Seriously, I Just Don't Get Heavy Armor

[Gorgon Rider]

42. Ah, that warms my heart.

[sirdilznik]

I kinda do agree with the basic theme of the OP. Having played a fighter with heavy armor, a mage, and playing a thief/archer with light armor now I feel that the armor bonus of heavy armor (fairly insignificant vs. light armor) does not balance against the extra weight carried around (quite significant). It's not a really big deal as you can definitely get by with the right build, but I do feel as if warriors (who would generally wear heavier armor) do suffer a bit of a penalty overall. I think a minor tweak for Book III (I can definitely live with things as they are in Book II) might be in order as I think melee fighters already are at a slight disadvantage as compared to archers and mages in the overall game balance even before the armor comes into play. That being said a melee fighter can definitely be viable with the right build I would just rather have the game be more balanced and it feels like melee fighters get the short end of the stick a little bit IMHO. I suppose I should play several more characters before I can be sure I have a good grasp of the balance though so stay tuned but my main point is that melee fighters who generally charge headlong into melee combat and will easily be subject to the most melee damage of any class (as well as magic damage as they generally would have some of the lowest magical resistances) should have the benefit of significantly superior armor so that they can be the tanks they should be.

[CrazyBernie]

Acutally, if anything, I think light armor should be toned down a bit. In testing, it was originally discovered that with heavy armor you were pretty much invincible halfway through the game, so the armor was tweaked downward. I think that light armor may not have been tweaked enough, giving the impression that its just as good as heavy armor.

Of course, perhaps the DR on heavy armor could be made more effective. *shrug*

[Oshkell]

Being a habitual nudist throughout Book II, I have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.

That said, it's been brought to my attention - and correct me if I'm mistaken - that the "Damage Reduction" of armor is the percentage chance that any given hit will only deal half damage... right? Why not just make "Damage Reduction" the way it is in D&D - something that subtracts from damage taken, instead of divides damage taken.

While I certainly would prefer 50% of 100 damage (as I'm sure Darus would have at the start of the game... tur hur!) 50% of the damage I normally see inflicted by enemies - 10 to 30(?) dmg - wouldn't make for such an earth-shattering deal.

I'd actually like to see Heavy Armor (which I did use in Book I) INCREASE YOUR CHANCE TO BE HIT. Seriously. You should get hit all day and part of next week if you're trudging around inside an iron kettle. However, the quality of this alleged kettle should determine whether or not you even notice.

[sirdilznik]

Being a habitual nudist throughout Book II, I have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about.

That said, it's been brought to my attention - and correct me if I'm mistaken - that the "Damage Reduction" of armor is the percentage chance that any given hit will only deal half damage... right? Why not just make "Damage Reduction" the way it is in D&D - something that subtracts from damage taken, instead of divides damage taken.

While I certainly would prefer 50% of 100 damage (as I'm sure Darus would have at the start of the game... tur hur!) 50% of the damage I normally see inflicted by enemies - 10 to 30(?) dmg - wouldn't make for such an earth-shattering deal.

I'd actually like to see Heavy Armor (which I did use in Book I) INCREASE YOUR CHANCE TO BE HIT. Seriously. You should get hit all day and part of next week if you're trudging around inside an iron kettle. However, the quality of this alleged kettle should determine whether or not you even notice.

Cosign.

This makes perfect sense. Wearing a suit of heavily encumbering plate armor would seriously restrict your movement making you much more likely to be hit than if you were butt nekkid. At the same time the armor should be really hard to penetrate. This could be achieved by having armor count against your dodge skill. I'm just going to throw some numbers out there not meant to be balanced, but for simplicity's sake lets say -1 per 10 lbs of armor (total of all pieces). This would work identically for both heavy and light armor but obviously the heavy armor would have a much larger penalty due to the increased weight. this way it would reduce your dodge skill (but not past zero perhaps) so that the dodge skill would be very effective wearing no armor (monks, mages and such), somewhat effective with a good number of ranks with light armor (rogues, druids, barbarians), and would require a whole bunch of skill ranks to be even slightly effective with really heavy armor (knights). To balance things the damage reduction could be a straight damage reduction (subtract from total damage) and obviously heavy armor would get much better damage reduction ratings.

