Armor Tweaks

[nsrr]

It has bothered me forever that Armor is so absurdly good. I see Massive armor being recommended for everyone, even 'Caster' and 'Rogue' type classes. On Normal you can get away with playing more the way you want to, but, as I understand it, Massive is next-to-mandatory for any higher difficulty, and still a huge advantage in Normal. From what I have gathered, this is because:

1.Armor does not suffer from diminishing returns.

2.Armor reduces damage before anything else is applied, like crit mod or resistance penetration.

3.Armor protects you from Weapon damage, which scales very high for NPCs due to the physical power from Weapon Training talents, and is therefore the most dangerous.

4.While not all Weapon damage is necessarily Physical, most of it is, and Physical resistance is much harder to come by than other types.

5.The 'downsides' of Armor are negligible (i.e. Fatigue and Encumbrance).

6. The 'requirements' for armor and armor training are also negligible, as they can be met by swapping in +STR gear.

What I would like to see are some ideas that make Heavy, Light and Cloth more appealing for certain classes without nerfing Massive.

Here's an example:
With my Naloren add on, I attempted to make Heavy(Mail) appealing to Naloren characters because it fits into their lore. They have a racial talent which grants them a bonus to movement and attack speed and a chance to completely ignore damage while wearing Heavy. The last point in the talent (it's tied to the last point mostly to keep it optional) will change the requirement for wearing Heavy from Strength to Constitution. This last bit was an attempt to make it a little more appealing for non-Weapon-damage classes who would be stacking Strength only for armor. However, the usefulness of Con is still quite debatable, and the requirement for the Armor Training talent remains Strength, so I think I missed the mark a bit on that one, in retrospect.

Tweaks along these lines are the kinds of things I would like to see. Something that makes other armor types more appealing, while not making them so powerful that they become the obvious choice, either.

I'll kick it off with a couple of ideas I had.

One would be a 'Mystic Armor' talent for 'Caster' type classes (Mage, Necro, Summoner, Doomed, Corrupter, etc) that would grant certain bonuses for wearing Cloth armor and require (Willpower?) to invest in. Minor increases to Spell/Mind speed and movement speed (scaling on something like 5%-15%) are the first thing to come to mind. This would make staying at range and avoiding projectiles a bit easier by making movement and the things you do offensively take less turn energy. Without some type of damage mitigation, though, I'm not sure if this would be enough to make it an appealing alternative to Massive or not.
So, the other thing that came to mind would be a kind of 'reactive shield' effect that would be triggered by X (Weapon or Physical? I'm not sure which would be better) damage above a certain percent of your max life. The effect would convert a percent of the triggering damage (and possibly all damage for the rest of that turn) into 'resource' damage, such that it would drain an amount of Mana/Pos/Neg/Vim/etc based on the percent of max life the damage would equate to. Quick example: If you had 1000 life and you were hit for 400 damage, the effect would trigger and the damage would be reduced by some percent (say 25% for this example). You would take 300 damage to your health and the remainder would drain resources based on the ratio of negated damage to your max life, in this case 10%. I don't know if that should be a direct scale (i.e. it would drain 10% of your max resource) or a proportional scale (such that 10% max life worth of negated damage would drain 5% percent of your resources, if it were a 50% proportional scale).

Obvious problems here:
Wilder and Chrono 'caster' classes (Summoner, Ooze, PM) don't have a 'max' resource, so it would make these calculations impossible and an alternative hard to balance. It could be tied to fail chance instead, or a portion of their fail threshold, maybe?
Anno and Doomed have odd resource management already with Hate and Pos/Neg, so I'm not sure how this would work out for them.

I have some ideas for Light, too, but I'd like to see what other folks think before I invest a load of thought and time into this.

Maybe everyone else is fine with an Archer running around in Massive armor, but it irks me to no end

If there are enough folks who agree, though, and we can generate some good ideas here, I would be up for putting in the time to craft an add on for this (as I think that Armor is so ingrained into standard ToME play that making changes to the base game at this point would take way, way more balancing than I have the time for, not to mention more knowledge of the engine than I posses).

