No, armour balance and class balance really are two separate things. You can't complicate one by making it dependent on the other. Obviously the two do interact. It is necessary to approach any discussion about gear balance by starting with the assumption that the nascent classes are already balanced already. Because if they are not, gear is not the way to fix that anyway. And bringing class balance into a gear balance discussion would make it over-complicated; literally beyond the capabilites of human comprehension and indeed at the limit of current machine intelligence.