Armor Use and the Woes of Negative Armor Rerolls

[Mystry]

I had a multi-page long essay about armor use and how its currently impacting the game for the worse, but it was lost when the forum decided to sign me out when I clicked 'preview'.

I don't have the energy to try and retype the whole thing so this is the short version:

Failing armor use checks causing negative defensive rerolls is too punishing, especially since you can only train up to double the skill rank of the DC check that your armor set up checks against (E.G. you can only train up to ~140 in armor use (aka having d240 in checks) when using light armor since your DC target is 120). This results in, when fully trained, 50% failure chances on armor check rolls which can cause multiple crippling defensive rerolls in a game where having one bad defensive reroll can end your current outing or just kill you period (looking at you warhammers/polehammers with crush/puncture damage that ignores most armor reduction and has huge damage ranges).

This also practically forces characters that don't thematically want to use more than light armor (or armor at all, like mine) to train in heavy armor so they can inflate their armor use skill to hopefully minimize failures, which is a break between gameplay and RP theme. And if your character is like mine, it means also putting magic training on hold because holding channels with medium or heavy armor is an exercise in futility.

I suggest one (or more) of the following:
A. Increase the range by which you can gain skill training from armor use practice by 200%; aka instead of being capped at 140 for light armor, cap it at 420. This gives d520 rolls against a check of 120 (if wearing a full suit), which is ~23% chance of failure instead of 50% chance of failure when fully trained.
B. Nix failed armor use rolls causing negative defensive rerolls period and have it affect dice sides instead; even then I'd suggest lessening the severity of what they do.
C. Cause failed armor use rolls to only result in failed negative defensive rolls for dodge, leaving block/parrying rolls untouched. This would feed into how heavy armor users don't rely on dodge as much anyway because of encumbrance and allow other trained skills the opportunity to 'save the day' if a bad armor check roll gets you.

Share your perspectives on armor use below.

[Lysse]

I mean, I think armor use hitting people with negative rerolls is fine. But I think it's too punishing for the heavy armor users, who's whole thing should be that they get hit more often, and just take less damage as a result. It's hard to make too many suggestions until the game is in a more fully realized state, but I think there's a couple of things that could be done, that would help the people hurting the most (the heavy armor folks), without almost fully trivializing the armor hinderance penalties for people in light armor. I think it's fine if someone gets hit with a -1 or -2 negative reroll every once in a while, that's just a part of what makes participating in combat risky.

I think that the heaviest armor (like plate) could probably do with an improvement to their damage soak ranges - you're going to just get hit more, by virtue of your defensive skills being penalized, so I think it makes sense and is pretty fair to up most of the damage resistances by 10 to 15% (except crushing and puncture, which I wouldn't increase more than 5% or so).

I think that the actual hinderance rerolls could be adjusted down to be stepping up in partial increments, so instead of hitting 5 and 8 negative rerolls, people are capping out at 4 negative rerolls for the worst failures.

A gear adjustment ability for the Heavy Armor specialization guilds that lowers the hinderance check difficulty would also be good - I'd make it so that the ability itself only innately helps with Heavy armor, and use the Class Spec Bonus feature to give Dreadnoughts a further improvement to Heavy armor, while letting Guardians help all armor classes with lowered hinderance checks.

[Gorth]

The grind itself is a real nightmare, if I'm being honest. You can get to a range, even for heavy armor users, where you can only get practice if you have really high DC, but but you cannot get your armor roll high enough to consistently beat it. And when you don't, you take -5 rerolls. I think increasing the range at which you can gain practice would be fine, as well as making the affect of negative rerolls on even just parry be less. I think that would be a neat way to make parry feel decent. Parrying attacks is usually about knowing combat and being able to read your opponent, anyway. Less movement overall, if you do it right.

[Gorth]

I forgot to mention that if you are a heavy armor user, you also have to deal with the fact that encumbrance gives you negative rerolls. And we don't have Strength to lessen this, anymore.

[Adresin]

So first let me respond to the comment about being able to train up to twice your check. That's not true across the board. Alia is in full plate right now and at the bottom of armor is this.
Armor Hindrance Check: d454 vs 339

Even with that, I can't train armor use at all, and the 339 is only as low as it is because of quality pieces. So we're looking at around a 75% failure rate... Note I said around. I'm too lazy to do the math. But it's pretty awful.

When I was training yesterday, I was regularly getting a -8 due to armor. Ouch!