So, what does everyone think? Am I right about the advantages of Massive, and does it bother anyone else?

[Radon26]

i believe that armor, should have "drawbacks", which are multiplied by encumbrance and tier, and then reduced by the above the required.

that would include: speed reduction, accuracy reduction, and fatigue.
i believe all 3 should be a thing. certain talents, could of course help in mitigating these drawbacks.

[nsrr]

i believe that armor, should have "drawbacks", which are multiplied by encumbrance and tier, and then reduced by the above the required.

that would include: speed reduction, accuracy reduction, and fatigue.
i believe all 3 should be a thing. certain talents, could of course help in mitigating these drawbacks.

I agree, to an extent; I think the imbalance is largely due to a lack of drawbacks in wearing Massive armor compared to the clear advantages. I feel like encumbrance and, particularly, fatigue were intended to be those drawbacks, however, they kind of fell through in implementation. It would absolutely make sense that wearing heavier armor would reduce speed and accuracy and increase resource costs(this, at least, it already does, but is currently negligible), however...

Adding drawbacks to heavier armor is not the route I want to go here. It would surely make lighter armors more appealing, but I would rather the appeal be in what they have to offer, not merely in a lack of disadvantages. Also, while a Massive armor Mage or Archer is not for me, I don't want to do something that would invalidate those options. This is about expanding choice, not restricting it.

On that note, we could flip your idea on its head, and have lighter armors add speed and accuracy and reduce resource costs. Although, on the resource costs, you could argue that lighter armor already does this because it creates less Fatigue. The problem here is that this 'advantage' in lighter armor is clearly not enough to detract from the benefits of Massive.

[Radon26]

i agree, the only reason to have a cloth or light "armor", is for their egos. Especially cloth, since it has literally no bonuses of its own.
is there a reason, why we can;t both buff cloth/light, and "nerf", heavy/massive?

as for heavy/massive drawback.
mages wouldn't be too restricted by these drawbacks, as they don't have to move as much, since they can teleport, aim, as their spells always hit, and again, even the fatigue is not all that bad, if they are good at resource managing.
only melee warriors, would truly feel these drawbacks.
not sure about archers and skirmishers though.

about cloth/light buff.
They certainly need... SOMETHING, but unless they are enchanted, i see no reason why it should be easier to move with a loose robe, than just naked.
(to which you are going to say something that can be reduced to "realism=heresy")
I too want them buffed, but it needs to make at least SOME sense. any explanation why it would work certain way?

[nsrr]

i agree, the only reason to have a cloth or light "armor", is for their egos. Especially cloth, since it has literally no bonuses of its own.
is there a reason, why we can;t both buff cloth/light, and "nerf", heavy/massive?

as for heavy/massive drawback.
mages wouldn't be too restricted by these drawbacks, as they don't have to move as much, since they can teleport, aim, as their spells always hit, and again, even the fatigue is not all that bad, if they are good at resource managing.
only melee warriors, would truly feel these drawbacks.
not sure about archers and skirmishers though.

about cloth/light buff.
They certainly need... SOMETHING, but unless they are enchanted, i see no reason why it should be easier to move with a loose robe, than just naked.
(to which you are going to say something that can be reduced to "realism=heresy")
I too want them buffed, but it needs to make at least SOME sense. any explanation why it would work certain way?

I'm certainly no stickler for realism in a fantasy game, but, hey, why not add some massive speed bonus to running around naked? You'll still be at a disadvantage due to the lack of egos, but it might be amusing, anyway

Regarding Heavy/Massive: Why add a nerf that is mostly going to affect the classes that 'should' be wearing that type of armor anyway? I am in no way prepared to do anything that is going to drastically alter the mechanics already in place. Massive armor gives you a lot of protection from Weapon damage, as it should. Lighter armors protect you less... but offer little to nothing in exchange. That is the issue I'd like to deal with.
Besides, if I made an add on that improved cloth/light and nerfed heavy/massive, would you leave it on when playing a melee class just for the realism?
You could also have the drawbacks mitigated by your current Strength, such that melee classes would be in the same place they are now, while 'casters' would be at a disadvantage in heavier armor... but again, this is not about limiting the usefulness of Massive, rather, it's about enhancing the usefulness of other armor.
So it is not that we can't nerf it, I just don't see any compelling reason that we should.

