<<2 = A couple, not many.

There's 3 out of the eight with both armor and survival tert.

-Evran

* Prophet Hotoke Fuku-Nyorai snuck out of the shadow he was hiding in.

Heyo!

Time for a few more details that will hopefully reduce some of the fears and angst (and, knowing my luck, probably create more). Please keep in mind that there is a lot more to the overall picture, and that what might seem terrible now may not be so when all is said and done, and of course the reverse may also end up being true!


The big question so far has been, "Am I safe with my current skills?"

That depends.

There's a limit to how much I am willing or able to say at this point, but here's a couple of specifics:

(1) There is a 10% padding between the armor skill and evasion skill. In other words, as long as the difference between the two is 10% or less, you will be at zero hindrance -- if that were possible. It's not, and that leads us to the next point...

(2) No guild can work hindrance down to 0%. This means that you do not need to worry about getting to the point where you have 0% hindrance -- you just need to get to your minimum. Let's assume for a moment that the minimum hindrance on your leather armor is 10% (made-up number; keep in mind the minimum hindrance is skillset based). That means as long as your leather armor skill is within 20% of your evasion (10% padding plus the fact you can't get below 10% hindrance), you are at the lowest hindrance you can possibly achieve. The higher the minimum hindrance of your armor, the more wiggle room you have to maintain minimum hindrance. However, keep in mind that HP may be reducing your evasion by, say, 40% compared to that 10% the leather is reducing it, so don't just assume that having more wiggle room means the heavier armor is a better choice for you. This is doubly true because...


(3) All armor types will also have a maximum hindrance -- that is to say, a point at which the hindrance cannot possibly get worse. This is a very significant change on several levels, but the one I want to focus on now is that this means that some armors (cloth, leather, and depending on guild bone) will be less hindering at their absolute worst than (with paladins excepted) LP or HP. This is definitely not true in the live game right now, but will be with the changes. When combined with stealth hindrance factors, this means that the lighter armors will generally be a lot more friendly to survival skills overall.


That's enough for now, I think. Mostly I just want to make it clear that this isn't going to be a situation where you must keep your evasion and armor equal, or even necessarily close to even (although that will depend on your armor type to some extent). I also wanted to make it clear that thanks to the new max hindrance we are adding, some of the lighter armors will be both the hardest to maintain at minimum hindrance, but likewise have the least impact even if you have the worst possible hindrance.



- GM Dartenian

Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night! - Sarah Williams

Dart,

In one of your previous "this is where we're headed" posts about armor, you had said:

<<(4) When an attack does get past your front-line defenses (evasion, parry, shield), it will be contested against armor skill to determine the final protection factor of the armor. This means that keeping armor at or above the level of what you are hunting will have some tangible benefits by making your armor play a more vital role if a blow gets through your other defenses. Letting your armor skill fall too far behind the rest of your combat skills will result in the armor providing minimal protection.>>

Is that part of what you're talking about now, or does that come later?

Thanks,
-Death's Nemesis Karthor

So far, this sounds great. (especially for paladins, for obvious reasons)


-Mr. Glemm

I want to hear about how wearing plate or chain can help compensate 40% minimum evasion hindrance. I don't think only paladins/wms should be viable with heavier armors. Also, will you give us better information for armor hindrance? E.g.) Great hindrance on half plate = 35%.

Can you talk about protection and absorption?

---

Gonif,

Are you suggesting that a spell be written specifically to allow necromancers to move into an area protected by holy magic for the purpose of constructing a vulture heart candy trail for Khurek to follow?

-Totenus

>>i.e eliminating guild based advantages (hiding at melee, poaching etc)

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you play a survival primary guild? Honestly, both of the examples you cite seemed to be (IMHO) senseless penalties for non-primary guilds instead of well-designed perks for primaries. Survival is literally the skillset with the most perks for primaries, including but not limited to snipe (mundane or magical), passive bonuses to survival skills, etc.

The armor perk you are talking about (again, IMHO) is a well-designed perk for armor. Eliminating it would make the guilds more vanilla, not less, just like you stated.

---

"I hate you so much right now." -GM Armifer

On system-level things, our focus has shifted from guild-based to skillset-based modifiers. It's a simple and elegant way to approach the guilds from a very broad way: if your guild is meant to be sneaky, they're not going to be Survival Tertiary. If your guild is meant to be great wearing armor, they're not going to be Armor Tertiary, etc.

Guild distinction should exist on a level of specialization under this, not as excuses to remove themselves from greater trends for guild balance.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

> IMO the only way to effectively stop resourceful players from doing this without entirely disabling it/making it instant death would be to both separate ranks gained from TDPs


Changing how TDPs are determined has been under discussion a lot lately, and we've been gathering data to decide if we can realistically do it and what approach would be best. The reality is that the current system just encourages people to powertrain skills solely for mechanical gain, which not only puts excess strain on the system, but is detrimental to the RP environment we try to foster.


