Armor Plating damage reduction

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

This isn’t exactly a suggestion, more of an inquiry if the idea is even any good. I don’t really minmax, PvP, mess around with mods, or anything else that would make me knowledgeable on the side effects this might cause.

So armor plating upgrades are useless. The best of their kind, Thick Armor Plating, give +3 armor each, or +15 from a full set. With end game (or level 51, when you unlock Master Armorsmith) gear, 15 armor is nothing, especially when considering the fact that the actual damage reduction from armor has diminishing returns.

If you don’t understand how diminishing returns works, here is an example. I have a medium armor set with 460 armor that provides 64% damage reduction and a heavy set with 800 armor that provides 76% damage reduction. Nearly double the armor increases damage reduction by an additional 12%.

So here is the proposition, what if armor plating gave a direct damage reduction instead of armor? This could rapidly become overpowered, making plating the only used upgrade, so the percent would need to stay low. I think changing the current extra armor straight into a percent would be far too much, but perhaps more reasonable for a complete armor set, i.e. divided by 5.

Thin Armor Plating would give .2% each, or 1% for a whole set.
Armor Plating would give .4% each, or 2% for a whole set.
Thick Armor Plating would give .6% each, or 3% for a whole set.

So if I upgraded my medium set mentioned above with all Thick Armor Plating, my damage reduction would be 67% (64+3) and my heavy set would be 79% (76+3).

So, as I said, I’m not sure if this idea is any good. The exact numbers could be tweaked whichever way if it is imbalanced, so they shouldn’t really matter. The only question would be,…

tl;dr
…is direct damage reduction for armor plating a better idea than the extra armor they currently provide?

2

The armor plating would be better if it caused a % increase in armor rating. As it stands, it’s basically useless.

Bear in mind that that 12% increase in damage reduction for your heavy set in the example above equates to a 33% reduction in damage compared to the medium armor (ignoring armor penetration sunder etc).

E.g. 100 points of damage will result in you taking 36 damage in medium and 24 damage in heavy.

1 Like
3

That’s just playing with the numbers in a meaningless way. The closer to 100% the two armors get, the larger the percent difference between them will grow. 99% is 1300% better than 87%, but the difference is still 12.

That would certainly be easier to balance, but due to diminishing returns, I think it runs into the very same problem as the current system.

4

Do you know the exact formula for converting armor rating to damage reduction? (Or indeed armor pen and sunder)

The maths is not meaningless. It highlights the fact that a % increase has greater effect, the closer you get to 100.

5

I do not know how damage reduction is calculated or how penetration works (I do understand sunder). If you know how these work, I would be interested to learn and maybe that kind of information could be added to the wiki.

6

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.