Update January 14
January 14, 2011 
Tasos Flambouras 
We’re still working on our latest sprint wrapping things up. We’re back at full capacity after the holidays and we’re catching up with work that has piled up.
Over the holidays support banned many professional gold seller accounts and along with them accounts of possibly legitimate players who were involved with the gold sellers on some level and I don’t just mean they were buying from them. Support urges you to not get caught up in any related real-money transaction activity since the penalty for this is a permaban of all of your accounts and we’re afraid that there can be no exceptions to this. We’re exploring changes in the way free trials work and several other account systems in order to curb these kinds of activities even further.
In our next patch there will be significant changes to the meditation system. We’ve been monitoring progress and we’ve decided to substantially increase meditation gains and significantly lower the cost. We’ll also award free meditation points to players based on various factors. More skills will be added to meditation in the next patch as well.
We could use player feedback on a feature we’re investigating for the next expansion. We won’t go into much detail so as to not influence the discussion. The topic: Consider armors and clothing working to enhance certain specific abilities like for example magic, melee, archery vs. hindering or even blocking others during their use. We’re very interested in the discussion, and the relevant comments will be delivered to the developers. Please stay on topic and please only post constructive comments. We thank you in advance for your comments.
Our next sprint meeting is next week so we’ve held off on discussing more of our plans before we discuss them during this week’s meetings. I’m not calling this update an activity report because of this. We should have a lot more specific information and details for you after our meetings next week.
Thank you for reading.
Office Talk 
Tags: Activity Report, bans, Community, Darkfall, Design, gold farmers, Meditation, MMORPG 
In response to armour’s affecting abilites, I am 100% behind this. Mages in robes, while risking there defense, should be able to dish out more damage than those in armor. Enough of a difference that there is motivation to actually wear robes VS a Q5 feathered infernal helmet.
I used to like the idea of mages wearing robes, but now I’ve realized that upon killing a mage that is now able to deal more damage (thanks to his robe), I’d like to get some actual gear from him rather than just a robe and some regs.
I’m completely behind armor playing much more of a role, and I’m curious where the “playstyle specific” armor sets are as they were mentioned a LONG time ago.
Good luck with your sprint projects. Hope you guys actually get around to adding stuff to the game.
If there is magic altering effects applied to armors, then i think you should introduce a caste system that incorporates 4 castes: Archery , Magic, Melee and a mixed caste.
These Castes would then have different armors lets say 3 different types per caste which have different advantages and disadvantages in terms of protections and magic or archery negating effects.
If this is done properly there will be a good balance and variety that the players can experiment with.
It should also be possible to combine different types of the same caste or even different castes.
Cheers,
SinSin
It should not take 10+ hits to kill someone naked – Heavy armor should have awesome melle defense and magic defense and slightly hinder movement for example make stamina costly when sprinting – leather for archers should give a speed bonus when sprinting only but make it costly on stamina –
Im not 100% on all these suggestions – atm there is no reason incentive to wear robes and leather armor in battle -
to get rid of the “naked zerg” make it so you have a penalty on your magic protections and melle/archery protections – you can still dish out dmg if you want to help friendlys in a fight but if u get hit ur going down fast.
I thought I would also add, that the restrictions should go no further than the armour you put on. If I go out in Full infernal as a heavy melee character, I want all the melee bonuses that armor might carry (as well as the magic / archery penalties) but if I regear into a caster armor, I want those bonuses and the new melee/archery penalties without having to buy some skill or respec in some way.
Without knowing the full effects of the Prestige classes makes this medium difficult. To many variables to just say hmmmm mages cant wear metal armor.
That said, for magic a scaling effect would work… Robes full magic damage including aoe and splash damage, faster spell cooldowns, and faster global cool downs.
Then work up from there depending on your encumberence. The higher you are encumbered the less damage, longer cooldown, longer global etc.
Am i more excited about the box i see? It’s wrapped in plastic and it is darkfall. Is there info on the box release of it?
Awesome for the meditation points increase it will make it so much better.
The boxed copy has been available in Greece for awhile. I picked one up while I was attending a conference in Thessaloniki a couple months back… it even has an instruction manual!
Always “next expansion”
Trial account fix: Thombstone cant be looted by others. Cant trade, cant use clanbank. Problem solved forever. No more waste time here.
Meditation: Dont make it so we prefer not logging in cause we are meditating.
