Armorsmith Archive
Thread: Advanced Layer Primus nerfed with v. 120884?
Mcgreag wrote:
The solutions I suggested was to either move a larger part of weapon damage into elemental or cut the elemental protection on a standard non layered suit in half making is so that layering for elemental might be come interesting and with diminishing returns this would most likely also balance out the primus layers at the same itme.
Unfortunately Mcgreag both these options were not implementable for various reasons.Changing the balance of weapons(as most weapons do not have elemental) would make those weapons that did have elemental damage "the best" weapons to use. Dropping elemental protections for everyone would again have made "the best" weapon again a possible scenario. Most worrysome would be weapons like the flamethrower, launcher pistol etc.
Again the problem between old/new systems was the "requirement" of layers to sell armor. Those massively layered suits in the old system "should" have caused major penalties on the wearer. Due to the power of Doctor buffs this never happened. Before the prevalence of Doctor buffs smiths did not make suits like this as they just caused so severe a HAM cost. Since the downside was mitigated by buffs and Brandy there was no reason not to get as much protection as you could and ignore the HAM cost. Had those layers made the armor difficult to wear in any way I would guess that layering wouldn't have become a requirement.
Blixtev wrote:
Again the problem between old/new systems was the "requirement" of layers to sell armor. Those massively layered suits in the old system "should" have caused major penalties on the wearer. Due to the power of Doctor buffs this never happened. Before the prevalence of Doctor buffs smiths did not make suits like this as they just caused so severe a HAM cost. Since the downside was mitigated by buffs and Brandy there was no reason not to get as much protection as you could and ignore the HAM cost. Had those layers made the armor difficult to wear in any way I would guess that layering wouldn't have become a requirement.
I'm always all ears for suggestions, however "resource cost" and "factory time" is not enough of a drawback to make a free 1200 protection available. The ease at which harvesters can pull up a million resources in one resource shift puts a damper on most inorganic arguments.
Then please explain under what circumstances you forsee any smith making and using layers, considering the extreme extra economic costs of a layered suit versus an unlayered suit.
Blixtev wrote:
I'm always all ears for suggestions, however "resource cost" and "factory time" is not enough of a drawback to make a free 1200 protection available. The ease at which harvesters can pull up a million resources in one resource shift puts a damper on most inorganic arguments.
This sounds like an issue you should be working on between the Armor and Weapon Development teams, since Elemental damage is so miniscule in weapons, its really no biggie to lose %'s. Whereas Kinetic and Energy are enormous.
Maybe redoing some lower tiered weapons to do 50% kinetic/energy and 50% elemental? It might make players decide which weapon to use for the best situation, instead of how it is now, just use a Master Certed Weapon.
I could really care less about factory times and inorganic resources, after all, my customers will be paying the costs, not me.
Blixtev wrote:
Again the problem between old/new systems was the "requirement" of layers to sell armor. Those massively layered suits in the old system "should" have caused major penalties on the wearer. Due to the power of Doctor buffs this never happened. Before the prevalence of Doctor buffs smiths did not make suits like this as they just caused so severe a HAM cost. Since the downside was mitigated by buffs and Brandy there was no reason not to get as much protection as you could and ignore the HAM cost. Had those layers made the armor difficult to wear in any way I would guess that layering wouldn't have become a requirement.
I'm always all ears for suggestions, however "resource cost" and "factory time" is not enough of a drawback to make a free 1200 protection available. The ease at which harvesters can pull up a million resources in one resource shift puts a damper on most inorganic arguments.
There are solutions but since, by your own words at the breakfast, you don'tread the boards it doesn't surprise me that you haven't seen them.
1. Increase hindrance. Make hindrance an experimetation line.
2. Make both kinetic and energy (and maybe even elemental) experimetation lines.
Quite frankly I'm surprised that you thought someone would want to make all of these other layers. They are pointless. Might as well just pull all layers. I can't imagine there will be many quad layered primus suits out there seeing how it will take 11k of resources and only offer a 2% increase in protection.
Or here's an idea... ask the community that knows the profession what they think.
Blixtev wrote:
I'm always all ears for suggestions, however "resource cost" and "factory time" is not enough of a drawback to make a free 1200 protection available.