This way a knight wearing full plate would get hit constantly but would be really hard to damage (make hits that do no damage to the player still damage the armor if they don't already , I'm not sure), a rogue wearing leather armor would be fairly hard to hit and take a moderate amount of damage when hit, and an unarmored mage (assuming they trained dodge) would be really hard to hit but would take massive damage when struck. Also this would make pieces of armor that were really tough (high damage reduction) but relatively light (as compared to other pieces of armor with similar damage reduction) extremely valuable (i.e. mithril chain, etc...). I think this would work out to be quite realistic.

[KillingMoon]

I'd actually like to see Heavy Armor (which I did use in Book I) INCREASE YOUR CHANCE TO BE HIT. Seriously. You should get hit all day and part of next week if you're trudging around inside an iron kettle. However, the quality of this alleged kettle should determine whether or not you even notice.

This makes perfect sense. Wearing a suit of heavily encumbering plate armor would seriously restrict your movement making you much more likely to be hit than if you were butt nekkid. At the same time the armor should be really hard to penetrate. This could be achieved by having armor count against your dodge skill.

Doesn't wearing armour already increase your chance to be hit? Except it's the armour that suffers, not you.
I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of the mechanics here, but I'm wearing armour in my current game, light armour, and this seems to give decent protection, but my armour gets ripped to pieces every time.
After a few encounters I'm having a repair bill of over 100 gold, if I've at least been careful enough to take my armour off before it got completely lost!

I'm curious how the comparison between light armour and heavy armour would work out. The few bits of heavy armour I've been wearing have never suffered much. Heavy armour seems to be a completely different beast from light armour.

[Randomizer]

Heavy armor doesn't wear out as quickly when it takes damage.

Most armor pieces have a higher maximum base armor for heavy armor over light armor so you should be able to get 10 to 12 more base armor using the best heavy armor. While you can get decent armor levels with light armor, you will never get as high as heavy armor.

[sirdilznik]

I'd actually like to see Heavy Armor (which I did use in Book I) INCREASE YOUR CHANCE TO BE HIT. Seriously. You should get hit all day and part of next week if you're trudging around inside an iron kettle. However, the quality of this alleged kettle should determine whether or not you even notice.

This makes perfect sense. Wearing a suit of heavily encumbering plate armor would seriously restrict your movement making you much more likely to be hit than if you were butt nekkid. At the same time the armor should be really hard to penetrate. This could be achieved by having armor count against your dodge skill.

Doesn't wearing armour already increase your chance to be hit? Except it's the armour that suffers, not you.
I haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of the mechanics here, but I'm wearing armour in my current game, light armour, and this seems to give decent protection, but my armour gets ripped to pieces every time.
After a few encounters I'm having a repair bill of over 100 gold, if I've at least been careful enough to take my armour off before it got completely lost!

I'm curious how the comparison between light armour and heavy armour would work out. The few bits of heavy armour I've been wearing have never suffered much. Heavy armour seems to be a completely different beast from light armour.

Nope. As a scientific experiment I had some wolves attack me wearing full heavy armor - 12% chance to hit. Then I took off everything except rings and my shield - 56% chance to hit.

My proposal is do away with the armors's bonus to armor rating (chance to be hit), instead the heavier the armor the greater the penalty to your dodge skill, but at the same time have heavier/tougher armor do greater amounts of damage reduction, and not a percentage chance to take half damage, but a straight up subtraction from the damage total. It's a major rework of the system but honestly I think it's a fairly simple system (the heavier the armor the greater the penalty to dodge skill and also the greater the damage reduction [with the exception of special armors that are both tough and light like mithril and such]) It would make the dodge skill exceptionally useful for unarmored chcracters, fairly uselful for lightly armored characters, and practically useless to tanks unless you are willing to put ungodly amounts of skill ranks into it, which in my mind is as it should be. Not only would that make combat more realistic, I think it would balance out armor repair issues. Heavier armor would surely be more durable but it would also get hit a lot more often while lighter armor would be more fragile but get hit a lot less often. In the end it would basically balance out.

Just a thought for Book III.

[KillingMoon]

Nope. As a scientific experiment I had some wolves attack me wearing full heavy armor - 12% chance to hit. Then I took off everything except rings and my shield - 56% chance to hit.

