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hardcore_gamer

Is armor pointless?

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Armor is always useful, valuable and dare I say necessary. Your health drains fast. Some mappers forget armor.

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My biggest peeve with armor is that it comes in either full vests or titchy bonuses. It's like giving nothing but health bonuses and having a soulsphere every now and then.

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10 hours ago, cyan0s1s said:

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!

 

You do realize that not everybody lives in front of their computers? Unlike some people here I have things to do and places to be.

 

9 hours ago, Jaws In Space said:

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

 

This.

 

My original point was that even though armor reduces the damage you take it seems pointless when you can simply give the player a soulsphere or some other health item anyway.

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It's being conservative. If I have a lot of health, then yeah, why would I need armor? But If I also had armor alongside all that health, I'll last longer in battle.

That's why armor is anything but pointless. It's like a vaccine: it makes you more resistant.

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The question if the armour is pointless is actually something like having doubts about a mechanism in the game that was implemented by John Carmack.

 

How can a person have doubts about Carmack?

 

That's blasphemy!

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Carmack doesn't take in stupid factors, he just gets to the point.

Some guy: "Armor will make Doomguy bigger, lower his speed a bit, gives him some special technology like a smart defense system and it'll explode when the armor gets hit at a specific point."

Carmack: "Armor will reduce the damage taken."

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Just as likely:

 

Some guy: "Armor will reduce the damage taken."

 

Carmack: "An unelegant solution to a non-existent problem. Just give the player more health."

 

Then the guy named Some goes and implements the armor anyway, because Carmack isn't in charge of gameplay logic.

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57 minutes ago, Da Werecat said:

Some guy: "Armor will reduce the damage taken."

 

Carmack: "An unelegant solution to a non-existent problem. Just give the player more health."

This is my point exactly.

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For reference: I read a long time ago that Carmack was opposed to the idea of hidden doors, or something along these lines. I remembered the solution phrase from there.

 

Perhaps an idea for a new thread?

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1 hour ago, hardcore_gamer said:

My original point was that even though armor reduces the damage you take it seems pointless when you can simply give the player a soulsphere or some other health item anyway.

Placing armor is a good way to prevent spamming stimpacks, medikits or soulspheres. Unless you want to restrict resources and/or make easier maps with little to no hitscanners, you practically have to put it somewhere in the form of megaspheres or blue/green armor, otherwise not even an accidental cyber rocket is allowed. But I guess it's up to the mapper to forbid armor and create a fair scenario were is possible to combat big guys at the same time. 

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32 minutes ago, hardcore_gamer said:

This is my point exactly.

Giving the player only two supply pools to manage (health and ammo) can get tedious. Armor gives you something else to manage, keeping your mind sharp, while giving mappers an option to provide players with a bit of damage resistance when they think they need it.

 

Also, having space marines run around with no armor on makes no sense.

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4 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

My original point was that even though armor reduces the damage you take it seems pointless when you can simply give the player a soulsphere or some other health item anyway.

Okay, and did reading counter-arguments like these affect your view anyhow?

Spoiler
18 hours ago, rdwpa said:

One big difference between health and armor is that armor attenuates the RNG range. Take a revenant fireball for example, which does as little as 10 or as much as 80 damage raw. With blue armor, that becomes 5 and 40 respectively. While there isn't much of a practical difference between 5 and 10 damage, there is between 40 and 80. This attenuation matters in maps that use both armor and soulspheres...

 

...which is a good thing. The interplay of health pickups and armor pickups has a variety of strategic implications. Compare a soulsphere to a blue armor. At 20 HP (+ 0 A) with little health lying around? You want a soulsphere. At 100 HP (+ 0 A) with lots of stimpacks and medkits you can freely return to? A blue armor will suit you better. Armor pickups aren't a thing anymore? Well you lose this dimension.

 

The mapper's ability to control both resources separately also leads to more interesting gameplay. For example, stimpacks and medkits can be given liberally, but green armors more scarcely -- about as much as you need with 'decent' play. The penalty for losing your armor in that case becomes having your effective HP capped at 100 (sans bonuses/spheres/etc.), as opposed to 150. You can imagine there being three separate 'states' in a map like this: (1) subsisting on almost nothing because you've lost your armor and gone though lots of health pickups; (2) you have little armor left but you still have lots of health pickups, be careful not to die quickly; (3) living large, with both health and armor. Without armor, the mapper would only be able to control health pickups, and the H/A dynamic in this map would only have two meaningful states. There are many ways health and armor can interact like this; with only health you have fewer of those. (Edit: and as GarrettChan mentions a few posts from now, there's also the very meaningful difference between GA and BA.) 

