stealth and thieving in heavy armor

[Drew]

I noticed that the thieving in heavy armor component appears to add some hefty penalties to the white dragon scale armor. In the unmodded game penalties to stealth and other thieving abilities were actually quite light. Is this an oversight or a purposeful change?

[Idobek]

There's a dilema here, obviously BioWare wanted the White Dragon Scale to be usable by thieves and wotnot. However, instead of doing the sensible thing of giving it the AC bonuses for studded leather (as for the Shadow Dragon Scale), they went and gave it full blown scale mail bonuses. Cam has, sensibly, assigned the thieving penalties based on AC, to give lesser penalties we'd have to nerf the armour class.

[Kish]

That's a pity, since in the unmodded game I'm pretty sure the point is that it's both very light/flexible and very good-AC armor.

[NiGHTMARE]

The question is, what made Bioware decide to have white dragon armour provide better AC than shadow dragon armour, considering that living shadow dragons have the best AC of any dragon, while white dragons have the worst?

[Fallen_Demon]

The question is, what made Bioware decide to have white dragon armour provide better AC than shadow dragon armour, considering that living shadow dragons have the best AC of any dragon, while white dragons have the worst?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

They thought the new armor you can get in TOB should be more powerful than what you could get in SOA. Plot/world consistency is irrelavent.

[Kish]

They thought the new armor you can get in TOB should be more powerful than what you could get in SOA.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well, I'd also say the fact that cold resistance is so much less useful than fire resistance (and/or Cespenar being able to invest items with more power than Cromwell can) is likely to be part of it.

[Drew]

I think Cam made the right decision to impose the penalties. I would however like to post a compromise of sorts. How about treating the armor as hide+6? The AC wouldn't be nerfed too badly and it would make a lot more sense for thieves to be able to use the item as the description states.

[CamDawg]

I'm certainly willing to take another look, though I'm not going to do anything as radical as hide. There were many pieces of armor that gave me fits when trying to classify them--Valygar's Armor and Andy's Bardic Leathers from S&S spring to mind.

[Drew]

fair enough. You could just as easily just change the item's description to better match how it works now as well.......then you wouldn't actually HAVE to change anything. (not that you do now. It just seems kind of wierd seeing the description talk about how the armor is so light and flexible that thieves could use it and then have it severely penalize thieving abilities.)

[CamDawg]

Well, the same is true now of the Shadow Master armor.

[SimDing0]

Valygar's Armor

Please, please, just make Valygar's armour entirely something sensible rather than chainmail made of leather or whatever the hell some people decided it was.

[devSin]

Please, please, just make Valygar's armour entirely something sensible rather than chainmail made of leather or whatever the hell some people decided it was.

Make it chain so he turns into the pink avenger. Under no circumstances should the color be changed.

[CamDawg]

Valygar's Armor is treated as chain for the purposes of the tweaks, but I did not, unfortunately, change the avatar icon to induce pinkness.

[Idobek]

If someone makes me a list of armors in vanilla SoA and ToB that have poor classifactions I'll look into tweaking them. So far we have:

• Corthala Family Armor
  
• White Dragon Scale
  
• Shadow Armor
  

Any others anybody disagrees with?

 

I'll look at all the dragon scale armors while I'm at it and possibly provide some consistancy across them. Currently it looks like BioWare simply wanted a dragon scale armor of each type, which ends up looking messy imo.

 

This'll be a seperate but obviously compatible component to thieving skills in armor.

[Drew]

The big metal unit. It's made of pants, last i checked, and has the penalties of full plate, I think.