Heavy Armour Should Have More Hyper Armour Than Light Armour

EDIT: It is likely that I am wrong about the technical details about how hyper armour works, but maybe giving heavy armour a few extra hyper armour frames could be good anyway.

Currently in Conan Exiles, your hyper armour (resistence to being staggered/interrupted while attacking) is based on what attack with which weapon you’re using and the roll recovery stat which you can increase by wearing light armour and levelling agility.

Mechanically, heavy armour doesn’t give much benefit because it gives you a worse roll which is the games’ main defensive mechanic.
The defense heavy gives is OK, but obviously it can’t have too high of a damage reduction as it would get annoying to fight.

Because light armour gets cheaper and faster rolls, it has fantastic offensive roll pokes, is better defensively with more defensive rolls, and also wins more trades because light armour gets better hyper armour on top of this.

Thematically, it doesn’t make much sense that someone who is in full plate is easier to interrupt mid swing than someone who is naked or in cloth.

Also personally it just seems really obtuse and unclear that hyper armour scales off your roll recovery.

I think it would make sense to have a ‘poise’ stat similar to the souls series that gives a fixed amount based on light/medium/heavy.
Then give a small bonus poise bonus based on agility or grit.

I feel grit is more thematically appropriate as its literally in the name and it would work with the new 15% damage decrease perk grit gets now.

TLDR; Light armour has it’s cake and gets to eat it at the moment, as it has better rolls offensively and defensively, so why not give heavy armour better hyper armour than light so it can trade better.
I don’t even think this would shake up the meta, but it would be a good step to making heavy armour more viable.

(For medium armour just assume I mean to put it in between light and heavy mechanically for everything)

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Normally I would agree, but with some details.

  1. It would need to be based on where on the body the player is hit. Head shot would usually stagger just from the impact depending on the weapon weight (as we can not change character attack force beyond “light” and “heavy”).

  2. Was it a stabbing attack ? Depending on the weapon the weapon could penetrate if in the irght place hit causing pain and flinching (staggering) to occur.

  3. Was it a concussive hit by a weapon with concussive upgrade on it ? Kinetic force from this alone would cause a staggering effect.

Honestly against players atleast I think light or no armor wearers should stagger more often per hit taken than med and heavy to balance out the weight difference and penalties given from it (and no the armor absorb is not nearly enough for heavy yet to compensate for this).

Light armor should make you roll faster as you would be able to be more nimble as would the weight difference could make you use less energy to roll around on the ground.

  1. The game is not precise enough to have induvidual hit zones outside of archery.

  2. Thrusting and slashing are all easier to withstand in metal armour than cloth armour in any part of the body.

As for concussive/blunt damage, make blunt damage do more stagger to heavy armour than light armour? I don’t see an issue with this, it’s supposed to counter armour.

  1. No where in the post did I say heavy armour should get buffed rolls, I just suggested that wearing heavy armour should make you harder to stagger mid attack than someone wearing light armour. Infact I don’t think rolls should be changed at all.

Right now, in Conan Exiles, being naked gives you the best hyper armour in the game.
Clearly something is wrong with that.

Wow, I thought hyper armour was purely a function of weapon animations. Had no idea it was affected by armour or stats.

I get what you’re saying and I agree heavy armour should provide stagger resistance.

Something to consider though: perhaps the game gives advantages to naked and lightly armoured characters to encourage people to play that way, like in the source material? The lore is very swashbuckling and Conan is usually naked or lightly clothed when he fights. Yeah it’s not realistic, but it’s a difficult thing to balance for the devs visually. If heavy armour is decent then people will use it more and then you no longer have a swashbuckling game full of naked barbarians. You have a bunch of knights bashing one another with maces. Not really on-brand for a Conan game.

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I too was under the impression that hyper-armor was something offered by the wielded weapon. Please point to your source, I would like to read up on it more.

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My ‘source’ is that I recently went on the dogs of the desert server and tried various armour types out, I found that heavy was easiest to stagger mid swing so I found out why on youtube.

Here’s a video talking about it, there are more videos that talk about it but they’re partway through 3.0 streams and this one is clear. Timestamped to the part he talks about it specifically (01:02):

https://youtu.be/LtVGkJ8ImpM?t=63

In-game this is the reason Dafari NPCs are so hard to stagger, because that faction has really high agility and wears light armour.

Unfortunately he doesn’t show a comparasion so I wouldn’t blame you for not being convinced (and its from 2 years ago), but the PvP duel community does know about it and its one of the reasons they level agility so high in the current, pre-3.0 build.

I want to do a video of it in testing conditions but the co-op/singleplayer does sometimes function differently to actual dedicated servers.

A random Youtuber is your source?

Well, even he says in the first 20 seconds that hyper-armor comes from the weapons. I don’t agree with a lot of the other stuff he’s saying, but it does sound like he’s reading it from somewhere. I would like to know if he’s reading his own notes or perhaps some Funcom blog (or other official source).

I’m sure having better hit recovery and dodge rolls (granted by light armor) makes for a good choice in PvP, as evidenced by how popular it is. However, despite heavy armor being less mobile, I still don’t think it, or any other armor type, has any bearing on the amount of hyper-armor you get. Can you point me to a Funcom video, document or thread where the devs state otherwise?

As far as I know, Funcom have never acknowledged it.

Like I said, heavy armour being easy to stagger was something I noticed in duels and found that video afterwards to explain why it happens.

The reason why we know that armour effects it on top of weapons is if you do the same attack with the same weapon, who gets staggered and who doesn’t is based on the armour they’re wearing and their agility stat.

Your best chance for empirical evidence is if me or someone else records a video of it, which I may do, because I get that it sounds really outlandish.

To me this seems like placebo and the general sluggishness and slower recovery of heavy armor is making people feel like they’re more prone to being interrupted. On top I would assume that heavy agility based players would simply roll out of the way of an incoming hit in most cases even in the middle of their own swings when allowed thus not even getting hit that much in the first place, which would increase the “annoyance” factor of this when wearing heavy armor, since it happens way more often as such sticking more into your mind.

This is what I could find on the topic on the wiki

Based on this, the whole stat looks binary… as in there is no “more hyper armor” or “less hyper armor”… you either have hyper armor… or you don’t.
At least to me this looks like every weapon animation (each separate sequence in each combo of each weapon) can have a fixed time-window on it’s timeline configured where it can provide hyper armor.

So think of a swing like a short movie clip consisting of 1 second for example and it could be configured that from time 0.324 till time 0.740 you have hyper armor and if you get hit during that time you ignore it.

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After doing some testing, I cannot definitively prove that bp_hyperarmorwindow is extended by wearing light armour.

It feels like agility does influence hyper armour (but it is possible it is just from the increased attack speed), but I can’t prove that it does, and from what I saw, if it does, it influences hyper armour the same amount regardless of what armour you wear. Also in my tests, I only tested 0 and 30 agility.

Someone with modding tools that display when bp_hyperarmorwindow is active could completely solve this discussion. I might look to see how difficult of a mod that would be to make.

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