I know there's the guardian tactics thing to give I think it's a 30% reduction, but that either isn't working or what it changes is hidden. I'm not sure which. Just making the skill training more forgiving and capping or spreading out the progression of negative rerolls would make a huge difference.

[DietCrack]

Created an account just to post here, since I feel like it's worth addressing.

New player here who started out a little over two months ago.

Personally, I think the Armor Hindrance skill should be way more beneficial than it was before.

In of itself, encumbrance is already a penalty for wearing better armor. I currently wear full ridgeleather (except for boots) and carrying just that with my weapon puts me at the end of encumbrance one, which means that carrying just a little more will put me on encumbrance 2, which tanks my defenses with negative rerolls. By virtue of being heavier, plate armor already increases your encumbrance, way past that, which gives you negative rerolls by default which doesn't seem to be mitigated by the Armor Use skill. This is not good.

Now add in the new changes to hindrance, and the fact the skill doesn't raise more to give any appreciable difference (in my case, I'm rolling roughly a D400 vs 300) and what was already a pretty slow grind is 5 times as bad now for me when it comes to combat skills. I went from (roughly) having to go back for medical treatment at every 5 skill points increase where I'm at to less than one, since negative rerolls means you're not just getting hit more, you're also getting hit with bigger hits. This is doubly not good.

It seems that everyone here agrees that as it is the hindrance is bad, so I'm looking forward to see what changes (if any) are made for that. My two cents on this, coming in as a fresh player, is that it would make more sense if Armor use actually helped encumbrance reduction in a way instead of just randomly making you not take a huge penalty while fighting. Contrary to what most people think, plate armor, while heavier was still pretty mobile, and you can find videos of folk running around and doing flips in late medieval plate.

As it is, funnily enough, I'm tankier if I go fight mobs naked instead of having my set of rigid leather equipped, since by laws of averages I don't get hit as often, even if the overall damage per hit is higher.

[Squeak]

I don't really have much to say in this, yet, having not really experienced all these woes ... but.

I wear 45 pounds of gear, including armor (1/2" steel plate), on a regular basis. While the stuff is heavy, it's secured around my body in such a way that it doesn't really effect mobility much. I've been meaning to suggest that the "worn" weight of armor, by having it securely strapped around the body, should, in effect, apply only a portion of it's weight to overall encumbrance. Perhaps it only comes into affect once you meet, or exceed, the threshold for wearing it and applies a % of weight reduction based on how much over the skill you are. Sort of as a way to show that a character is becoming more and more comfortable with the armor so that it effects them less and less.

I'm not sure how this would coincide with some abilities reducing overall hindrance, though. I'll follow up more after I play around with it some.

[jerc]

To me, it feels like the core issue is that the way that heavy armor sets out to accomplish its goal is also in direct opposition to that goal. Ignoring offense rolls, we can think of armor classes as lying on a spectrum of "hit less/hurt more" to "hit more/hurt less." With how damage works off of end rolls though, these are the same thing. A linear increase in the opponent's end roll will both increase their hit frequency and damage per hit. There isn't really a way to avoid this without decoupling the damage roll from the hit roll entirely, or by pushing the damage absorption of heavy armor much higher to compensate. Though with the latter approach, I would expect to see a meta emerge where people wear heavy on vitals and light everywhere else so as to benefit from having both good defense rolls and a damage sponge where it counts most.

Apart from a drastic change to how damage is calculated, I wonder if armor hindrance couldn't be simplified so as to be easier to understand. Rather than a roll to determine whether to add a reroll penalty, why not simply a flat penalty that comes out to the same-ish roll distribution? At the end of the day, all of these reroll modifiers and reroll modifier modifiers average out to some distribution over the die sides.

[Dean]

Created an account just to post here, too, after multiple people prodded me to put these thoughts here so they aren't lost.

I'm new; I've been playing for just under two months. I don't have any context for why this system was thought to be a good idea, nor any attachments to it or reservations about it lingering from time on COGG or old CLOK or whatever. I do not have a legacy character with enough unobtainably-high legacy-skill to simply ignore the issue; I have only my honest reaction to things as they have been implemented.

In frankness: This sucks, and has turned my Guardian grind from 'difficult, slow, but ultimately rewarding' to 'tedious, expensive, and thoroughly demotivating'. A grind is a grind, and prior to the hindrance 'fix' I would've said the CLOK 2 combat grind was right in that 'goldilocks zone' between too-quick progress that feels empty, and too-hard progress that doesn't feel worth it.