Good idea on the trial account thing, i fully approve this!
After three months of heavy grinding I already don’t want to log in.
So devs, with this change you will be on the right track. I want to PVP. Not grind every day. I’ll wager I’m not the only one.
I want giant armor with high a huge hitbox and magic resists that makes you move slow so I can stand in front of a zerg like a boss.
Make it so if your wearing heavy armour you don’t get magic raped?
I think a good idea would be to make transmute robes kinda like the staffs, and make them able to be stacked with LIGHT ARMOR ONLY….meaning if you put 1 piece of heavy armor on, it removes the robe. The offline meditation revamp is great. A customer support team revamp would be good too. Keep up the good work!
Magic users in heavy armors are currently the cream of the crop in that they have the highest protections while also the highest damage output. Fizzles are so random that many argue that they get more fizzles at lower encumbrances than at higher, so fizzles are not a factor in terms of arguing balance.
I think many players want mages to be motivated to wear robes rather than armor. Decrease the damage output for spells based on encumbrance and make robes the ideal clothing for any magic user. As it is now, high end players are running around in Infernal/Dragon armor, basically reducing damage by ~20 points, yet throwing out the same kind of damage as a robed person.
Don’t change the damage numbers with magic, change the damage standard. For example, don’t introduce robes as “Increased Magic Damage 5%”, etc because magic already outdamages everything else/. Introduce serious damage penalties for using armor (especially heavy armors, anything more than bone) so that a mage wearing a robe will throw out optimum damage. I know AV wants to maintain their notion of player freedom but you can’t have your cake and eat it too; if you have maximum damage output, you can’t have maximum protections too. The last thing Darkfall needs is heavy mages who can dish out the crazy damage they do, and robed players being able to throw out even more damage. Introduce serious damage penalties for encumbrance so that mages are not the highest DPS and tanks as well.
Robes, should offer good protections against other magic as well as bonuses to utilize magic. You can go further and introduce different robe types that specialize certain magic school bonus damage and effects.
Heavy armour should offer lesser magic protections with better protections against melee & archery and other types of damage.
Medium armour (for archers) should offer better magic protection than heavy armour but just medium protections against all other types of damage.
I like this.
We need the days of people running around in infernal having awesome resistance to melee AND magic to be over. And dishing out great dmg all around too. It’s enough they have good resistance to melee and perhaps archery but magic too that doesn’t make sense. Nor does it make sense that they can wield magic so gracefuly with a couple feather enchants. Everything needs to have a balance of strengths and weaknesses.
There is no way to play the game other than using magic and melee characters cannot engage in melee with mages who bunny hop and knock up and stay out of melee range.
Until balance is achieved in the different combat styles and there are viable alternatives to playing as a mage new armour would be completely irrelevant anyway.
If you are going to do implement beneficial armor, there are right and wrong ways to go about it.
For example if you are wearing a fire robe that increases your fire-based spells, then your more vulnerable to water-based spells.
Right now, your heavy armor sets are too expensive for the protection they provide which is why you are seeing so few destroyer/warrior speced players in the game.
There are a number of ways to fix this issue, (1) make heavy armor cheaper/more readily available, (2) increase the protections provided by heavy armor, (3) decrease the encumberance of heavy armor so that it is easier to cast and use bows with, (4) give heavy armor benefits in addition to protections such as better slashing damage, and so forth.
I think adding benefits to armor is a great way to diversify the armor options in the game. If done correctly, you will see entirely new play-styles open up, but if done incorrectly, players will gravitate even more tightly to one or two play-styles which is one of the current ruts DF is stuck already stuck in.
The thing about offering bonuses for wearing gear, that’s the fact they should only give protections, but offering only protection limits the amount of stats to award.
For example, wearing gear can by no means affect you in a positive way and increase the amount of damage you do with a weapon, that’s unless it’s magically altered to give you bonuses.
Now nothing has to be logical, because if you did most damage being naked, people would refrain from wearing gear unless they died in 1-2 attacks.
So, if we conclude that it’s better for the game, even if not logical, that bonuses are given by using gear.
Then I don’t think people should focus on altering what protections certain gear offer, but rather what style of combat could fit in that certain getup.
Think also that these bonuses makes gear currently “useless” worth it to use.
Along those lines,
Robe , Magic Potency,Reduced Cast-time and Shorter Spell Cooldowns.
