The Physical / Magic armor system

[Ellye]

How do you feel about it?

I'm still at the beginning of the game, but I'm not sure if I enjoy the aspect of 100% immunity to CC before the armor is broken, and 100% susceptibility to CC after it is broken.

It makes it feels like the ideal party composition would be to have everyone dealing only Physical Damage and Physical CC or everyone only dealing Magic Damage and Magical CC, so you can quickly burn down armor and start chaining CC.

Also makes the start of battles very hard, and them they suddenly get extremely easy once you break past the armor and can chain-CC.

Kinda weird. Sounded interesting in theory, but so far I'm not enjoying it so much in practice.

[Ellye]

Same; it's just that it could be even better. But still, really enjoying the game.

[chebur2012]

best armor system in games so far

[Ellye]

The more I play, the more I get annoyed by this thing in particular:

Originally posted by Ellye:

And how some hybrid characters don't really work too well. The "Battlemage" class, as suggested by default, uses two-handed weapons and have skills like Shocking Touch... but if you're attacking someone in melee with Physical Damage, than Shocking Touch will be useless because it deals Magic Damage.

Stuff like Petrifying Touch is useless on a physical fighter.

On the first game, we could make interesting builds by mixing effects from different skill lines. Right now, it feels we're punished for trying to do that. Picking up some sort of offensive support skill from a different type is useless. You can't even have a magical Slow effect on a Physical character, because even slow will be blocked.

[ghost_zero5]

I don't really like the system because if I try to use magical and physical damage it gets really annoying, e.g. my mage destroys the magical armor. However, if my tank gets close to the enemy the physical armor is still full.

I think it would be better that once one armor is destroyed BOTH are gone. That way you can start to do physical damage but the armor type itself is still separate.

[Blacksnake]

The 100% saving throw from armor is garbage. Maybe it would be better if the amount of armor gave more cc resistance, leaving a chance to CC if the armor is up. Lots of people have stated this, but controlling the battlefield and crafting cool effects goes to waste. You tend to hurt your teammates more than the enemies because they will run up in melee range with 1.2 billion magic armor, through fields of necrofire. Then someone tries to throw their fireball and the aoe makes the area explode, doing more magic armor damage to your team than to homeboy. Yes I'm exaggerating, but not by much.

[Iry]

It only takes a round to knock armor off, and then you can freely use CC. Armor is mostly cheese protection against the kind of stuff you could do in DOS1.

[Kulin]

Originally posted by Ellye:

How do you feel about it?

I'm still at the beginning of the game, but I'm not sure if I enjoy the aspect of 100% immunity to CC before the armor is broken, and 100% susceptibility to CC after it is broken.

It makes it feels like the ideal party composition would be to have everyone dealing only Physical Damage and Physical CC or everyone only dealing Magic Damage and Magical CC, so you can quickly burn down armor and start chaining CC.

Also makes the start of battles very hard, and them they suddenly get extremely easy once you break past the armor and can chain-CC.

Kinda weird. Sounded interesting in theory, but so far I'm not enjoying it so much in practice.

I think this is the best part of the combat system at this point.

So many thoughts are based on this. For example its no good idea to focus on one kind of damage, because mages are generally weak to physical attacks, while knights are weak to magical attacks. Their armors are just designed that way. So it's also important in both directions - attack and defence.

So as a result my shadowblade - who is always attacking mages first - has a high magic armor. My ranger is balanced and attacks other rangers and also mages. My mages attack melee dudes. They have not so much magic armor and are prone to magic based crowd control.

I think a huge part of depth would be lost without this armor system.

[Crow]

Originally posted by Ellye:

How do you feel about it?

I'm still at the beginning of the game, but I'm not sure if I enjoy the aspect of 100% immunity to CC before the armor is broken, and 100% susceptibility to CC after it is broken.

It makes it feels like the ideal party composition would be to have everyone dealing only Physical Damage and Physical CC or everyone only dealing Magic Damage and Magical CC, so you can quickly burn down armor and start chaining CC.

Also makes the start of battles very hard, and them they suddenly get extremely easy once you break past the armor and can chain-CC.

Kinda weird. Sounded interesting in theory, but so far I'm not enjoying it so much in practice.

Get a Warfare, later in the game you get a skill to instantly destroy all physical armor as long as the Warfare character has more Armor than the target.

[w.f.schepel]

I like it. Takes some getting used to, but it opens up a world of tactics and strategies.

That said, most presets are really bad. If you want to play at a higher difficulty, you need to make your own custom character and the choices you make for your other party members in the start are critically important. I wasted my first start because I failed to properly study the various presets.

[Frozen Esper]

I love this game, but if I have to criticize one thing this would be it... It's kind of a drag when some characters attack with non-magical weapons and then you have characters attacking with magical weapons or spells and both have to penetrate different armor types. It's almost as if you should either choose to use all characters that use non-magical damage or choose to use all characters that use magical damage. Also, this new armor system makes traps less dangerous. I can easly just walk through fire or poison in non-combat...

[Ydyp]

Originally posted by w.f.schepel:

I like it. Takes some getting used to, but it opens up a world of tactics and strategies.

That said, most presets are really bad. If you want to play at a higher difficulty, you need to make your own custom character and the choices you make for your other party members in the start are critically important. I wasted my first start because I failed to properly study the various presets.

I feel just like this, but this mechanic had me pissed off at the start as I couldn't CC the first round which made let say some battles very frustrating until I started to work with it and strip away the weakest type of armor and not focus my physical dmg on an enemy with very high physical armor.

[Kulin]

Originally posted by Maximus:

I love this game, but if I have to criticize one thing this would be it... It's kind of a drag when some characters attack with non-magical weapons and then you have characters attacking with magical weapons or spells and both have to penetrate different armor types. It's almost as if you should either choose to use all characters that use non-magical damage or choose to use all characters that use magical damage. Also, this new armor system makes traps less dangerous. I can easly just walk through fire or poison in non-combat...

But is this really the fault of the system?

Just think about real tactics. If there is a tank batallion you don't send in a anti air missiles defence batallion to destroy it. If there are incoming attack helicopters you don't send in tanks.

And - to complete the analogy - if you simplify the game too much all you'd have is tanks fighting tanks.