I've boiled down my thoughts to the macro- and micro-level to try to put words to how this has been detrimental to the play experience for me. For context, my character is a Guardian, wearing mostly Superior Ridgeleather, using a round shield and various hafted weapons. I happen to own a set of average iron/steel plate armor, that I cannot wear anymore, at all; wearing it prior to this change got my Armor Use up to 481, where it stopped progressing. Thereby, my roll is 481 vs 300.

At a macro-level, this means that ~62% of my hindrance rolls are failures, and roughly a third are a penalty of -3 or more. I regularly see the -4 to -8 penalties; I get something -7 to -8 in each fight with any mob, on average. I measure my progress by how quickly my skill improves against a superior-skill opponent, compared to how often I have to go back to the healer for a major wound to a vital hit location.

Before the change, I averaged four skill levels in Shield Use before I needed the healer. Afterward, I average two. This means, overall, the number of mandatory pauses to travel a long distance, the time spent healing, and the riln spent paying the healer, has doubled. Because of this, my training is no longer profitable, meaning I am also spending about half of my time doing other activities to gather riln. Overall, this comes out to about a third of the grinding speed I was enjoying before abilities were introduced.

To say this has put a damper on my previous excitement for the ability release is an understatement.

At a micro-level, I'd like to present a few specific cases - individual rolls at the terminal - to explain why it feels awful to play a Guardian right now.

Code: Select all

[DefenseAnalysis:2, ArmorHinder:-7]
You follow up with a bash at a dark-green forest drake with your ridgeleather shield!  Melee(d985)(-6.75x):19 vs Dodge(d1350(-2x)):19 = 0 (0%)
   dodged!

This is a new (to me) ability, Followup Bash! I got a lucky roll and proc'd an extra hit after landing a hit with my warhammer. That's great! I've been fighting this mob for a few rounds, and have built up enough Deconstructed Defense from that brawl to give it a -2x reroll, and that paid off. It rolled a 19! I should have a pretty good chance of giving it a good thrashing!

And then I take -7x on my attack, also roll a 19, and whiff.

The following sorts of thoughts come to mind in this scenario:
1. Why did I bother learning this ability?
2. Why do I bother using heavy armor?
3. Why does wearing the armor my class is expected to wear, in some cases required to wear to make its abilities function, make me worse at fighting?
4. Why didn't I just roll up a Duelist instead?

Those aren't good vibes.

Code: Select all

[TrueStrike, DefenseAnalysis:2, ArmorHinder:-5]
You make a calculated strike at a dark-green forest drake with your bronze warhammer!  Melee(d1037)(-3.75x):9 vs Dodge(d1350(-2x)):444 = -435 (-41%)
   dodged!

Here's an attempted True Strike. It gives me an extra bonus reroll! Plus, the mob has Deconstructed Defense going. Surely, I think, this once-per-thirty-seconds ability will get some consistent damage in. The mob even rolled poorly - not even a third of its die sides!

And then I take -5x on my attack, roll a 9, and whiff, because somehow the armor I am required to wear for my class to function inhibits me 5 times more severely than something I spent an ability slot on to perform once every half-minute.

The above thoughts all come to mind once again.

Then, let's look at my own defenses for an example.

Code: Select all

[Encumbrance, ArmorHinder:-8]
A dark-green forest drake bites at you with her teeth!  Melee(d1350):920 vs Dodge(d976(-9.5x)):49 Block(d988(-7.05x)):47 Parry(d1039(-8.5x)):96 = 824 (61%)
   14 pierce damage (38%) (right arm, vambraces)

Ouch. The mob rolled pretty well! Thankfully, I've diligently managed my encumbrance, and evenly (and at great expense) trained all of my defenses without neglecting any, so there's a good chance I'll mitigate enough of the roll to reduce it into Armor Deflection range and make it glancing -

And then I take -8x on the defense roll, and none of the time and effort spent on meticulous weight- and gear-management, considering how much food, bandages, and lantern fuel I can carry without hitting Enc 3, and money spent on maintaining Dodge despite the encumbrance penalties over the past month and a half go down the drain and every roll result is under 100, just like I was rolling on day one, before I did any grinding at all.

Thankfully, I am playing it smart: I'm fighting mobs that deal damage of a type my armor is pretty resistant to. This isn't a warhammer, or a poleaxe, or a morningstar, or anything like that.

This is the best-case scenario for me - and I am still losing.