Cloth , Crafting and Gathering Haste, Success Rate.
Leather , Mobility and Ranged Haste.
Studded , Ranged and Melee haste, Mount damage protection.
Chain-mail , Knockback-reduction and Siege damage increase.
etc.
So I guess DF2010 is out of the question? Such is life and will not resub until substantial changes are added to increase stat gain.
So, my suggestion is to add stats to the meditation system and keep it cheap and have them raise somewhat fast. This is especially good for new players and vets to combat AFK swimming, running, etc.
You must have them raise faster than swimming though or else meditation would be pointless.
Keep it up. I guarantee adding stats to meditation will be a huge help to the game population, especially if it’s cheap like you say so new players can afford it.
Horse shit. why waste your time balancing some rock paper scissors bull shit armor changes when you could easily just add an interchangeable active skill cap and spend your time with systems that will actually bring pvp back to life.. perhaps start with the village system or maybe make some good changes to pvm.
Adding restrictions or buffs to gear does not sounds like Darkfall, more specific player roles not limitation to war/bow/mage builds does.
I have no idea what PC will actually add to the game, so I’ll try to focus on how we would enhance the gear and give it a more specific use than hitting the good balance between defenses and encumbrance.
Armors includes clothes.
1. X/Y bonus/malus to each/some generic pieces of armors.
Some modifiers are applied on output/input melee/archery/magic damage, spell success, casting/archery/melee speed… Mods are stackable.
ie: Infernal helm:
reduce 5% of magic output damage
increase 2h damage by 5%
2. Gems that could be hooked on each kind of armors, with similar modifiers so you can still have some choice could be an alternative. Or additional slots like enchanting on a few armor/cloth pieces.
3. Buffs on high level robes (we need high level robes btw, transmuts could be nice too), mods could be magic pen, spell casting, spell success.
4. Boost encumbrance effect, make it work more efficiently with magic schools. Either scale it differently so only a robe will give you 0 encumbrance with maxed armored csting, and give more various effects on magic schools, ie giving a bigger malus to spell success to arcane/fire than to witchcraft/earth…
Ofc more modifiers would be better, it will be a pain to balance anyway, so the more you throw in the game, the better the players will make the best use of each.
- magic damage
- spell power (with knockback effect)
- fire damage
- melee haste
- arrow travel speed / arc
- running/mount speed
- jumping
- harvesting speed/success/luck
- health / stam / mana
Basically this would work like enchanting, but with more restrictions on armor kinds (3 kinds of slots for war/bow/mage), and more powerful mods, this would also require to balance armor costs, add few good quality robes, and add many melee skills – maybe included in PC, so we still see heavy armored melee.
[...The topic: Consider armors and clothing working to enhance certain specific abilities like for example magic, melee, archery vs. hindering or even blocking others during their use...]
An old suggestion thread with my thoughts on the issue:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=257670
[...The topic: Consider armors and clothing working to enhance certain specific abilities like for example magic, melee, archery vs. hindering or even blocking others during their use...]
My thoughts on the issue copied from an old suggestion thread. (showthread.php?t=257670)
“This is really just a thought dump on the subject of balance for Darkfall.
Every skill available to every player with no skill cap.
I’ve seen a lot of threads where players complain that without a skill cap, class system, or other limitations on character development everyone ends up the same and whoever grinds the most has the biggest advantage in PvP. UO is referenced as an example of a balanced game that had a simple static skill cap to ensure every character was equal once they ‘completed’ their character development.
Firstly, character development is a big part of the fun in any RPG. If there is a point at which a character is considered ‘complete’ then for the player to continue enjoying the character development aspect of the game, they need to reroll. This is not really an ideal scenario, encouraging players to make multiple characters so they can experience different aspects of the game. In this environment players will create super specialized min/max characters: a main, a crafter alt, and maybe a secret PK/griefer alt. A new character is a new identity, and encouraging players to take on multiple identities within the same game world undermines the social aspect of an MMO.
Skill caps and class systems create unnatural barriers: “Why does my character not have the brain capacity to master more than X amount of skills? I must be roleplaying a retard.” “I chose to play a warrior class at the start, but it doesn’t make sense that for whatever reason I simply cannot learn to shoot a bow.”
