This addon changes the point maximum of the Armour Training skill from 10 to 5. Having lurked the forums a bit, I've seen some good arguments for this and figured it wouldn't be hard to do. That was nearly correct.
The skill itself has been changed slightly:
- The point maximum has been lowered from 10 to 5 and the effect of each point has been doubled. The strength requirement is 16 for the first point and a rising cost for each additional point (16->20->26->34->44) rather than 18 for the first and 1 per thereafter (18->19->20->...->27).
- The first point allows the wearing of heavy mail (previously 2 points) as well as the heavier extremity armors given by the 10 point version. This makes gauntlets, etc. a little cheaper in strength for those classes that prefer light armor. It also makes heavy mail available earlier to melee classes that don't start with any Armour Training at all. Also, I never liked the mismatch between iron mail's strength requirement of 14 and the skill requirement of 2 (which itself required 19 strength).
- The second point allows you to equip shields (previously 3 points). 20 strength required for that, same as before. Shields also have a strength mismatch (11 required for iron shields and 20 for the skill) but a shield is basically an ego platform guaranteed to include a bit of armor and a decent defense boost. You probably should have to spend some points on strength to get that.
- Point 3 grants the use of plate armour (previously 4 points). Now, 26 strength is required to unlock massive armour instead of 21. The previous mismatch was the goofiest of the bunch, requiring 21 strength to meet the skill requirement but 22 to actually wear the lightest plate armor! I like the symmetry here, too: both mail and plate armours have strength requirements lower than needed for their skill requirements.
- All PC classes that begin with Armour Training have had their initial skill points halved.
- All NPC classes that begin with Armour Training have had their initial skill points halved. If they had skill ranges, the initial and maximum points were halved and the levels between increases doubled. Some classes could maybe be rebalanced a bit, but this addon is more a proof-of-concept, try-it-and-see-how-it-fits deal.
- Heavy armour, shields, and massive armour have had their Armour Training requirements adjusted to fit the new skill.
- Golem Resilience (GR) is implemented in terms of Thick Skin and Armour Training. With 10 point Armour Training (AT), the golem started with 4 points of AT and got 1 more per point of GR. This doesn't work with 5 point AT, so I had to change the skill a bit. Golems now start with 3 AT (so they can still wear any armour) and gain 1 each with the 2nd and 5th points in GR. This makes them better armored at all levels of GR and causes them to end at the equivalent of 10 points under the old system rather than 9. This is the one part of the conversion that I hate, but would require a rewrite of GR to fix. Your golem still gets 3% resist all and 10% healing bonus per point of GR, so a point spent there is still good value. Note that this does not contain any fixes for the Golem Resilience or Golem Power bugs.
- The skill Thought-Form: Warrior had its Armour Training halved.
- The skill Thought-Form: Defender used a range for Armor Training, starting at 3 and increasing by 1 every 10 levels until maxing out at 8 points at level 50. The starting and max points have been halved and levels between increases doubled to 20, maxing the skill out at 4 points at level 40. I debated changing the levels between increases to 25 to max out at level 50, as before, but decided against it. This makes them slightly better armored, but the gaps between increases are so great that I think leaving it is justified.
- There's an artifact helm that required 4 points in Armour Training. It's obvious that wearing massive armour was the intended requirement of the helm, so I changed it a 3 point requirement. The strength requirement of the helm is 35 and it's still 1 fewer Armour Training points required than previously, so no complaining.
TL;DR This addon makes eating orphans legal in Derth.
Edits: Changed the strength requirement progression from 16->20->24->28->32 to 16->20->26->34->44 since maxing the skill out was way too easy. Also, contrary to my previous edit, the addon does work without any tinkering. It just doesn't show up in the addons list unless "Show incompatible" is selected. It's still automatically enabled, though, even though it doesn't appear in the list. A bug in the addons dialog?
File edit: Removed the download of v1 since the download count keeps going up even though version 2 is available!