The thought that comes to mind, here, is very simple:

Why did I waste my time training any of these skills, if the armor I want to wear will negate their use nearly two-thirds of the time? Why did I spent three ability slots on Block Proficiency to get +0.75x of a reroll on a single defense type when hindrance will, on a coin toss, penalize me for two- to three times that amount?

Why am I even trying to make this work?

I'm not trying to play optimally. I understand I'm a noob, and my setup won't be the best. I know using hand-and-a-half weapons one-handed is just kind of worse than using a normal one-handed weapon. I'm not asking to obliterate everything in some kind of self-indulgent power fantasy; I'm fine with being functional, if mediocre.

My Guardian cannot functionally Guard himself, with all of his defenses available, for more than fifteen minutes of combat, right now.

How the hell am I supposed to protect someone else?

----------------------------------------------

TL;DR playing Guardian sucks and feels bad because hindrance is too punishing and there's no way to grind out of it being too punishing. I can barely play the game, and not for a lack of stubbornly trying anyway. Other folks with more experience with the system have presented a bunch of solutions and I'm fine leaving figuring out an answer to them; I'm new here, I won't pretend like I know best. I just know something's wrong.

[Lysse]

Though with the latter approach, I would expect to see a meta emerge where people wear heavy on vitals and light everywhere else so as to benefit from having both good defense rolls and a damage sponge where it counts most.

This is one of the reasons I don't necessarily think that improving the skill training range beyond 1.5x or so the challenge is the best solution. If the point of heavy armor is that it's intended for specialized training, you can offset that by upping the damage soak a fair bit, increasing the hindrance penalties a bit to discourage people who aren't class specced for heavy armor, and then increasing the Tactics benefit (when that's functioning correctly) so that i helps make up the difference. I think that + turning the failures into partial rerolls (for ALL armor classes, not just heavy) should go a long way towards making it feel better, while not rewarding people who are going to try to game the system as a non-heavy specialist.

edited to add:

I also think, especially with regards to changing learn rates or skill challenge thresholds/etc., it's generally best to both be pretty conservative with improving those rates to the benefit of the player, as well as changing them based on the current game state. Early release is early release, and it feels way worse to have something over-tuned and then nerfed, than it does to have something tuned up 2 to 3 times as we test things.

[Gorth]

Pretty much identical experience to Dean.

I don't know how to balance games. And I know that this game is still in functional rewrite, or port, or whatever you want to call it. I'm sure that when CLOK went down and we moved to Somnium and then COGG, the players of CLOK felt similarly. But from what I've been told, the grind wasn't anything like this, in the beginning of COGG.

We had our characters, for some of us capped with years of grinding both for experience and for the money to get our really specifically made armor and weapons, and special restrings, and all of that. And now it's gone. Which, okay, that stuff happens. I'm not sitting here demanding we get special treatment because we lost our characters. But I don't know. It just feels like a lot of us left our concept behind and looked at the new system and went, 'oo! All the stuff I wanted to do!' But the grind is harsh, I've seen a lot of concepts flushed because of how classes are placed across societies, the economy is bad and is only going to get worse, and it's hard to get anywhere roleplay-wise because a lot of old players just have it all. That isn't to say that old players should stop doing what they're doing. It isn't your fault. I'm not even asking for anything in particular. But I figured I would pop up to say that I've seen people kind of ragging on newer players for having a hard time of it and expressing such. But it's rough.

It's a minority, though, and I appreciate all the players who have been trying to talk about statistics and how we can better the problems.

I'm not sure how probabilities roll out with such a large skill spread in this game, but I still think condensing rerolls is a good idea. We added this new concept of partial rerolls. Why don't we use that a lot more? Make them rarer? The defense focus abilities only give, what, 0.1-0.25 rerolls? Same with the melee and ranged focus abilities, if I recall. If armor is so demanded with how the combat system works, I feel that there needs to be some leeway. It might result in the playerbase as a whole being generally more powerful, but what I think it actually would mean is that methods of gaining or taking away rerolls are going to be pretty strong. Which is okay, I think. They are meant to be cornerstones of how someone fights.

[Mystry]

I'm just popping back in my own thread to gently point out that all of the Woes exhibited above also apply to light and medium armor users as well. It's not JUST a heavy armor problem; you will get nailed with severe negative rerolls in light armor too, especially if you actually want to stick to using light/medium armor and not deliberately train in heavy armor to inflate your armor use skill. And even if you do, you'll still fail rolls and get nerfed in combat rounds very frequently.

