Buff/nerf defence related gear stats.
The defence stats at the moment are absolutely ridiculous. They're entirely trash.
You can get +6% defence as the main stat for a fully upgraded legendary chest piece. The penalty for not having defence as one of your stats is a whopping -7.4% on the shoulders and -5.4% on the helmet. (For conqueror). That means that if you want to be able to fight raiders and centurions you'll have to take a -7.4% defence straight away, since you pretty much need the stamina regen and cost reduction from the arms to stand a chance. Personally I dislike the stuns and being exhausted too, so that adds the -5.4 defence for the helmet too. Even with the chest piece with defence as a main stat I can't offset more than half of that. Add in defence penetration and you're playing with -20% defence.
Seriously. The warden's heavy attacks are doing 55 or so damage. It's ridiculous. Lord help you if you want the revenge buffs too. Enjoy your one hit deaths. :P
The defence penalties wouldn't be nearly as bad without defence penetration. It's a pretty broken stat really. Being able to take 10% - 16% off your opponents defence is just stupidly good for a single gear stat. Maybe I understand it wrong though. Maybe it only takes 10%-16% off the bonus you get from your gear and not your overall defence? If so, does it reduce the penalty from your gear if you have negative defence bonuses? In that case it would be fair and it would have an interesting gamble idea to it, where you have to anticipate whether your opponents will have a defence heavy build or not.
The buffs I would propose would be to make the defence bonuses bigger than their penalties. It's like that for every other stat so why is defence different? Like with exhaustion recovery, you can get +72% for a fully upgraded main piece of armour, but if it's your dump stat then you only get a -36% penalty.