Armor and Mitigation Changes

[CeltEireson]

Right, so the Epic Duelist's Leathers I'm wearing now currently has a Max Dex Bonus of 28, and the Dodge Cap is at 25%, so if the Dodge Cap for light armor was capped at 20%, it would decrease if I were to use it again should this change occur.

So based on that, I think I have a pretty decent concept of how Dodge Caps currently work, good sir.

Your epic duelist leathers don't have a current max dex bonus of 28 - from memory the base cap on them is 20 - I assume the other 8 comes from enhancements or epic destinys. So under this new system your max dodge bonus would be exactly the same.

The cap of 20% on light armour is before any enhancements/destinies are applied.

[ForgettableNPC]

I am even more confused now:

Are we talking Max Dex Bonus of Armour is base 5, or character dodge cap is 5. they are two different things. Character dodge cap is not increased by many enhancements (sacred armour mastery for instance), and if the dodge cap is 25% you just have to increase the max dex bonus of your armour to use it.

If it is Character dodge cap is 5, then the number of enhancements like sacred armour mastery are now really useless and they are all over the place.

If we are talking max dex bonus is 5, then really this is not change to how the current game works.

If you take the "maximum" of the max dex bonus and the char dodge cap to be the actual dodge cap then this is still how it works today, but looking at it from a bottom down and not a top down view (like it is current).

If you are just going to retro/or not retro but make the new full plate armours that come out to be base 5 max dex bonus instead of the current 1/2 that is standard, it really is a waste of time to discuss or even implement. Just do it.

I think he's saying, that, in case of Heavy Armor, if your Max Dex Bonus is 3, then the Dodge Cap will be increased to 5, but won't have any effect on the Max Dex Bonus.

But if you have any Heavy Armor that has, say, Max Dex Bonus of 6, then the Dodge Cap will stay at 6 instead of being limited to 5.

[EllisDee37]

Except that prr and mrr work vs physical damage and non-evadable magic damage *polar ray to the face*. The two are not even remotely close to the same benefit to investment and under the proposed system Heavy armor and prr are vastly superior to evasion. Raising the cap on dodge for armor makes the benefit vs cost ratio even further bumped towards heavy armor. Remember heavy armor can still put on incorperal and displacement items so the only difference we can talk about is prr and mrr and ac vs evasion and dodge.

The bolded part is only true if the evasion character has no PRR/MRR or AC at all. They will certainly have PRR. (Most likely 100 PRR -- the cap -- under the proposed change, and if it's a monk, triple-digit AC.)

[EllisDee37]

Yeah, maybe the best way to avoid confusion is to change all existing/future armor MDB to match the new dodge caps if the new caps are higher, and then you just have to say that the MDB is going up and most people would understand what that means.

[redoubt]

This dodge cap is meant to be a bonus, not a nerf. It will replace the base max dex of the armor, but only if it increases that value. We wanted to increase the dodge cap for some of the heavy and medium armors.

Feats and enhancements that increased dodge cap will increase this new dodge cap. If armor has a higher dodge cap than the numbers listed we will use the higher value.

Since this has generated a lot of questions let me bring this up with the team to make sure we have a clear way to explain this. There might be a simpler way to accomplish this by working with the Max Dex of the armor instead of having an alternate straight value.

Thanks for the feedback!

Sev~

Good plan.

Some examples would be to talk about stuff like

Flawless black dragonhide. It currently has a max dodge of 19.
-does this become 20 since it is light armor?
-would an effect like "lithe" make it 26% under the new system?
-then the tempest improved dodge take it up to 29%

Will there be any new restrictions on stacking things that increase max dodge bonus or dodge bonus?

[CeltEireson]

Except that prr and mrr work vs physical damage and non-evadable magic damage *polar ray to the face*. The two are not even remotely close to the same benefit to investment and under the proposed system Heavy armor and prr are vastly superior to evasion. Raising the cap on dodge for armor makes the benefit vs cost ratio even further bumped towards heavy armor. Remember heavy armor can still put on incorperal and displacement items so the only difference we can talk about is prr and mrr and ac vs evasion and dodge.