Unnatural barrier VS Natural barrier
In the game world an example of an unnatural barrier is an invisible wall at the edge of a zone, an example of a natural barrier is a high wall or deep ravine. If you find yourself going, “WTF is this shit why can’t I go there?” when approaching impassable terrain ingame, you know its an unnatural barrier. Unnatural barriers make you feel boxed in, and the believability of the game diminishes. Darkfall is a great example of a game that has very few unnatural barriers. Infact, the edge of the map is the only unnatural barrier.
In terms of a character itself, an unnatural barrier is a skill cap or a traditional class system. With no barriers whatsoever, whoever spends the most time ingame grinding their character has the biggest advantage, which isn’t ideal either. So how do you find a way to create balance between characters in a game like Darkfall without the use of unnatural barriers? What kind of natural barrier could be implemented instead of a skill cap or class system?
Gear
It doesn’t matter how much time you’ve put into developing your character, you cannot reliably win naked against someone with decent gear on, even if they have been playing only a couple of weeks. This is already a reality in Darkfall, and it makes sense. Gear could be defined as a natural barrier in Darkfall that has the potential to balance the unlimited character development issue.
When you gear up, you are choosing a playstyle. Heavy gear carries penalties to archery and magic usage, and light gear doesn’t offer much protection. When you’re wearing a full set of dragon armor, your 6 magic schools with 100 intensify are of little use to you. When you’re wearing full bone armor, you will take more damage and be easily outclassed in melee. So there is a decision that you must make when gearing up as to what your strengths and weaknesses will be. This makes sense and is perfectly natural, but it needs to be more balanced and defined. Right now mixing a light chest with other heavier pieces and a few good enchants will make you reasonably effective in every aspect of combat. Also, the costs associated with heavy melee oriented gear is too high in relation to the best gear for a mage.
Ideas
(I realize some of these may already be on the way or suggested before.)
* Full set gear bonuses.
Encourage players to use a full set rather than mix and match. Example: a small encumberance reduction, increased protections.
* Mage tailored armor and enchantments giving bonuses to specific magic schools.
Example: Earthen Armor, bonus cast time and intensity for earth magic spells.
* Armor types that offer various ratios of melee, archery, and magic encumberance.
With the possibility of high melee encumberance but low magic/archery encumberance.
* Elemental armors and enchantments that give bonuses to specific damage types.
Example: Use Infernal Gauntlets with a transmuted fire sword/bow for bonus fire damage.
* Balance costs between best melee, archery, magic, and hybrid focused armors.”
Have to fully agree with this;
* Full set gear bonuses.
Encourage players to use a full set rather than mix and match. Example: a small encumbrance reduction, increased protections
Encourage wearing a full set with decent durability to get a bonus on top as an alternative to the min/max matching that the armour system currently revolves around. If a piece breaks mid fight, you lose your bonus, so durability becomes an issue.
At the moment no enchants stack; maybe if all pieces of a single type of armour set have the same protection enchant level; this would translate to an additional bonus to that type of protection. Would then enable having a suit of strong fire protection plate or slashing protection bone.
Encourage use of enchants more to create variation in players.
Armor Sets ! plane and simple, overcome this min/maxing and push sets of armor.
Changes to Armor effect don’t even need to be inherent in Armor effects, but can be attributed to other supporting systems, such as Enhancements and Enchantment.
For starter, a major influence but not too difficult change would be to make Hoods and Robes Enchantable.:
1) Add 1 Enchantment slot to Hoods, as they are a “Helmet type” that is used by Mages, who are the major Enchanters. Hoods are also something that could be seen as easily enchanted. (Embroidered runes, anyone? It is deplorable that one can enchant even Cloth Chest armour, but not proper mage gear.)
2) Make Robes enchantable with 3 slots, similar to weapons and staffs.
Magic protection of Robes are good in general, but to make it a viable armor as 2 regular Enchanting slots grants 2 more possible Resist bonuses… unless you wish to use it for other worthwhile enchantments. Together with the Enchantment slot to Hoods (& Helmets) one gets 3 Enchantment slots from Robes+Hood that can be used for the 3 Physical resistances, making a proper “mage armour” set.
The Transmute slots grant a great possibility for “Mage armour” robes. Improved Resistances in general, one Resistance in particular and a bonus like reduced Mana Cost for spells of one school based on Transmute type.