I just don't want light and medium armor to fall by the wayside in terms of relevance when it comes to this.

[Lysse]

I'm just popping back in my own thread to gently point out that all of the Woes exhibited above also apply to light and medium armor users as well. It's not JUST a heavy armor problem; you will get nailed with severe negative rerolls in light armor too, especially if you actually want to stick to using light/medium armor and not deliberately train in heavy armor to inflate your armor use skill. And even if you do, you'll still fail rolls and get nerfed in combat rounds very frequently.

I just don't want light and medium armor to fall by the wayside in terms of relevance when it comes to this.

I feel like upping the training max to 1.5 times the challenge rating (and seeing how that feels before going further up) and lowering the maximum reroll penalty to -4 using partial rerolls would probably help alleviate a lot of this, tho - which is actually why I suggested those specifically :) I didn't want people in the lighter armor to get totally rekt. As it stands, it seems like it's not the presence of a penalty that hurts, so much as it's just the harshness of the penalty. It may not "make sense" for some people to wear heavier armor to train (I don't really agree with that line of thinking personally, but to each their own), but if the training cap is raised to 5 times the amount, it means that someone who only wears light armor for combat can just grind up their armor use through heavy armor, making it trivial to wear light armor at all. That feels a bit unfair to the people who are investing in heavy armor, who would be "stuck" (compared to light armor users) at a permanently higher challenge rating, that they can't alleviate.

It also might help when padded armor is something that's available to players, as I think that was a lower hindrance than leather or fur. I think I live, personally, in a world where when my Rook dons armor, it's okay if they have a harder time of wearing it compared to my Berserker - because that's kind of what the combat specializations are supposed to do, be better at fighting!

[Mystry]

I'm just popping back in my own thread to gently point out that all of the Woes exhibited above also apply to light and medium armor users as well. It's not JUST a heavy armor problem; you will get nailed with severe negative rerolls in light armor too, especially if you actually want to stick to using light/medium armor and not deliberately train in heavy armor to inflate your armor use skill. And even if you do, you'll still fail rolls and get nerfed in combat rounds very frequently.

I just don't want light and medium armor to fall by the wayside in terms of relevance when it comes to this.

I feel like upping the training max to 1.5 times the challenge rating (and seeing how that feels before going further up) and lowering the maximum reroll penalty to -4 using partial rerolls would probably help alleviate a lot of this, tho - which is actually why I suggested those specifically :) I didn't want people in the lighter armor to get totally rekt. As it stands, it seems like it's not the presence of a penalty that hurts, so much as it's just the harshness of the penalty. It may not "make sense" for some people to wear heavier armor to train (I don't really agree with that line of thinking personally, but to each their own), but if the training cap is raised to 5 times the amount, it means that someone who only wears light armor for combat can just grind up their armor use through heavy armor, making it trivial to wear light armor at all. That feels a bit unfair to the people who are investing in heavy armor, who would be "stuck" (compared to light armor users) at a permanently higher challenge rating, that they can't alleviate.

It also might help when padded armor is something that's available to players, as I think that was a lower hindrance than leather or fur. I think I live, personally, in a world where when my Rook dons armor, it's okay if they have a harder time of wearing it compared to my Berserker - because that's kind of what the combat specializations are supposed to do, be better at fighting!

Increasing the range at which you can gain skill training doesn't leave heavy armor users 'behind' or 'stuck' - they *also* would be able to train up beyond the current limit and reach a point where they can actually fight in their chosen armor without being inordinately crippled.

Also while it isn't the focus of this thread, I fundamentally and strenuously disagree with the notion that it is okay for some characters to be flat out worse than others at a gameplay topic as broad as combat itself. You can say that a berserker should do better than a rook when fighting up close with axes and that's fine, but trying to say that berserker should just be better than rook in combat period? No. That's not something that I will ever agree with. In a perfect world every class or guild should be able to excel in combat by leveraging its individual strengths (except from those that are clearly and obviously not meant to engage in combat at all, like artisans). Of course this isn't a perfect world and its a balancing nightmare, but I digress.

