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Medium armour useless?


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I'm mostly liking the mod so far. It gives low dex characters a huge incentive to wear heavy plate while high dex characters tend to be better off with leather (at least until ToB when THAC0 scales too high). My one gripe with the mod is how anything in between seems massively underpowered. Studded leather is just plain worse than leather and all kinds of mail are even worse. For avoidance purposes studded is worse than leather but the damage reduction is almost the same. Mail has atrocious AC (just like plate), so you get hit constantly, yet the protection values aren't that impressive. Especially piercing damage becomes a huge headache for mail wearers.

 

I think medium armour needs a big buff so it's closer to either leather or plate in statistics. Perhaps you should go as far as making it almost identical to leather in terms of avoidance but with better resistances. One of the drawbacks of Barbarians is the inability to wear anything heavier than mail, but with this mod they may as well be restricted to leather as you'll not want to wear mail anyway.

 

Also, poor scaling of armour is an issue in the vanilla game, but this mod doesn't really fix it. It only changes things around a bit. In BG1 you'll want a low AC, which you can easily get with high dex and leather, as enemies have poor THAC0. This makes heavy armour relatively weak at low levels. I have yet to play to ToB but I'd guess the high THAC0s kick in, making heavy armour relatively strong and avoidance based leather, once again, nearly useless.

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I'm mostly liking the mod so far. It gives low dex characters a huge incentive to wear heavy plate while high dex characters tend to be better off with leather (at least until ToB when THAC0 scales too high). My one gripe with the mod is how anything in between seems massively underpowered. Studded leather is just plain worse than leather and all kinds of mail are even worse. For avoidance purposes studded is worse than leather but the damage reduction is almost the same. Mail has atrocious AC (just like plate), so you get hit constantly, yet the protection values aren't that impressive. Especially piercing damage becomes a huge headache for mail wearers.

 

I think medium armour needs a big buff so it's closer to either leather or plate in statistics. Perhaps you should go as far as making it almost identical to leather in terms of avoidance but with better resistances. One of the drawbacks of Barbarians is the inability to wear anything heavier than mail, but with this mod they may as well be restricted to leather as you'll not want to wear mail anyway.

 

Interesting thought, actually. I'll have a look and run the numbers a bit.

 

Also, poor scaling of armour is an issue in the vanilla game, but this mod doesn't really fix it. It only changes things around a bit. In BG1 you'll want a low AC, which you can easily get with high dex and leather, as enemies have poor THAC0. This makes heavy armour relatively weak at low levels. I have yet to play to ToB but I'd guess the high THAC0s kick in, making heavy armour relatively strong and avoidance based leather, once again, nearly useless.

 

I think it still works fairly well at high levels - you get the choice between avoidance based leather that will let you get hit somewhat less often by horrible status effects, and heavy armour that reduces pure damage but you still get actually hit by Bad Stuff.

 

At BG1 levels you want avoidance any day, since you die from 1-2 arrows. That's a generic AD&D level 1 problem I haven't tackled.

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I think medium armour needs a big buff so it's closer to either leather or plate in statistics. Perhaps you should go as far as making it almost identical to leather in terms of avoidance but with better resistances. One of the drawbacks of Barbarians is the inability to wear anything heavier than mail, but with this mod they may as well be restricted to leather as you'll not want to wear mail anyway.

 

Interesting thought, actually. I'll have a look and run the numbers a bit.

 

Having looked at things, I agree that studded leather and chain is underpowered at the moment and could use a buff. Elven chain is a whole different animal however and looks fine - they're considered light armour. Splint mail I don't want to buff much, since it's supposed to be cheapass plate mail.

 

Comments?

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Studded Leather's almost complete inferiority to Leather was one of the first things I noticed. Even if studded had its original AC of 7 it would still be inferior in most cases.

 

Having just entered Beregost I haven't really formed any other opinions yet. Conceptually I like what I'm seeing thus far.

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