Please Read - Armor

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Brad
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Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2002 11:46 am

Please Read - Armor

Post by Brad »

Guys,

I have discovered a MAJOR snafu in armor, that dates back to nearly early GDH.

The net effect is, a certain level of armor / stats combination makes creatures generates nearly 100% armor blocks ( save attacks that ignore armor, and 1 in 100 chance type effects ). Essentially, i think this rendered many classes unable to use basic combat abilities against these creatures ( and its a rather large group of them ). What i thought was a need for more "armor penetrating attacks", was really just "formula washout"

For you geaks, it surrounds an old section of code that was used back in the cobrahn days to correct some of the combat issues in the scenario. Essentially all the logs say AC is fine, but this section of code essentially bypassed those calls. It only reared its head because the level of armor in the later areas exceeds this "threshold".

Long story short, i am going to have to completely engineer a new armor solution for combat, which somehow better reflects armor class vs combat ads.
I'm also going to essentially have to go back to every creature GDH and higher and figure out a real AC for them, because the percentage formula i was using was based on perceived hit values that weren't "real". Then, we are going to have figure out what other values are going to need to change (because they were inflated due to the perception of this issue)

To get player feedback the fastest, i'm going to be hijacking NL2 and slowing it down to normal rates. The first version going up ( hopefully later tonight ) will just write a log message every time a player attacks, showing me all the values ( on the backend ).. so i can get some feedback.

This will of course affect creatures attacking players also ( though i doubt player armor ever reached 1000AC.. it may have in some cases ).

This is a frustrating thing for me personally, as it reflects back to when the code was "owned" by another company for a while. But i think in the end we will end up with a much smoother combat experience at the higher levels.

Thanks,
Brad

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