I think that its now that I brought something fairly important up, before the Admin start working on the next round of race balancing (if they haven't started thinking about it already) - and to be honest it is something that really needs to be worked over. And that is the complete armour and resistance system itself.

I think that DMP was a step in the right direction, but the way it is implemented now is half-hearted at best, and the current state things are in just leaves us with a hell of a lot more confusion than we used to have in regards to how all of the various resistance systems (racial resistances, old style armour, DMP and flat percentage damage reduction like putrefaction and the Resilience skillset) interact.

The entire system needs to move over to DMP, with the various skills and armours (including greatrobes/splendours actually being classified as armours) with specific roles in place for each of them. Because honestly, at this stage I think even the Admin would have trouble telling you exactly how much tankier a ninjakari kepheran acrobat with greatrobes and virtuoso resilience is (L3 cutting/blunt, 65DMP, 55/55 armour) than a human necromantic ur'Guard in fullplate and trans resilience (28 magic DMP, 15 fire DMP, 102/102 fullplate and putrefaction) against the same opponent who only does physical damage.

While I don't want to see tailors screwed over, there needs to be a place in this game for more than just the Greatrobes/Splendours + Fieldplate/Fullplate scenario we have now. What I would prefer to see is a compromise where enchanted armours may have higher generic cutting/blunt than some of the forged goods, but the trade-off is that they could have reduced wounding DMP instead. That way people would still use greatrobes for bashing but for pk you would see them switch to chainmail or scalemail instead. I wouldn't mind if Tailors got different patterns to help with PK more, but the system as it is now is in need of fixing.

The way the Magic skillset works in conjunction with proofings is also slightly annoying, but nowhere near the problem level that the rest of the system is currently in, though it has its own issues, with greatrobes/splendours being debatably better than anything except fullplate in the game, just because of the added proofings they can recieve, and the lack of transparency in the way armour stats work making it virtually impossible to decide whether its better to wear robes and good proofings against an artifact runed warrior or a good set of fieldplate to try and mitigate the physical damage as much as possible.

While we don't need it, it would be extremely nice if we had some sort of way to know how much DMP in each damage type we actually have (even if we don't get the converted results - we can work that out ourselves), because especially when it comes to psychomet monks, its complete guesswork until they transcend it. Rework how much protection the armours give, do whatever you have to do, but PLEASE do something to fix the way armour and resistences work in this game and make it all the one system. Once all that is completely sorted out, it would also make things like the weapon stats and other offensive damage skills easier to codify and make more balanced on all levels too.

I don't think we should make wounding robe wearers easier. Remember mages can only wear robes, not sure if guardians and wiccans have better options, and monks and bards are robe and leather, leather being useless for stopping damage and wounds.

Psymet monks currently face wounding as their worse problem, I have overcome it with Callia through a massive expentiture on artifacts that allow me to not sip, if using heal scroll and sparkle berrys, and apply health more or less on every balance. It has helped a lot, and has proven to me offensive psymet is great. (I am far more effective offensively now then I ever was as a acrobatic monk.) but you have a huge defensive hump to over come in that you really have no way to stop wounding.

But this is not a psymet thread, so back to armor. I would love to see more armors used. Add some new skills in combat that open up new armors, with drawbacks to using them. Something like this:

Inept: Leather Armour: No dex, or elemental/psionic penalities.

Adept: Scalemail: -1 Dex, +5% mana/ego to elemental/psionic abilities

Fabled: Chainmail: -3 dex, +15% mana/ego elemental/psionic abilities

The penalities are waved if you have a class that could normally wear that armor type.

Just a rough idea, I would like to see armor used more.

The idea would be to assign various types to armor to various classes. That is, Mages/Bards/Monks would get leather, Wiccans/Druids would get scalemail, Guardians would get chainmail, and Warriors would get plate.

Some excellent points made here. No doubt the admins are absolutely swamped right now, but yeah- it is kind of weird to expect any warrior to buy field plate, when they can buy proofable great robes that block a similar amount of damage AND have resistances. I'd go so far as to say that any Necromancer would definitely want splendour robes- they have doubled resistances to fire/cold/electrical/magic, at a relatively small expense of physical damage. An expense that is often covered by Putrefaction in the case of overall damage. Can you afford to NOT have a set?

NB: I'm aware that even splendour robes won't block as much wounding as fullplate: but I'm mainly talking about the large number of elemental/magical attack sources by both adventurers and denizens.

That the thing though. Once all this was all on the one single system (DMP), it would be much easier to code in specific changes to problem areas, so that if you notice that mages are taking too much wounds then you could give them a skill or tailored item that specifically helped them (but not every class) with wounding (preferable - and it would bring in a bit more profit for tailors), or even allow them to use one of the forged armours. I don't want to see Tailoring made useless, but the current status quo NEEDS to be fixed, and everything needs to be consistent instead of the insane amount of different systems we have to keep track of at the moment.

Fyi the way it is now is because when they did have everything under dmp people bitched.

Monks can't wear leather armor if I remember right. Only bards can. I remember trying to wear a leather skullcap one day before I got my robes and it said I couldn't wear that.

Where the hell are you getting 65 DMP vs. physical for a ninjakari acrobat from? Elasticity is 20, bracing is 15... that's 35.

I think DMP is fine as-is. Of course greatrobes are better than any other kind of armor - the game is balanced around that and if you change armor suddenly all warriors are going to become hideously powerful.

Yeah, um, the issue with massive differences in damage taken is because of warriors and fullplate, not robes. If you're looking to make things more even, it's the forged goods that need changing. Athletics already gives you elemental and magic resistance on par with robes.

15 Dodging (inept in Acro)
20 Elasticity
15 Stealth Bracing
15 Ninini Body
=
65 DMP.

acrobatics gives elemental and magic resistance?\\

Sure, but tankiness against denizens doesn't really matter all that much (acrobatics dodging DMP only affects denizens and nobody would be stupid enough to use ninini in PK). DMP is balanced around PvP.

The most noticeable and important function of armour is reducing wounds, since nothing else does (directly). Try going hunting without your robes; it really has less to with damage than you might think.

He said Athletics.

I don't know where I said just greatrobes needed to be changed though, if you actually bothered to read my post Shamarah, you would have noticed that I said the entire system needs to be re-balanced, because as it stands there is ONLY a place for Greatrobes/Splendours and Fullplate - whether the extra physical protection from fieldplate is as important as the resistances is a hugely debatable point, probably coming down in favour of the resistances.

Honestly, I'd find it pretty annoying if armour was situational. It is kind of strange that leather, scalemail, and chainmail are all useless, but I like the system the way it is.