ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Right now heavy armor has very little use. It needs to be a bit better to see normal use.

I suggest a tier percentage resist all for mail and double that for massive armors. You should also lets the -crit chance apply to any type of damage, not just physical.

This will differentiate it from leather or cloth which it desperately needs without increasing it all that much. It is also the easiest change I could think of to bring the heavier armors up to the level they should be at.

It seems to me that heavy armor is very good after you spend a few points in armor training...

Yeah, I've heard complaints that light armor is too weak due to bad egos/artifacts for non-AM melee players, but never heavy armor.

Resist All? Universally on heavy armor? Are you nuts?

That'd be more balanced on Light Armor. Endgame Heavy Armors can break 100% total resists fairly easily, in good resists-most light armors are lucky to break 50%. (The one exception is AM and has no physical defensive bonuses unless you're a Zigurite, so you have to gamble there.) Heavy Armor is also possible to get Armor Hardiness on, whereas Heavy armor requires RNG luck to see anything above 30%, for any class without Mobility.

I personally think the balance is pretty okay now-Light Armors have some valid options but are weaker than heavy armor, but heavy armor has fatigue and requires more of an investment, and the classes that use Light Armor were designed with being frailer in mind. They're not good to directly compare to each other, but taken on a class by class basis, Heavy Armor is almost never totally useless for a class, and Light Armor can almost always make for a good possible short term equip if you find an exception to the rule. (Spydre, Breath of Eyal. Death's Embrace is pretty good short term if you haven't found any of the high end heavy armors, too.)

It's a bit of an issue for Mobility types, but people underrate how good Mobile Defense's Defense bonus is. 60 Defense is very solid and that's one of the few ways to reach that high. Mobility builds are good for characters that fear physical attacks. Not so much magical ones.

skein wrote: This will differentiate it from leather or cloth which it desperately needs without increasing it all that much. It is also the easiest change I could think of to bring the heavier armors up to the level they should be at.

I can only assume you don't know how the armour training skill works. It gives bonuses to armour hardiness, armour and crit reduction whilst wearing heavy armour. The hardiness is the rather important thing here - it makes your armour stat way more effective. The talent doesn't apply to light armour.

Also the egos are different on heavy and light armours, and generally considered to be way better for fighters on heavy armour.

To be honest, I feel like people are overestimating hardiness. Early and mid game, I do agree massive armor with high hardiness do help a lot. Late game it matters very little. Normal enemies are fodder at this point that can be killed by sneezing, and if they manage to hit you, you have such high hp pool it doesn't matter. While late elite enemies (Forge Giants, ugh) or rares can easily deal hundreds if not thousands of damage per hit. If you have 100 armor, and enemy hits for, say, 400 damage, there is ZERO difference if you had 30% or 100% hardiness.
In fact, the 'important' damage that you have to soak it's so high it's only viable to stack physical resist against those, leaving armor mainly as way do deal with trash.

That aside, I don't really have a voice in this debate, all my melee fighters in late game wear massive/heavy artifact armor strictly because it often have best enchantments (only ego that ever comes close are high rolls 'of Dragon'), and even if I wanted to wear light armor, the one that seem to be designed for melee/archers (+damage on hit) are nearly always Arcane Powered, which is not option for Anti-Magics.

And you underestimate how armour works
Armour is applied before all multipliers; that is before crits; before talent %damage; before inc_damage%; ...

So if you got hit by say a sunder arms (with say 200% damage) hit that would do a critical hit (for 200%) for 800 your armour works a lot on it:
With 0 armour you get hit for 800
With 100 armour you get hit for 400; because the base damage was 200, which is reduced to 100 and then multiplied by x4

That sounds nice, but hardiness for this example is only needed at 50%, and heavy armor for some reason never really stopped Forge Giants melee from destroying my health (including perma block Stone Warden who couldn't get scratched otherwise even by Ata) or rare rapid fire archers (that should be really stopped by armor in theory?) from melting them.

I've seen my summon being critted for 4,5k in SINGLE hit, I doubt any amount of armor would prevent a melee from dying from it. My archer died to... rare Mindslayer aura release I believe, for 1300 crit. Armor is nice, yes, especially against flurry like attacks. Hardiness is less important. And late game I still don't see them being more important that straight physical resist.

PS. Armor does stop melee elemental attacks, right? At least that's what one of 'reds' told me on chat. In that case, the tooltip is wrong for stating it only work for physicals.