 

Also armor is great because full red screens for any projectiles other than a cyb rocket are dumb lol.

18 hours ago, Archvile Hunter said:

Armor allows you to stay in the fight longer and make more mistakes before running for a health kit. Without armor, any mistake can be deady, and you have to play much more carefully.

 

If you wanted to provide a player with the same "tankiness" armor provides without placing any on the map, you have to litter the floor with health kits, just so the player can stay alive.

18 hours ago, Edward850 said:

The opposite should also be important, if not the defining point: You can have all the armour you want, but having 1% health still makes any damage (within unmodded Doom) instant death.

 

The point of armour is therefor not to be more health, but to be the RPG-equivalent "defense points". It makes you resistant to damage, but not impervious to it.

 

In deathmatch, this actually creates a weird meta strategy. Maps that have Blue armour (50% resist) can allow you to run around a map tanking hits while also allowing you to hoover up all the health, denying it to opponents. Thus it's typically why duel maps don't have blue armour, as it can make you insanely deadly.

 

 

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19 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

I have often wondered this. What does it do that health doesn't? Why give the player armor when you can just give him more medkits or health potions/powerups?

 

If armor and health are pointless, does that also make Doom pointless?

 

Why are we here? What is our purpose in life?  Do we really exist? Are we figments of our own imaginations?  Who is hardcore_gamer?  Does he exist?

 

[/philosophy]

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isnt the questioin whether 200 200 is better than i.e. 400 0 as max. actually I do not know what is better for a good game experience.

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Is the OP a clickbait factory or just a dumbass?

 

Green Armor: reduces damage by 1/3

Blue Armor: reduces damage by 1/2

 

Both make you last longer in the face of long or short combats so you don't have to be constantly eating health items in the middle of a fight. Even if you grab a pile of medikits and restore yourself to 100%, guess what? That's right! You can enter the next room, take a couple shotgun blasts, and get knocked back down to single digits! Or you would, if you didn't have that armor making your health consumption more economical.

 

Next stupid question.

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What does the armor do that Health don't?

From the raw way you put it, nothing for sure, it's just a second health bar which you can fill separately from the main health and it is there to save your ass from hard direct hits like a rocket in your face, because with 400 hit points you can withstand in the middle of a slaughterfest for a couple of seconds.

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On 31/8/2017 at 5:20 PM, esselfortium said:

 

No.

Nope, armor is really usefull, you can have 200 Health, but If you get hit with a total amount of 201 Damage, well, thats it. But, If you are wearing lets say, 100 amor points, than you will only recieve 1/3 of damage, that will save your life; also, MegaArmor is just awesome, its like extra health. 

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14 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

This is my point exactly.

Giving the player an item that reduces the damage they take by either 1/3 or 1/2 is not the same as simply giving them more health, it's been explained clearly like 9000 times in this thread. If a player is playing poorly and they have 10 HP, finding a Blue Armor won't save them. It's nice to have that option as a mapper because just plopping soulspheres/medkits everywhere would ensure the map sucks for anyone seeking a challenge. It makes the game more dynamic.

 

Please read at least one of the many explanations given as to how armor differs from health.. Or don't, I can't make you

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I love armor. Instead of losing up to 80 HP from a revenant at worst, I now can only lose up to 40. Also, because of blue armor, I can survive a direct hit from a Cyberdemon. But as Doomkid said: with the green/blue armors, you need health to utilize armor. 

 

In fact, if you play Stronghold, there's an armor that can block 100% damage. It's OP. 

 

In Short: Armor is very useful. 

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Armor makes gameplay simply by adding an additional wrinkle to Doom's resource management mechanics. When armor and health are tracked and replenished independently it gives the player another thing to think about and the level designer many more opportunities for dynamic enemy encounters, item-based gameplay (i.e. armor or health denial), and tension/release loops to provide a more powerful experience for the player.

 

Personally I can't wait to be able to use armor in ECWolf mods, the lack of it is a serious limitation for level design in the Wolfenstein engine (and perhaps even moreso than a lack of armor would be for Doom, considering how heavily Wolfenstein tilts towards hitscan threats).

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