Would also be nice to be able to craft & enchant Earrings, Belts, Shoes, Boots, and Gloves as well as wear them with Robes. Having non-armoured shoes, boots, gloves and (new) belts and such be wearable with Robes, on top of them, would be good. And give them a use, apart from merely a fashion statement. Magic gloves (even armored gauntlets), belts and boots are of course also common magical items in fiction, and would contribute nicely to the fantasy feel of the game.
As for how Extensions could contribute to armor diversity for mages, without making them overpowered. (Encouraging the use of lesser armors instead of Infernal, while still doing it at a calculable cost) one could for starters introduce Mage Extensions, activated by Staff use as the other are activatable by Melee or Ranged weapon use.
A few ideas for regular Extensions are:
Spell-shield: Absorb 15% damage, costing Mana. (As Archer, but slightly better.)
Mage Duellant: Increased resistances against magic damage. (As Magehunter.)
Magic prodigy: +10% Mana.
And whatever else AV has in store for Mages.
Of course we also need Specialization Extensions:
Boost Casting Speed & Cooldowns of own school, nerf damage/effect or lock out opposition school
Archmage specialization: Greater Magic boost, no opposition school.
Apprentice: Lesser Magic boost, no opposition schools.
And then the main point here, to which the above are the thing one give up to gain this, Armored Mage Extensions:
Reduced Magic Encumberence in Chain armour and one more armour type:
Arcane: Banded (low-grade armours to the best damage schools)
Fire: Banded (as above)
Air: Scale (Archer-friendly)
Water: Scale (Fish-like scaled ones. )
Earth: Half-plate (to be combined with Chain, reducing it to a more mediocre protection level)
Spell Chanting: Full Plate (Paladins!)
Necromancy & Witchcraft: Bone (one can then raise the protection a bit and encumberance a lot on these, which are made of hard materials and should definitely be more cumbersome than Studded.)
Lesser Magic: Reduce Magic Encumberence for all armours. (Encumberence then only hits hard on Greater magic and up spells, limiting all proper Mage spells making this a “low-magic” alternative.)
All the above should encourage a varied use of armors, not everyone going for the top tier Infernals and Dragon armors regardless if they are magic users or not, and encouraging Robe Wearing Mages by giving them proper Robes to wear, while at the same time encouraging Specialized Single School Mages which is a necessity to bring in more Specialized combat roles (in conjunction with the upcoming Prestige Classes) as well as balancing the combat scene as well as the Grind scene when cycling spells from different schools will be less efficient.
However, if one wants to look at armor effects on the battlefield even more thoroughly, a simple addition of adding incresed Stamina Drain while Jumping/Swimming/Sprinting would have a definte effect on the battlefield. Adding a Armor Movement restrictor skill for movement in general about as severe as the Mage Armor skill, would do this.
Together with a Combat Momentum addition on land (as we have in the water at the moment… only the limitation on Sprint speed acceleration and deceleration would help greatly, or maybe even building a better Momemntum system that also takes into consideration hills and gravity for terrain effects on Stamina cost and acceleration speeds while Sprinting, making it slower and more arduous run uphill than downhill) that would make melee to slow down considerably and be far more strategic than running around in figure-eights swinging wildly while sprinting. And still retain that strategy for those who truly wish to continue with it, as long as they wear lesser armors (unless they are using massive Stamina boosters regularly). This would also greatly encourage a more varied use of armors.
With this, one could even need to balance the Jumping & Sprinting of Mages and Archers, by putting restricitons that one need Extensions for Mobility to keep Bunnyjumpshooting to keep the distance, as heavy armor guys cannot keep chasing them indefinitely due to Stamina drain. (Spell Extension: Allow Jumping & Shooting with Spells at -40% damage; Archery Extension: Allow Jumping & Shooting with Bows, with a -25% damage reduction, due to difficulties to focus and concentrate while moving at full speed.)
Boosting Shields a bit by raising the Armor resistances granted by them as well as remove the Archer ability to disable shields, could also reduce the 2-hander domination a bit, and encouraging Shield Wall strategies, for even more Group combat options. (Change
Shield-disabling to Shield-ignoring for that shot only, as one simply aims at a small portion of the body not protected by the shield and rename it to suit that function.)
Even more benefits would be gained from this by introducing Dome (higher Shield/Ward) spells where a highly skilled Mage can be in the center of a “turtle formation” and protect all the troops within the dome from all the ones outside it with his Shield spell, that would also be a nice graphical effect with a coloured transparent dome protecting a part of the battlefield, that would also be great having in Sieges. (A 1 active Dome/mage, with standardized Dome size regardless of Skill or School would also help making it more specializing as well as that it will be fairly visual what spells will be efficient just by seing the colour of the domes, as dome effects will be clear and visually identifyable.)
