Hordes are doing a good job on the overwhelming front. It’s not perfect, but I think that has more to do with how powerful cutting weapons are. If you face a horde in the early game when you aren’t running around with high end swords, axes, and guns they’re plenty deadly. Once they get them tuned in, they’ll be plenty dangerous. If we upped the time for weapon repairs and required access to specialized tools (repairing a Katana with a Soldering Iron? Should probably require a forge), combat would become more of a trade off - use good weapons and risk damaging them or use cheap weapons that aren’t as good but can be easily replaced.
I think the problem with armor has more to do with layering. They’ve been doing a great job with adding multiple layers that don’t interact (close layer, normal layer, belted layer), I think increasing the encumbrance penalties and the bonus encumbrance for wearing multiple items in the same layer would negate a lot of the armor issues. If heavy armor halved your attack speed and light armor consisted of a single Army Jacket, a Survivor Rig, and an undershirt, armor would be more of a trade off. Right now it’s way too easy to layer two Survivor Trenchcoats, a Survivor Rig, an Undershirt, and become basically bulletproof with no encumbrance penalty.