Although some of the classes with evasion do tend to have enhancements/epic destiny that increase dodge and/or add additional options for concealment.

But I'd agree - if the idea is to have some counterbalance to evasion then armour should only be providing damage mitigation for effects that are evadable in the first place.

To be honest if theyre going down this route they should really just do away with AC altogether to make it easier to balance things. You can then have a sliding scale from a high dodge character with little reduction on damage to low dodge character with high reduction in damage. You could then increase the dodge cap / PRR significantly to compensate for no AC.

The main problem with MRR is save. Even if you don't build for it heavy armour will always provide a certain amount of protection against magic regardless of the level of content, evasion on the other hand requires a certain level of reflex save to be useful which varies depending on difficulty level - in normal you may be evading pretty much everything but failing most of the time in elite. Its very difficult to balance the two because of this.

[LordTigerDawn]

I think he's saying, that, in case of Heavy Armor, if your Max Dex Bonus is 3, then the Dodge Cap will be increased to 5, but won't have any effect on the Max Dex Bonus.

But if you have any Heavy Armor that has, say, Max Dex Bonus of 6, then the Dodge Cap will stay at 6 instead of being limited to 5.

Trying to not get into semantics, would that not be saying the min Character dodge cap is now 5 in full plate and max being "max dex bonus".

If that were true with all the light armour max dex bonus increasing abilities out there, the max Character Dodge cap would be in the 40's if not the 50's. Evasion + 50% dodge is a lot more of a buff to robes/light armour than they are buffing heavy/medium with.

[nokowi]

Stat inflation ruined a D20 based system. DnD characters do not get stats in the 60's by level 28. PC's do not get abilities with DC's in the 60-100 range in DnD (by level 28). In PnP, If you run into Asmodeus, you will most likely fail the DC 50 will save, and willingly serve him. With DDO stats, a rogue (DC 70 Reflex) can auto-succeed while another toon (DC 35 Reflex) can auto-fail. This doesn't happen often in PnP because the Rogue might have a DC 30 Reflex and the other toon might have a DC 18 Reflex. DDO can not operate well on the D20 system because of broken mechanics from stat-inflation.

Having ruined the D20 system (auto-succeed or auto-fail happens on a regular basis), dev's implemented a curve based system for AC. PRR was added as a way to allow tanks (heavy armor) to be useful. These changes seemed to work fairly well, but revealed a flaw in that light or no-armor toons with evasion (using dodge) could tank as well as heavy armor users.

The best answer would be to fix stat creep. Lowering stats to reasonable levels would not be popular, and is probably not a realistic solution that players would accept. I see 2 solutions.
1. Go to a D30 or D40 (instead of D20) system to reduce the auto-fail, auto succeed issue.
2. Stat bonuses could be cut in half for saves. (58 Reflex gives you +12 to saves instead of +24 to saves).

I like #2 better because it sticks with the D20 system. Mob DC"s would need to be dropped by 10-15. Both will help fix most of the problems with DC based builds (necro, monk QP, assassin). Either solution would also allow dev's to reduce evasion-based damage (most classes will fail some of the time now, making evasion useful but not required). This will fix most of the heavy armor issues (taking too much elemental damage) while remaining true to DnD.

Please stop making increasingly complex mechanics and fix the core problem. Complex mechanics cause problems when players find all of the "holes" in your new system designed to fix the last set of mistakes.

[Blackheartox]

Have a question dear sir, as i read this thread i see the analogy appear that, what is giving prr will give equal amount of mrr.


So for example ring from horns will also give 24 mrr and new bracers will give 30 mrr.
Im assuming augments will also give mrr? Or not? Or seperate mrr augments?

Real question is, will this change apply to past lifes as well?
Purple dragon knight past life and past life from divine sphere each give 3 prr per stack.
Would this change also add mrr to that 3 ?

Just wondering

[thegreatneil]

Real question is, will this change apply to past lifes as well?
Purple dragon knight past life and past life from divine sphere each give 3 prr per stack.
Would this change also add mrr to that 3 ?