Regarding Cloth: Yes, I would most likely tie this into the robes or whatnot being 'enchanted' or 'enhanced by your latent magical/mental energies' or some such, so there is at least some explanation, albeit a lazy one.
You may be right, though, movement speed is not necessarily the best fit here, but it makes sense mechanically in that it aides ranged characters in staying ranged, and most of those are casters (Archer and Skirm being exceptions). I do think that mind/spell speed is a solid fit, though. That combined with some type of appropriately mystical and unique damage mitigation might be all it needs.

Regarding Light: Again, some explanation would be in order here, such as, 'You are so practiced in the use of Light armor that it is like a second skin'. Lazy, but it's something. I think movement and attack speed would be a solid fit here, as you can move around a battlefield more nimbly if you have everything wrapped up tight, so to speak. Along those lines, I think the damage mitigation here should come in the form of 'dodging'. Some kind of passive evasion combined with projectile deflection and/or slow. Personally, I really enjoy 'side-stepping' an incoming Icebolt or the like.

[Radon26]

the original idea was that the drawbacks would scale down with appropriate stats... but yes, i might have missed the point slightly.
while not required per say (in a fantasy game) i think it is good to have, some, realism, as long as it doesn't go directly against gameplay.
to that, i still think... it makes sense.

as for cloth armour... (still speaking from the point of view of realism...) while they aren't the most solid thing in the world, and all weapons can go right through, it is still a bit of an environmental protection, since it is loose and not a metal conductor. I think it would make some sens, to attach some (3*tier)% to elemental resistances.
not mind or temporal, nor would it work for physical, since it is NOT going to stop a rock smashing you in the head. further, Since you are less distracted by the environment, it could boost your mind/spell power. just maybe.

[Micbran]

Gathering/summarizing and adding to some of the ideas you've thrown around, you could add two talents in the combat training tree: Cloth Armor Training and Light Armor Training (as well as probably rename armor training to heavy armor training) each with their own effects when the corresponding armor is worn.

In my opinion, the talents should all at least somewhat mirror each other, so first, let's look at what Armor Training gives you:

• +armor while wearing heavy armor
  +armor hardiness
  +critical hit reduction

+armor: amplifies the main reason someone would wear heavy armor, more armor.
+armor hardiness: ditto as above. Bonus for having more armor, essentially.
+critical hit reduction: further amplifies the "I need ALL the protection" mentality of heavy armor.

Overall, the bonuses are all defensive... But should the other armor types be the exact same as that?

For Cloth Armor Training, I was thinking spell/mind speed, as you mentioned before but spellpower + mindpower is another way to go. For a defensive boost, there's the elemental resist boost mentioned, flat dam reduction or perhaps even that one thing that prevents you from losing more than x% of your life from one hit. For the third effect, I think a spellpower or mindpower boost, depending on which is of the two is already higher. Obviously, these effects, although bound to a talent, would scale far more heavily based off the armor tier than talent level, unlike the current armor training which scales all off talent level.

For Light Armor Training, I really love the movement + attack speed bonus and the projectile slowdown. I think all 3 of those effects really bring out the concept "light", in terms of armor. Once again, these effects would probably scale more with item tier rather than talent level.

[HousePet]

Perhaps it would be good to think of armour as more than one dimensional.
So instead of light or heavy, it is also flexible or rigid.
eg.

Cloth - Light and Flexible:
Minimal innate defense.
No requirements or penalties. - It is just basic clothing.

Leather - Light and Rigid:
Significant innate defense.
No requirements. - It is light.
10% fatigue. - It is rigid.

