Non-physical mitigation with armor/defense

[SageAcrin]

This thought chain was inspired by a few basic thoughts.

A: Very high armor and defense are rewarded very little. Most enemies lategame simply are walled by high Defense(60+) and high Armor(100~ with good Hardiness), enough so that continuing to boost it is nearly useless. For that matter, capped Armor Hardiness doesn't do much.

B: The top tier classes are, by and large, not armor or defense users. In fact, they're mostly mages or mind classes that go around armor and defense entirely. So, such a buff would even out the classes in general. The probable best physical class is Berserker or Wyrmic, and neither have big armor or defense focuses, either. The probable worst physical classes are Rogues, which have a heavy Defense focus, too.

As such, I find myself thinking that actually altering the basic mechanics of armor and defense to cover a little magical defenses would not actually be dangerous. Having it have the same amount of bonus against magic would be, but there's no reason that they couldn't have some impact on non-physical-strike skills.

Thoughts for implementation;

Armor: Grant Armor a (Armor/10) mitigation against magic, with the same Hardiness limit as the normal one. So, if you have 100 Armor/100% Hardiness, you can take 10 damage off any attack. If you have 100 Armor/30% Hardiness, you can take 10 damage off, or 30%, whichever's lower.

This is a rather low value, but it could be sweetened by coming in after resistances, not before. This would allow it to mitigate already heavily resisted attacks somewhat. Mostly good against DoTs and the like, obviously, and mostly focused on characters with AM Shield and such, but it is a bonus.

Armor/5 is also a possibility. Anything higher is probably dangerous to the game's current balance on both ends, and I wouldn't suggest it.

Defense: Grant a (Defense-Spellpower)*2.5%(capped at 50%) chance to, on a (non-archery...or maybe this could replace current Defense rules for Archery) projectile hitting you, deflect it one square away("(player)/(enemy) deflects the attack!"). This prevents Defense from constantly walling DoTs(Which is just silly), and most player mages will have an easy time of piercing the effect, simply by using area of effect spells.

It's a reasonably believable way to have Defense function against magic, without it constantly walling it all the time, and it works better for the player than enemies-which is good, as enemies dodging constantly is highly frustrating.

I had several other thoughts for this, but given the way that attacks are coded, I think integrating it into projectile code is the most sensible.

(Again, dodging your poisoning is silly. The armor idea would have this problem to a degree, but it's at least more sensible if you don't poke at the concept too hard. Dodging constantly damaging flames is a lot harder to rationalize than armoring it, and armoring against poisoning...well, at least you could argue that the armor mitigated how badly you were poisoned. Ignore that removing armor would make you poisoned worse. It's more[/] sensible, at least...)

So, any thoughts? I don't really feel strongly about this, but it was an interesting idea, so I thought I'd share.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Love the concept of extra resistance from the armor. Might make people actually pay ATTENTION to armor instead of ignoring it. Makes high armor enemies less of a joke to mages too! I like this idea.

[HousePet]

Defense allowing you to avoid non weapon projectiles would be great. I've probably suggested it at least once already.

Not as keen on Armour working against all damage automagically. I think it would be a great addition to Spectral Shield though.
Perhaps use the same system as blocking, your armour only applies if your body armour has the relevant damage resistance on it?

[McAllister]

I agree with Crim entirely. Stacking Defense feels like a waste of time, and Armor only slightly less so.

Alternative: a trainable Generic tree with Talents that implement some of these features. The problem is to make sure this doesn't overlap with or replace the Antimagic tree.

[jinsediaoying]

I agree with Housepet for the armor part. The armor's damage reduction should relates to its resistance

[Faeryan]

I agree with Crim entirely. Stacking Defense feels like a waste of time, and Armor only slightly less so.

Alternative: a trainable Generic tree with Talents that implement some of these features. The problem is to make sure this doesn't overlap with or replace the Antimagic tree.

Something like this?

Armor Expertise:

Skill 1: (fancy name here)
Make your armor negate its effective value (armor rating * hardiness) worth of elemental damage. Ranks: 1= 10%, 5= 50%

Example: 100/100% with rank 5 would do 50 negation, 60/30% would be rank 4 would be 7 negation.

Skill 2:
Make your armor resist more magic.
Rank 1 gives light & darkness
Rank 3 gives blight
Rank 5 resists all

Skill 3:
Make your shield reflect back to caster half its blocking value worth of damage. Sustained skill that affects your movement speed negatively since you have to walk more carefully behind your shield.

The numbers on the first skill are most likely a bit skewed but it'd have to be somehow related to armor hardiness as well instead of just armor.
Also not sure if it's possible from the coding point of view to make it only work for straight up bolts and beams instead of DoT or AoE. Skills might have a little impact on them as well but since they do less damage than straight single target bolts the calculation would have to be different.
Also there's the thing of different armor negating different damage types. Wouldn't imagine an iron plate to protect that much extra against lightning, ice or fire.

