Discussion: Armor

[Auriel]

I have organized, somewhat, last Saturday's Town Hall and will bring subjects here for further discussion. As the players Saturday learned, the devs want to know our thoughts and wishes. So please feel free to contribute!

ARMOR

nimor LOCAL mm rujj had a point about all high end chacter have the same skills

Admin LOCAL reflect damage? well theres some reflect powers. It's a little tough to work out the armor problem because the scale stops at level 50 right now

Admin LOCAL like there are Shield-skills shields that raise the armor mitigation of your Armor by 5. that does jack squat right now

Admin LOCAL but it just keeps getting better and better as your max armor goes up

Admin LOCAL so I've been hesitant to do too much without having a better feel for the whole curve

Dreadz LOCAL if armor absorbed damage it would help scale damage through out the level range because you could make the mobs hit harder than lower level mobs

nimor LOCAL it dose!

nimor LOCAL every 25 armor u get 1 less dmg

Admin LOCAL it does absorb, just hard to get an effect that's really noticeable without being REALLY overpoweredDreadzLOCALfor example with a 260 armor I can not agro more than 5 mobs to aoe them even the lower level mobs

Admin LOCAL yeah, that

nimor LOCAL so if u have 250 armor u have 10 dmg redaction

nimor LOCAL armor is ok right now, 500 armor with shild is more then 24 dmg rdaction right now

Gremror LOCAL And there's armour with universal damage reduction

Admin LOCAL yeah if you get the crazy levels of armor at the end of the current level cap, you can have so much mitigation that the stuff in Serbule can't even do 1 damage to you

Dreadz LOCAL kk

Admin LOCAL it's just a very subtle effect until you get a lot of armor

Admin LOCAL which is kind of a problem, but... eh, we'll figure it out as we go

 

[Ferines]

It's good there's already a thread on this. The most ridiculous thing about armor right now is that the more armor you have, the more armor you actually have. It's actually fine if you want to scale just armor for endgame, since it ensures that low level characters are always weaker than higher level characters, but then it makes health completely obsolete.

My suggestion for dealing with this scaling problem is to make armor mitigate a percentage of health damage, so that health damage is always being done, and removing the mitigation it has against itself. (I'm working around with a function that would be useful at lower and higher levels, but it's kinda hard right now)

Right now, healing skills are nearly useless because when armor is 0 and health damage is being done, you're usually screwed and the healing is not enough to survive. Allowing damage to always be dealt (in part) to health would give back some of the useful-ness.

 

[Qyra]

In the next update, damage will be split evenly between health and armor, instead of entirely depleting armor first. from twitter

This will work I believe since armor does give dmg reduction and there are skills that heal when you use them. so it'll work out nicely, i'm sure.

 

[ErasmusPrime]

I am somewhat confused about the mechanics of armor. The idea of armor depleting and automatically regenerating during and after a fight just does not make any sense even within a world of magic. Its game play is not necessarily bad, I just feel like it might be better off named something else.

And maybe have a separate armor stat that is just pure damage reduction/mitigation.

 

[ALinkToTheFuture]

In the next update, damage will be split evenly between health and armor, instead of entirely depleting armor first. from twitter

This will work I believe since armor does give dmg reduction and there are skills that heal when you use them. so it'll work out nicely, i'm sure.

I can see how this would fail. If your armour is say 500 and health is say 200, then that extra 300 armour points just became useless.

 

[Qyra]

but we have stats on gear that heal when you use whatever skill, like for werewolf my bite heals, if that applies to only health it would even out armor/hp over time. but ya right now im 600 armor and like 400 health, my initial concern in hearing about this was that all the armor would be wasted, but it can work.

 

[Citan]

There'll be some new ways to raise Health in the next update, and a new heal that lets you convert armor to health. And First Aid will be less expensive to use, only consuming a health kit 1/3 of the time. I've also effectively lowered monsters' damage by making their rage bars much larger, so they can't rage as often. Still working on all the variables, but I *think* it'll work out okay. Maybe not the first pass, but eventually...

One of the big benefits of this setup is that your armor's mitigation lasts much longer. As I think was mentioned in this thread, for every 25 points of armor you currently have, monsters' damage is lowered by 1. (If you use a good shield, its every 20 armor instead of every 25.) This doesn't work too well in the current game because your armor is depleted so quickly, but now your armor will deplete at half speed, so it'll keep mitigating damage longer.

It's true, though, that if a newbie has hand-me-down super armor, this change will make their armor less amazing to them. Which is okay.

In terms of "why does armor work this way?" it's just an abstraction, same as health. We're just so used to the health abstraction that it no longer seems weird. In the olden days of early MUDs and such, health came back very very slowly, to simulate natural healing. (Without a healer, an EQ fighter could literally wait 30 minutes for their health to come back.) But that was boring and terrible, so games sped healing up to the point where you heal from grievous wounds within a few seconds. Armor here works the same: you are getting your armor hacked off during the fight, and then via magic (the same abstraction that lets you heal almost-instantly), you repair your armor. If you prefer, think of it as "putting your armor back on"!