Armorsmith Archive
Thread: How I would change armor...one Master's perspective
I've been a Master Armorer for many months, and even though it does supply the bulk of my income... I'm sooo bored with the cookie cutter composite look.
I like the thoughs you have on the armor, now if only we could drag a dev in here to actually read anything in this forum 
Blakmoor
the enDless
NeoenD, Dantooine
and do you propose they retrospectively nerf all the "pre patch" 80% good stuff ?
Because thats what they would need to do in order to stop the bottom end of the econmy falling out, otherwise you are in a situation where any exisiting pre nerf 80%/65% coimp would sky rocket and the onlypeople benefiting are the old school smoths you have warehouses full of the stuff.
Remember SWG devs have a piss poor way of implementing sweeping changes, e.g the change they made to the cert on rep blasters was not applied retrospectively and pre patch rep blasters (which are still useable by anyone) are selling for a small fortune.
I think it is too late for anything to be done about the current state of armour without a major overhaul of the database deleting / adjusting every piece of armour currently in the game before any changes to limit armour effectivenes are brought in.
Yep, like the ideas in this post, certainly would bring in more variety both for players and AS.
One point though, I thought the Droid Invasion picture represented RIS armour.
Everything is great, but I have one thing to add.
If you make all armor the way you want it set up, then RIS should take the place of Composite, in crafting and resists. The armor is so rare that, people will actually begin to want to find it for that 80%, triple layered resists. Plus you don't have a bunch of people wheeling around in RIS because of its rarity - most people would get bored quick, and cave and buy another set of armor...
Shilak wrote:
At the moment I see the existing armour as follows: -
Bone/Mabari - Starter level armour.
Chitin - Mid-range creaturegrinding armour.
Tantel - Dress armour, practically useless for combat situations.
Ubese - High-end creature grinding armour.
Padded - Near useless, to many vulnerabilities and too much encumberance to make it a viable option for anything other than show.
Composite - PvP armour, and general grinding armour for long term players with more cash to spend on armour.
I see all of the armors as useful (except for Tantel), which is probably why I never understand the calls for revamps. I didn't grind my way through armorsmith, which means I took the time to craft the best lower-level armor I could.
The problem with the lower level armors is the requirement on organics. The lower level 'smiths who may decide to try to craft the best chitin or padded they can are faced with huge hide requirements. The established 'smiths are too busy with the dozens of resources required for composite and Ubese to be bothered with it. As a result, no one is dedicating a large amount of time to making quality armor outside of comp and Ubese.
When revamp calls come from folks who havea problem with composite being the end-all, be-all armor, I don't pay much attention. If it's the hardcore PvP'ers who are causing the most uproar over this, I think back to my PvP days - if it took three different sets of armor to cover all of the different damage types then I'd have three different sets of armor macro'd on my toolbar so that I could tailor my protection to the weapon being used against me. The only thing that revamping comp would do (short of nerfing the max resistances) is require me as an armorsmith to stock even more types of armor, something I really don't want to do.
As for factional armor, my guildmate Tekhap posted a great idea on it. Unfortunately I was half asleep when reading it, took it as a call for an armor nerf, and promptly **edit** all over a great thread. Look for a thread about a simple "fix" for armor in the GCW, and ignore my ignorance in it.
Arturr wrote:
Look at the graphic for the droid invasion. The artists rendition of mabari is a shiny mirror-like finish, capable of reflecting away energy blasts? Seems so to me anyway.
That armor isnt Mabari, it is RIS.
I have to agree with the major theme of this thread. To me, it doesnt bother me that everyone is running around in Composite. What does bother me is that Composite can get "too good" (for lack of a better term.) With perfect resources, which I do understand is near impossible, Composite could get up to 45%stun with mid 70s base. With relatively bad resources, I can make 37%stun and 62%base...even that is too good.
Asking for a change is one thing, but the real problem lies in how they would impliment the biggest nerf to game if they reduced Composite to a more playable level. By only nerfing new Composite they would create a huge pre-nerf market, but it is the most likely way it would be done (I imagine it would be impossible to nerf all armor in existance.
There is just no easy solution to this problem.
Just a couple of things...
Comp requires more than six resources. You're forgetting about the advanced segments and the layers. If all you did was one layer type you're talking about a dozen different resources. If you run your own cloth like I do it's up to 15. Add three other resources to your stock if for every other layer type you want to run. And going to the ends of the earth to get a few more points on OQ, SR, or MA is what takes up most of my time.