Mail - Heavy and Flexible.
Significant innate armour.
Requires strength. - It is heavy.
10% fatigue. - It may be flexible, but it is still heavy.

Massive - Heavy and Rigid.
Significant innate armour.
+10% armour hardiness.
Requires strength. - It is very heavy.
25% fatigue.

That gives you a choice about whether to go with 'heavier' armour and get a fatigue penalty, regardless of your strength stat.

The Armour Training talent is a tricky one. Its strength requirement overlaps with the equipment requirements, making them redundant. Currently it gives a 33% bigger effect for wearing massive armour, which is part of the cause of massive armour being greater than everything else. (Not sure why the effect for light armour was removed, other than not being worth the investment.)
Now what even is the purpose of the Armour Training talent?
It is:
A great source of Armour Hardiness, which you need for your armour to work well.
A good source of critical hit avoidance.
A small source of extra armour points.
But what do we really want from this talent? How good do we want armour to be without and with this talent?
At the moment, the armour stat is pretty useless without this talent, because you only have 30% base hardiness.
The defense stat is just pretty useless.
With this talent, massive armour is awesome and heavy armour is okay.
You can get some armour by going with light armour, and by using the heavy versions of other slot pieces, but this talent oddly gives no benefit to those unless you wear heavy or massive armour.

I'm feeling fairly blank here. I'd like the armour stat to be useful without investment in a talent, but there is also a parallel with weapons being much better with their mastery talent.

[nsrr]

Adding two talents to Combat Training is likely the route I would go, mostly for simplicity. Combat Training is available to anyone who wants it, and this would be a lot easier than trying to fit it in somewhere else.

//Anticipates realism arguement// What's that you say? Combat Training doesn't "make sense"?
Well, after all, it is Combat Training, and not Martial Training, and I don't think it could be argued that any hero in ToME is not engaging in "Combat"

Slightly-heavy-handed-explanation: done

Good call on tying the power of these talents to item tier. I hadn't considered that, but that's definitely a good limitation. Most of the benefit from Armor Training is based on the Armor value of the equipment, so it is naturally tied into the level of the gear. Throwing in things like speed or power based only on talent level (even with stat and level restrictions on the talent) could be a bit unbalanced without tying it to some aspect of the gear, and obviously tier makes the most sense. In short: I concur.

For Cloth I feel like the defensive bonus should be somewhat... supernatural. Elemental resistance isn't a terrible idea, but a little boring. I would probably layer that under a more esoteric means of damage mitigation. I really liked the damage-to-resource idea, but upon further consideration, the variety of resources and mechanics for regenerating them make this a bit too messy. Flat damage reduction is little heavy-handed, imo, as is 'no damage greater than X% max life'.

Maybe we can combine those, and add a dash of mysticism, to produce something a little more unique:

This is the idea I just had: Any damage above X% of your maximum life is delayed and dealt evenly over the next Y turns. Additionally, this damage is converted to, and split evenly among, your three highest resistance types (excluding physical, mental and temporal). X would scale on item tier, talent level, and the higher of your mind or spell power, while Y would scale on item tier and talent level only. (Y could scale something like 1-5 turns and X should probably not be allowed to go any lower than 15% of your maximum life, at the absolute minimum, with ~20% being a reasonably obtainable goal with tier 5 armor and enough mind/spell power at TL 5)

The idea here is that you are being protected from taking too much damage all at once, but not completely negating it. Spreading it over a few turns and converting the damage type will then let you reduce the damage in a number of 'clever' ways: Pop a damage shield; use some Wards; use a torque; utilize class-level activated damage mitigation; pop some regen to mitigate the damage as it comes in; etc. You could also focus on stacking just a few types of resistance for over-all damage mitigation.