Heavy armour also reduces critical hit chances too.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but crit is calculated when attack is launched, and not for target, right? My alchemist throwing bombs, if had a crit, hit all monsters for same amount of damage. That would mean it works only if you are directly targeted (wouldn't help with that archer death, it was aoe attack). And I'm also reading here that -crit applies to only physical, not spells, like... Freeze. And it still is 'just' more rng, if there is rare that can one shot you if it crits, unless you can bring his crit chance to zero, you are still making a gamble that you should never make, so again, overall damage intake decrease, but not necessary when it counts. Now, if it instead decreased crit damage multiplier of attack...

I just want it on the one slot for main armor worn, and yes I understand how it works. There is literally a miniscule difference between wearing a robe with no armor or wearing voratun plate mail versus any mob that matters. 10% resist all is NOT way out of line for wearing a voratun plate mail.

This is because most of your armor comes from all your other item slots and hits from creatures that matter take into account all your armor anyway even at a hardiness of 30% for that robe. Or they IGNORE it anyway.

See take that 400 hit you advertised with. The difference between wearing the plate mail (total armor 100 hardiness 100%) and wearing the robe (total armor 75 and hardiness 30%) is then 400-100 x multipliers or 400-75x multipliers. Even with a 4X multiplier you are only looking at 100 more damage.

I just noticed that it is better to have a random piece of cloth armor with some resist all then to be wearing real plate. The same thing sorta happens with shields as well, I just think the melee users could use a little bit more love.

See take that 400 hit you advertised with. The difference between wearing the plate mail (total armor 100 hardiness 100%) and wearing the robe (total armor 75 and hardiness 30%) is then 400-100 x multipliers or 400-75x multipliers. Even with a 4X multiplier you are only looking at 100 more damage.

200. Not 400.

100/(50+) against 200 is 100 impact, or halving the base damage. 75/30 is going to come out to 60, or 140 remaining damage getting through. Meaning you take something along the lines of a third more damage, which is non-trivial. You are looking at 160 more damage, which, on a hit that's doing 400 vs 560, is pretty notable.

However, against 150-which is more common, many standard physical fighter enemies can pull this, 200+ is only the very hardest hitters in general-100/70% still caps out at 100. Dropping the damage by 2/3rds. 75/30 will block 45-dropping the damage by one third. It's the difference, with the same multiplier of 4x involved, between taking 200 and 420.

In other words, you take twice as much damage with light armor in this case, as with heavy, and the returns increase the lower the damage gets-meaning that heavy armor is far better at keeping you from getting mobbed.

You essentially are also ignoring that heavy armors have better egos and artifacts, in general, than light armor. While Light Armor finally got some okay elemental spread defense egos relatively recently, there is nothing in ego light armor that matches Hardened or Dragon egos, and there's only one light armor that really competes with the normal elemental defense armors...and it was specifically designed to mostly be an AM thing, with bad physical defensive abilities relative to its tier, particularly without the AM bonus.

This is because most of your armor comes from all your other item slots and hits from creatures that matter take into account all your armor anyway even at a hardiness of 30% for that robe. Or they IGNORE it anyway.

Nothing much fully ignores armor.

Enemies do have APR, of course, but APR means that the 30~ or so extra armor you'll get from heavy armor matters more, not less. Let's look at the 150 example, and assume the guy has 30 APR.

In the former case, 70/70 of the armor/armor hardiness, you'll block 70, down to 130 base, or 520. Nasty hit.

In the latter case, though, you'll have 40/30, which even with Armor Hardiness kicking in before to lower your armor, means you still take 160-or 640.

Yes, on paper, the returns diminish...but there's more than one way to look at a statistic like this. In both cases, you're getting closer and closer, with nasty hits like this, to getting twoshotted. Two hit kills are huge dangers-you can't do anything but blow resources and die if you match them turn for turn(unless you are very, very confident that you oneshot the enemy back), and if the enemy has a speed bonus you'll get effectively one-shotted. The difference between getting killed in two, and in three, hits is quite large. You don't want to get any closer to that than you have to.

It means more than you'd think, in other words.

Also, another thing to note is the critical hit rate drop.

Now, I know what you're thinking-most people are thinking-when they look at that. 15% or so, 20% or so, isn't a large drop-some enemies can critical all the time.

But many enemies have low-single digit-critical hit rates...but getting critted by them still means sudden, nasty damage. An example of this I find very prominent is Armored Skeleton Warriors. They hit pretty hard on base-a critical can mean the difference between surviving but being in pain from a technique from one, to being dead, and the Armor Training margin prevents this from ever happening. Not so with light armors.