All in all, this would grant a much more varied battlefield and armor wearing strategies, all essentially based on how armor interacts with different systems in the game and how it can be used more strategically.
can I suggest wearing armour or any gear adds base health or something essential. Its good that armour doesn’t have make you win, but right now you can fight people naked and still not be at much disadvantage at all. would force people to gear up in something even leather, and stop naked spawn zerging.
Magic boosting armour should be specfic to a specific magic school.
Fire magic armour = Boost to fire magic (plus it should look cool)
This will do four really cool things
1. Gives you an excuse to wear really cool armour.
2. Gives you a bonus to your favourite school
3. Makes PVP more interesting as it informs defenders about what the attacker is good at. “Target the fire mage you fools”
4. Encourages people to pick a particular role.
They should have skill requirments that need to be met to wear them. You could even have different robes for different skill levels: Fire magic 1 = simple fire robe (maybe a nice scarf). Fire magic 100 = Awesome fire robe (omg he looks like a dragon).
There should should be a penalty paired with the bonus. Maybe just the fact that robes aren’t terribly effective against melee is penalty enough.
For the melee specialists.
An equipable banner that provides a bonus to nearby warriors. Perhaps they need to be wearing armour dyed the same colour to get this bonus as well as being in the same party. You could do something similar for the leader, maybe a damage bonus. Other ideas could include a musician that boosts vitality. A totem bearer that grants a chance of deflecting magic (back at the caster).
The main benefit would be encouraging players to move in formations and a more tactical side to large scale engagements.
Another bonus of all the above is that it adds lots more diversity to the crafting side of Darkfall.
Greetings, here are a few idea from me.
I beleive that the approach should be that everyone can use all kinds of armor, but if you want specific bonuses then various armors are optimal for the different styles.
Melee: Infernal, Fullplate, plate
Archer: Chain, Studded, Leather.
Mage : Robes
Dragon Armor change: Reduce encumbrance severely on dragon armor pieces, and let all dammage types benefit from using them.
This is the most expensive gear to wear, and should be useable by anyone.
It could be done in a very simple way, with enchanting (or a new skill called enhancement or something if you want that).
If you enhance enchant a melee armor the effect is +2 melee dammage pr level of the enchant, and -2 magic AND Archery dammage.
This mean that if both helm and chest is enchanted with q3 you get +12 melee dammage and minus 12 magic and archery dammage. (or even make the loss factor even bigger with +12 and -18).
If you enchant archery armor its +archery and minus the others, and if you enchant robes its +magic and minusmelle/archery.
Addition:
This will create a imbalance due to low costing robes, and i suggest you make 3 different robes – at 3 different costs, with either magic protection or magic dammage bonuses.
By doing this you can implement this in a really easy way – all it takes is to make a few new enchants – and all the other systems is in place allready.
Wishlist:
I would like a dammage form on the playerstats, where you can see how much dammage you deal with a particular weapon.
Let people see the formulas, so we can work on optimising dammage output etc.
Wishlist2.
It would be even more great with a full armor revamp making class armors, but at the same time i think its kinda overkill when the same can be done so easily with enchants and you can focus your energy on other stuff while still getting the wished feature in the game.
thanks for reading
/Frank Sinatra
What about the idea of adding a mana surcharge on Heavier armors? This would allow the players the freedom to play how they want while at the same time introduce a balancing mechanic. Armors intended for weapon combat with high protection values might have a significant charge to the mana bank per spell and lightest armors would have none. This could be scaled creating a trade-off between casting endurance and protection. Some Heavy armor wearers might choose to use the mana for a few strategic spells during combat. More vulnerable robe wearers could cast all day long.
You could also add a recharge penalty to the armors as well giving the heavy armor wearing caster limits and thereby difficult and interesting choices as to what spells to cast. While a person who sacrifices some of the protection would have more spells to cast.
This mechanic could be applied ot slowing down the jumping and sprinting thing as well. Light armor should offer more mobility while heavy armor should be penalized with a stamina surcharge. This would have to be carefully balanced but it might open up a lot of options while limiting the single approach problem.
Agree.
