Tactical Vest/Riot Armor Questions and Concerns

[IronBudmeister]

Hello Styg,

Let me first say thank you for the excellent work and effort you are putting into crafting this game into your vision of a hardcore isometric rpg. While I joined in the most recent build (0.1.10.0) I have logged in 40+ hours and am loving what I have been seeing. I just had some questions/concerns I wanted to discuss about the light- to medium-tier armors. Brace yourself for potential wall of text, I'll have a simple TL;DR at the end just in case.

From what I have seen, there is a nice balance in armor tier vs DR/DT. However, with my experience in crafting tactical vests and riot gear, there seems to be no real reason to choose laminated over reinforced fabric ballistic panels. From looking at the wiki and ingame tooltips, laminated is supposed to increase damage threshold while reinforced increases damage resistance. However, looking in crafting laminated only increases DT 1 or 2 points while reinforced increases DR about 10-15%. I am not sure how exactly the quality of material and required crafting skills play into the DR/DT added, but I am wondering if you were planning on increasing the stat differentiation between the two ballistic panels so that laminated makes more of a noticable impact without adding in a ceramic plate to increase DT incredibly. That in turn brings me to my next point.

While my current character is rolling through the underrail in a nice suit of riot gear, I find little reason to replace my rifles for a pistol and shield plate. While I hardly use pistols anymore after picking up a lovely 9mm Huszar and 12.7 Corsair and haven't put in too much research into pistol abilities and dps, I feel that the dps difference of one- vs two-handed weapons gives little incentive to add just a 20% chance to eliminate X amount of damage from melee attacks and 40% or so to armor penalty. Have you considered or are you planning on adding extra DR and/or DT that a shield plate adds to compensate for a potential drop in dps as well as extra encumbrance?

Overall thank you for your time and thank you again for the time and effort you put into this wonderful game, and I look forward to seeing what you bring to the game in future content updates.

Sincerely,
Iron

TL;DR difference between laminated and reinforced fabric ballistic panels seems lackluster and shield plates might need extra stats to seem viable. Thanks.

[Jinxedster]

Everything is quality dependant, and I found some laminated panels that were awesome at 60+ quality. I prefer them over the % damage reduction.

I too dislike the riot gear, but disagree that the single handed weapons are bad. I found a .44 hammerer that with aimed shot was able to do 150 with ease and I crafted a plasma gun that was able to do over 200. problem is I needed the other hand to spend the remaining action points for a single shot of 8.6 but if I remember correctly it does not allow you to. Going through creature heavy areas does make sense to have riot gear though, but I always concentrated on having better offence...

[malfunction]

I'm also loving the .44 hammerer, but instead of 'aimed shot' I went for 'gunslinger' (which reduces the AP required for pistols) and combined with a high dexterity (started at 9, now at 10) reduces the AP cost of the .44 from 32 to 22 which alows me to pull of two shots per turn (or one shot and a few secondary attacks from a knife or weaker pistol).

I have found this quite effective and as 'gunslinger' is limited to pistols only have found even a sniper rifle to be less effective for my build. Also there are other perks (like kneecap shot) that are also limited to certain weapons, including pistols, so it is possible to make a pistol only character and not be lacking in combat.

[IronBudmeister]

Awesome, good to hear that quality plays a much larger role in stats than what I've experienced currently with laminated vs reinforced. I'm personally more for the percentage reductions, but in small arms fire I definitely see the results of threshold defense. I'm glad that pistols are a viable way to go, although not personally my cup of tea I have seen some pretty sexy plasma pistols that I wouldn't mind giving a try. I'm excited for the addition of lazer/plasma rifles later on in future content updates.

That being said, I think my main problem with riot gear like I said earlier is a shield plate only adds that 20% chance to nagate X damage. While it definitely pays off in combat against creatures and melee heavy goons, I feel like it should also add some sort of DR/DT against damage in general. Possibly something like adding 10-15% / 3-5, or upping the bonus percentages from 100% to 150-200% for firearms and 50% to 100-125% for melee. Sure I'm completely spitballing here with values and whatnot, but I feel like with that sort of stat bonus implemented it would close the gap from medium- to heavy-tier armor. This would work as sort of a midway point between riot gear and metal armor should one go on the heavier side of the riot gear crafting.

Again, I'm a fan of riot gear regardless but I personally feel that should something like this be implemented it would allow for agile dexterity characters to sacrifice less stat points into strength for nice defensive armor options, should they choose to do so. Thanks for your time all.

[Styg]

- As people suggested, pistols have been indirectly buffed by changes to dexterity and I think they are pretty powerful now.
- I agree that the riot shield is a bit underwhelming right now, it's getting buffed.
- Increasing DT on riot/tactical vest is more beneficial against firearms as it's multiplied (x3 on tactical vest, x2 on riot) so in reallity you're not just adding 1-2 DT
- Upping the riot armor bonuses as you suggested would make tactical vests obsolete

[IronBudmeister]

Thank you for the reply Styg, I agree with everything you're saying and can see where you're coming from. Thanks for taking my opinion into consideration. I look forward to seeing what you have in store for us next patch.