I don’t know if developers have realized that the performance of plate and mesh is completely superior to that of cloth and leather, because Enchant is universal, while Armor is much lower, and the load does not have a significant impact. I believe that each material should have its own characteristics, and collecting sets should have unique effects
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Yeah, I’ve been noticing this myself. Have played through to the Crucible (haven’t finished it yet) on three different characters, each at different weight classes.
Light weight class has the fast dash, but it doesn’t seem to go very far. You also need to either use very light armor and/or invest heavily in Equip Load. Additionally, they take considerably more damage, so it takes very few hits to get destroyed. Not only that, but the first hit is likely to interrupt and/or flatten them, since there isn’t much poise to be gained from armor that light.
Medium weight armor is alright and the dodge roll seems to have some good distance and is reasonably quick. Has some more ability to mix-and-match different armor types, though plate will still likely push them over into heavy weight. The expected “middle of the road” option.
Heavy weight is… nuts. Not only do they have considerable amounts of armor and poise, allowing them to actually take a few hits without getting obliterated, but they also get the incredible “push” ability. The dodge roll isn’t that great, but it’s still usable once you get used to the timing.
I don’t know what kind of change I’d suggest, but I do think there should be a bit more to compensate the lightest weight class, since currently there isn’t really much going for it. It takes the most effort to achieve and maintain, but it’s also the worst.
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I think rebalancing weight could be a good solution.
Like wearing cloth armor does not require spending any points into equip load, thus freeing those points up to be invested elsewhere.
Where plate users have to invest points into equip load, and are thus down attribute points compared to lighter armor users. But, gain more damage reduction as a trade-off.
It would however, limit player freedom where a cloth user can’t have a heavy load and slow roll if they want to. But, not sure if that would be an issue.
There needs to be more of a trade-off. There was also a suggestion of perhaps different affixes or maybe higher affixes roll on lighter gear.
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The first few points into Equipload provide such a huge benefit that they will never be skipped if you care even slightly about your ability to not die. If cloth gives you Light weight immediately with zero investment, in a game where just 6 points into Equipload practically doubles your available weight and increased total weight / reduced armour weight are available Enchants the result will just be that Cloth is never worn past the beach.
While I think it would be interesting to have unique benefits for being Light in the same way that Heavy gets a unique ability… I think it would also be more sensible for the game to have a less dramatic survivability spread between the lightest and heaviest characters for the sake of sensible difficulty tuning.
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En effet,
D’ailleurs, on se fait un peu “trahir” par la description des équipements, certains équipements parlent d’encourager les “fourberies” et la “discrétion” dans le descriptif. Mais aucun passif noté en ce sens, et l’on est tout aussi facilement détecté par les ennemis, et la “fenêtre du backstab” reste tout aussi “petite”.
Je pense que les armures légères devraient augmenter d’avantage la vitesse du personnage lorsqu’il est accroupis, ou se fondre d’avantage dans le décors, ou augmenter la rapidité des attaques quelque soit l’arme.
Tout comme je pense qu’il devrait être nécessaire d’ajouter des bonus si l’on utilise tout les équipements d’une même panoplie.
Light builds are just in a bad place.
No amount of points in damage, HP, or focus, are going to make up for the lack of 600+ def.
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Hypothetically speaking.
I spend 0 points into equip load, wear cloth, and invest 6 points into HP.
I spend 6 points into equip load, wear plate, and invest 0 points into HP.
Effective HP, should be similar to an extent.
Effectively Plate users have more Effective HP, and Cloth users have more Damage.
This is probably very hard to balance, tweak and get right. But I do think it should work something like this to validate a trade-off. And there needs to be an incentive to wear cloth and other ‘‘lighter’’ armors. Right now almost all machinegun dagger builds are using plate 
Things won’t work like this because of the logistics of stat scaling and diminishing returns. A character with 40 points into HP does not have 8x the HP of someone with 5 points into HP. The greatest returns from investment come from the first few points into the stat, so at such low levels of investment dipping a little way into both is always going to yield higher overall stats. I don’t think this is a problem, it makes sense when considering the bigger picture.
Equipment load is the problem stat because you have an entire class of armour with unique models and textures which artists have painstakingly worked on and if you start the player with too much available weight by default these items will literally never be seen. Not only does the player’s available weight increase with Attribute investment, the armour itself actually gets LIGHTER because of Enchant and gem bonuses, and lower weight armour which brings you even further below the Light threshhold has no reason to exist. For the sake of making this work I think it’s acceptable for the player to be at Normal weight if wearing full Cloth on the beach before any investment into Equipload or Enchants.
Cloth still needs a speed buff, maybe not movement but everything else. Recovery frames are way too slow. When getting shoved to the ground in full cloth it’s confirmed death when there’s an immediate follow up attack. But there should be a chance to make it out of that. Full cloth ain’t full plate, so there’s no reason to get up as slow as if it were.
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Yeah, that’s the reason I said it would be very hard to balance.
I think this is one part of the problem, the other being armor values on gear. If Cloth gear has more armor than it does now, it will mitigate part of the problem: people defaulting to Plate due to armor values and Poise.
I have little experience with Soulslikes, I have experience with CRPGs, MMORPGs and Moba’s mostly.
Maybe a balanced idea would be:
Light Armor Types Baseline: you can take 2 boss hits before being KO’d
Medium Armor Types Baseline: you can take 3 boss hits before being KO’d
Heavy Armor Types Baseline: you cna take 4 boss hits before being KO’d
You would then combine this with X% armor and make sure it feels like this way across the entire game. Then you have to account for upgrades, enchants, EHP.
I am just spitballing here, I have no clue if it fixes anything. I just understand the issue.
Yeah, agreed.
While having leather or plate armor definitely has a lot of advantages, being in the fast category is an absolute blast, compared to the heavy weight class(in my opinion).
I played a heavy char and now a fast build. And the difference is huge. Side stepping dodge is amazing and that run speed extra is huge.
So with adding maybe some extra buff for the light weight (like slightly faster recovery, noticeably better stealth, etc.), and making it very difficult to reach with plate gear, it could be at a nice balanced state.
(Of course we can just judge on the current state of the game, we have fe. no idea if there is any extra coming in at the real late game.)
à l’heure actuelle, il est aisé d’avoir une armure lourde (7XX en défense, 4X d’équilibre) et de rester dans la catégorie légère, via l’enchantement (réduction du poids de l’objet) + l’infusion avec une plume. Le tout sans investir beaucoup de poinds dans la statistique appropriée.
Ce qui “casse” la logique du jeu.