Armor Balancing
Mi, 12/08/2010 - 12:03
Since this has no thread yet:
Heavy Plate Mail seems to have no real upsides anymore with Rock Jelly Mail bumping up so much? Normal defense is close to equal, and added to that Rock Jelly Mail has no negative attack speed modifier and it has a very, very high defense against Piercing damage? Sounds a bit to me like Heavy Plate Mail needs something more.
Towards defense overall, I still don't feel that my armor actually saves me from a lot of damage. I'm mainly using full Drake Scale equipment now (except for the Swiftstrike Buckler) which has quite a low defense rating. I swapped to Rock Jelly Armor and a Rock Jelly Shield now to see how the change feels. Quite the disappointment still in my opinion. The attack speed bonus keeps me alive much longer than the damage reduction Rock Jelly offers me. The shields don't feel like they have a major difference in damage-soaking capabilities either. Perhaps I'm slightly biased in that opinion though, since I don't often have the need to shield for a prolonged time while wielding the Drake Scale/Swiftstrike Buckler set, so I don't break that shield so often.
Any other opinions about armour?
Mi, 12/08/2010 - 17:07
#2
Safety Dance
Originally, I thought the damage types were opposites.
Normal <-> Piercing and Elemental <-> Shadow
If you had high Normal Defence, Piercing stuff would smash straight through your armour.
If you had high Elemental Defence, Shadow stuff would eat you alive.
But apparently Normal is the norm.
Everything else is just specific.
Now, I don't know what they're trying to achieve with armour.
It doesn't protect you from damage passively. At least not to any noticeable degree.
Wearing the maximum amount of Normal Defence and getting attacked would reduce damage by like, three bars.
And it wouldn't even reduce damage from any other types.
Shields are probably even more imbalanced, since they have two stats, Health and Defence.
Some shields have more health than others, some have no defence in a stat and still absorb more damage than other shields with more defence.
Armour has gone from being well rounded to trivial with the armour update.
And with the monster damage upgrades have made it even more useless than before.
Of course, I've said all of this before, but whatever.
Mi, 12/08/2010 - 23:56
#3
Not only has armor moved away
Not only has armor moved away from well-rounded, most monsters now do two damage types in one hit. There's just no way these days that your armor will protect you against *any* monster. And I've tried outfitting myself vs wolvers/gremlins, but that has never had any positive effect (see my frustration in the Shields thread).
All this has led me to simply buy the armor/helm that gives me the biggest bars for my buck.
I can't follow how first swapping armor in a gate got disabled, then armor got made trivial.
Mi, 12/15/2010 - 23:33
#4
Cobalt/Defender seems a little weak at 2 star and VERY weak at 3
Bump.
Two star: Spiral Demo helm/armor seems to start around 30 normal, and goes up to 40 normal. It also has elemental defense, about 20 to 30. And 20 points of fire resistance. Health bonus +1.
So that's what two star gear is. Firebreak and Jelly are similar.
Another two star: Cobalt. You know, the Spiral vendors that sells competent equipment and recipes appropriate for any star level? Cobalt is normal 30 to 40. Same. Also has the health bonus. But no elemental, piercing, or shadow.
Well, Cobalt is the "basic". It's supposed to be enough, and there's better out there. Ok, fine. The "Basic" at 2 star seems a little weak, that's all.
Now, lets go to three star.
Solid cobalt? 32 up to 40, with +2 health. Wait, it doesn't get any better? Nothing but normal?
What are the shields like? Defender: Basic 2 star: Normal 30 to 40, piercing 15 to ... 28?.
Great Defender: The 3 star version: Normal maxes at 40, piercing at 30.
Odd, but the 2-star and 3-star armors are almost identical. Something seems off here.
I don't have any other 3-star items or recipes, and the wiki doesn't have any numbers for them. So all I can say at the moment is, at 10 heat the two star seems just about as good as the three star. And, the two star Spiral Demo stuff is strictly better than the 3 star "standard", and most of the 2 star stuff seems better overall.
Do, 12/16/2010 - 11:00
#5
Comments on plate armor
Incidentally, I recently acquired a Heavy Plate Shield, and can confirm that the defense is truly disappointing- it doesn't seem to be any better at absorbing damage than my Swiftstrike buckler, despite the fact that the buckler has much lower normal defense.
Furthermore, 5* plate stuff seems to offer only normal defense. And while it's close to the max... so are most of the other 5* armors, but the other options also throw in huge defense against an entire extra type of damage. And where Ancient plate offers penalties, the competition has bonuses instead. I agree with the comments that the shop description for plate stuff is truly uninspiring.
Fr, 12/17/2010 - 01:41
#6
Armours that have high damage
Armours that have high damage bonuses should not also have high defences and resistances and other good bonuses.
This seems like a no-brainer, really. It shouldn't need to be mentioned.
But compare Seraphic Mail to Sinister Skelly Suit. Same star level. Same normal defence. Skelly has slightly higher shadow defence, and isn't vulnerable to fire, but it has some other small status vulnerabilities. Seems balanced so far.
But wait! Seraphic has high poison resist. High curse resist. Low bonus damage to fiends. And high universal bonus damage, which is also applied in pvp. And the 5 star versions are even more overpowered.
Is about ten extra dimensionless units of shadow resistance really worth all that much? Really?
Armour balance really needs to be looked at. It is not hard to compare two items of the same star level and actually make them similar in power.
I question whether ANY armour should get a universal damage bonus. Even if you reduce all its resistances to 0, it would still be overpowered. That is how little resistances are worth compared to bonuses.
Fr, 12/17/2010 - 02:45
#7
I agree fully with you. The
I agree fully with you. The release of all that new equipment also makes me wonder if it was intended to be implemented somewhat balanced, or if they just inserted it and planned to take a look at it afterwards.
A main thing that needs to be kept in mind is that armor is not completely necessary. If you train yourself a bit at dodging attacks, then you can go perfectly without needing that defense bonus. Having a bonus penalty in return for a high buff is then completely pointless, because it doesn't add up with balancing.
You should try going in with your Spiral Brigandine and see the difference.
Overall I think armor makes very little difference. I changed my full Drake Scales to the full Heavy Demo gear. Those blue spiky blobs now do me 5ish damage instead of 7ish. Observed in the heat of battle, so bound to be inaccurate. And damage is probably variable anyway.
I never really noticed the difference in attack speed from the Drake Scales though, so I gladly got rid of them. And no, I've never used bombs. Heavy Demo just looked nicely overpowered and I needed that to compensate for my frustration over Heavy Plate.
The Heavy Plate shield is useless. It takes two hits from any type of monster to completely break it, no matter the damage type. The Rock Jelly shield, same number of stars, can take a lot more punishment. This isn't obvious at all from the stats, but in practise that's what I've seen time and again. Sadly better than using a shield, you could wield a Khorovod and hack yourself a way out of your troubles. I just don't like Khorovods. ;)