A few comments and suggestions

[Needs Food Badly]

1) Please buff medium, light, and cloth armor to be competitive with heavy in melee. Either give it the same 20 DR or incentivize it in some other way with better AC or ability score bonuses. As it is, most characters should be considering getting heavy armor somehow, even if it would disable some of their class features, because it reduces most incoming damage from massive to single digits or nothing. Building toward AC is a ridiculous task on this server and unless you are attempting a top-tier AC build, a total waste of time.

2) Please get rid of skill bonuses on items. Most skills are not even used on this server, and any item with a skill bonus on it right now is vendor trash.


3) If you are going to nerf Pale Master AC (once again making AC builds needlessly difficult--PM is worthless without this ability), say so in the notes somewhere.


4) Please upgrade spell damage. It's quite pathetic here compared to building yet another scythe/scimitar/AA guy. Trying to burst down 1,100-hp monsters at 40 and having to rest every three fights to do so isn't worth the hassle compared to characters knocking out 200+ damage crits and never resting because they have heavy armor and regen.


5) Please fix the drops so they aren't 80% monk gloves, especially when straight monk is terrible here because of the armor problems.


5) Monster packs with some variety (different types of slaads, lycans, dwarves, undead) would do wonders to break up some of the monotony and challenge different types of characters to encourage more grouping.

[Bhaal]

Thank you for posting your suggestion!

1) Cloth armor allows full Dex bonus, so we would rather not add dr to it. If the same DR for the other Armor were added, what would be the reason to ever wear heavy armor? Medium and Light allow more dex bonus than Heavy, so we went with a 5 dr difference from each.

2) Skill bonuses are planned to be used, in many things. We aren't a very old server so alot of stuff isn't in yet, sorry about that!

3) The Pale Master AC nerf is actually on here, and on the discord as well.

4) While I agree with the spell damage point, most of the spell's damage is halved due to outrageous saves by the mobs. I'm personally working on that over the next few weeks. After that is done we will look at possibly buffing!

5) As I said earlier, we aren't very old. I end up being the one doing mobs, and when I started I was rushing it all out, so it's not finished. I had planned on variety in all the zones, and still plan on it! Should be able to work on some of it today hopefully!

-Bhaal

[Needs Food Badly]

If the same DR for the other Armor were added, what would be the reason to ever wear heavy armor?

Answer: Because you didn't go Dex. And like I said, it doesn't have to be the same as Heavy Armor, just in any way competitive or attractive for any reason.





Sneak attack melee builds right now are quite unrewarding btw, since the monster immediately turns to focus on whatever is sneak attacking it, giving you at most a round of sneak attack in most cases, while the server's ubiquitous scimitar/scythe tanks continue to shred whatever is in front of them.





I have heard of one guy ever doing successful epic tier AC tanking on this server. Building for AC is just not profitable compared to the much-easier to put together Str-based or ranged builds, monster ABs are simply far too high and the +3 limit is stifling here. Which is why it blows me away that PM has its AC nerfed. Nothing else about PM is attractive when you are getting wizard BAB out of it and its summons are terrible/broken (see: Doom Knight and several other summons that don't acquire targets).

4) While I agree with the spell damage point, most of the spell's damage is halved due to outrageous saves by the mobs. I'm personally working on that over the next few weeks. After that is done we will look at possibly buffing!

If all spell damage were tied to level with no limits (so you could get a 40d6 Fireball if you went 40 pure caster), caster would be much more viable.





Another thing I forgot the other day: Should probably not put one-way portals to boss areas. All that happens with this is that groups keep one guy sitting outside so they can port back when they're done and keep leveling.





Thanks for listening! I like a lot about the server.

[Bhaal]

No problem at all, I appreciate the feedback myself! Of course, I don't do the class changes But yeah!

I think they could get something more attractive too, the non-heavy armors I mean. Just not 100% sure what

Yeah, I agree about sneak builds. Partially because of my crappy building in the start, but they also need some buffing. I do think that's something coming eventually, just can't say for sure when D;

We have alot of Devs and DMs that don't like AC tanks, being able to dodge all inc attacks is annoying to build around. That being said casters would be a good alternative, but the vanilla AI really really limits what we can do with them, they either caster 2 spells and auto attack or don't cast any of the spells they have. Unless Mizz custom builds some scripts for them but he's got alot on his plate for sure.

I'd LOVE that for spells, not sure about the other DMs/Devs so we'll definitely have to talk about it. That's alot of spells though, so it will have to stay a work in progress for now :c

I made the one ways because of people exploiting, it happened often, all kinds of different exploits. It'll probably get changed somehow scripted I think, and it won't be a one way at that point, because yeah they can just do that.

[sagil]

To make heavy armors & shields less attractive: Leave DR as is (or drop overall - e.g. no DR for cloth/light/buckler, 5 for medium armor/large shield, 10 for heavy armor/tower shield), but have medium/heavy armor and large/tower shields impose some penalties, e.g.

• a -10%/-25% movement speed penalty, or
• a -2/-5 penalty to attack rolls

For the speed penalty, as welcome side effect would be that it makes Barbarian fast movement useful again (with perma-haste and a 150% speed cap for non-monks, fast movement has no effect currently). But maybe not that great for group dynamics.

Additionally, I think some of the weaker armor types could use a boost to make them competitive. I'd suggest some increases to max dex bonus as follows (armor.2da):

2DA V2.0
         ACBONUS    DEXBONUS   ACCHECK    ARCANEFAILURE%      WEIGHT

0          0          100        0          0                   10
1          1          8          0          5                   50
2          2          6          0          10                  100
3          3          4          -1         20                  150
4          4          4          -2         20                  300
5          5          3          -5         30                  400
6          6          3          -7         40                  450
7          7          2          -7         40                  500
8          8          1          -8         45                  500


I.e., breastplate/chainmail and halfplate get a +1 increase to DEXBONUS, while banded/splint mail get a +2 bonus.