Feedback:User/Armond/Armor rating and damage reduction
Armor rating and damage reduction | |
|---|---|
| User | Armond |
| Categories | Mechanics |
Armor rating is an excessively powerful stat in Guild Wars. There's a couple reasons for this, but fixing armor in Guild Wars is a task beyond a four-man team, so we should instead try to pinpoint exactly what makes armor so powerful and how to avoid the same thing happening in GW2.
- Armor is universal: Unlike other games, armor in Guild Wars reduces damage taken from spells (unless otherwise specified). While this lets armor replace half a dozen other stats, it also means there are very few things armor doesn't protect against.
- Armor scales quickly: Light, medium, and heavy armor have a difference of +10 per "step". "Plus ten" doesn't sound like much compared to "minus 141 times three", but it's around 15% reduced damage each step.
- Armor is cheap: Several skills provide +24 armor, even to the whole party. That's another ~35% damage reduction. It's even worse in PvE.
There's a couple other problems that arise because of armor:
- Armor scales weirdly: I gave myself a headache trying to write some examples for here. Linear scaling would be great, especially since armor is such a basic stat.
- Base armor is hard to guestimate: A paragon has 80 "base" armor, but his passive armor (before temporary buffs) is either 86 or 106, depending on whether he's using agg refrain.
- Armor penetration is confusing: This stat has been introduced to a few games because armor is such an important stat, and in all of them it's turned out to be pretty complicated. New and experienced players both can be confused by what armor penetration actually does for them and whether it's worth paying attention to.
- World of Warcraft had an armor penetration stat, but it was removed because it was "too mathy" - by which Blizzard meant that not enough people understood it even after they released all their internal formulae.
- Upgrading armor is critical: A new player (especially playing Factions) can get stumped by seemingly overpowered level 14 AI enemies... until they find out that they were supposed to upgrade their armor - twice.
Subtractive damage reduction is similarly powerful.
- Damage reduction is applied last: -5 damage off a hit for 100 isn't significant, but when you've already reduced it with armor, it's a bigger deal.
- With the current order, an AL 136 Defy Pain warrior reduces 100 damage to 27, and then takes another 9 damage off that, for a final total of 18. Damage reduction ended up reducing the damage by 33%.
- If damage reduction were applied first, the warrior would take 24, or (coincidentally) 33% more damage.
- Damage packets are common: When a team is focusing on one target - a tank in PvE, a monk in PvP, Gunther, etc - subtractive damage reduction can quickly become the most effective defense available.
- Damage reduction is fairly cheap: Shielding Hands and Shield of Absorption are both monk staples in PvP, and Union, Shadow Form, and to a lesser extent Stoneflesh Aura are all very common in PvE.
- Skills like Reversal of Fortune are balanced by only affecting one source of damage, and because of that have become less commonly used since Nightfall's release. Lightbringer is balanced in the sense that DoA is balanced.
In some more simplistic games, such as Golden Sun, defense is comparatively simple. The attacker deals a certain amount of damage, either physical or elemental; physical damage is reduced by an amount equal to the target's defense, and elemental damage is reduced by a percentage based on the target's elemental resistance. The rare attacks that are both elemental and physical are reduced by defense and then multiplied by resistance. Perhaps similar formulae could be considered for GW2. (For the record, offensive formulae are also fairly simple; they are generally ((base damage + bonus from stats) * multiplier).)
