Skyrim's armor system is broken

[Deleted1719337User]

I agree with this, and look at it this way- how many people complained about armor/damage scaling in Morrowind, eh?

There most likely will be several mods/overhauls that fix this, and many players will be satisfied.

 

Great job at presenting the facts!! :thumbsup:

[Immortalsinner]

Thanks for the graphs Jimhsu. I absolutely could not remember how to make those last night.

 

Also I'm glad to hear that this will be easy to fix.

 

Honestly from what I've read people have little difficulty surviving at higher levels if they have reached the armor cap. However other things should be taken into account, like even if a character caps their physical defense, they will get further defensive/combat tools. Staffs, healing spells, scrolls, potions, etc. If there was not a drop off in defenses why would anyone need to utilize their accumulated wealth/skills/treasure?

My original plan was to make the loot system more like Morrowind. Ebony, glass and daedric armors would be made much, much rarer than they are now. As it is you start finding them in chests on the bottom of every lake and at the end of every pathetic bandit cave. In Morrowind, high-level armors were extremely rare and expensive, and assembling a complete set of Daedric armor was a monumental task. The problem is that their defensive value in Skyrim doesn't justify making them particularly rare. Firstly, this is because AR barely increases from armor to armor. Daedric only has twice the AR of Iron, while it was 8x higher in Morrowind. Secondly, you're able to hit the armor cap with just steel armor and a high smithing skill. Making the effective HP curve linear would also lessen the overpoweredness of smithing, since the marginal points of armor added on by the smith wouldn't be more useful than the intrinsic value of the armor itself.

 

I agree with Jimhsu on late-game balance. If the player becoming a walking god of death by the end of the game it really doesn't concern me. That's part of the appeal of TES. What I have seen is a number of players complaining that they still didn't really feel strong by the end of the game because of the scaling. If you're forced to use thing like potions and spells to keep yourself alive in fights where you didn't have to before, you'll start to feel like you're actually getting weaker.

[ishmaeltheforsaken]

If you ask me, %damage reduction should be a function of both armor rating and level, so that the same armor rating protects you less as you increase in level, á la Dragon Age II.

 

You should be able to have 50% DR at level 1. DR should drop as you level unless you upgrade your gear.

[jimhsu]

Thanks for the graphs Jimhsu. I absolutely could not remember how to make those last night.

 

Also I'm glad to hear that this will be easy to fix.

 

Honestly from what I've read people have little difficulty surviving at higher levels if they have reached the armor cap. However other things should be taken into account, like even if a character caps their physical defense, they will get further defensive/combat tools. Staffs, healing spells, scrolls, potions, etc. If there was not a drop off in defenses why would anyone need to utilize their accumulated wealth/skills/treasure?

My original plan was to make the loot system more like Morrowind. Ebony, glass and daedric armors would be made much, much rarer than they are now. As it is you start finding them in chests on the bottom of every lake and at the end of every pathetic bandit cave. In Morrowind, high-level armors were extremely rare and expensive, and assembling a complete set of Daedric armor was a monumental task. The problem is that their defensive value in Skyrim doesn't justify making them particularly rare. Firstly, this is because AR barely increases from armor to armor. Daedric only has twice the AR of Iron, while it was 8x higher in Morrowind. Secondly, you're able to hit the armor cap with just steel armor and a high smithing skill. Making the effective HP curve linear would also lessen the overpoweredness of smithing, since the marginal points of armor added on by the smith wouldn't be more useful than the intrinsic value of the armor itself.

 

I agree with Jimhsu on late-game balance. If the player becoming a walking god of death by the end of the game it really doesn't concern me. That's part of the appeal of TES. What I have seen is a number of players complaining that they still didn't really feel strong by the end of the game because of the scaling. If you're forced to use thing like potions and spells to keep yourself alive in fights where you didn't have to before, you'll start to feel like you're actually getting weaker.

 

Have only found one piece of ebony armor that is not a shield, and have not found any daedric armor, at all. Lvl 61. (Of course, I smithed it though, though balancing smithing is a topic for another thread. My personal preference though would be to do away with the perks, and make the various armors smithable by completing a series of quests, which makes far more sense). But I agree with everything above.

 

BW this was also a problem with Oblivion (the max armor cap thing), though the early game scaling was less prominent with that game.

Edited December 1, 2011 by jimhsu

[Immortalsinner]

Have only found one piece of ebony armor that is not a shield, and have not found any daedric armor, at all. Lvl 61. (Of course, I smithed it though, though balancing smithing is a topic for another thread. My personal preference though would be to do away with the perks, and make the various armors smithable by completing a series of quests, which makes far more sense). But I agree with everything above.

 

BW this was also a problem with Oblivion (the max armor cap thing), though the early game scaling was less prominent with that game.

That's unlucky. I'm on my second character now, and at level 32 I've already found four pairs of ebony boots and an ebony armor. The commonness of high-level armors is only half the problem, though. There isn't much excitement in finding it when you've already smithed your low-tier armor up until it's better than anything you can loot. The defensive values of high-tier armor needs to be upped, but of course you can't really get away with that because of the DR cap. I think that reworking the way armor works is going to be a prerequisite to any attempt to balance smithing.

 

I can't speak much to how things worked in Oblivion, since I never got far without the overhaul mods and wore the DB robes for most of the game.

 

 

If you ask me, %damage reduction should be a function of both armor rating and level, so that the same armor rating protects you less as you increase in level, á la Dragon Age II.

 

You should be able to have 50% DR at level 1. DR should drop as you level unless you upgrade your gear.

