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hardcore_gamer

Is armor pointless?

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Let's make a map without having armor bonuses or proper armor...


No need. We've got DECORATE and DeHacked!

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I went my whole life not knowing how armor exactly works until, i think, @CapnClever or someone brought it up on his last Evo of the Wad show just recently.  Apparently different percentage brackets of armor (<100% vs <200%) actually have different damage reduction rates (1/2 health saved per armor vs 1 whole point of health saved per armor point).  Knowing how it works has caused me to slightly change the timing/order of when I pick up health/armor items, which prevents you from squandering your cumulative effective health across an entire map.

 

Because health is now worth more for blue armor than green armor, I consider saving health pickups for when I finally get a bigger armor.  Instead of gaining 10% effective health from a stimpack, you could get effectively 15% if you wait for that green armor, or even 20% effectively if you wait for the blue armor.  If you pick up the stimpack early game without armor, you will be safer early game, but at the expense of potential safety later on.  Late game is when when mappers like @Ribbiks like to throw the end-map lock-in cyberdemon fight at you on your no-saves blind playthrough.

 

Just looking it up now, though, it turns out my first understanding was slightly wrong too.  according to this doomwiki page, even a megaarmor persists at 1/2 (edit: 1 to 1 ratio i mean, not 1/2 hp per armor point; clarification) reduction even when you're under 100%.  It doesn't revert back to 1/3 reduction from 1/2 right away once below the threshold:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Armors

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1 minute ago, GarrettChan said:

I guess Scythe Map21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27 and 28 fit the bill, IRC?

Oh yeah, maps 21 and 22, those days when I had to punch taller guys for the first time. I still remember that baron fortunately dying after the sixth punch.

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6 minutes ago, NoisyVelvet said:

Just looking it up now, though, it turns out my first understanding was slightly wrong too.  according to this doomwiki page, even a megaarmor persists at 1/2 reduction even when you're under 100%.  It doesn't revert back to 1/3 reduction from 1/2 right away once below the threshold:

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Armors

Yes, this is correct. That's why usually you shouldn't replace the MegaArmor with Armor when you have 75%~99% MegaArmor. Captain also showed this not intentionally in one of his videos, forgot which one though.

 

I always like to use the example of 150 damage (two unlucky Revenant missile rolls). If you have 100/100 (A), you would die because you're going to take 100/50; However, If you have 100/75 (Mega), you wouldn't die because you're going to take 75/75 damage. That's why I'm always sweating when fighting a bunch of Revenants with only Armor.

 

4 minutes ago, galileo31dos01 said:

Oh yeah, maps 21 and 22, those days when I had to punch taller guys for the first time. I still remember that baron fortunately dying after the sixth punch.

Yeah, those maps are tough. You can do a E2M9 fist only to have some fun ;P

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28 minutes ago, leodoom85 said:

Let's make a map without having armor bonuses or proper armor...

 

One of the requirements for the last Eagle speedmaps session was actually no armor in the levels, and I did miss it a lot lol

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15 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

Yes, this is correct. That's why usually you shouldn't replace the MegaArmor with Armor when you have 75%~99% MegaArmor. Captain also showed this not intentionally in one of his videos, forgot which one though.

 

I always like to use the example of 150 damage (two unlucky Revenant missile rolls). If you have 100/100 (A), you would die because you're going to take 100/50; However, If you have 100/75 (Mega), you wouldn't die because you're going to take 75/75 damage. That's why I'm always sweating when fighting a bunch of Revenants with only Armor.

Some math:

 

The effective HP formula for green armor is health + min(health/2, armor), and for blue armor it is health + min(health, armor).

 

So the question is 'how do we decide whether to pick up a green armor or keep our blue armor for, let's say, a final lock-in fight'. 

 

We pick up the green armor if health + min(health/2, green armor) > health + min(health, blue armor).

 

The first health terms will cancel out and the green armor value will be 100.

 

So we get min(health/2, 100) > min(health, blue armor). 

