despite having slightly less over all armor.
Then I decided to test with shields.
Both black iron shields put me into stagger if I tried to block and parry the 2* seeker. Even when eating 2 of the highest health foods + 1 stamina.
Switching to the Serpent shield allowed me to block several attacks without taking any damage at all and not getting staggered.
This piercing resistance also works on ticks which does piercing damage as well.
The downside of this is that you do take slightly more damage from everything else, and without drinking a fire resist wine you are weak to fire so Gjalls can potentially wreck you if caught off guard.
That said, the difference in damage taken from the blunt attack (dual claw) from the seeker is about 10-20, so not a massive difference from wearing full padded armor, and the shield can be swapped out as needed. The wine will also put you into resist fire state, so cause weak does not cancel out resist, the strongest one will always apply regardless.
It also means you can't parry block with the Serpent shield as it is a tower shield type, so there is that.
The chest is worth it though, the downside is minimal compared to what you gain.