I disagree. That's completely contrary to the point of leveling up. Players want to feel like they're getting stronger as they make an investment in their character, not weaker.

[Beriallord]

Its quite easy to get the maximum 80% resist, just don't expect to get that immediately. Later on enemies hit way harder, and really make you pay in damage taken with no armor. The master alteration spell dragonskin gives 80% resist to physical, which is the maximum armor can give, so if you are in a robe you better get it, mage armor perks are useless if you got dragonskin.

 

No reason to be complaining about finding higher tier armors, when they let you craft it in this game way easier than you can find it. If you aren't skilled in smithing then you probably aren't using armor anyway, because those 2 skills go hand in hand, pointless having one without the other. With 100 smithing and heavy armor perks you can get the full 80% with just legendary steel armor, which basically means just use the armor you think looks the best and you don't sacrifice protection. I think the way armor works in this game is fine.

Edited December 1, 2011 by Beriallord

[Socalista]

The problem with the current armor system is that it creates a very difficult (relatively) early game, a fairly easy mid game, and a progressively more difficult late game (all other variables remaining the same). That sort of level scaling makes no sense at all.

 

It does not make much sense from a purely mathematical point of view. However, consider the concept of difficulty as a storytelling technique.

 

This difficulty progression makes perfect sense to give a game-wide sense of achievement to the player. If the progress of the game through levels is a story, it would make sense for difficulty (Dramatic Tension) to increase on a gradual exponential scale, building towards some sort of climax. As the player reaches his or her Heroic Potential, the perceived difficulty of the game decreases logarithmically according to your provided model.

 

Here's an example, which looks a lot like your projected difficulty model (which I agree with by the way).

 

http://www.tofp.org/images/narrarc.gif

 

The disconnect, however, is where difficulty decreases at the climax then slowly increases at the tail end of the game, which does not help Dramatic Tension.

Edited December 1, 2011 by attackdrone

[ishmaeltheforsaken]

If you ask me, %damage reduction should be a function of both armor rating and level, so that the same armor rating protects you less as you increase in level, á la Dragon Age II.

 

You should be able to have 50% DR at level 1. DR should drop as you level unless you upgrade your gear.

I disagree. That's completely contrary to the point of leveling up. Players want to feel like they're getting stronger as they make an investment in their character, not weaker.

 

I understand where you're coming from, but it completely dissociates leveling and improving gear. Once you hit 80%, there's nowhere to improve anymore, and your level has nothing to do with it. I think, frankly, that that's poor systems design.

 

I should have a reason to keep searching for better gear. What I'm now considering is making it dependent on the level of the attacker rather than level of the PC. 100 armor is the same against a level 1 enemy no matter the level of the PC. But since enemies tend to scale with the PC, she still has to upgrade to keep up.

 

I'll have to see what's possible once the CK is released, and you don't have to use my mod if I make it :P

[Immortalsinner]

Its quite easy to get the maximum 80% resist, just don't expect to get that immediately.

Yes, it's VERY easy. I think that there are probably a good number of players out there who are stacking up armor well above the cap because they don't realize it's even there.

 

No reason to be complaining about finding higher tier armors, when they let you craft it in this game way easier than you can find it. If you aren't skilled in smithing then you probably aren't using armor anyway, because those 2 skills go hand in hand, pointless having one without the other. With 100 smithing and heavy armor perks you can get the full 80% with just legendary steel armor, which basically means just use the armor you think looks the best and you don't sacrifice protection. I think the way armor works in this game is fine.

I think that smithing high-tier armor is too easy as well. Ideally you should be using smithing mostly for upgrades and not smithing a full suit of Glass the second you hit 70 smithing. I'd like to increase the price of high-tier ingots to several thousand gold each, and make them much harder to find (maybe actually give the player a reason to seek out ore deposits). Dragon armor would be changed to require ebony ingots for smithing, if it doesn't already. I never bothered trying to craft any.

 

I can appreciate the appeal of being able to wear any armor style you want. At the same time, it hurts the thing that I love most about TES games: going in dungeons and finding cool stuff. Finding a new suit of armor at level 50 that has worse stats than the stuff I've been wearing since level 5 kills that.

 

I understand where you're coming from, but it completely dissociates leveling and improving gear. Once you hit 80%, there's nowhere to improve anymore, and your level has nothing to do with it. I think, frankly, that that's poor systems design.

Absolutely. The cap puts a very sudden stop to the progression of the player's defense, but without the cap the player would quickly become unkillable. That wouldn't be an issue if armor increased effective HP linearly, rather than exponentially.

 

I should have a reason to keep searching for better gear.

The problem as I see it is that there really isn't much better gear to be found. New armors will usually be worse than what you have smithed. The artifacts in this game mostly come in the form of Daedric rewards or masks. Most of the Daedric quest rewards are underwhelming to begin with and either can't be upgraded or can't be upgraded until the smith is at a high level. The only rewards that really felt like suitable artifacts of a Daedric prince were the Spellbreaker and the Ebony Mail, not counting the things like rings and staffs. Then there are the masks, which have good stats, but there are nine of them and you only have one head.

 

I want to add in a bunch of artifacts from previous games and handplace them in some of the more difficult dungeons, but it seems pointless to add the armors in while players are already hitting the armor cap with steel.

[byzod]

What about Protection Value/Defence Value (PV/DV) system?

PV reduce the damage by X point and DV reduce the damage by X%, the damage you eventually took would be (Damage-PV)*(1-DV)