Thanks. Corrected the typo. Regarding armour, I haven't been poking around the map much recently, waiting for a stable version first before starting on any translation/optimization, but I wonder if the devs meant to change the armour coefficient to 5%. Could've sworn it used to be 6% as well.
The 967 to 977 change seems to be as divisive here as it is over at touhou.cc/HF game rooms. I think the scaling issue is being blown out of proportion though -
after tweaking things around, the final damage of most spells should remain the same or near what they were in 967g, taking into account hero base stats+attribute bonus skill. The difference that it makes is that it'll take more time for skills to reach their full potential, and at the same time give some leeway for int heros to improve the potency of their nukes at the cost of survivability (notice that hp values are much lower in 977 generally). The max hero level reduction was also supposed to achieve this effect, making survivability items that much more important to everyone,
especially in a 5v5 game. It does make it more irritating to play, because it's now harder to gauge when a spell will be able to finish off someone without doing some calculation, so it'll take time for people to adapt and gain the experience needed for gauging such things. As for the new items, they're just... well, I don't think they were needed and still don't think they add much to the game, but it's a choice whether one wants to go for them or not. Some don't even make sense (I'm looking you, Miko's Divine Sword.)
Regarding casters vs carries, the 977 game is quite different now, hence the proliferation of magres items. It's now a bit more of a Final Fantasy-like system of counters. If one team has chosen too many casters to carry their late-game, it's possible to stack magres to ridiculous levels and nullify their damage, even if they buy things like Hakkero and the Violin. On the other hand, it's still harder to nullify agi carries' physical damage output. Agi carries can still win the game, but they'll have a much harder time now in a 5v5 environment with crappier survivability. As I mentioned though, tweaks are still on-going, e.g. Alice's dolltrain could do >1k damage each time the train crashed into you with 12 dolls in 977b. :V The biggest thing that I'm not liking about this is how they're going about the balancing, and some of the other devs have said the same thing too in the QQ chatroom, so I don't know why upward balancing is still the default way.
Lack of playtesting results in funny bugs like this

(I've seen Tenshi with 8 of those things before.)