balance Redistribute armor durability to better reflect their costs and their destruction rate

[Byrnorthil]

Currently, every piece of armor in a set has the same durability, despite costing wildly different amounts of material and despite taking damage at drastically different rates. But what is even worse is that repair materials will provide less durability for armor pieces with a higher cost and that already wear out faster. In my experience this typically results in helmets never needing more than one or two lamellar/chain/whatever in repairs, while chestpieces may need a dozen or more dumped into them before they get replaced. I'd greatly appreciate it if two changes were made:
 

1. Redistribute the base durabilities of the armor pieces to better align with their costs. Much less base durability on helmets, and much more on chestpieces.
2. Rework repair recipes such that each unit of material always gives the same static durability. For example, 1 firewood = 25 durability for all wood lamellar pieces, rather than giving 50 for helmets, 25 for legs, and 20 for chestpieces (which is what it gives now).

This would need to come along with a bugfix to the currently broken armor durability behavior and probably some more thorough playtesting to ensure the new system feels balanced.

[coolAlias]

For point #2, the way repair currently works (at least for leather and gambeson) is based on percentage of max durability, so a chest piece and a helmet both at 50% remaining durability require the exact same number of repairs to get back to 100%.

Changing this to a fixed amount of durability rather than a proportion of max would mean that repairing higher durability items could consume significant quantities of repair materials, which seems to be what you are going for but in my opinion would be fairly tedious especially with high durability items such as iron and steel.

I suppose it would be more realistic, but I'm not so sure it would be more fun.

[Byrnorthil]

6 hours ago, coolAlias said:

For point #2, the way repair currently works (at least for leather and gambeson) is based on percentage of max durability, so a chest piece and a helmet both at 50% remaining durability require the exact same number of repairs to get back to 100%.

This... simply seems to not be the case. Perhaps it used to at one point, but I've tested metallic, wooden, and leather armors in 1.22.2 and all of them have big differences between the percentages granted to helmets, legs, and chestpieces. Helmets consistently get much more durability/material, and since they all have the same max durability that translates to much more percent/material.

6 hours ago, coolAlias said:

Changing this to a fixed amount of durability rather than a proportion of max would mean that repairing higher durability items could consume significant quantities of repair materials, which seems to be what you are going for but in my opinion would be fairly tedious especially with high durability items such as iron and steel.

You misunderstand what I'm asking. A piece of firewood should give much less durability than a piece of steel plate. But the same piece of firewood should give the same durability on a helmet as it does on a chestpiece, rather than twice as much.

Edited May 14 by Byrnorthil

[coolAlias]

21 minutes ago, Byrnorthil said:

This... simply seems to not be the case. Perhaps it used to at one point, but I've tested metallic, wooden, and leather armors in 1.22.2 and all of them have big differences between the percentages granted to helmets, legs, and chestpieces. Helmets consistently get much more durability/material, and since they all have the same max durability that translates to much more percent/material.

Appreciate the correction - this might have been one of those cases where I read it on a probably outdated wiki page or something, then never bothered to verify via in-game testing and it just stuck with me as fact. Always kind of makes me wonder just how much of what I "know" is false lol.