[Atarlost]

If this is a tree it won't automatically apply to NPCs and therefore won't properly make things harder for caster and mindcaster PCs.

[SageAcrin]

It also makes it a point sink, meaning that it needs to be powerful enough to compete with other talents-on classes that don't normally get this mitigation outside of AM Shield.

It's far messier that way.

Tying it to resistances is interesting, though that's why I suggested calculating the subtraction after resistance-that effectively does exactly that, causing a relatively smaller impact to become larger.

Another way to do it would be to have the Resistance value function as your Hardiness against the element, rather than using Armor Hardiness at all. That bugs me a little, as it allows no armor hardiness characters to tank magic, weakening the focus of the idea(which is more to buff heavy armor than all armor). Still, that's not too major of a deal.

A good compromise would be to have it average the two. That would give you 85% hardiness if you cap a resist and have 100% hardiness.

Having said that, the armor value granted should still be a small fraction of your actual armor, I say. 20% is a little high, 10% is a little low, but both make good target values. AM Shield is quite solid at what it does, and this is, in the end, a free but lower powered version of that, as a system element. Some caution should be taken, I think.

[HousePet]

Am thinking it would be nice to include spell save in the armour reduction formula.
Something like damage reduced = min( damage*hardiness, armour*attacker spellpower/defender spell save )
So at equal spellpower to save, you would be allowed to use your full armour reduction.
At spellpower being twice the save, you would only be able to use half.
A spellpower being half the save, you would be able to use double your armour, as long as hardiness allows it.

As an added bonus, spellsave becomes more interesting.

[jinsediaoying]

Am thinking it would be nice to include spell save in the armour reduction formula.
Something like damage reduced = min( damage*hardiness, armour*attacker spellpower/defender spell save )
So at equal spellpower to save, you would be allowed to use your full armour reduction.
At spellpower being twice the save, you would only be able to use half.
A spellpower being half the save, you would be able to use double your armour, as long as hardiness allows it.

As an added bonus, spellsave becomes more interesting.

The idea is interesting, but you messed up your formula...
it should be (k*armour*defender spell save/attacker spellpower)
where k is a constant modifier because I think k=1 is definately way too powerful.
I think k should be around 0.2, plus it should also check the resistance type of the armor

[HousePet]

Oops, I had spellpower and spellsave backwards in the formula.

I didn't put in the k factor, as the people with lots of armour generally have low spellsave, so that will act as a limiting factor by itself. Then if you add in the restriction of requiring the armour to have the relevant resistance, you would have not much benefit remaining.
Those with high spellsave tend to have low armour, so they won't get a huge benefit either.

[jinsediaoying]

Oops, I had spellpower and spellsave backwards in the formula.

I didn't put in the k factor, as the people with lots of armour generally have low spellsave, so that will act as a limiting factor by itself. Then if you add in the restriction of requiring the armour to have the relevant resistance, you would have not much benefit remaining.
Those with high spellsave tend to have low armour, so they won't get a huge benefit either.

but alot of talents grants ss, such as t3 of Veteran(?)(whatever the name is, the tree that grants passive stamina and life regain) will grant 60+ ss at level 5, also the Chant t1 and Thelorn race t2.
So it is definately too good to Thelorn Paladins, they can easily boost their ss over 100, and remember that sp is the hardest too boost power.

[jinsediaoying]

The resistance part is just for the sake of make style consists with shield

[Atarlost]

Making it contingent on the armor resisting the element is a bad idea I think. It makes it stronger for PCs who can consciously select their armor from everything generated to date in their game compared to NPCs who have their armor selected randomly once and much of the purpose of the idea is to buff brute NPCs against mage PCs.

[SageAcrin]

That's a pretty good argument against making it resistance based, yeah.

Another is that enemies can break 70% resistances, which may cause problems with some formula.

Spell save...hmmm. You could have Spell Save/Mindsave vs Spellpower/Mindpower function as the hardiness, if you wanted to be really clever. Like a halved version of the spell check formula. If you have the same save as they do power, your Armor Hardiness vs magic or mind skills is 25%. If you have 20 less, it is 0%. If you have 20 more, it is 50% and capped.

But it's true that that rewards some hybrids a lot more than standard fighters, which isn't entirely the goal. It's also hard to get enough save to matter at a lot of points. But it would make the impact a lot more noticeable when it worked right, than a simple cap on the extrapolated armor would, while still being balanced.

The only real downside is that physical save would get left out, though it's probably the most important save right now anyways...