The Engineer's Survival Guide

[bronislav84]

I don't believe different ranks of Protection stacking is a bug. You NEED the armor in this game, as players have less starting stats than PL. It could be an oversight, but seriously I believe it is needed because although everything has less health, including players, in PL terms everything is doing more damage than PL. You need every advantage you can get.

The stacking must be a bug. It doesn't make any sense as far as game design to stack only differing levels.
The original intent would have to be one of these two:
(1) Only the highest level should take hold.
(2) All protection buffs should stick regardless of level.

It may be a low enough bug priority that it remains in the game for a long time. In that case, there would be a big outcry from the community that got used to the buff stacking. (although, the devs tend to not care about public outcry. eg. GCD in PL) Also, sometimes a bug becomes a feature if the result is interesting enough that the devs decide it doesn't cause any harm and its kind of cool.

I think it will get fixed to not stack, and maybe they will give us free re-specs for a week so we stop complaining.

Be happy. The Devs agree with you. The game just became 3x harder at the content level. 1x Commando and 2x Engineers (21, 21, and 20 respectively) used to be able to clear the first spawn in Big Bug Blast and now they can't. Not without deaths or a lot of pot spam anyway.