Animal armor critique

[Fostik]

Well, everyone understand that you need to do something with boat hunting on world start, but absolute armor absorption isn't very good mechanic.
Before there were armor, you were able to choose your fighting style: low damage attacks at high rate, or rare heavy damage attacks between dozens of maneuvers, and for the current state most of attacks are useless for PvE, while only opportunity knocks and melee attacks with big damage scale effective in hunting before you will get good quality weapon and hundreds of strength. I'm not even speaking about unarmed attacks.
And in any way, boat hunting becoming real with first metal in village - bronze sword or spear makes hunting from boat easy as it were before nerf.

This really requires some re-balance or rework.

Make it so, that hunting from boat will be just harder, rather than impossible on world start. I really don't see a reason why game cant reward you, if you will pay enough time, skill and some risk?
Just make a 50% damage absorption, or increase creatures HP.

[Belliaum]

Since I am the n00b that inspired this post ill just say that I can understand nerfing using a sling to kill bears from a boat as i did way back when i started to play this game. However my boar spear simply cannot damage a bear fast enough to kill it. This time i also had some lag and almost died to the fricken bear. Please give us forever n00bs a way to access stuff that we could do way back when i started playing. Needing q 200+ weapons just to kill bears seems a bit excessive.

[MagicManICT]

Please give us forever n00bs a way to access stuff that we could do way back when i started playing. Needing q 200+ weapons just to kill bears seems a bit excessive.

Well, you are getting, typically, between q150 and q300 goods from them. We're also talking one of the most dangerous solitary animals in the modern world. It's just a question of what size of bear are we dealing with... smaller brown bears, or grizzlies?

I do find the "armor" a terrible band aid at an attempt to fix hunting exploits, and not a very good one, either. I think this can be chalked up with failed experiments like cheese racks. I think the village I started with were killing bears two or three days in (whatever it was to get the first metal bars out of mining).

[Zentetsuken]

I think the armour mechanic is pretty cool tbh, it certainly threw a bit of a wrench in to day 1 bear kills for many people.

I don't think that hunting in general is so reliant on hundreds of strength and high q metal weapons though, but maybe it actually should be.

I think it would balance things out to make mellee weapons damage quality just the way that archery used to and nerf UA damage versus animals. It's unrealistic to assume that you would be able to land a punch on a squirrelly fast fox, let alone hurt a massive thick skinned boar or bear with your knuckles. It would add a more realistic curve to the idea of hunting, having even pvp veterans rely on ranged hunting until quality or stats are boosted to a certain point.

In exchange we could implement more realistic buffs like making archery debuff animal speed upon hit, or simply increase bleed.

This would make the safer alternative of ranged hunting more realistic and more accessible to all players, and force the idea of meleeing an animal with weapons or fists to be a slightly later game feat. This is also more realistic because it would take a very skilled hunter with very well made tools a lot of effort to cleanly and efficiently approach an animal like a bear and slice it in the most perfect way to avoid spoiling it.