 

The first term further reduces to health/2, because you can't have more than 200 health in typical Doom :) 

 

health/2 > min(health, blue armor)
 

health/2 is never larger than health, duh.

 

health/2 > blue armor

 

So basically, whenever half your health is a larger number than the amount of blue armor you have, you get more protection for that fight from the green armor. (I think this is right.) 

 

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13 minutes ago, rdwpa said:

(Formulas and stuff)

Yes, this is totally correct. You got the approval seal of a Maths Bachelor (wait, who cares...?)

 

Seriously, this is a very interesting thing to consider since more and more designers like to give you 200/100(A) for a Cyberdemon fight rather than 200/200(M) (basically a Megasphere) based on my observation. You should be able to survive a hit from direct rocket with 200/100(A). However, usually we are in the situation of 100/75(M) or something like that, and sometimes player only focus on the absolute number rather than effectiveness/efficiency.

 

Still, it's very nice to see the whole deductions procedure, nicely done. I usually raise that 150 damage thing to say because it's a pretty straightforward calculation, but can't sum up all the situations.

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You could technically go without armor, but you'll quickly find that the 33% damage reduction (50% for Megaarmor, until it either wears out, or you replace it with a standard 100% armor) often makes the difference between tanking a hit and winding up face-down on the ground, dead.

 

Also, if you don't have any armor whatsoever, taking a Cyberdemon rocket to the face will kill you instantly, even from maximum 200% health. Whereas a rank 1 armor will (barely) let you live that hit if you roll the maximum 288 hp damage value to the face.

 

It's usually better to ride out a Megaarmor as long as you can (Picking up bonuses will count as Megaarmor damage protection), then grab regular armors until you can find another blue to replace it with.

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1 hour ago, galileo31dos01 said:

For someone who claimed to have been playing Doom for such long time, it's seems odd to me how's that they still don't know the value of armor. 

I have likewise been playing 10+ years and haven't ever really bothered to understand how armor works

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1. Gets a notification that somebody commented on a thread called "Is armor pointless?"

2. Instantly knows who made it

 

3. ???

 

4. Leaves comment for the heck of it and unsubs from thread....

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12 minutes ago, Tango said:

I have likewise been playing 10+ years and haven't ever really bothered to understand how armor works

Shame on you ;) 

 

I'm kidding, there is no obligation of knowing the maths or the 33/50 percentages thing, but even with some basic experience you can tell why armor is important and how different is getting damaged with and without armor. The user usually makes threads with "polemic" titles, and doesn't pay much attention to the responses, even the best constructed ones. Maybe this will be the exception, who knows...

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At this point I think we can flat-out assume that hardcore is just a sockpuppet account rdwpa and co use to generate opportunities to flex with their brain muscles.

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11 minutes ago, Arctangent said:

At this point I think we can flat-out assume that hardcore is just a sockpuppet account rdwpa and co use to generate opportunities to flex with their brain muscles.

It's true. We just like dispensing memes and gameplay tips and tricks. Hardcore gamer never existed.

Edited by Edward850

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Oh hell armor..

If you put armor in a deathmatch map for example, especially blue armor, item balance could be significantly broken.

Simply because it's a 1 item in the heat of a battle that would determent whether you win or lose with 1 frag left. 

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Funny how he never came back to respond yet, gotta love OPs that are wrong about something and then leave you hanging after two pages worth of replies. Bait and run! It is the Fáviti way!

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2 hours ago, rdwpa said:

math

I'd always planned to do the math on this, but I never did.

So, thanks for solving one of the questions that's been bothering me, I guess.

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4 minutes ago, Tango said:

I have likewise been playing 10+ years and haven't ever really bothered to understand how armor works

I was the same.  I played Doom 2 a lot as a youngling (didn't really restart playing again until ~4 years ago).  The internet back then wasn't what it is today where you can just google certain things you are unsure of.  I also didn't read at that age anyways, so consulting the instruction manual of Doom 2 was out of question.  From this perspective, armor was just kinda the powerup that made you die more slowly, so you just kinda grab it whenever you see it and don't think about the nuance of it.  It's inclusion in the game seemed to be mostly for flavor, and it certainly seemed like the designers could have just increased your max hp to 400% health instead to accomplish almost the same thing; especially in older maps that just wanted to make a wacky space to explore, and didn't care as much about tighter control over difficulty throughout the map.

