Useless armor variants

[Mork]

Summary of current armor selection:

15 Dex with +3Dex item or 14 Dex with +4Dex gloves:
6/4 Mithril Chainmail (melodic) From Doron Amar Merchant.

Less that 14 dex + Armor Optimization Feats:
8/3 Entropium Fullplate

Less that 14 dex no Armor Optimization:
8/3 Mithral Fullplate

30+ Dex or Monk/Duelist/Invisible Blade
0/unlimited Cloth robes

26+ Dex:
3/8 Spidersilk

Druid that can't wear metal:
8/1 fullplate of umberhulk/wywern/dragonhide

Spellcaster:
Leafweave, 0ASF padded or robes

Shapeshifter:
doesn't care

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Above makes any:
Chain shirts, half-plates, hide armors, leather armors, breastplates, banded, etc completely useless. I just tried to sell EPIC breastplate and no one wanted it for 15000...

Additionally difference between heaviest armor available only very rarely in loot (Entropium Fullplate) and light armor easily available at NPC store is 1 AC(base armor+dex) which is laughable.

Maybe it's time to consider some changes? Make breastplates/hide/leather/banded/halfplate armors viable? Further increase differences between light and heavy? I'm curious what other experts think.

[Steve]

Supposedly, the answer is to make Content—meaning mobs—less strong so that extreme optimization and power building is no longer needed, and thus one can run with lesser quality Gear and still have a good time (but maybe not soloing>!).

[Mork]

Supposedly, the answer is to make Content—meaning mobs—less strong so that extreme optimization and power building is no longer needed, and thus one can run with lesser quality Gear and still have a good time (but maybe not soloing>!).

It's possible already. I've dragged through content people on both my chars that had absolute garbage for build and gear yet they are simply fun to be around.

I'd still prefer solution that changed armors itself. Make them ALL 10 or 11 AC totals (base + dex). No one will ever care about 5/2 or 4/4 stuff.

Big issue was introduced with addition of 6/4 +3 Mithral chain-mail to NPC (melodic one) and situation would look much better without such powerful light armor available in unlimited quantities but damage is done and now all we can is to consider how to move forward. Full Plate has all the negatives of heavy armor and barelly +1AC advantage (only Entropium one) meanwhile Iron plate is all kinds of awful when it should be top tier armor.

I've played on server that added piercing/slashing/bludgeoning as percentage resistance but it was max level 12 environment which can be balanced much more easily.

[Steve]

Wouldn’t make sense to make all armors equal in stats.

More “realistic”” would be to make certain armors less useful, like making it impossible to run in full plate, or applying Fatigue, or something like that (which nobody would like!).

The BGTSCC economy is (do-me). Epic gear sells for coppers on the gold piece, if it sells at all these days. Unlimited loot and most players running regular loot runs 24/7 is the real problem here, not whether or not armor is useful. A character who can only use mithral breastplate should have some value in gameplay, but….

[Mork]

I'll never understand the notion of
"Players regularly playing" being a "real problem".

Sounds to me like opposite of a problem

In fact opposite is a reason why many other servers stopped existing so... Maybe let's not go this route

[Sean Maxhell]

I agree with everything Mork says, and my character can't even use armor.

Back in the day, with second edition rules, armor weight made sense — a full plate armor weighed much more in the character's inventory compared to light armor. So a character with low strength was forced to wear light armor.

Now, the most unrealistic thing in the game is that you increase your ability scores every 4 levels, but the carrying capacity bonuses from strength are objectively what I love the most — because with just 26 strength, I can carry the corpses of 8 adult red dragons in my backpack. Obviously, I have no intention of giving that up.

However, yes — since the earliest days of the game, with the introduction of mithral, I've always thought that armor made of other metals was pointless. Because even if you make a character with 13 dexterity (for feats) granting +1 AC, with an item that gives you +3 dexterity, bringing you to 16, you get a +3 AC bonus. So even full plate armor absolutely must be made of mithral — which then becomes medium armor, no longer heavy.

I'm the first to take advantage of unbalanced mechanics, but I'm forced to admit that mithral armor is unbalanced — it always has been — and it makes all other armor useless.