Certainly. Except I was hoping I had been a bit more clear about what kind of damage I was talking about; I meant to include the damage that the armour itself is getting.

If you're wearing armour but not getting involved in melee fighting you can be wearing this armour the whole game without ever needing to repair it. But get into a couple of tough fights and it will show on your material afterwards.
Just looking at the to-hit rating of your opponant doesn't tell the full story.
I can be fighting a couple of boreheads, getting only a few scratches, to-hit rating of the boreheads very low, but if I open up the equipment screen afterwards some pieces of my light armour will be down to the last threads.

How do you want to interpret this? I'm imagining extra lines in the log. Inbetween the lines about misses I'm imagining that the boreheads made contact, and affected my armour.
Some of the damage does get logged, but I play with 'deterioration through use' on, and this deterioration does not happen if I'm not meeting enemies. What is 'deterioration through use' in the case of armour? I'm imagining enemy contact. I'm finding it difficult to assume that a 'miss' is a complete miss of both myself and my material if I'm seeing what becomes of my material.
If you think my imagination is too lively, than I give you that, but that's where I was coming from.

[SpottedShroom]

The "armor rating" in Eschalon doesn't just model the quality of armor that you're wearing. It's a more generalized "armor class" ala D&D - it includes bonuses from Dexterity and Speed. So it's perfectly reasonable for people in heavy armor to be "hard to hit," because a miss in Eschalon includes both failing to land a blow and the strike glancing off armor.

As I see it, there are too many defense types in Eschalon. In addition to armor rating, there's also the Dodge skill which grants a separate percent chance for an attack to miss, and damage reduction which gives a percent chance for an attack to do half damage.

Both Dodge and DR are of rather dubious value, so I would prefer to see those mechanics removed and replaced with armor rating. Maybe armor skills could give a small multiplier to the amount of armor rating you get from wearing armor of that type. So say you're wearing 12 points of light armor and have enough light armor skill for a 17% bonus - 12 * 1.17 ~= 14. Dodge could do the same for the armor points you get from Dex/Speed.

[Antigrav]

I think we need just two kinds of defense, to allow for two or three different basic approaches to character types: The stealthy and agile who rely on avoidance (dodging) and the heavy warriors who rely on mitigation (absorption by armor and toughness or deflection by shields). The third type is the mage, but they have ways of doing the impossible already.

I haven't monkeyed around with shields yet in EB2 because, short of using magic or lots and lots of potions, there still is no way to illuminate your surroundings while holding a shield (or two-handed weapon?) without depending on magic, and spells are hard to cast while holding items of any heft. Shields weigh around 16 lbs., better weapons around 12 lbs., and gauntlets 3 or 4 lbs. So we're looking at 96 strength?

[CrazyBernie]

Playing with a cleric, I have no problems casting spells while carrying a shield... provided there aren't any enemies nearby. If there are, it's no difficult task to swap my shield out, buff up, and re-equip my shield. This allows me to carry around the biggest, baddest shield I can find. 0_o Even if there's enemies within' striking distance, I just pop a haste potion and it's all over for them.

I'd like for DR to kick in more often for Heavy Armor, but maybe have the armor take more damage as a trade-off. Of course, that means if you don't use the armor degrading rules, you've just given heavy armor increased effectiveness for free.

[Oshkell]

I'd like for DR to kick in more often for Heavy Armor, but maybe have the armor take more damage as a trade-off. Of course, that means if you don't use the armor degrading rules, you've just given heavy armor increased effectiveness for free.

Meh. But that's why you get rewards for turning those rules on, right?

Cosign.

This makes perfect sense. Wearing a suit of heavily encumbering plate armor would seriously restrict your movement making you much more likely to be hit than if you were butt nekkid. At the same time the armor should be really hard to penetrate. This could be achieved by having armor count against your dodge skill.

Hmm... The more I think about it, the more I like the idea, really. While weight in general should be an issue, I think the armor category should be, too. And, your remark about mithril chain resonates with me; I never understood why mithril equipment was heavier than tempered steel... except for possibly game mechanics reasons. (better material = heavier)

The "armor rating" in Eschalon doesn't just model the quality of armor that you're wearing. It's a more generalized "armor class" ala D&D - it includes bonuses from Dexterity and Speed. So it's perfectly reasonable for people in heavy armor to be "hard to hit," because a miss in Eschalon includes both failing to land a blow and the strike glancing off armor.

