Weaker but nearly as hard to obtain. That's the point. They're a new stepping stone. A pretty redundant one but still.
Well, as I said in my above post... Silver/Tungsten are not hard by any means to obtain and they have roughly equal power to several of the new sets added by this mod (without some of the fancy +% crit here, +% damage here which isn't going to do much at this point in the game).
For example... Ingvar vs Tungsten... Tungsten has what, 2-3 defense more, something like that, and lacks the +10%-ish melee/ranged/magic damages that the Ingvar set has... but when you have a weapon that only does 10-12 damage... you're talking about
1-2 damage. To get Ingvar, you need to fight a lot of Undead Warriors (which are somewhat of an uncommon pop). To get Tungsten, well, you dive into caves, fighting way easier mobs (most of the time... unless something like an Aphis (sp?) or the blue fairies pop). Even then, if you have a spear, you have nothing to fear (lol, rhyme) as these new, stronger mobs can be knocked back into oblivion and they'll never touch you (and they are rather weak offensively if they DO touch you).
Or, Steel Armor. About the same as Tungsten (maybe 2-ish defense better), but requires you to go down to the Lava Layer to get a Lava Bucket, and then burn a bunch of wood into charcoal (we're talking nearly 100 wood here) and then smelt the Steel. By the time you get a Lava Bucket and the ability to make Steel... you probably found nearly enough Tungsten/Silver to make a whole suit of armor anyways.
My point in all of this, is that we get lots of side-grades, and duplicates, and alternate paths... that don't really make much sense. Now, it IS good that they seemingly added more varieties of Ranged/Magic/Summon Armor (having to wait until the dungeon for armor that made your ranged weapons better was lame) is nice. I rather like that idea.
I suppose I'm just kinda wishing that they had made more variety in what armor
does, such as adding abilities onto those armors to make them different. For example...
Ingvar: 50% of damage taken reflected back to attacker.
Steel: 50% Knockback Resist.
etc. etc.
That way, I might be tempted to wear Steel instead of Silver or even Shadow Armor, because I hate knockback for example.