Umm, that is awfully categorical. Another way to look at it is that armor gives you an advantage in the situation.....in any situation where violence is a viable option, really. It means it isn't easy to strike you down with a single blow. You can take some big risks, becuase you know, you've got this bronze chainmail that will protect you from most of what your opponent can do to you. A more skilled opponent will still still usually win if they keep bids down, but this gives the outmatched foe more ability to gamble it all on a couple of high bids. The difference now is that when a fencing master faces moderately competent armored monstrosity is that instead of the fencing master making high bid to overcome the armour (but not having to take away many AP), he makes small bids, playing it safe, content to gradually gain advantage. Personally, I think this makes intuitive sense.
I think the real effect of this change, in many ways, is that it dilutes followers a bit. The multiple attacker defender thing is still very significant, but for the starting warrior, having 40 AP instead of 25 makes the 17 from a follower a little less significant. Still important, but not as important as it was.
Having said all that, it still feels a little strange to me. We've spent so long modelling armor as damage reduction that doing so seems normal. Modelling it as a tactical advantage will take some getting used to. Personally I didn't have any trouble with edges, I even enjoyed the options it provided, but numbers and I are good friends. I know a frightening number of people (many of them very succesful and bright people) that baffle me with the confusion they bring to basic numerical tasks. Having seen how much trouble taking 10% of a percentile number gave many of these folks, I can imagine that even consistently adding and subtracting edges could lead to confusion and disruption. Not that they couldn't do it, they just couldn't do it without distraction.
--Bryan
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