Feedback: Armor Balance

[LadyGoo]

Nowadays the majority of the players use the cutthroat cuirass (CTC)s, since it gives agility bonus, can be crafted higher quality than the steel armor, gives all sort of bonuses. Meanwhile, it is much easier to craft than the steel armor.
The leather quality is not important, since you can spiral the leather by using high quality wax. Therefore, you would only need one hide for the high quality strings.

At the same time, the steel armor, that requires more resources, time and effort cuts your agility more and more, as the quality of the armor increases. The steel armor cannot go beyond the quality of the anvil, hammer, steel crucibles and etc., whereas the CTC can be upgraded almost endlessly.

It is kind of unbalanced:
1. Ctc, easy to craft, lots of bonuses and no debuffs.
2. Steel plate, hard to craft, no bonuses but higher agility debuff as the quality progresses. Which is illogical, since higher quality armor tends to be lighter and restricts the movement less.

There are a lot of armor types that are being unused:
- Leather armor use has significantly decreased since the ore can be found in form of boulders. We have had bronze armor in the second day of the world, so no-one needed to craft the leather armor and spent the leather for backpacks, leather pants and etc. Same for the boar tusk helmet.
- Steel helmet requires more materials and effort than the winget helmet, however it is worse than the winget helms.
- Same as for the steel for the bronze helms, except for the time when you have no iron available.
- The druid's helm and hirdsman's helmet have never been used, since the first one requires the 150k worth skill (by that time there is no need for them), the second one is just bad. The resources spent for them are better to be used for the winged helms as well.
- The chainmail shirt is also disregarded in early and mid game, since it drains the agility significantly and it is better to use better and more expensive armor.

Therefore, we have the following picture:
Earlygame: winged helm, bronze plate, leather pants, leather boots
Sub midgame: winged helm, steel plates, steel greaves, steel gloves
Midgame: dragonhelm or winged helm, CTC, steel greaves, steel gloves, rarely steel plates
Late-game: dragonhelm or winged helm, CTC, steel greaves, steel gloves

Shirts such as vapntreyiu and badger vests are quite balanced and widely used. Same for the bat capes.


New trends:
Leather boots might be used more for mass-guilding nowadays. They are also much cheaper than the ranger boots. So it is more or less balanced.
The leather armor and tusk helmets might be used by hermits later in the world, where there are no surface ore boulders left.

Disregarded armor list:
1. Steel helmet
2. Bronze helmet
3. Leather armor
4. Hirdsman's helmet
5. Druid helm
6. Сhainmail shirt
7. Boar tusk helmet


What could be done for balancing:
1. Increasing hitpoints of some disregarded armor, so it would be used for hunting more. A lot of people do not really engage in PvP, so the armor wear is more important for them, than the armor class.
2. Decreasing the agi penalty for the chainmail twice would make it more useful.
3. Decreasing the agility debuff for the steel armor as the quality of the armor grows
4. Re-considering the CTC base armor class (deflection and absorbtion), so you would actually have to choose between having higher agility (CTC) or more armor (steel plate).
5. Letting people to guild the leather armor, boar tusk helmet and the leather pants would make this armor type more feasible in the early-game.
6. Druid's helm should be completely re-considered and made as good as the winged helms because the druid helm requires the 150k nature skill.
7. Hirdsman's helmet should also be re-considered. Probably, it should have the same stats as the winged helm. So people would actually wear different helms. Or, the hirdsman's helmet could give buffs that is calculated from the stats of the nearby party members.
8. Steel helmet should be better than the winged helm. At least, it shouldn't have such agility debuff and maybe let players to guild it with feathers.

9. Some armor could give buffs that depend on the enemy you are fighting against (animal or human), or the time of the day and etc. Some armor could let you gild constitution, some - agility. Providing a variety of options for the armor and gilding could emerge visually different types of warriors and hunters.


#balance #armor

[Enjoyment]

Decreasing the agility debuff for the steel armor as the quality of the armor grows

Never understood, why better gear provides bigger debuff...

[zebratul]

...the ore can be found in form of boulders.

You should probably keep in mind the fact that not everybody joins the new world as soon as it's generated.
I've started playing around the 4th month of W9, and haven't seen a decent ore boulder until the map was expanded, generating new ones.

By that time all the boulders were long gone, and we had used leather armour and chain shirts excessively, until we had access to high Q wax and steel.
It helped us hunt and tame greatly, and i didnt feel like the armour was way too useless value-wise or had very high agi penalties.

[LadyGoo]

...the ore can be found in form of boulders.

You should probably keep in mind the fact that not everybody joins the new world as soon as it's generated.
I've started playing around the 4th month of W9, and haven't seen a decent ore boulder until the map was expanded, generating new ones.

By that time all the boulders were long gone, and we had used leather armour and chain shirts excessively, until we had access to high Q wax and steel.
It helped us hunt and tame greatly, and i didnt feel like the armour was way too useless value-wise or had very high agi penalties.

Meanwhile, you could buy some armor for a couple of flotsam from any other village.
The point was not that the leather armor is completely useless for the noobs, but that it could be used more widely in different situations. As in it would have its cons and pros. Using leather armor or bronze armor cannot save you from anyone more advanced, however, if they are good enough, why not to have some gilding slots to help you progress faster? A chain-mail with gilds could help you to stand against the beasts + give exp, perc or whatever you need.
So, a fairly weak character would prefer to use something like that, instead of jumping inside of a CTC that will not save it from pro-raiders.

Someone who wants to hunt and attempt to escape any PvP could have a use of armor that is cheaper to make, but has much more hitpoints and would wear off much slower.
Someone who is looking for PvP would prefer an armor with less hitpoints, but higher armor class.
This is what my village has been doing in the early-game. We had armor for hunting, and separate one for fighting.

[Ozzy123]

Decreasing the agility debuff for the steel armor as the quality of the armor grows

Why isnt that a thing yet lol

[ekzarh]

Sounds valid.

[Potjeh]

Flat damage reduction is nearly impossible to balance because the space between 0 damage ping and OHK is so tiny and there's lots of variables involved. Percentage armor plox.

[Patchouli_Knowledge]

I agree with Potjeh, your life is a virtually a boolean at the moment and it has been for virtually all of Haven since the very beginning. That said, I do agree with LadyGoo to an extent it is make more sense that better craft armor are less clunkier than shoddy once, but it should alway approach a limit but never reach it, Calculus sty;e.

[bojackson]

I agree, this is good stuff Goo, armor def needs attention (even if we at least see some small changes).

Also concerning the ease of acquiring metal early comes from all the boulders on the top layer. I think these should be reduced dramatically. First day everyone running around with tons of high end metal such as silver/gold seems silly.

Imo only low tier metals should spawn above ground. Like copper/tin (which should be reduced as is), maybe a few iron boulders but literally like only 10 in the entire world imo.

I like your 9th suggestion too, give some more variety to what armor can do for us.

[Enjoyment]

Everyone posting in this thread should keep in mind:

04 May 2016
[*] Redid pretty much everything equipment related except armor as a part of this change, significantly so by removing most native stat bonuses. We mean for armor values to be more integrated with this system as well, but we want to have a better damage model before we move forward with that, so this all mostly applies to clothing for now.

So devs have some plans for armor revamp.
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