I disagree that the armour system ‘doesn’t work’. The stats based system of the first game was much less inventive and strategic, as the stat-dump mechanic ended up playing the game for you: you didn’t have to think, as it was done for you with dice rolls behind the scenes.
The new armour system may be flawed, but it at least forces you to think. Should I target physical or magical? Should I heal lost health or heal lost armour? If you find yourself having to ask questions and make choices during combat, that’s a good thing. If the computer is doing the numbers for you instead, what’s the point in playing the game?
However, I do agree strongly with the point – raised by a poster on the previous page – that damaging magical and physical armour shouldn’t be as simplistic as it is now. Currently, 100/100 physical armour will absorb all 30 points of a physical attack, leaving you with 70/100 physical armour and full real health. I believe your real health should also take some minor damage too. Say 5% of the initial attack by default (with certain weapons gaining bonus properties allowing this to be increased and certain armours gaining bonus properties allowing it to be decreased).
This would add a much-needed tension to the new system, without undermining the strategic value of having physical and magical armour in the first place. I don’t think you should ever feel completely safe from real health damage, even with full armour. Every blow should count towards keeping you on your toes: even small bites into your real health will eventually add up to a problem that will require a judgment call to resolve.
I also disagree about the new shields, for the same reasons mentioned above. The armour regen ability for shields can strategically turn the tide of combat in spectacular ways. There was one memorable fight I had within the keep inside a room with a character being converted to a silent monk (can’t recall the names of the enemies here off-hand). It featured at least one shield and sword guy: at one point, I had him CC’d, with his health whittled down to nothing, and his magical and physical armour at zero. So I focused my attacks on the more dangerous enemies around me, considering this guy a goner. Then he gets up, does the shield regen, and gets healed by some other lad – suddenly he’s back in the game, and a significant threat just because I failed to pick him off.
Returning to the problem of CC, I hadn’t read this thread
http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=602078#Post602078 on CC. This covers the ideal solution to the problem, I don’t have anything to add to that.
That being said, I’m also not convinced Larian can or will make such changes at this point in the dev cycle. They’ve so much work to do that a release this year seems ambitious in the extreme. It’ll require either heavy patching post launch, or it really will fall to the modders to supply solutions to the bigger problems.
It would be great all right to get a kind of modding handbook for the game, either from Larian or someone familiar with the codebase. Though I’ve never felt like anything more than a fumbling hack with unfamiliar languages and systems, I find you can still go a long way as a hack, so I’d be more than willing to get involved with the right docs as pointers.
