Armorsmith Archive

We all know that in the coming combat balance, the current uber-ness of armor is going tobe taken out into the street and get the hell beat out of it with a nerf stick. This is expected and in many ways a welcome change to the game as armor is too powerful right now (I watched my gf solo a giant canyon krayt the other day, and she is not what I'd call a hardcore power-player, she just relied on her 80% kinetic armor and healed herself with an occasional stim). But there are some questions about how will/should armor work in the post CB game.

To get to my point, I have to first quickly go over a few goals that have been set by the Devs for the CB.

Already Devs have stated that they are looking at creating a new HAM bar solely for specials: this bar is meant to be based on the player sub-stats for their other pools; they want to create a way for there to be dynamic combat without players killing themselves by using more than a special move or 2 during combat, especially if they're wearing any armor, since buffs are also going to be severely nerfed too. They want players to be using a wide variety of armors, with possible armor certifications for some profs. And they want to end Stun damage as the be all and end all in pvp combat.

Here are my ideas to help with post CB armor:

1. Encumberence: divide the total encumberence between the two sub-stats, not the total encumberence added to each sub-stat. Meaning that if a full suit of armor has 300 mind encumberence, 150 should be added to focus, and 150 should be added to willpower, not 300 added to both of those stats. Immediately, this would eliminate the need for most players (particularly non-human characters who have limited sub-stats) to get buffs to put on some armors, and allow for the more dynamic/strategic combat that they're aiming for yet still placesome penalty on those wearing armor.

2. A new way of choosing armor protections: the reason why everyone is presently running around in composite is becuase it protects against basically everything, sure you have to add a layer to protect against Stun, but even just a 4% layer that doesn't bump emcumberence up all that much provides a 54% reduction in most Stun damage. My idea here is to let armorsmiths choose what protections go into an armor. When you start off as a novice, you can choose between kinetic or energy as the primary protection and then the other as the effective protection, as you advance up the layers line, you are able to choose more protections for an armor (up to 1 special, 4 effective), in addition to being able to add that sort of layer to a set of armor. The more experimentation points you get, the better armor you make. At master, an armorsmith could be making 50% kinetic mabari armor if they so chose, they design of armor would become the least important aspect. A certain armor type would eventually become the standard (kiniteic, energy, acid, then probably blast, stun and/or heat). As far as bussiness goes, yes this could become a hassle as people would now want the best possible armor of whatever type they prefered the look of, but many armorsmiths already have a method of dealing with that in place for special orders/pre-sliced armor: place a full set into a backpack and label the protections in the sellers desription. The current composite armor self coloring option would probably have to be added to all armor from that point onto keep armorsmiths sane.

Anyway, I know that these ideas are not perfect, but I think that they have some potential, and if anyone could add some new ideas here, i think that we may eventually be able to help the Devs implement a plan that won't leave armorsmiths as the new tailors post CB.