Ok, here is what I would propose for armor changes.
Based on:
* Dmg spread (fire, cold, poison, energy) makes building suits way to tedious to deal with all the details of trying to max out 70/70/70/70/75(Elf) without wasting points etc.
* Armor has to work with imbuing, enhancing, reforging
* Armor materials have impact on the enhancing of the armor
* Max resist is 70 (except for 75 energy for elves) such that 70% of dmg is 'avoided' based on damage type
* Armor consists of 6 pieces (need 11.6 average to achieve all 70)
Proposed change:
2 Resist Types on Armor - Physical and Magical
Max on Physical/Magical 70/70 or 70/72 for elves
Armor Type : Physical Base/EX made/Max Allowed : Magical Base/EX Made/Max Allowed
Cloth/Leather : P 4/5/10 M: 5/7/14
Studded/Bone : P 5/6/13 M: 5/7/15
Ring : P 5/6/14 M: 4/5/12
Chain : P 5/6/14 M 5/6/15
Plate : P 6/7/16 M 5/6/16
Bonus for materials:
Spined : 40 Luck + 2 Phys
Horned : 2 Phys + 1 Magic
Barbed : +1 phys + 2 magic + Mage Armor
Metal:
DC : +3 Phys + 50 Dur + 20% lower req
Shadow : +2 phys + 1 Magic + 100 durability
Copper: +2 phys + 2 Magic
Bronze: +2 phys +3 magic
Gold : +2 phys + 1 magic +40 luck
Aggy : +1 phys +2 magic + mage armor
Verite : +3 phys + 3 magic
Valorite + 4 phys +3 magic + 50 durability
(something similar for wood)
So lets say you make GM made plate armor out of verite:
7+3 = 1o Physical
6+3 = 9 Magic
Six Pieces so suit would be 60/54 base and you would need to imbue at least 2 pieces with 6 more physical and 3 pieces with max magical to achieve 70/72.
The MAX you could make a cloth or leather suit would be 10x6 or 60 physical. If you want high physical resist - wear heavier armor.
Plate should increase str + 1 per piece and reduce dex 1 per piece
Chain/Ring/Bone reduce dex 1
This would provide some encouragement to wear heavier armor for hand to hand fighters and still encourage casting/taming classes to use cloth/leather with the limit on physical
All existing armor would be 'normalized' to this system by averaging Fire/Cold/Poison/Energy and applying a factor.
NO armor bonuses on rings/braces (remove them) since it makes no sense to have phys/fire/cold/poison/energy ratings on jewelry anyways.
Obviously there is ALOT to do here to fix/retro this into existing systems but this would:
- Make armor SO much easier to swap out as switching a max phys/max magic piece for the next would be even swap.
- Reduce suit building complexity tremendously
- Reduce Imbuing/reforging/crafting random starting pieces so much easier
- Keep existing armor relevant as it would be converted to similar pieces in the new system
- Encourage suits outside of leather/cloth which 90% of the playerbase currently wears