Solving the heavy armor dilemma

General Discussion General Discussion
70

Kind of as it should be. Heavy lacks the distance Light gets on its roll.
You have to consider that when a Light is in melee with a Heavy, You can double tap Roll and be 10+ meters away.
The Heavy dodge is barely a sidestep in comparison. The best form of mitigation is to simply not take the damage in the first place.
Using Heavy means comitting to trading blows. You can heavy dodge a big attack, But you are still well in range for any followup strikes.
A prime example of this is my recent epic duel with a Heavy Healer over my Fort.
He would attempt to dodge my Wrecking Ball by cutting diagnally toward me so that he would end up behind me. Which theoretically would put him out of range of the flatten effect based on the original position and aiming.
This failed miserably because i simply adjusted my aim mid animation and slammed it right down on his head because he never actually left melee range despite two dodge steps.
Had he been Light instead, One backwards roll would have put him well out of range of Wrecking Ball and now my CD is wasted and I’m vulnerable to a counter.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Any nerfs directed at Heavy Armor will negatively affect Tanks more than anyone else.
Many boss attacks (Hell, many normal mobs also) have elements tied to them the same way our Gems work.
Thorpe is a perfect example of this. His sword swings for both Physical AND Fire. So if we nerfed Heavy to be garbage against magic, I cannot properly mitigate that strike. Sure, ill reduce the physical but then I’ll get absolutely creamed by the now barely mitigated Fire damage.

Extend that to pvp, Heavy Armor is weak to magic? No problem! literally everyone can run Magic damage conversion Gems!
And now sure, The Heavy DPS are going to switch to other Armors, but what about Tanks whose literal job it is to soak and mitigate damage on cap points?
Everyone is running Magic and the most devastating AoE’s come from Magic, so you’re shredding the pisspoor Magic defense.
So now the Tank has to wear light to make up for this … But now its getting shredding by physical.

Tanks just get put into a no-win scenario.

The solution, as I’ve stated elsewhere, is to reduce the base Phys/Elem Armor ratings to be closer to Medium (If Light is 15% DR, Medium would be 30%, Heavy would be 45%) and then have Constitution Perks granting Bonus Armor Percentage to bring the mitigation to where it needs to be for a Tank to actually do its job.

If you’re wondering how this affects PvP, its easy. A Heavy DPS would be sacrificing damage and mobility for around 15 - 30% more mitigation than Medium or Light.
If the Heavy DPS wants to get more DR, They will need to invest heavily into Constitution.
This reduces the damage potential of the Heavy DPS.
They’ll be harder to kill, yes. But they will be far less devastating to your Lighter Armors.

DPS then makes a personal choice, be slightly more tanky at the cost of mobility and damage, or go for a more mobile harder hitting setup.
All this accomplished without affecting the Tanks in PvE and PvP.

71

Muskets absolutely destroyed plate armour, though.

72

I think heavy armor got retired before gunpowder. Longbows penetrated or knocked you off your horse and they were like turtles on their back. After that, historically, armor started getting lighter. Granted, only the rich could afford heavy plate to begin with…but nobles hated being the ducks in a barrell.

1 Like
73

I think the changes to the Resilience perk might fix this. A lot of the heavy armor you are seeing is Faction gear and Voidbent. I think the people in Heavy are going to be a LOT more vulnerable if the fix works.

74

There are no bugged gems for armor, btw. It’s fake. Check it by yourself.

75

Could always add some passives to the attributes the same way they did for mining etc.

Give HA a -20% speed bonus for example, but gives the Strenght attribute a +5% speed bonus in the heavy weightclass for every Strenght milestone (50 points). That way healers wouldn’t be as fast since they mainly spec Focus. This shouldn’t be an issue for PvE but would give it a downside for PvP.

I don’t see an issue with heavy being good in PvE, nerfing it there seems like a bad choice to me. They’ll just have to make light actually do 20% extra damage then and medium an extra 10% like the tooltip displays.

76

In your hammer example, it sounds like he didn’t dodge anything if you turned your attack and still connected. If he had correctly dodged it, his invincibility frames would have ignored your attack completely. He failed because he poorly timed his dodge.

Yes, gems would inherently be the ideal source of compensating heavy armor’s low magic defense, but you can only gem for 1 element at a time. Socket your heavy armor with rubies to reduce Thorpe’s fire damage. That won’t stop the Ice Gauntlet, or weapons with elemental gems that convert damage into things like lightning or arcane. With the suggested system, there’s suddenly trade-offs other than the ability to roll and a couple inherent bonuses. There’s actual strategy involved in your build. Magic conversion gems only convert a portion of your damage, though, so it’s not like a physical fighter can ignore a heavy armor’s innate defenses. A portion of their damage will simply do a little more. You can already see this effect with the current mob weakness system.

If my normal attack with a sword does 1000 slashing damage to a corrupted enemy, and I socket my sword with a 40% conversion to arcane (Sapphire) gem. 400 of my attack damage does 30% more, 400*1.3 = 520, add in my other 600 my physical damage and my total adjusted damage is now 1120. That’s 12% more damage for exploiting a pretty significant (30%) weakness. Conversion gems are great, but they’re not some dominant thing force.