Now the scene is different.  Doom mapping clearly cares more about skill-based fights and tight balance.  For example: A map with multiple fights (most maps) might want to give the player 150 effective health per fight and no more.  One alternative to armor, medkits and 50 health bonuses before each fight, means a player that takes no hits in one fight will carry excess health bonuses to the next fight; armor gives mappers the option to control the variance of potential difficulty across a longer map; it controls entropy.  Another alternative to armor, medkits sprawled throughout the encounter instead of before it, means you can still get one-shot or two-shot more easily by high-damage monsters.

 

^I'm kinda just restating things already said previously in the thread.

 

Also, it's really interesting to see people answer two completely different interpretations of the question in OP.  A couple people (unless it's just shit-posting for fun, which i can understand) even explicitly responded as if OP literally said that picking up an armor in game doesn't do anything.  I don't really follow @hardcore_gamer's posting history so I'm not pre-primed like others to read the question as trolling.  For me, instead, the question looks much more interesting than a lot of discussions on the Doom General subforum, not to say that things like "What does Cacodemon Meat Taste Like?" isn't an important topic that we clearly need to get to the bottom of too.  This topic, on the otherhand, seems to be about an interesting and honest oversimplification of the amount of total damage you can take, but while reducing the dimensionality of the subject by ignoring the timing and delivery of the resource that actually lets you survive.

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6 minutes ago, NoisyVelvet said:

Also, it's really interesting to see people answer two completely different interpretations of the question in OP.  A couple people (unless it's just shit-posting for fun, which i can understand) even explicitly responded as if OP literally said that picking up an armor in game doesn't do anything.@hardcore_gamer

It seems to me that most people are responding to the title of the thread rather than the question in the OP.

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1 minute ago, superchargecacodemons799 said:

How is armor pointless? It is useful in maps that don't have megaarmors!

This made me think. Did OP mean all armor in general, or just green armor? 

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Funny how he never came back to respond yet, gotta love OPs that are wrong about something and then leave you hanging after two pages worth of replies.



He'll reply back after 34 days.

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I think most of you seem approach this question from the wrong point of view.

 

The Armor is totally justified if you look at it from a "gamedesign" perspective.

Armor is basically a "Bonus Item".

DOOM was designed during a time when power up's and bonus items were common in every game... especially jump and run's. People loved it. This is the reason why it is in the game.

The Designers just needed a "realistic" excuse/explanation to give the player more then 100% health...    So they called it armor.

They also needed to give you a reason that makes you look out for secrets (where armor was hidden most of the time) 

 

 

 

 

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3 minutes ago, Doohnibor said:

 

Armor is basically a "Bonus Item".

DOOM was designed during a time when power up's and bonus items were common in every game... especially jump and run's. People loved it. This is the reason why it is in the game.

The Designers just needed a "realistic" excuse/explanation to give the player more then 100% health...    So they called it armor.

They also needed to give you a reason that makes you look out for secrets (where armor was hidden most of the time) 

 

 

 

 

Green armor is often found out in the open.

 

Also Soulspheres and other health boosters.

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Ive wanted to make the argument that maps would be more fun if they were more generous with health items and less with armor. 100% health is still very vulnerable in the face of many of Doom 2's monsters because its such a low amount of HP to put a cap on. Similar to the argument that Doom is better without the backpack because it forces the player to better ration out the inventory.

 

In most cases a mapper can just give the player a megaarmor and litter some stimpacks around and everything is fine. I'd like to see more of those Wolf3D closets with thousands of health kits as a recharging station you have to defend instead of being an armored tank all the time.

 

I think this will just benefit my own maps though.

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Armour halfs the damage taken if you have enough. And you can use it like the suit charge in half life where specific hazards will only deal damage to your armour instead of health if you have any.

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