ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Now the meta has changed and defense is more favorable than armor!
On Insane difficulty, I have never seen a high-peak enemies with an accuracy over 105 and most of them even don't have one higher than 95, without using Perfect Strike. It's really not too hard for a player to get over 125 defense at this time. Even if they use Perfect Strike, it doens't last long and you can just walk away and come back a bit later.
It's not just in endgame. Some of my friends have shown that if you wear light armor and pay attention to collect equips giving defense, you can have a high defense enough to ignore over 90% weapon attacks in all stages of the game.

Now it's time to change this. However, the root of this problem is that how accuracy vs defense (and power vs save) works. With a mere difference of 40 points, it's the difference between always and never, but if dg make the number bigger, players will also complaign that their weapon attacks and debuffs are not hitting stably enough.

helminthauge wrote:With a mere difference of 40 points, it's the difference between always and never

The difference between 90 defense and 130 defense, that 'mere 40 points' is 240 raw defense.

How much of the problem is Ethereal Form? How much would it help if EF ignored dexterity?

The main issue comes from the fact that egos and random powers giving defense have been buffed a lot in 1.6. In 1.5 and before almost everyone thought defense was totally useless because one couldn't get it high enough to work. And then, in 1.6 a single random power can give up to 30 defense, and the player has 10 item slots other than wielded equips. Ehereal Form does give a lot of defense but not this much, and nobody can have it before lv 25.
Plus in 1.6 Combat Accuracy was nerfed. In 1.5.10, almost all weapon enemies on High Peak had an accuracy over 90 and many over 100.
Making Ethereal Form ignore dexterity won't help much because in most cases Magic will be higher than Dexterity, because how powerful Arcane Might is, and even item_acid_corridor, the best solution to monsters having a very high armor, is affected by spellpower.