Okay, I don't think this has actually ever been suggested before, but it might be possible to turn Enchant Armor flow back up safely while simultaneously limiting a player's power if their composite (base) level is reconfigured to be an average of all their levels. As it currently stands, your base level is determined by the first 110 levels you earn.
Since there are six leveling categories, we simply combine the player's levels together and then divide by six, probably going with integers unless an experience bar is added or something. (Hint hint.)
So if you have the following:
Agility 27
Magic 35
Mental 14
Physical 72
Personality 8
Wisdom 62
The player's composite level would be 218 / 6 = Level 36. Enough for +3 AC on 6 Slots, or +18 AC from enchantments.
This means they would be able to handle a maximum of 3 enchantments on any piece of their armor. With 6 enchantable slots (excluding bracers, which do not stack AC with chest pieces) that's around +18 AC max, which is reasonable for a Level 36 player to have. However, a player must be limited to equipping their maximum at any given time, similar to how you can't equip a sword that's prepped higher than what you can wield.
Now here's the same thing at much higher levels:
Agility 87
Magic 92
Mental 107
Physical 73
Personality 62
Wisdom 107
The player's composite level would be 528 / 6 = Level 88. Enough for +8 AC on 6 Slots, or +48 AC from enchantments.
This could potentially solve a major problem with power creep because as it currently stands, players can shoot up to their maximum base level quite quickly. Base level has no bearing on how much damage a player does with any given skill they're using, but it does determine how much they can enchant, so that could be used as the limiter for power from lower to higher levels.
Altogether, enchantment levels would look a bit more like this instead:
Level 1-60: +0 AC from enchantments
Level 61-121: +6 AC from enchantments
Level 122-182: +12 AC from enchantments
Level 183-243: +18 AC from enchantments
Level 244-304: +24 AC from enchantments
Level 305-365: +30 AC from enchantments
Level 366-426: +36 AC from enchantments
Level 427-487: +42 AC from enchantments
Level 488-548: +48 AC from enchantments
Level 549-609: +54 AC from enchantments
Level 610-642: +60 AC from enchantments
Since the max for enchantments is around 72 per player, the final +2 AC per armor piece could potentially come from Level 1 and Level 110, so as to provide players with a bit of AC to start with and reward them for maxing out their levels.
However, Enchant Armor scrolls would need to be much more freely available in this system, because it will actually turn armor into an important aspect of the game, and some monsters may need to re-tuned so they're fightable but difficult at those levels. Weapons are basically configured using a similar kind of scale, so I figured this kind of thing might work for solving the issue of players getting too powerful too fast without needing to sap the economy of EAs / IWDs to punish players for getting too strong too fast.
What do you all think? This could potentially open the door for dungeons that have been scaled better, more balanced PvP and PvE, and so forth.
The math has been there all along. It's just a matter of recognizing it.
10-02-2014, 05:35 AM
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