More significant AC

[Mark]

So a while back there was discussion around making AC more significant - making it a bigger factor in helping players withstand melee attacks. Or at least, making its existing benefit more apparent.

One way to making AC more beneficial, especially to the casters (which is sort of everyone bar warrior), would be for AC to provide a physical saving throw.

Physical Saving Throw would reduce the chance and/or duration of

• Stunning
• Cuts
• Poison

It feels approximately appropriate that wearing heavier armour would reduce the chance of such physical attacks successfully hurting you. (Admittedly, armour wouldn't really help against poison *gas* but would against poison needles). As I understand it, Saving Throw only affects the mental adverse status (conf, hallu (?) fear, blind, slow, paralysis). So there is a 'gap in the market'.

The degree to which AC should help protect against the adverse physical affects would need to be carefully considered and relatively slight, so we aren't simply reducing the chances of interesting (albeit 'bad') things happening to the player. A relationship like:

0 - 50 AC negligible affect
50 - 100 AC mild affect
100 - 150 AC - moderate effect
150 - 200 AC - makes a massive difference.

Another way to make AC better for most classes (although very hard to communicate) would be if it protected against confusion, fear, blind, or slowing from melee attacks, whereas Saving Throw only does this from spells. Perhaps it already does this implicitly by reducing the chance you get hit by such an melee attack? (although given the frequency of melee attacks perhaps it offers negligible protection and the melee attack landing the the status affect being successful could be separated out)

[debo]

I don't know how PosChengband's AC works, but it is way more important in that game than it is in vanilla, even though the mechanic is roughly the same. Normal melee monsters will just wreck you at low AC, whereas in V it doesn't really seem to matter much at all.

[Derakon]

AC makes a bigger difference than you think in Vanilla. If your AC is low then standing in melee range is extremely painful; if it's high then you can last a noticeably longer amount of time. However, it doesn't have the kind of stepwise effects that resistances or protections do, where you either have them or you don't. And, aside from body armor, most gear has basically the same AC. Thus people don't tend to base their equipment decisions on AC.

[Estie]

AC doesnt matter in vanilla. While it protects somewhat against physical damage, most of the threats are elemental in nature and the top physical damagers ignore AC. Add to that that in the early game AC comes in a "mixed blessing" form, that is wearing heavy armor reduces your speed, and you can safely ignore AC. I do for the most part.

I see 2 ways to change this:

1. make AC protect from other things than physical damage - for example, some amount of elemental damage absorbed by an amount proportional to AC.

2. Change the threat distribution to more physical, by for example making more and more damaging archers.

Personally I would like the latter, because I feel the game has over the time become far too magic heavy in an attempt to keep the difficulty up. Breath weapons are the most effective attack, so devs gave it to everything and their hound. However, it would mean a great change to go back on that and probably change the game in a big way, and of course it would be a lot of work.

[wobbly]

AC makes a bigger difference than you think in Vanilla. If your AC is low then standing in melee range is extremely painful; if it's high then you can last a noticeably longer amount of time. However, it doesn't have the kind of stepwise effects that resistances or protections do, where you either have them or you don't. And, aside from body armor, most gear has basically the same AC. Thus people don't tend to base their equipment decisions on AC.

So matters, but doesn't matter enough to effect your choice? To me that's not an interesting choice. I'd prefer melee to be more dangerous, otherwise melee (which is a large portion of the game) is not interesting. Currently it's only dangerous to melee breathers or around breathers. Breathers/casters/etc. of course.

[Mark]

AC doesnt matter in vanilla. the top physical damagers ignore AC.

Is this true?! Are these attacks like "butts", "kicks" etc. Does AC only protect against "hits you" type physical attacks?

Which physical attacks ignore AC?

[Nick]

Is this true?! Are these attacks like "butts", "kicks" etc. Does AC only protect against "hits you" type physical attacks?

Which physical attacks ignore AC?

It's not true as far as I'm aware. All physical attacks are checked against player AC.

[LostTemplar]

AC affects chance to hit of all monster attacks and damage of normal and "shatter" attacks, damage of e.g. titan's "hit to confuse" is not affected.

[Nick]

OK, to clarify:

• Every physical attack needs a check against AC to hit at all
• Some physical attacks (normal hit and hit to shatter) then get further damage reduction from AC
• Elemental (bite to burn, etc) melee attacks potentially get damage reduction from resistance and/or from AC

[fizzix]

The reason AC is less important in Angband is because the big damage comes from breath/spell attacks that bypass AC. Yes there are monsters with big melee attacks, but after the early game (and even in the early game if you're a mage or have a ranged weapon) you can attack from a distance.

If you want AC to be important, then you need to weaken ranged attacks (for both players and monsters) first. Otherwise, you're putting a lot of effort in for little gain. One quick area where improvement could come about. Angband only has one range for attack spells, max distance. Having the more powerful spells have shorter range might help.

Of course there's the whole decoupling of evasion and armor...

[Estie]

Let me clarify, too:

- I never wear something like a magic full plate. I wear the first magic leather I find and squelch {good} armors at that point, so the next upgrade is something with resists.
- If I have the choice between a leather mail of resistance with 20 AC and a chainmail of resistance with 50 AC, I pick the leather for weight reasons.
- Even if weight of all armors was reduced to zero, I would prefer a leather of resistance over a chain mail of resist fire.

AC concerns are strictly below resistance (and stats ect) concerns, so I wear the armor with the most benefit to resists. It is rare to have the choice between two similarly good top resist armors; if it occurs anyway, in the early game I prefer light weight over AC and lategame I look at "C" -> "h" table to see what best plugs my holes. A robe of permanence is a perfectly good endgame suit for a warrior.

[Derakon]

A robe of permanence is a perfectly good endgame suit for a warrior.

That warrior is going to be taking something like 15-20% more damage from physical attacks compared to if they were wearing a heavier armor that gave 100 more AC.

If nothing else, the effects of AC on your chance to be hit and your physical damage reduction need to be messaged to the player. You can't expect the player to make an informed decision if they don't know what the rules are.

[Estie]

Exactly: 15-20% more damage is the difference between the best possible and worst possible endgame body armors in regards to AC. Compared to resisted and unresisted fire breath, thats negligible.

[fizzix]

While I'm theory-crafting, I'd also recommend considering allowing evasion to factor in on allowing players to dodge bolt spells, and armor to reduce damage from ball/breath spells. The same could be true for monsters, but it's important then to scale up the damage to account for new misses.

[Estie]

Maybe there is a 3rd way to make AC relevant, by bringing the (melee) damage numbers in line with the breath weapons.

Lets say a Titan does 1600 dam/round in melee to a naked character. This gets reduced by AC to a few hundred. Wether thats 200 or 500 depends on the amount of AC.

If done this way, AC should change from evasion to absorbtion similar to resists as evasion is too spiky. Intricate combinations of evasion, %absorption and flat absorbtion would be interesting in principle, but arent going to happen under the umbrella of the elemental resistance game. A simple system with AC amount reducing physical damage by a percentage is enough.

To hit chance is still part of Angband though. To throw out some ideas:
- Evasion could be tied to enchantment value while base ac reduces by %.
- The (low relevance) evasion values could remain as is, but %reduction be tied to the body armor. Maybe change the minus to hit variable on armours to %reduction display. Robes would probably become unviable in lategame.

Anyway, this is probably difficult enough to code that it might be worth to consider going to the root of the issue: the prevalence of magic (elemental) attacks on monsters. Wether thats wanted or not I dont know, but its the cause for these "More significant AC" threads.