Also, I'll reiterate that giving a couple more vunerabilities to composite won't affect PvP. First, as long as they can be layered over you'll still still see some of the vunerablities filled, and all that will end up happening is that people will have multiple sets of armor hotkeyed. Start taking damage from a T21 in you energy-weak comp? Hotkey to some energy layered comp. Rifleman switch to a DXR-6b to hit your acid weakness? Hotkey over to your acid layered set, and so on, and so forth. The net result is that the serious PvP'ers see little to no reduction in defense, anda new barrier to elite PvP is put up as you'll need multiple sets of armor to survive one encounter.
In any event, this is a fun discussion. 
If it ain't broke...
In my opinion, the current armorsmith system is not that bad. Sure it's a profession dominated by masters, but so is every other profession. When I was a young novicearmorsmith, I made lots of sets of mabari, and sold 'em on the bazaar for good prices, and scraped together money to get harvesters, factories, ect. As I moved up the tree I made a set of chitin which sold really fast, and started making several sets of ubese which also sold pretty well on the bazaar too. Once I mastered armorsmith, I began concentrating on ubese and composite, because as you all know, that's where the money is. But I still make padded and mabari quite a bit (mabari as a nice gift for new players, and padded for my guildmates when they supply me wtih fambaa segments and lokian leathery hide)
To me, they have a simple yet effective system for regulating armor, the more protection, the more the encumberance. If you don't know what you're doing you could easily make 80% kinetic, 60% base composite with a total suit encumberance above a thousand (my first ever tripple layered set had 950, 980, 1050, boy that was a waste of resources) Making armor vs Weapons Rock, Paper, Scissors styleis not the answer to you being bored with making composite. I think we need more unique types of quest armor. As they have RIS, and soon mandalorian armor, I would like more quests, maybe quests for factions to get schematics for faction armor, and quests to get more unique types of armor. They are starting to add them, and I think they area refreshing change to the Armorsmith profession.
DirthNader wrote:
Just a couple of things...
Comp requires more than six resources. You're forgetting about the advanced segments and the layers. If all you did was one layer type you're talking about a dozen different resources. If you run your own cloth like I do it's up to 15. Add three other resources to your stock if for every other layer type you want to run. And going to the ends of the earth to get a few more points on OQ, SR, or MA is what takes up most of my time.
Yeah I wasnt trying toover-complicate it, but my point is the resource needs for compo are very easy and IMO, not a consideration.
Also, I'll reiterate that giving a couple more vunerabilities to composite won't affect PvP. First, as long as they can be layered over you'll still still see some of the vunerablities filled, and all that will end up happening is that people will have multiple sets of armor hotkeyed. Start taking damage from a T21 in you energy-weak comp? Hotkey to some energy layered comp. Rifleman switch to a DXR-6b to hit your acid weakness? Hotkey over to your acid layered set, and so on, and so forth. The net result is that the serious PvP'ers see little to no reduction in defense, anda new barrier to elite PvP is put up as you'll need multiple sets of armor to survive one encounter.
In any event, this is a fun discussion.
You're second point though is dead on...but I see that as a GOOD thing rather than a negative. The hardcore PvPers WILL have multiple suits hotkeyed and multiple weapons as well...but the net result is NOT that PvPers will see no reduction, the net result is that ALL the armor types wouldnow serve a viable purpose and take it one step further... ALL the armor types you carry would need to be the very best they could be, forcing smiths to either specialize or attempt to carry EVERYTHING!!
You start forcing people to carry 40-50 pieces of armor, along with the weapons to counter each one...and that's nothing to discount. That's ALOT of space taken up and players will again be forced to consider their choice VERY carefully.
The issue here, for me anyway is NOT to base the changes around PvP, but to base them around what will promote the purchase of every type of armor out there. I think you came to the exact conclusion that I intended. These changes WOULD force people to use every armor type making combat far more diverse. The fact players would have to carry more types is the fundamental point of this thread. There's also a HUGE difference between having armor start out with 65% base, and layering itto removea vulnerability. If armor has 2 vulns, at best you could only split the layers 2 and 1, giving you roundabouts 20% and 10% respectively...that hardly negates the vulnerability. At those resists, you're basically just layering em to get em under the AR1...but the armor is still VERY susceptible to those types, which would still warrant carrying a second type.