Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-26172435-20151212141734/@comment-26172435-20170223103413

About a week ago I did a complete overhaul of the system as originally proposed in the first post above, in order to get armour weights and their effects on player speed as much as possible in agreement with realistic materials and crafts, lore and gameplay balance. This lead to this table listing starting points and assumptions. You will see I adopted the assumptions that there was hardly any plate armour in Middle-earth and I hope I found a reasonable explanation for the variances in armour material costs, durability, protective values and realistic weights.

For easier overview check this table of armour types and their weights (with weights calculated as full armour sets). It is implemented in a customized config for the readily available ArmorWeight plugin, to make players without armour have a base weight of 85 kg and a 15% speed boost compared to vanilla Steve speed. A total armour weight of 15 kg gives the player the same speed as Steve and a weight of 30 kg slows the player down to a speed of 85% compared to Steve. No mod armour weighs over 30 kg. This implies that any speed providing brew still makes players move at least 5% faster than vanilla Steve speed, as well as all non-speed-boosted NPCs.

After a period of playing with that new config, it seems to provide an acceptable experience to the players of the Battle for Middle-earth server. That is currently the only server where this is implemented.

Sadly the weight doesn't count for NPC's, but if you consider that NPC's don't have the opportunity to use a broad variety of brews, it seems still not unfitting for use in PvE at all.

Bottom line for both PvE and PvP combat is that heavy armour slows you down to an extent that encourages players to use brews in order to fight strong melee NPCs or players, or revert to a tactic of using light armour and ranged weaponry (bows, spears, pikes, ...), or use a mount. Either with or without ArmorWeight Players can choose to combine a set of armour that allows for outrunning vanilla speed using NPCs while still providing decent protection.

When regarding the relatively high weight of evil steel armour types, consider this: 1) steel is heavy, especially when not crafted using the best technologies available and 2) evil forces have an interesting range of ways to counter good aligned forces in lighter armour like speedy wargs, bombs, fire pots and poisoned blades.