Good question. I would love an answer to this.

[Tilomere]

Note that we have designed this so characters cannot gain both Evasion and the shield bonus coupled with high levels of resistance rating. This is intentional. If you see a hole in our design that allows for this please warn us!

I'm going to warn you that you are going to succeed, which is going to destroy the already weak tank archtype, and leave no melee character other than a Druid capable of withstanding both sustained physical and magical damage. Which is fine, since I play a druid a ton, but not so fine, as in everyone else is going to need to switch to a monkcher or shuriken thrower. Melee is already considered the weakest form of combat. Tanks are the weakest melee. You are nerfing the weakest of the weakest play styles. Which is somewhat humorous.

I think it would be better to cap ranged mitigation. Aka mitigation without a melee weapon in your main hand. That being said, the hole in your design is that I can replace PRR > 100 on a cloth/docent wearer with more healing capacity, defensive roll, HP, displacement, CC on hit, range, or other non-prr damage mitigation.

[thegreatneil]

I'm going to warn you that you are going to succeed, which is going to destroy the already weak tank archtype, and leave no melee character other than a Druid capable of withstanding both sustained physical and magical damage. Which is fine, since I play a druid a ton, but not so fine, as in everyone else is going to need to switch to a monkcher or shuriken thrower. Melee is already considered weak. Melee that can't stand up to both physical and magical damage is worthless.

As someone who plays melee I can state this is so wrong, not even funny.
Everything I have seen here will increase survivability.
More dodge and less damage.

[J-mann]

The bolded part is only true if the evasion character has no PRR/MRR or AC at all. They will certainly have PRR. (Most likely 100 PRR -- the cap -- under the proposed change, and if it's a monk, triple-digit AC.)

Actually looking at the numbers, ASSUMING that a robe wearer has 100 prr and ASSUMING that a heavy wearer hits 250 prr the numbers look okish, depending on how hard it is to hit 250. 100 prr would be 40% reduction and 250 prr would be 57.8% reduction. Assuming a dodge of 25 vs 5 assuming 100 damage a swing over 100 swings we would have 4500 damage, vs 4009 damage on the heavy armor. The problem arises on the magic side. It is fairly difficult to get a no fail reflex and evasion ONLY effects reflex save spells. This is where things get questionable, and I think in the long run as stat inflation continues that heavy armor will prove to be the best option.

The other problem, we have to look at the whole package of investment. Under the proposed system all heavy armor needs is a prr investment and it gets GREAT differences. Where as an evade build will need to invest in prr, dodge, get evasion, AND build a workable reflex save. The costs and benefits for the system and the additional perks of heavy armor are WAY out of wack.

[Firewall]

Nice Changes! Especially making investment in AC worth some more in EE content is already a big deal!

[Madja]

I'm kinda sad to see the 100 PRR cap for robe wearers. My current plan is/was to grind out the 9 divine epic past-lives, but now I don't see the point as it would put me way over the PRR cap
I think it's great to see armor get some love though!

[Thar]

These changes will make or break a LOT of builds, can we put in now for another LR +20?

2nd this.

[Thar]

These changes will make or break a LOT of builds, can we put in now for another LR +20?

2nd this along with a box of shields where we can pick a raid worthy light endgame shield to use...

[Thumbed_Servant]

...

On another note, regarding MRR, where would Orbs fit into that equation? I think they should give more MRR than PRR (if any) considering they're magic-oriented rather than physical.

Good catch on the orbs.

How will orbs work in this system?

[ScoobieDoo]

Greetings.

I wanted to jump in and talk about some upcoming changes we are working on.

<cut>

Everything about this post is win. Very well thought out. Me like.

[B0ltdrag0n]

Right, so the Epic Duelist's Leathers I'm wearing now currently has a Max Dex Bonus of 28, and the Dodge Cap is at 25%, so if the Dodge Cap for light armor was capped at 20%, it would decrease if I were to use it again should this change occur.



So based on that, I think I have a pretty decent concept of how Dodge Caps currently work, good sir.

You would be absolutely wrong. I think it has been explained extensively in this thread.