Aren't resource costs and factory pretty much all armor is? By your logic, a combatant is getting a "free" 6000 points of protection just by wearinga suit. There is no penalty for wearing a suit when you are master. And lets face it, a new player that just hit novice elite isn't going to be able to afford armor so the hindrances don't matter.
This CU has taken one of the best, most enjoyable and creative crafting professions in any MMORPG and turned it into a glorified tailor. Armorsmith is so dumbed down at this point you should just give us all /respec and put up Armor Frogs.
FignarKrynn wrote:
this is what i hate we have a correspondent yet i doubt he even knew these changes were implemented, yet a single PM has managed to make layers useless. Changes were made and no-one even knew about them until "a" armorsmith tested it out, and even i confirmed it with that armorsmith when i spoke to them in chat. No communication before changes are considered or are going to be implemented. Honestly you should really consider having NPC vendors dishing out armor it would be so much easier just to kill this profession then to mame it so it looks like some 2 legged dog trying to run around.
Blixtev wrote:
Again the problem between old/new systems was the "requirement" of layers to sell armor. Those massively layered suits in the old system "should" have caused major penalties on the wearer. Due to the power of Doctor buffs this never happened. Before the prevalence of Doctor buffs smiths did not make suits like this as they just caused so severe a HAM cost. Since the downside was mitigated by buffs and Brandy there was no reason not to get as much protection as you could and ignore the HAM cost. Had those layers made the armor difficult to wear in any way I would guess that layering wouldn't have become a requirement.
I'm always all ears for suggestions, however "resource cost" and "factory time" is not enough of a drawback to make a free 1200 protection available. The ease at which harvesters can pull up a million resources in one resource shift puts a damper on most inorganic arguments.
Imho Ineed to disagree. The layer system was very well balanced and that since October 2003 when layers were fixed (revised). Ifwhat you claim is true layersmust have stayed as they were before publish3!
I said this many times that publish was the big mistake to armor, from patch notes...
Once resources were available in the 900 OQ/MA/SR it was easily possible to create 1/1/1 layers that were good for 80% Kinetic armor, base effectiveness should have been unimportant but customers went for the spoilers, (still dont get it, but the market demanded high base on top).
80% Kinetic Composite suits with total HAM of under 1500 were possible. Unlayerd Composite sets were possible with 1200 HAM but with under 60% Kinetic those could never compete. If 60% protection was intended to be the cap, you should have just flattened the experimentation curves or never let publish 3 go live like it did.
_Monroe_ wrote:
There are solutions but since, by your own words at the breakfast, you don'tread the boards it doesn't surprise me that you haven't seen them.
That is a misquote, I said that in reference to the Jedi forums as everything over in that forum gets squashed in a matter of minutes, be it useful or not. Most of my posting is done late at night as I don't have the time at work to browse the forums, so I do it in my free time.
1. Increase hindrance. Make hindrance an experimetation line.
Hindrance is our built in system to ensure combat professions wear the correct levels of armor for their advancement. Letting it be an experimention linewould endanger us of going back to the old system where no one used the lower end armors because you could at any point put on the higher end armor. Novice elites would put on the advanced and new purchase a set of basic or standard.I have no doubt the smiths would figure out ways of making the top end armor wearable by the novice elites.
We would would have to break up the certs in the combat professions like a cert basic at novice, cert standard somewhere through the tree and cert advanced at master, which we wanted to leave the combat professions a bit of flexibility in what they wore levelwise.
2. Make both kinetic and energy (and maybe even elemental) experimetation lines.
The team in general is very worried about armor letting players get back into the state of near invulnerability, so we may have been overally gunshy on letting the crafting let the values go up too high.
Quite frankly I'm surprised that you thought someone would want to make all of these other layers. They are pointless. Might as well just pull all layers. I can't imagine there will be many quad layered primus suits out there seeing how it will take 11k of resources and only offer a 2% increase in protection.
Or here's an idea... ask the community that knows the profession what they think.
I have taken as many suggestions as I could and implemented as many of them as I could, hitting most of the top 5 you presented recently.
I think we set a record for a 2 page thread with the # of replies from Blix. lol.
