The broader goal of the recent armor changes was fairly straightforward-- increase the impact armor has on melee combat.

This has a few drivers:
1) Class/character variety: It pushes characters towards gear that matches their class theme-- paladins in shining metal, thieves in soft leather, mages in arcane creations, etc. There are no added barriers to wearing whatever you want, but you now have an IC-sensible incentive to go that route. If you just played a warrior, and switch to an assassin, your gearing strategy is no longer so identical. More is coming on this front.

2A) Intuitive outcomes for armor: I've talked about this before, but our pre-Armor Use system where armor had nearly nothing to do with protective value was incredibly confusing to newbies. Newbies (who were generally trying not to die, rather than to kill) tended to gravitate towards high-AC armor. On the flip side, experienced players couldn't strategically "dress for defense" as far as melee was concerned, other than stacking HP.

2B) Intuitive outcomes for armor's enemy, hitroll: Again, it was very confusing that hitroll didn't do anything to that guy who was avoiding everything you threw at him. Strategically, it was undesirable that you couldn't really gear yourself to pin that guy down, either.

3) New niches: A general problem we have with areas is that one "best" item can eclipse dozens of other alternatives. Item limiting helps this a little, but this change creates more situations where two characters won't agree on what the better of two items is. Area authors can more easily throw in some items that see use, without resorting to slapping +4 damroll on every pair of kobold pants. (At least until this becomes common, at which point +5 damroll kobold pants are called for.)

Specifically, you're seeing a trend that helps large, strong characters somewhat, but it's not all free lunch. The weapon changes in particular add an element of strategy-- you can wield that big, heavy mace to crush your way through parrying and blocking (and parry other big, heavy maces), but you probably want to keep an eye out for dagger specs and necromancers who can leave you barehanded with their strong maledictions.

4) Don't make everyone super-tanks: In a vacuum, increasing the impact of armor creates problems-- notably in PvE, since most of our NPCs don't formally wear more than a piece or two of armor. Running around sticking full suits of actual armor on hundreds of random small-time guards isn't a great solution. So instead, I brought down the other defenses a touch, to aim for a net neutral impact on overall PC defense. Overall, PCs are likely seeing roughly the same amount of defense pie, but it's now sliced differently. The change isn't huge, but you'll probably notice it.

This created an opportunity to smooth out some game balance issues where we had broad staff consensus, but hadn't gotten around to. So rather than something like "My math says everyone's going to Deflect X% more often, so I'll make everyone Parry -X% more often.", we wanted to couple the Armor increase to some adjustments there. Polearms got a small bump, low-level invokers and necromancers got a very small bump, sword specs got dinged slightly, etc.

Similarly, armor changes in general help the big strong guys a little more than other characters, because they can pick from a wider array of pieces, particularly on the 'big' slots like body, arms, legs, etc.

I'm not nearly done tweaking this sort of thing, and hopefully I've made it clear that none of these changes are particularly radical, especially at this stage. It's a number of small shoves in what I think is the right direction, and I'm specifically doing things in stages to watch how they play out.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

My early return is that a polearm warrior will still never hit a sword spec in combat outside of pincer, boneshatter, etc.

Playing a high level character and still never hit a sword spec.

Not complaining just commenting.

Thanks,

Polmier

P.S. I believe the imms do a great job and are awesome.

nt

From the announcement:

"- The penalty for parrying especially heavy weapons has been increased in cases where the defender's weapon is much lighter than the attacker's weapon.
- The 'natural' (unarmed) attacks of very powerful (large in size, high in level) NPCs are slightly harder to parry with lightweight weapons."

What about assassins (unarmed defense), hth specs (ironhands), or anyone attacking with hth, since their effective weapon weight is 0? I assume they are a special case somehow (and not parry heavier weapons/large NPCs worse, or get parried more easily now), so could you shed some light on how they are affected by this?

1) For classes that don't favor armor, like savages, will they see any sort of "compensation" for the switch to making armor more valuable?

2) What kind of effect does bone armor have overall in comparison to the others?

3) As it was brought up on the other forum, do you forsee this making paladins and shamans that much stronger? There's a long thread about the perceived strength of a shield-dedicated paladin over the dedications and this seems to help it quite a bit, no?

1) savages use armor, just not metal armor (bone and light come to mind as well)

2) I would imagine bone armor is receiving a similar level of uptick just like all of the other types of armor, but just was not mentioned in specifics because it doesn't have as "obvious" of a fit

3) I would imagine that those 2 classes will end up at about a wash because even though their armor deflection skills went up a little (like all classes) their parry still went down a little (like all classes). If anything, there is potential for them to be at a slight disadvantage in the big picture, especially if people make use of the heavy weapon vs light shield change that also occurred.

I made it because armor use on a shield user makes way more of a difference than on someone not using a shield. Every hit will check the armor of the shield and armor use feeds into shield block, and ac already seemed to make quite a significant difference on shields.

Take your point re the lightness of shields, as I know the shield of light is very light (no pun intended). However, it felt like this would be a boost to shield users as armor use seems to already be at its most influential for shield users.