I’m in the very beginng of game - near with Warrick. I found intresting that wearing cloth tattered shirt, gloves, leather pants, helmet and wooden sword counts as “Heavy” - 112/170.
Changing leather pants to cloth pants makes count my armor as “Normal”. But to be honest - my char stands almost naked in tattered clothes.
If I take off helmet and shirt my armor becomes “Fast”. But my char looks like very little far from naked - just tattered pants that looks more like underpants and tattered gloves without fingers.
For me it’s very weird that fabric clothes counts as “Heavy”, and to be more lightweight my char have to walk naked.
I understand, there have to be progression, but it can be less punishing at start for player. Cloth things are not necessary have to be that heavy.
I currently have a max equip load of 440 so I can use a full plate set and still be on “normal”. With that said, I do think items should be a bit lighter, or make equip load points be a lot more efficient.
second this.
The difference between leather/cloth vs metal armor should be way bigger.
It just breaks the immersion when you’re wrapped in worn rags, and game makes you fat roll.
IMO the stats should change so with cloth & leather armor it should be very very difficult to reach even-mid load. Players should need to carry a big weapon to even reach mid load, otherwise it should just be light-load
Not sure about this one. Big weapons like the claymore should make you straight away heavy, such as clubs and hammers. A dagger shouldn’t be heavier than a double dagger, but a double dagger doesn’t make you heavy (nor put you at normal weight).
Ultimately, if you add some points to the skill you can carry more items, some items enchants can reduce its weight and there is even enchants to increase the total weight you can carry, it’s all about your build.
kinda true. Maybe the weight for the beginning of the game needs to be adjusted and grow from armor to armor.
theres as much weight difference from cloth rags to a fine sorcerer cloak as there is from a clunky half-torn chest piece to a fullplate body armor. so the weight progression shouldn’t be an issue. maybe there could also be some lighter and heavier parts even in their weight category so you can easier mix and match light/normal/heavy armors
yeah I agree, making it default heavy with heavy weapons works for me. The only thing I would add here is then we need to make sure heavy weapons gives enough poise damage so you’re not vulnerable half the time when you’re already fat rolling and slow, ideally, it should also provide better hyper armor during charge attacks, it’d be better to introduce rune abilities to reduce damage taken when the load is heavy so it’s actually viable, or just make heavy weapons more lethal in general.
Yeah some of the 2-Handed weapons currently don’t have a lot of Poise Damage. Curved swords especially.
Also a question for all of you since I have only played with Plate so far. What is like the benefit of Cloth/Leather over Plate besides it being lighter if there is any?
Isn’t wearing full plate just better due to damage reduction and then add equip load to mitigate fat rolling? Or am I missing something, genuine question.
I think it’s just a preference thing mostly. For me I enjoy lighter build play style more so I just go for that, don’t get me wrong tho cuz heavier build has its own fun going, in this game, the dodge animation is much sicker when the load is light IMO, I’m never really a fan of rolling around lol.
In all seriousness though, heavy, mid, light builds should all be viable for a healthy game.
I think then it’s just a tradeoff between investing into Equip Load vs investing into Health. With a Light build you invest the same amount of points into Health as a Heavy build would invest into Equip Load. Guess it’s kinda balanced then since a Heavy build would have to then still invest into Health whilst a Light build can invest into Damage.
I want my next run to be a swashbuckler so was curious to the potential benefits of light gear/load. Also makes more sense from a roleplay perspective.
So the title makes it seem like the weight categories don’t matter, which they do, but then the subject matter seems to be more focused on armor types we’d picture as being light or medium still causing heaviness. Which is fair.
I was thinking they could perhaps create more of a difference between the armor types. Like maybe the stat pools they pull from lean more heavily towards their focus while occasionally pulling from other types…
Plate Armor
• Survivability stats such as increased armor, increased healing effectiveness.
Cloth Armor
• Focus regen (when fixed) and elemental resistance
In addition to some weight and armor changes, they could make it so that each armor type plays a bit more differently because right now it just feels like they’re all the same and if you can carry plate, you go plate.
I think this is a fantastic idea that deserves it’s own post and should be explored more. The only thing it affects currently is the armor and poise value. as far as I’m aware of.
I would however, be careful with adding affixes that are too specialized. Plate armor has to appeal to any class fantasy a player can have, same with Cloth, Hide, Leather etc. They should be broad in it’s applications so they don’t force players to wear a different armor type since the affixes don’t synergize with their playstyle.
Yeah I was more so going for a general direction. The specifics would have to be worked out. Like there would still be a general pool all armor pulls from, but then their specific pools would be what that armor type tends to get on a given roll. It would need to be tested and tweaked for sure.
im wearing a mix of plate and mail so that i have poise and defense, so that i can charge most of my attack and not be stopped by regular ennemies attack and unleash devastating blow with a 2H GS. to do so i had to go up to 27equip load, and my bar is almost kissing the limit to heavy, i also had to look for enchanted gear with weight reduced and slot in some feather, i personnaly think that it is perfectly balanced the way it is now : /
Intresting thing - in real life clothed person should be much more mobile than naked, because clothes protect skin from stones and sticks. So with clothes you can roll much more safely that naked.
