[PvK]

Yep, SJ is right. The old EA effect was nice and interesting - with multipel EA components, some of the damage would be spread between them randomly, with the result that sometimes you would destroy an EA component, and sometimes not, with the same amount of damage. SE4 increased the grain of damage by about 10x, which means even if MM suddenly decided to use an SE3-like system, it would have less randomness with 10x points than in SE3, unless a neat algorithm was invented to make it more like the SE3 performance.

As has been said many times before, the SE4 EA is rather too much an all-or-nothing affair. Personally, I'd like to see some new protection effects possible, such as:

1) Reduces damage of each weapon hit by X.

2) Reduces incoming damage by Y%.

3) Reduces damage per hit by a random amount between A and B.

4) Has a Z% chance of being hit before other components.

PvK