Exactly. Theoretically, if the strike glances off your armor, it still contacted, right? If hits registered, but damage didn't get through, the armor itself would take a little wear and tear. This could wind up not only giving one a reason to take more than 1 rank in repair, but also drive home the concept that heavy armor is a bother to maintain. (Do I really wanna have to deal with the maintenance costs of my lovely wonderful platemail, or do I think I can cheap my way out of this and dodge around with leather?)

On the matter of repair, what if your total skill modifier determined the max % that you could repair your equipment? I have a hard time reconciling myself to the fact that a complete novice could repair from "Worthless" to "Perfect" a complete suit of divine ore heavy armor, given a month or so.

[sirdilznik]

Playing with a cleric, I have no problems casting spells while carrying a shield... provided there aren't any enemies nearby. If there are, it's no difficult task to swap my shield out, buff up, and re-equip my shield. This allows me to carry around the biggest, baddest shield I can find. 0_o Even if there's enemies within' striking distance, I just pop a haste potion and it's all over for them.

I'd like for DR to kick in more often for Heavy Armor, but maybe have the armor take more damage as a trade-off. Of course, that means if you don't use the armor degrading rules, you've just given heavy armor increased effectiveness for free.

OK but you still have the high penalty to sneaking and the extra weight reducing your carrying capacity. In addition to that I propose another penalty for heavy armor. Have armor give a penalty to your missile weapon accuracy (thrown and archery). It could either be similar or exactly the same as the light and heavy armor penalties to sneaking. Realistically this should only kick in if you are wearing armor bracers/gauntlets, but if you want to make the penalty more severe you can make it kick in whenever ANY piece of said armor is worn. I think this would help balance out heavy armor's bonuses that I put forth in my proposal. Obviously this wouldn't affect you if you were a soldier melee type but that fits as heavy armor is for melee soldier types... and mounted knights but we know we're not getting mounts in Book II so that's a moot point. If you were an archer you would want to avoid heavy armor, or at least anything on your arms, which again fits perfectly. Optionally you may also make arm armor penalize spellcasting during combat somehow.

[CrazyBernie]

OK but you still have the high penalty to sneaking and the extra weight reducing your carrying capacity. In addition to that I propose another penalty for heavy armor. Have armor give a penalty to your missile weapon accuracy (thrown and archery). It could either be similar or exactly the same as the light and heavy armor penalties to sneaking. Realistically this should only kick in if you are wearing armor bracers/gauntlets, but if you want to make the penalty more severe you can make it kick in whenever ANY piece of said armor is worn. I think this would help balance out heavy armor's bonuses that I put forth in my proposal. Obviously this wouldn't affect you if you were a soldier melee type but that fits as heavy armor is for melee soldier types... and mounted knights but we know we're not getting mounts in Book II so that's a moot point. If you were an archer you would want to avoid heavy armor, or at least anything on your arms, which again fits perfectly. Optionally you may also make arm armor penalize spellcasting during combat somehow.

More penalties = more complex = more programming = more problems for BW. This is an RPG, not a simulation... next people will be suggesting stuff like wind direction factoring into the Bow Skill. We need to keep it simple, while still offering a decent amount of depth. You already get ToHit penalties when carrying too much, and Heavy Armor makes it really easy to hit that "encumbered" penalty.

While I agree that Damage Resistance should be a scaling HP reduction stat, I don't think it should necessarily be applied directly to the armor pieces, nor do I think the armor ratings need to be removed.

Armor in its simplest form should be something like:
Light Armor = Low Damage Absorbtion, Low Armor HP, Low Weight, Mild Movement Penalty (sneak/cast)
Heavy Armor = High Damage Absorbtion, High Armor HP, High Weight, Heavy Movement Penalty

Personally, I'd prefer to see spellcasters get the ol' % ToFail when casting while wearing armor(on the hands)/carrying weapons. Let 'em cast, but know that they might fizzle.

Keep in mind that while it'd be cool to have all of these different suggestions implemented, but if BW has to overhaul every single aspect of the game, we may never see a Book III. As it is, it'll only take a couple of these combat adjustments to require a complete rebalance of the combat system.