And just to spice things up - how mobile can be person wearing heavy armor:
Of course I understand, that this is a gaming convention, but still weight categories can be reviewed. Tattered clothes decided as heavy because I have low level char, so char need to be naked to be fast - this is beyond the limit of what can be decided as game fantasy and convention.
yeah I have to massively invest in equip load points and get lucky with enchanment rolls on gear and adding feathers after getting over 20 with equip load and using feather ring I’m just a smidge below heavy. It feels like I have to invest WAY too much into weight reduction to stay in the normal roll range, I think if they just moved the bars around for light/normal/heavy it would alleviate a lot of the weight issues. If you look at the bar for weight in the stats screen the “normal” weight is really slim and the light and heavy areas are way bigger.
I think it makes sense to put affixes that are considered to be “inherent” to that item type.
Right now, my decision making has been to simply find the armor that gives me the most defense that doesn’t put me under the heavy weight category. It didn’t matter to me whether it was cloth or plate, I just looked at the def and poise stat numbers and that was it.
Once I know the particular armor type that gives me that, I look out for it and keep enchanting those until I get one with a combination of affixes that I like.
They kind of lose any identity to me. There were certain armors and helmet that looked cool that I kinda wanted to wear but ultimately just sold because something else gave me better stats.
If armor types were given 1 (or 2) built-in affix (and of course still allow you to do enchantments to give it more affixes on top) it could give me a reason to stick with a particular armor type, even though it gave lower defense.
As an example, in Path of Exile, a chain belt would give a plus to energy shield, while a leather belt would give a plus to max health. Higher rarity versions of these items would give you random affixes on top of that, but you’re guaranteed that a chain belt will always have a plus to energy shield since that is its inherent affix. That makes kitting out your character a little less random since you don’t have to solely rely on farming items until it has affixes that you want. You can plan out your gear by getting items based on their inherent affixes.
Btw I’m talking about the particular armor type, not the broad categorization of cloth/mesh/plate. So in this game, for example, maybe Broken Vow’s Mantle has a built-in affix of gain health on kill, while Eversol Knight Armor adds to poise defense. Both are plate but have different built-in affixes.
I agree with you for the most part, but that has a lot to do with me preferring to argue from a realistic perspective since my main focus is roleplay.
They seem to be aiming for maximum freedom so limiting affixes is not in line with their vision.
I do think you touch upon the main issue: there is no real incentive to wear cloth over plate since the game favors tanky builds. So most builds default to heavier gear.
Now in CRPGs it is generally balanced by adding both armor and dodge. In a CRPG this works to an extent. Ultimately, people will favor dodge builds with armor stacking. Now in Wicked this won’t work due to the soulslike nature. We do, however need an incentive to wear cloth over plate.
Currently you are penalized with having to invest into equip load. This alone is not enough since the first few points into equip load give so much value.
There either has to be another penalty besides equip load. A bonus similar to armor that is high on cloth armor and low on plate. I don’t think nerfing equip load will be enough.
Right, I don’t have an easy suggestion here. I see this Equip Load system as a carry-over from the souls genre.
In the actual Souls games, unless you’re going for a specific build, you just want to be in the Normal weight class. There’s even less incentive there to wear anything light, like cloth/robes (in terms of gameplay), because that game has no item affix system to potentially give the cloth armor some bonus that you might want. Personally, I find some of the light armor there to be interesting only because of the lore they reveal in their item descriptions, not for their actual function as armor!
There’s only very specific situations to wear robes (iirc there’s robes that have high poison resistance that you’d want to wear when crossing a poisonous swamp).
In the end, your deciding factor to wear something in Dark Souls is if it looks cool. Really, once the player’s familiarity with the game has reached a certain point, what you wear kinda no longer matters (because you’ve committed to memory the attack patterns and enemy weaknesses and when it’s best to roll, parry, or block) and players just wear things for the looks. They call this “fashion souls”.
So they have this Equip Load system for the RPG aspect of it, but looking back, I see it as mostly just to gate you from equipping the late-game armor too early (i.e. you have to allocate enough points to the Equip Load attribute first, because being in the heavy weight class is undesirable).
tl;dr I don’t think even the souls-genre that Wicked copies from has an answer to this.
Weight classes are copied from Souls but this doesn’t mean that Souls is the benchmark for how to design weight classes, in reality this is one of the things which Fromsoft handles poorly and all of their recent titles have functionally only had one weight class.
The best example of armour weight variation within that series is Dark Souls 2, which starts you with relatively little carry weight and also has benefits on a sliding scale for being lighter, rather than just being under a set breakpoint. Being lighter in DS2 makes you roll further and regenerate stamina faster. The game also has a ring which can provide a large amount of additional flat damage for being very light, something which enables cloth armour builds that otherwise would have no reason to exist and makes DS2 the souls game with the widest variety of gameplay-viable Fashion.
When it comes to Wicked though, I think the game already does a good job of distinguishing Light from Normal movement, as the faster movement speed and lower cost Quickstep dash which travels further does offer decent advantages over Normal weight. You could start adding benefits like bonus damage or focus for wearing cloth, but actually I think things would work out fine if you just narrowed the damage mitigation gap between different weight tiers.
What prevents people from using Light right now is not that there are no meaningful benefits to being Light, it’s just that you’ll bloody well die.
