Armour should block percentage of damage

[Potjeh]

What it says on the tin. I really don't like how damage is all or nothing these days, which renders some weapons totally useless (wood bow, I'm looking at you).

Instead of blocking x/x, make armour block x%/x%. Of course, this doesn't really scale well with quality, since you could theoretically get a set with over 100% protection and thus get healed by getting hit. But quality of stuff should matter, so it should be plugged into the damage formula somehow. For example, actual blocking value could be armour q / weapon q * base block value. This however gives advantage to weapons as the q rises, so perhaps weapons shouldn't get bonus damage from q.

Anyway, this could work well with potential future developments. In addition to damage, weapons could have armour piercing value, which would be a multiplier to their q for purposes of calculating how much damage gets through. So you could have military picks that have low base damage but virtually ignore armour, or sabres which have high damage but are crap against armour. Armour could, if multiple damage types are implemented (blunt/slash/pierce), have bonuses of it's own vs specific damage. So you could wear a balanced set, or put all in pierce protection (losing on other protection) if you're expecting to face archers.

[loftar]

Hm. There is some truth in what you say that damage is all-or-nothing, which I guess isn't particularly good. On the other hand, I don't immediately see how armor could meaningfully block percentages of damage, especially taken quality into account. Also, what I find the most reasonable aspect of the current armor model is that a weapon of particular materials and quality needs armor of matching materials and quality to be blocked, and I wouldn't want to just throw that property away. There may be some other approach that does away with the "hysteresis" in damage matching, though.

And yes, we do consider implementing different damage types from time to time. In the beginning, we wanted to avoid that in order not to complicate the system even more than it is, but there certainly is something to be said for it.

[Potjeh]

Anything particularly wrong with this?

actual blocking value could be armour q / weapon q * base block value

Percentages for blocking simply add up, like the current block values do.

[stickman]

wouldn't that make slings better then ranger bows simply because ranger bow q is hard to get up over 100 but slings are well over double the armour q?

120 q steel armour / q320 sling = .375 * base block

120 q steel armour / q100 ranger bow = 1.2 * base block

I think that if you moved to a system like this the q of the weapon should not matter for the % blocked as the q already determines the weapons damage.

[Potjeh]

Part of the problem is that slings can be made at crazy quality, which stems from how farming works. But there is a simple solution - don't give bonus damage for quality, just use it for armour penetration. Archers would be boned by that, so archery damage needs redoing too - I'm thinking remove the randomness, and make per/agi a multiplier to this new damage rather than the minimum damage for the current random range. Melee would get extra damage from strength, so it scales with the bonus HPs from constitution (ie people with same strength deal the same percentage of total HP to people with same con on every level of those stats if they have same tier equipment at same level).

[Granger]

Problem with the ability to 100% block damage is that even a whole army of low-level toons won't be able at all to defeat a single top-armored toon.

While it may be fun to be the one wading knee-deep through the blood of poor farmers trying to mount such a futile defense...
I think they should have a chance - which at the moment they absolutely didn't (except the wayout to logoff before getting aggroed).

This is why i think that the current combat system is somewhat broken.

[spectacle]

How about simply dividing all damage and armor values by N or so? Then armor and weapons would work like they do today, but fighters would be able to take a few hits before going down, depending on their HP. This would go a long way towards making attacks less all or nothing.
It could make hunting tedious though, since it would me a lot harder to kill animals before they run away, but then hunting could do with a complete revamp anyway