When it comes to armor and classes engaging in combat that don't like to be wearing armor like rooks and elemancers, my observation has been that it's a balancing act. You have to put up with dropping channels because not wearing armor when in combat is just asking to die or be non-profitable from more healer costs; but you can't wear medium or heavy armor because then all of your roundtime will be eaten up by reapplying channels and you won't be able to cast a single thing (doubly so since you can't pick up quickchannel adept/master as channeling skill is disabled right now). But in the current system, wearing light armor and simply dealing with losing a channel every now and then still isn't enough, because you can't train your armor use high enough to not be constantly smacked with severe armor hindrance penalties despite only wearing light armor. So you're stuck in a weird and disheartening spot where you can't grind without armor or you'll just lose all your riln doing so from massive healer costs (and repair costs for clothes since those have very little durability compared to armor), but you also can't grind with armor because armor hindrance is making you fight worse than a fresh character with no skills at all. And you can't improve armor use slowly over time in order to reduce those penalties because you reach your skill training cap too early, making you still have very high chances of severe penalties even at capped armor use skill (for light armor).

So you're left with one option:

Forget the magic, put on heavy armor, and use the higher armor hindrance check difficulty to grind armor use higher like a sword swinger (or axe swinger or mace swinger or what have you), except with none of the abilities or bonuses or benefits that an actual sword swinger would have.

So yes, I consider it a problem that I am forced by the mechanics of the game to not play the guild fantasy that I chose.

[Lysse]

Also while it isn't the focus of this thread, I fundamentally and strenuously disagree with the notion that it is okay for some characters to be flat out worse than others at a gameplay topic as broad as combat itself. You can say that a berserker should do better than a rook when fighting up close with axes and that's fine, but trying to say that berserker should just be better than rook in combat period? No. That's not something that I will ever agree with. In a perfect world every class or guild should be able to excel in combat by leveraging its individual strengths (except from those that are clearly and obviously not meant to engage in combat at all, like artisans). Of course this isn't a perfect world and its a balancing nightmare, but I digress.

I imagine if Rooks and Elemancers and Primalists and any other class specialization is intended to be as proficient in armor use as the Combat Specializations, their class specs would give them a reduction to their armor hindrance penalties.

[Gorth]

I think that is a simplification of the point made.

[Adresin]

I just want to jump in here with the reminder that these abilities came in specifically so we could test them. The armor use fix just came in at the same time.

I'm getting the feeling that some have the impression this is how it's intended, and I just don't think so. Balance is clearly needed, and this is hopefully a good place to give our feedback for that balance. I get the feeling some are taking this as it's always going to be this way though, and that doesn't seem very likely. I've been talking about the issues with armor use skill training for a while and i'm glad to see others addressing it as well, but we shouldn't look at it as trying to convince Rias and others there's a problem. Rather, we can give them the data and ideas and let the adjustments happen when they do. Yes, it's true that right now Alia can't really fight much, but due to a lack of viable targets she couldn't before anyway. It'll get fixed I'm sure.

[Lysse]

I just want to jump in here with the reminder that these abilities came in specifically so we could test them. The armor use fix just came in at the same time.

I'm getting the feeling that some have the impression this is how it's intended, and I just don't think so. Balance is clearly needed, and this is hopefully a good place to give our feedback for that balance. I get the feeling some are taking this as it's always going to be this way though, and that doesn't seem very likely. I've been talking about the issues with armor use skill training for a while and i'm glad to see others addressing it as well, but we shouldn't look at it as trying to convince Rias and others there's a problem. Rather, we can give them the data and ideas and let the adjustments happen when they do. Yes, it's true that right now Alia can't really fight much, but due to a lack of viable targets she couldn't before anyway. It'll get fixed I'm sure.

I appreciate the kind and thoughtful approach to this discussion. I'm going to excuse myself from this thread, because people are getting pretty hostile to what I thought were pretty reasonable and tempered suggestions made in good faith, but I do appreciate you taking the time to be civil and level headed.

[Dean]

Also while it isn't the focus of this thread, I fundamentally and strenuously disagree with the notion that it is okay for some characters to be flat out worse than others at a gameplay topic as broad as combat itself. You can say that a berserker should do better than a rook when fighting up close with axes and that's fine, but trying to say that berserker should just be better than rook in combat period? No. That's not something that I will ever agree with. In a perfect world every class or guild should be able to excel in combat by leveraging its individual strengths (except from those that are clearly and obviously not meant to engage in combat at all, like artisans). Of course this isn't a perfect world and its a balancing nightmare, but I digress.

I imagine if Rooks and Elemancers and Primalists and any other class specialization is intended to be as proficient in armor use as the Combat Specializations, their class specs would give them a reduction to their armor hindrance penalties.