So Cloth Armor Training would look like this:
+Resistances
+Spell/Mind Speed and/or Power (probably both; speed definitely needs to have a limit, but I don't think there's much risk of granting too much defense by making blasters more blasty)
+Damage Smearing and Conversion

For Light Armor, I think there needs to be something to help with 'instant travel' damage (melee attacks, beams, and certain bolts), as well. Movement speed and projectile slowing will let you dodge, and attack speed is a solid offensive bonus with defensive application (attack in less than one turn, allowing you to move before enemies can attack). On that note, I just had another idea:

When you take damage greater than X% of your maximum life, you get an instant rush of adrenaline, granting a Y% chance to completely avoid (i.e. negate) damage for the next Z turns. This effect will end early if you remain on the same tile.
(Again, X would scale based on TL, item tier and some boostable stat (I'm not sure what would be the best fit here. Con? Dex? Accuracy?) from something like 40% to an absolute minimum of 15% with ~20% being reasonably attainable at max tier and TL. Y could scale on item tier, TL and Defense, and this could scale pretty high, due to the you-have-to-keep-moving limitation. 75% absolute max? You'd still get hit roughly one in four times, and you could easily be taking four or more hits per turn. 60% should be reasonably attainable at max tier and talent level with decent Defense. Z would scale from 1-5 based on the lower of your item tier and TL).
The idea here is that the most reliable means of avoiding damage for a Light armor wearer should be... well, avoiding it. If you get stuck in a situation where you take a high amount of damage from a source that can't be dodged, the adrenaline kicks in and gives you an opportunity to relocate into a position where you can better avoid further damage. If you are boxed in, it won't help at all, so this will only further reinforce the fact that you should be doing your absolute best to avoid such situations in the first place.

So Light Armor Training would look like this:
+Attack and Movement Speed
+Projectile Slow
+'Dodging'

Thoughts?

[Radon26]

//Anticipates realism arguement// What's that you say? Combat Training doesn't "make sense"?

WHO SAID THAT?! SHOW YOURSELF!! combat training is THE most generic category of them all! Ofc it has some of everything, but at the same time nothing super specialized. Why would anyone claim that, of all categories, this one doesn't make sense?

also, i am pretty sure there is already an entire category for light armour. are you going to gut it or something?

Maybe we can combine those, and add a dash of mysticism, to produce something a little more unique:

This is the idea I just had: Any damage above X% of your maximum life is delayed and dealt evenly over the next Y turns.

... excuse me, but that's damage smearing... and cauterize... that's... a bit specialized.

Additionally, this damage is converted to, and split evenly among, your three highest resistance types (excluding physical, mental and temporal). X would scale on item tier, talent level, and the higher of your mind or spell power, while Y would scale on item tier and talent level only. (Y could scale something like 1-5 turns and X should probably not be allowed to go any lower than 15% of your maximum life, at the absolute minimum, with ~20% being a reasonably obtainable goal with tier 5 armor and enough mind/spell power at TL 5)

...
*puts fingers together a few times in a sort of bouncing motion before stopping*... torques.
one damage type of cauterize and DS, is already plenty powerful.
now you are going to make the torques flat reduction apply... something like 15 times, while as otherwise it would only be one.
Pls note, that torques CAN give you a hundred or two of flat reduction. think about it.

For Light Armor, I think there needs to be something to help with 'instant travel' damage (melee attacks, beams, and certain bolts), as well. Movement speed and projectile slowing will let you dodge, and attack speed is a solid offensive bonus with defensive application (attack in less than one turn, allowing you to move before enemies can attack).

not entirely sure what to think about that.

and i couldn't read through all the afterwards so i wont answer to it. but i am prett sure there is already talent that gives you speed on damage. i think it was in brawler's generic category.

[nsrr]

I am pretty sure there is already an entire category for light armour. are you going to gut it or something?

There's one talent, called Mobile Defense, in the Mobility tree. It grants a bonus to Hardiness and Defense while wearing light armor. Defense is not very useful, and hardiness doesn't mean a lot if your armor value is low. Only a few classes have it, and I would leave it alone.

fingers together a few times in a sort of bouncing motion before stopping*... torques.
one damage type of cauterize and DS, is already plenty powerful.
now you are going to make the torques flat reduction apply... something like 15 times, while as otherwise it would only be one.
Pls note, that torques CAN give you a hundred or two of flat reduction. think about it.

