Definitely stay as a 1 defence pure, maybe you won't be as tanky but you will do more damage and even if you don't win every fight I think you will have more fun. Also you'll be more useful in a pking team
they fell because there was a new update that allows you to split an item worth 500k into about 10k scales, which means that as long as that item has such a low price, the scales will match it in their price.