- GM Dartenian

Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night! - Sarah Williams

Yes, having skill respecs would be nice for major combat system changes.

One of the reasons I still train ME is "just in case" my choice of 2HE was a bad one once the combat changes hit.

-pete

Errr... I'm not sure how my question got turned into a Guild vs Skillset argument!

I run around with plate armor on my bard! It would just be nice to have some(more then now) benefit besides being cool. And so far, the evasion hindrance % doesn't look like its changing much(for my bard, because he has armor the same rank as evasion.)

---

Gonif,

Are you suggesting that a spell be written specifically to allow necromancers to move into an area protected by holy magic for the purpose of constructing a vulture heart candy trail for Khurek to follow?

-Totenus

>>I'd feel cheated if I had TDPs taken away.

I'm not sure he explicitly said removing TDPs? I thought it was a discussion of changing how they were awarded.

I would personally like more ways to use them: learn languages, combat feats, whatever.

---

"I hate you so much right now." -GM Armifer

>I'm not sure he explicitly said removing TDPs?

Hopefully not.

My concerns won't go away until I know exactly how it will change the game for me, and that probably won't happen for a while. It may never happen, because the data they collect may lead them to the conclusion that it's not a good idea to mess with TDPs.

>purchasing combat feats with TDPs

I'm not sure there are enough combat feats to go around for this to be doable. Maybe in the new combat system, but that remains to be seen.

---

Formerly Known As Nitish

>Alisyn edges away from you.

> I'm not sure he explicitly said removing TDPs? I thought it was a discussion of changing how they were awarded.


This is why it sometimes doesn't pay to say anything at all. People can jump from 'We are looking at ways to change how they are earned to reduce the countless problems associated with the current system, including encouraging people to powertrain skills they never use and are totally OOC for them' to 'They are removing my TDPs!" so incredibly easy.

That's not to say that couldn't happen since absolutely nothing has been decided at this point, but at this point its a huge leap of logic and an unlikely one. There are a truly lot more options than just wiping all TDP purchases clean and then re-awarding under a new scale that results in a net loss.


- GM Dartenian

Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night! - Sarah Williams

>It may never happen, because the data they collect may lead them to the conclusion that it's not a good idea to mess with TDPs.


The data we are collecting is more related to "How can we do this with the least impact to the existing status quo", not whether or not it's a good idea to mess with it. To be perfectly frank, that concept that the current system is hideously broken and needs to be rebalanced to something that doesn't encourage people to mindlessly grind skills they never intend to use has been discussed and generally agreed upon by all involved for years now. It's just a case of being such a high impact change that it tends to get put off and set aside. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, I suppose), the current Dev team isn't particularly afraid of looking at high impact changes if they truly are in the best interest of the game as a whole...and revising the TDP system falls squarely into that category for many reasons, both those mentioned already and others like, oh, the periodically recurring dead horse debates over how unfair the current TDP system is to some guilds.


- GM Dartenian

Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night! - Sarah Williams

My concern with the upcoming armor changes is that they don't seem to leave much room for changing your mind with regard to which armor type you wish to wear once you've gained any significant skill. Because armor trains concurrently with other defenses, any new armor type that you haven't already been training seems doomed never to catch up, particularly for armor terts.

While it may be undesirable to have characters wearing a mismatched collection of armor pieces for the sake of TDPs, I'm not sure it's any more desirable to have them doing the same for the sake of keeping their options open by trying to keep any armor type they may ever potentially want to wear at a compatible level with their other defenses.

It may still be in the player's best interest to just eat the penalties and train multiple armors anyway, lest he find himself regretting a choice he made long ago, possibly when the rules and desirability of any given choice were entirely different.

---

You suddenly feel nauseous, as if you'd been doing performance art.

<<I already plan to continue wearing 3 armors plus shield,

Currently my plan is to get the lightest possible versions of several armor types and train enough strength to be able to carry them. Then I'll work them all on a given hunt, wearing only one kind at a time. All it takes is a retreat and two seconds for a script to completely swap sets, so should be easy to keep them all moving without having to suffer the penalty for mixing types.

---

You suddenly feel nauseous, as if you'd been doing performance art.

<<Which actually leads me to a question for Dart... Is the percentage difference based on the evasion skill or the armour skill? So for example, if I have 200 evasion and 150 in armour is it 'armour is 25% less than evasion' or is it 'evasion is 33% higher than armour?'

I asked this over in the Thief folders not really realising it was the Thief folders, so I'll repost here where you're probably actually reading, Dart.

Put another way, do we need to keep armour within a percentage of evasion, or evasion within a percentage of armour in order to minimize hindrance?

-Evran

* Prophet Hotoke Fuku-Nyorai snuck out of the shadow he was hiding in.

Cant wait for the armor changes! Im super excited.