Would only add one more thing. Make a resistance point allocation system for armors. The heaver the armor the more points you have to work with. These points can be put into magic, archery, or melee resistance.
The following example isn’t a suggest as to how many points should be assigned to each set of armor. I’ll leave that to the devs. The example is only meant to show how the system would work so I’m just throwing out some junk numbers.
For example cloth might have 5 points to work with while bone might have 10. Jumping further up the armor scale chain might have 30 or 40 while plate might have 60 or 70. To make things even more interesting the quality of the armor could also determine how many points you have to work with.
These point are spent though upgrading your armor which a high end crafter could do with the proper components. This would allow individuals to decide, within their armor’s point limits, exactly what their armors resistances will be. So if you want to have an extremely high magic resistance so that you can specifically target mages, and be known as a mage killer, then you will have to use heavy armor and sacrifice melee and archery resistance to achieve that goal.
Now add Patrick’s idea of a mana surcharge which increases with heaver armors and you now have a pretty cool system. A system in which heaver armors allow you to allocate more resistance points thus giving you more resistance where ‘you’ want it but at the cost of having a higher mana surcharge and mana recharge rate which in turn means you cast far fewer spells at a time then an individual wearing lighter armor.
Magic damage and success rates won’t come into it at all since casting fewer spells at a time is enough of a penalty.
This system would help the crafters by sending much more business their way. It would give players more options in terms of resistance point allocation allowing them to better choose their own play style. And it would cause mage specific players to wear lighter armors in order to cast more spells at the cost of fewer resistance points in their armors. Overall it would make a well balanced system.
we would need to know how prestige classes will work before.it would make a well balanced system.
Ok, If you introduce armour to class then you need to make robes fucking worth it. Make robes expensive, no one wants to loot a mage in crap robes whilst risking infernal but on the other side… Im not going to lie if I could I’d go in robes 24/7 to save gold and time.
You need to fix shit so higher ping players can fight properly (SIGH WTB JESUS PATCH)
You should add custom armour so people can resistance to what they want to add to it , reduce knock ups on fire spells so then you have people specing all DIFFERENT kinds of magic so they can get past peoples maxed out fire resistance of air resistance but also make sure that when doing this you compensate so most people use fire magic.. and another school…
Say one person goes all fire res, make them weaker to another school like air or all the others weaker. But keep the option to even everything out otherwise too much time would be spent on bone sets and what not.. Maybe add something like WoW with reforging were you take one stat and replace it with another
Example
4.8 fire res.
1.4 arcane res.
Takes 2.4 from fire adds 2.4 to arcane or a completly different res like spell immunity .
Or
1.4 arcane res
4.8 fire res.
Takes 1.4 arcane adds 1.4 to fire … Because high arcane res would be OP so u make sure people cant stack one thing
When it comes down to it… This is one Idea , you need to read EVERYONES, take in account what they have to say and save your game before it dies.
I am totally in love with the current system.
If a mage wants to pvp in armor it wont be cheap he needs a q4 and above enchant.
If a mage wants to be cheap he can wear a robe and suffer bny having weak resists.
Darkfall is well made and the system works. What is ruining this game is people trying to make it into WoW and give it classes like prestige classes.
That will ruin this game entirely.
Keep trying to copy WoW and you will see me cancel my sub.
I don’t like the idea of equipment affecting the role of a character more than what’s designed into the game now with heavy armors affecting magic and archery more than melee. I think that it would detract from the realism of the game and prestige classes or caps should be the way you focus a character’s role. PvP versus a character that can drop by the bank and a minute later be doing the exact opposite role destroys any idea of character development and makes this game a simple grind and too much like a pure first person shooter.
I would like to see a little more balance in making wearing heavy and expensive armor and focusing on melee viable. It seems like bunny-hopping archer/mages using disabling shots rule the roost at the moment. It’s not realistic to have an arrow knock your shield out of the way and leave you open to attacks. I’d make the arrow special attack shoot around the shield and call it a trick shot or sniper shot or something, but not have any ranged attack make shield blocking ineffective.
@Sergio Valdes
the system works so well.
there are so few players in game, and 2/3 or more current players want presstige classes
Classes Prestige is not the same WOW.
We want a diversity of styles.
Open your mind
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Open your mind you mean. You can do anything you want right now in Darkfall. Only thing prestige will do is put us in a box with a name and give us a cookie with some stat bonus or spell etc. to make us happy.