IDEAS FOR RYZOM

When entering melee combat, when using light and medium armor, I noticed that hits to the head (from mobs) pass "as is", without significant damage reduction, as when hitting any other part of the body covered by armor. The difference in damage is 2-3 times.
If in Raizome all headshots were enhanced, I would understand it and take it for granted. But when you equip a heavy helmet, the problem disappears, but instead we spend more energy on each action, because of the new "interference", which is not good for non-tanks.

A bit of history.
When I started the game, I noticed that there was no head protection for sale at the merchants of light and medium equipment on Silan. So I bought a heavy helmet and wore it until I encountered the problem of "jumping into the water", which makes passing the game and killing mobs too easy, and therefore I chose the path of a ranged mage, in view of the lack of a decent alternative. The other paths are simply "weak", because of the still unfixed "water jump" bug that interrupts any fight, even with creatures that can swim in water.

Now I want to know the opinion of developers and the community, how to solve the problem with head protection, because it is much easier than radically rewrite the AI, which I tried to do (thanks to the authors who put the sources of Rysom in the open access). Adding new things (without a new category for now) is quite possible with my efforts, if anything :)

There's a gameplay interest in this helmet business, which becomes crucial as you level up and pvp.

Be aware that fighting creatures is only a training exercise. Many people are content to farmer levels on easy creatures, in which case the damage caused is of little importance, being more than compensated for by being two to fight (three being an optimum for leveling up).

Whether these creatures hit you in the head and do more damage is irrelevant.

This becomes different against stronger creatures, and especially against players who take aim at your head. At this point, as you've noticed, you have a choice to make:
- be better protected, but expend more energy and increase the risk of spell failure
- be more efficient but more fragile.

Good gameplay forces you to make choices. In pvp, all configurations are possible, and in some cases you'll win and in others you'll lose.

This is the shifoumi principle, which is quite advanced in Ryzom. In ten years of playing, I must have come across about twenty people who understood all the subtleties, and only one who did so in less than a year, out of the hundreds of people I've played with. Myself, although I understand the concepts underlying certain parts of the game, I wouldn't claim to know how to find the right combinations in "all" cases.


Look at pvp: some do it in light armor, others in heavy armor, others with a mix. Everyone wears a heavy helmet, except the oblivious. Combat is very much decided from the outset by everyone's equipment, but no configuration is "perfect"; there will always be a situation where your superb equipment isn't suited to what your opponent has in front of him. But this choice to keep the helmet means less efficiency on certain actions, which you have to compensate for with other choices.

Adding light and medium-weight headsets runs the risk of destabilizing this part of the gameplay. Honestly, given the complexity of the whole thing and the fact that no talented professional gamedesigner is currently employed on the game, I consider it very dangerous to touch these mechanics. A purely cosmetic addition is possible, but a gameplay modification here risks having a rather sad domino effect. It's not just a question of coding an object (which is not difficult at all), but of understanding the overall impact on the balance of the game.

I think that since the beginning of the game, players have been asking for medium helmets to be added. In fact, a few models have been created. But not in the game, and not for nothing. Do a search on the forum.

The balance of the game isn't perfect, and every change of this kind runs the risk of breaking everything (and many things have already been broken over time...). To believe that we can improve this balance before we've explored all the gameplay and code is hubris. In an RPG, touching this kind of mechanic requires a few thousand hours of testing before you can expect it to be "right".

On the other hand, flooding the "suggestions" will do a disservice to any useful proposals you might make... while some of the things you propose deserve a response and might interest me, I'm already wondering whether I should block your replies because it's "too much", and I'm not the only one in this case.

One proposal a day would be enough and probably a little better received. Take the time to search the forum. The internal search is very bad, unfortunately, and the archives of the old forum have been lost, but there are already elements for many of your questions, some of which have been dealt with extensively.

thank you zatalyz for saying out loud what many are thinking :)

Searching the forum yielded 2 conventionally appropriate results:

https://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/15624/1
IDEA: LA "hat" crafting plan?

No middle helmet, no specs on features, just talking about looks. A decade ago.

https://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/13152/1
Hat. Not quite what I need, but can be used as a lightweight helmet too.

Leaving things as they are is not the best option. I'm looking for better suggestions, because I don't have a complete idea myself - a mockup of what will need to be done in code.