I personally like the idea of having the significantly more skilled warrior winning in 1-2 strikes, and slightly more skilled winning in 3-5 strikes, and evenly matched taking 6-8 actions (unless a lucky blow lands), and to bring this back to the original topic - that plate armor may effectively absorb the damage from 80% of strikes, so perhaps instead of 1-2 hits, it ends up taking 5-10 hits.