It is not a reason for dedicating time to training with the armor and raising the skill, regardless of Abilities, to be inadequate for fighting in it to at least a mediocre degree.

A simple solution that comes to mind, is for the maximum penalty to begin at -3 to -0 at each 25% increment of the endroll percentage - and for armor specializations to improve that scale by 1, up to -2 to +1, if every armor slot is occupied by armor of the specialized type (to prevent opportunistic mismatching as described above).

Then, completely uncap skill gains. Spending hundreds of hours in combat to slowly-but-surely reach 2500 Armor Use Skill, and thus secure a +1 reroll most of but not all of the time, seems like a just reward for the effort put in - and for everyone else, putting the time in is still worth it to mostly-nullify the issues, with still a 10-20% chance of getting a penalty, even at the end of your grinding experience, depending on how much you've armored up.

An experienced warrior using the weight of their armor to their advantage, where a beginner is mostly impeded by it, is hardly something that stretches the imagination. That isn't something that needs a specific singular ability, like Bulwark, and would reasonably apply to anyone that put in the time to practice it.

No matter what happens, though, the scale ending at -8 is completely absurd. At that point, your armor has more of an impact on your combat abilities - offense and defense - than the rest of your character's efforts and expenses combined. That's just silly.

[Gorth]

You have valuable insights. But you also, for whatever reason, have an immediate tendency to call anything I say hostility. Could it be worded better? Probably. But hey. I thought what I thought. I didn't call you an asshole. If you have nothing else to say, that's cool. You've given helpful things on the topic. But we were conversing, and you said something that we disagreed with. Nothing more. If a discussion never has any disagreements, what is the point of it? No learning happens. no progress is made. People agreeing with each other in an echo chamber helps absolutely no one. Especially when we are attempting to solve something we view as a problem.

[Mystry]

I imagine if Rooks and Elemancers and Primalists and any other class specialization is intended to be as proficient in armor use as the Combat Specializations, their class specs would give them a reduction to their armor hindrance penalties.

The issue at hand isn't that rook/elemancer/primalist/et cetera is worse than front line fighters at using armor.
The issue at hand is that using armor right now, as any type of character, heavily penalizes you for doing so, and it's not currently possible to train high enough to make that penalty bearable. For anyone. So the idea is to either change the penalties or to allow for higher achievable skill ranks in armor use or (preferably) both.

Rook/elemancer/primalist just happen to visibly highlight the issue insofar that they are, by the mechanics of the game, encouraged to wear light armor during normal gameplay (since having no armor means you can get fractured/severe wounded/or just killed in one hit), yet are unable to do so because you can't train armor use high enough to make wearing light armor viable thanks to the high probability of negative rerolls; so to mitigate that, these magic based classes are now encouraged to put on heavy armor and train like fighters for the sole purpose of improving armor use so that during 'normal' gameplay, light armor won't impede them quite so badly.

[Dean]

I imagine if Rooks and Elemancers and Primalists and any other class specialization is intended to be as proficient in armor use as the Combat Specializations, their class specs would give them a reduction to their armor hindrance penalties.

The issue at hand isn't that rook/elemancer/primalist/et cetera is worse than front line fighters at using armor.
The issue at hand is that using armor right now, as any type of character, heavily penalizes you for doing so, and it's not currently possible to train high enough to make that penalty bearable. For anyone. So the idea is to either change the penalties or to allow for higher achievable skill ranks in armor use or (preferably) both.

Rook/elemancer/primalist just happen to visibly highlight the issue insofar that they are, by the mechanics of the game, encouraged to wear light armor during normal gameplay (since having no armor means you can get fractured/severe wounded/or just killed in one hit), yet are unable to do so because you can't train armor use high enough to make wearing light armor viable thanks to the high probability of negative rerolls; so to mitigate that, these magic based classes are now encouraged to put on heavy armor and train like fighters for the sole purpose of improving armor use so that during 'normal' gameplay, light armor won't impede them quite so badly.

In the interest of Adresin's suggestion (and since we've belabored the point of the problem existing enough, I think) - to build on my last post; instead of hindrance penalty reductions for Rooks/Elemancers/Primalists, perhaps their 'armor specialization' provides a reroll bonus to the channeling issues you've mentioned, so long as they wear thematically-appropriate armor? Cloth and nonferrous metal for Rooks, Cloth or elementally-appropriate drake-scale for Elemancers, and leather/hide for Primalists. That'd let the combat-focused characters in the appropriate guilds have a guild ability that synergizes with their guild or flavor of magic's expectations, while letting the peaceful sorts save an ability slot for utilities. Similarly, a Templar ability could be added in a similar vein, for channeling in ferrous/celesteel/other Light-friendly armor materials.