Should tanks be more durable? Definitely! Should they be able to just mindlessly soak damage? Not if this game wants to claim it’s skill-based.

Except they’d still be strong against the vast majority of damage in the game, as well as having defensive skills and significantly higher HP. They’re not suddenly “weak” to magic, they just can’t ignore it.

I’m also of the firm belief that hit-stun needs to come back to melee attacks. Hit-trading and ignoring attacks that don’t have arbitrarily assigned cc is an absolutely horrible design for combat that they keep mislabeling as “skill-based”.

77

So you want Tanks to keep replacing gems for every encounter to mitigate whatever magic is in that encounter?

How about hell no?

A Tank deals virtually no damage compared to what a DPS can push out. Their only purpose in PvP is to soak damage and hold points.
And what you want to do is make them weaker in every conceivable way.

There is absolutely no scenario under your suggestion in which Tanking is improved.
All it would do is make the job of a Tank harder. Tanks already have to choose between Physical, Magical or balanced.
We then also need weapons for Tanking with Carnelians slotted and weapons for DPS without them.
You then want me to have to carry either an infinite supply of resist gems and constantly swap them out on a per encounter basis, or have 7 different gearsets all gemmed in a multitude of ways?

All so you can hit a NON TANK for more damage?

No. Your suggestion just places burden upon burden onto a role that is already burdened with an extreme lack of DPS capacity and restricted build variety. All to the goal of nerfing an unrelated role!

78

I feel like you haven’t spent any time in light armor in OPR…

79

How about they add swimming for light and medium armor. As well as fix the scaling on it to go based off your overall damage and not just your base. Then change the damage/healing increase from 20 for light and 10 for medium to maybe 30 for light and 20 for medium. Instead of nerfing stuff that players are complaining about they should balance other weapons and armor by buffing them up to a competitive level. If they go the route of just nerfing everything then eventually we will just be playing a game where all we do is run around and hit each other with limp noodles.

80

With dex weapons being undertuned, do you mean less people play it or it does less damage?

Because I am main greataxe / hatchet and i tested bows. Bows legit did more dmg then greataxe ^^ Like a lot more. Over 1k more.

81

I think you’re overexaggerating the role/difficulty of tanking in this game. :man_shrugging:t3:

Also, since when do tanks deal no damage? Are you playing right?

We’ll chalk this up as another instance where traditional MMO mindset is crippling New World’s potential.

82

One issue that I see with the way the devs chose to setup their game (trinity based) is that “generally”, magic (mana) users are penalized the heavier the armour. The reasoning is that it blocks the channeling of magic. This is why Clerics/Paladin can wear heavy armour…their powers come from deities and NOT magic. If they followed these, now generally accepted fantasy rules, it would fix the dilemma currently in-game concerning heavy armour and life staff use. </$.02>

Edited for clarity.

83

add a 5% arcane spell failure chance per heavy item like they do in dungeons and dragons. lol

…jk, dont do that.

84

Here’s my suggestion:

Give bonuses/weaknesses per piece of armor you wear (5 pieces max, naked counts as light):

Light

+4% outgoing damage/healing
+4% movement speed
+4% outgoing damage over time
+0.4 meter dodge distance
-3% incoming damage (strong) vs strike, ice, lightning, arcane
+3% incoming damage (weak) vs slash, fire, nature

Medium

+2% outgoing damage/healing
+2% movement speed
-2% reduced CC duration on self
+2% increased CC duration on enemy
2% chance to ignore CC
+0.2 meter dodge distance
-3% incoming damage (strong) vs slash, fire
+3% incoming damage (weak) vs thrust, void

Heavy

-4% reduced CC duration on self
+4% increased CC duration on enemy
4% chance to ignore CC
+2% incoming healing
-3% incoming damage (strong) vs thrust, nature, void
+3% incoming damage (weak) vs strike, ice, lightning, arcane

Normalize base dodge distance to 1 meter
Also change musket damage type to strike.

85

Would make sense, especially in a PvP game. Don’t think I’ve ever played a pvp game where weapon type vs armor types didnt matter.

Heavy armor:
-Thrust resistant
-Crush Vulnerable
-Slash Neutral
-Cold Vulnerable
-Heat Resistant
-Energy Neutral

Medium Armor:
-Thrust Vulnerable
-Crush Resistant
-Slash Neutral
-Cold Resistant
-Heat Vulnerable
-Energy Neutral

Cloth:
-Thrust Neutral
-Slash Neutral
-Crush Neutral
-Cold Neutral
-Heat Neutral
-Energy Resistant

86

Thats a firearm, not a thrusting weapon.

87

Before anyone thinks armor damage bonus is bugged, check this out before you post.

88

It is, but it’s also a DEX based weapon that does Thrust damage, which is what the OP was talking about.

89

-50% damage? dang i wear light and i wouldnt wish that on my worst heavy armor wearing enemies.