Fair point. Though, the idea here was exactly that you would be able to actively mitigate this damage as it comes in, since you will be able to anticipate it. Five turns may be too much to spread it over, though. The idea behind splitting it between different damage types is that you would not be able to mitigate all of it as effectively as you could parts of it. Splitting it up would make flat reduction a lot stronger, though. Maybe the triggering damage should actually be increased slightly before it is divided and smeared? That way, if you do nothing about it, it will actually hurt you more, but if you take actions to mitigate it, you can reduce it significantly. Or maybe the damage should only be split between two types, your highest and lowest resist? I think it is important to be able to predict what type of damage it will be, though. The idea is to have a kind of effect that would let Cloth Wearers deal with damage 'cleverly'. Do you think tweaking this idea could work, or do you have some other ideas?

i am prett sure there is already talent that gives you speed on damage. i think it was in brawler's generic category.

Yeah, my explanation was not the best there. All I meant was that if your attack speed is higher than your enemy's attack speed then you can attack and move before an enemy could also attack and move. In this way you can slowly kite them in melee range and they will not be able to attack you as many times as you could attack them. This is far from the best defense, but that's all I meant by attack speed having 'defensive applications'.

[Razakai]

I believe Hachem/Shibari were planning on reworking armor and weapon scaling for 1.5, but not sure where they got to. maybe see if you can catch either of them on irc? But I agree, light armor needs buffing. I'd probably take the dead simple option of rolling them all into armor training and just having it scale better with heavier armor. Not a perfect fix but smooths out the balance.

As for light armor/Mobility, there's been proposals by Edge and others to rework Mobility/Survival/Field Control/Acrobatics into 2 better trees, so you could do that and scrap it.

[jdisk]

It has bothered me forever that Armor is so absurdly good. I see Massive armor being recommended for everyone, even 'Caster' and 'Rogue' type classes. On Normal you can get away with playing more the way you want to, but, as I understand it, Massive is next-to-mandatory for any higher difficulty, and still a huge advantage in Normal.

A quick check in the vault for recently played archmages, paradox mages, anorithils and necomancers (discarding those with changes that obviously increase the amount of generic points) showed that less that 20% of recent winner on roguelike insane had armor training higher than 1. Similar numbers (a bit higher) for shadowblades.

So I really doubt that using massive armor is next-to-mandatory for caster and rogue types.

[nsrr]

Well, fair enough, then. I seem to be scheming up things that act more like prodigies than 'tweaks', anyway. Mostly a product of staying up way, way too late at night. I did come up with a couple of ideas I like, but they would fit better on a class level than as generic changes.

I'm glad that weapon and armor scaling are being looked into, though, and having combined Mobility/Field Control/Acrobatics/Survival trees available to 'agile' classes would certainly make a difference in Generic defensive options.

[HousePet]

Last nights random idea (which happened just before I went to bed, causing insomnia...) is to have a variety of Combat Training like categories based on different styles and stats, instead of having the boring general no-brainer one we have at the moment. Cos really, what's the point on having a talent point system if we are going spend a load on no-brainers?
General concept is that there are 6 categories and you can only invest in one of them. Each one would have a weapon mastery like talent that gives accuracy and something else, and an armour training like talent that gives hardiness and something else.

Examples:
Savage Style - strength based.
Weapon talent gives increased accuracy and base weapon damage.
Armour talent gives increased hardiness and resist all.
Graceful Style - dexterity based.
Weapon talent gives increased accuracy and a boost to your physical power scaling with dex.
Armour talent gives increased hardiness and increases your total defense by a percentage.
Arcane Style - magic based.
Weapon talent gives increased accuracy and increased weapon proc damage.
Armour talent gives increased hardiness and reduced non weapon damage by a fraction of your armour.

The other two talent slots would be filled with some sort of 'casting' buff talent and a utility.