[Mystry]

In the interest of Adresin's suggestion (and since we've belabored the point of the problem existing enough, I think) - to build on my last post; instead of hindrance penalty reductions for Rooks/Elemancers/Primalists, perhaps their 'armor specialization' provides a reroll bonus to the channeling issues you've mentioned, so long as they wear thematically-appropriate armor? Cloth and nonferrous metal for Rooks, Cloth or elementally-appropriate drake-scale for Elemancers, and leather/hide for Primalists. That'd let the combat-focused characters in the appropriate guilds have a guild ability that synergizes with their guild or flavor of magic's expectations, while letting the peaceful sorts save an ability slot for utilities. Similarly, a Templar ability could be added in a similar vein, for channeling in ferrous/celesteel/other Light-friendly armor materials.

I wouldn't be strictly opposed to such a thing, in fact I do think it's pretty neat to have something like that, but I don't see how that would solve the wider issue of armor hindrance being incredibly punishing. To be honest, dropping channels in light armor is more of a very mild annoyance than an actual issue. I see it as an acceptable trade-off for the protection that light armor provides.

For reference, establishing a channel requires 3 seconds of round time. You can have up to three channels active total, but the number of channels in any particular magic is determined by magic skills. So, for example, with 50 in Sorcery, you can only have one sorcery channel active. But if you have at least 100 Sorcery, you can have two active.

So let's say a rook is in combat and they have two channels of cryomancy and one channel of sorcery active. And they low-roll and lose their sorcery channel. That means that they have to either fight with cryomancy only or spend 3 seconds of round time to re-establish it, at which point they start doing nether damage and can use sorcery spells like Essence Leech again. That's not that bad at all. It only becomes annoying if you lose multiple channels in a row. Highest round time I've ever personally witnessed was 12 seconds to re-establish channels 4 times in a row, and that's rare. With Quickchannel Adept/Master, those round time costs become lower (2 seconds for adept, 1 second for master), but these abilities aren't currently obtainable because no one can train channeling right now (and as a side note, channeling skill doesn't impact whether or not channels are dropped from armor, I don't think).

Funnily enough, there are actually abilities on the wiki that describe giving damage reduction, such as Shadow Martyr (rook) and Shield Pattern (elemancer). These abilities are not, to my knowledge, currently available though.

But leaving my tangent on the intricacies of magic channels, while I do think it'd be cool to have an 'armor class' for rook/elemancer/primalist/et cetera, I don't see that solving the problem of armor hindrance severely nerfing all of your combat rolls constantly. I think addressing that will have to come from changes of armor use itself, which will also benefit every type of character in the game, and not just the magic ones.

[Dean]

In the interest of Adresin's suggestion (and since we've belabored the point of the problem existing enough, I think) - to build on my last post; instead of hindrance penalty reductions for Rooks/Elemancers/Primalists, perhaps their 'armor specialization' provides a reroll bonus to the channeling issues you've mentioned, so long as they wear thematically-appropriate armor? Cloth and nonferrous metal for Rooks, Cloth or elementally-appropriate drake-scale for Elemancers, and leather/hide for Primalists. That'd let the combat-focused characters in the appropriate guilds have a guild ability that synergizes with their guild or flavor of magic's expectations, while letting the peaceful sorts save an ability slot for utilities. Similarly, a Templar ability could be added in a similar vein, for channeling in ferrous/celesteel/other Light-friendly armor materials.

I wouldn't be strictly opposed to such a thing, in fact I do think it's pretty neat to have something like that, but I don't see how that would solve the wider issue of armor hindrance being incredibly punishing. To be honest, dropping channels in light armor is more of a very mild annoyance than an actual issue. I see it as an acceptable trade-off for the protection that light armor provides.

-snip-

Well, this is why I'd said to build on my prior suggestion; these things are additive, meant to work together.

[Mystry]

Well, this is why I'd said to build on my prior suggestion; these things are additive, meant to work together.

Oh. This must be what they were talking about when they said I couldn't see the forest for the trees.
Well.
Carry on then. You have my full approval of armor set bonuses for magic classes on top of alterations to ameliorate armor hindrance woes.