If you ask me, heavy armour is the most important topic for 0.8. It doesn’t need to be restored to its former overpowered glory, but the fact that wrapping a piece of bedsheet around you provides better defence than a plate mail set is a bit sad. And you get spells on top of that.
So, here are some recent changes:
- Guaranteed damage reduction (GDR) from body armour is doubled
- Body armours are now enchantable up to a bonus equal to their base AC
- AC/EV bonuses are no longer generated on randarts
GDR is based on base AC of the armour. You now get 5% of GDR for each base AC over 2. So, a robe gives 0%, a leather armour gives 5%, a scale mail gives 15%, plate gives 40% and the rare crystal plate mail gives 60%. This means that armour is especially good against fast enemies with many not-so-strong attacks (such as executioners).
Enchanting armour: robes have base AC of 2, so they can be enchanted up to +2. Chain has 6 AC, so +6 is possible. Plate can go up to 10, and CPM up to +14! This might well be too much, capping to +9 is a possibility (to match weapons). Enchant armour scrolls now no longer have that chance of failing when you try to enchant a piece with high pluses. Randart armour can be generated with a plus of higher than the base AC (e.g. you’ll still find +6 randart robes). Heavier randart armour with very high pluses isn’t currently generated.
Finally, AC/EV bonuses from randarts were often as big as skill investment. These are now gone, so getting high AC on an EV character, and vice versa, is now harder. edit: the base type of the randart can still be one that gives AC or EV, such as rings of evasion or weapons of protection.
This should provide plenty of testing material for heavy armour characters. The builds are available on the Windows test build page, and playable online on CDO. All the player feedback and testing has been very important. Big thanks to ledtim for providing some dodging/armour statistics in the wiki. Automatic statistics from morgue files is on the TODO/wishlist. Happy crawling!
–Eino
1. Comment by they
14/Dec/2010 at 20:46
It’s great to see the AC issue getting some attention. These are some interesting changes and look like a big step toward finding a better balance for heavy armor. Cheers to the dev team.
2. Comment by REX
14/Dec/2010 at 22:26
Great! :-)
3. Comment by PigVomit
15/Dec/2010 at 15:20
<3
4. Comment by Bein
14/Jan/2011 at 19:23
I worry about what this does to casters, or specifically hybrid characters who don’t use heavy armor (eg transmuters). Spells can affect the usefulness of EV (eg paralyse), while there are no spells to my knowledge that reduce the effectiveness of AC. Now that most casters types are now essentially hit with a -6AC, I think it would make sense to say boost magic resistance while wearing the lighter armors, in a similar way that wearing heavy armor affects spellcasting. Perhaps this can be also tied to Int level so that low level characters don’t get a huge MR boost for wearing a robe. This probably isn’t necessary for races like DEs, but it might be for casters in other races.
5. Comment by evktalo
15/Jan/2011 at 14:19
I don’t think the light-armoured casters need a boost, lowering their AC was precisely the point. We’ll see.
–Eino
6. Comment by mitch45678
1/Feb/2011 at 18:58
Light-armored casters were by far the best choice before the armor un-nerf. For non-expert players (like me) light-armored casters were the ONLY thing that had a realistic chance of surviving to rune depth, which made the game extremely unbalanced.
7. Comment by CobbledConcept
4/Apr/2011 at 19:26
IDK about this supposed game balancing for two reasons:
1. The game philosophy specifically does not embrace the idea that all race/class combinations ought to be equally powerful. This is why Ogres are still so terrible.
2. Wanting to make fighters more playable does not necessarily mean that you need to make casters more fragile. Even with a light-armored caster, the game is brutal.
The armor unnerfing is welcomed, the caster nerfing is discouraging.