Heavy and medium armor should offer a degree of protection to hands and feet in accordance with their level of protection. I know that the grenadier armor also does that, but that’s not a reason for this suggestion to fall flat. Just play with the numbers I guess.
Reason it’s a good idea:
It’ll give more reasons to marines to wear heavier armors whereas now pretty much all the more senior players run light armor/B12 (and no armor in some cases).
It might cut down a bit on the feet meta, or at least add more dynamic thinking to where a xeno should target in case-by-case situations.
Downsides:
The armor sprites don’t necessarily make common sense of where the armor would protect. Perhaps picking different armors could also provide different gloves/boots that can only be worn with the respective armors.
Taking a look at this, I would say to keep the buff only for heavy armor with foot coverage. I would hope to see this added, maybe even nerf light armor protection values more to make it further contrast the others.
I think the general idea of using EOD armor compared to light is that you eat the extra movement penalty in return of less likely getting fractures. However, these reduction in fractures do not cover your most important part, your feet. So now you are double penalized in speed from wearing heavy armor and having a splinted foot.
The reason some people shy away from heavier armour, while primarily based on movement speed, is also considering that players DON’T want to be captured by xenos.
If you wear lighter armour, you are more likely to succumb to your wounds, such as being hit by some “rogue” bullets or tanking a grenade that kills you.
If you are wearing heavy armour, that grenade that would’ve killed you in light armour will only knock you out for 10 seconds in heavy armour, more than enough time for some Runner to cap you. Or those bullets that would’ve killed you now only wounded you.
Thats a good point. More survivability can be to your detriment especially wearing heavy armor. I guess it has to do with crit state being draggable by xenos while fully dead is unable to move. I understand its for balance purposes but it plays into the need to die quickly when out of position to avoid being capped or dragged away to where your body is unreachable.
The solution here probably shouldn’t be a straight numerical buff/nerf. Instead, perhaps a minor rebalancing of armor, with the addition of an evasion mechanic where it’s harder to hit hands/feet as xeno. Higher risk/reward. Like in TTRPGs where hitting a smaller target is harder.
Just give it stun resistance so you get out of stuns a little faster than in other armor and it would instantly be worth taking and function as actual heavy armor.
Light armor avoids being stunned as its surviability mechanism
Heavy armor should reduce stun time as its survivability mechanism
Doesnt heavy armor already protect arms and legs? I feel like it does… doesnt it? The sprite looks like it has arm and leg braces and all. And i think that itself is already fine. The main problem is not really you should disgurage targeting hands and feet, but giving reasons to target other body parts would be a lot better. Like, does targeting eyes do anything? Imagine if you could blind a marine shalshin there eyes. Makes eye protection more valubel. I know this has problems itself, but generally you shouldnt make the only viabel thing worse. You should make other things better. More fun that way.
And if my suggestions are already a thing, then most either dont know it or its just weak af.
I thought I replied to this, but it must have just been one of my phantom shower conversations. The solution to this, in my opinion, is to just give the xenos more tools/ more effective tools to deal with armor. For instance, perhaps heavier armors have no more acid protection than other armors and so they are more vulnerable to acid-based attacks because they are slower. That way it incentivizes a rock-paper-scissors style of play where heavy armor defeats backliners, but light armor is better for dealing with skirmish acid-based xenos.
Make delimbs a consequence of having fractures in your limbs, or something that has a increasing chance to occur the more permanent wounds you accure, not this annoying system where you get 2 hits by a drone and you lose an arm or leg.
I dont remember fully, but i think that was the case once. Or just that ligth armor had better acid protection. But i do remember that it was talked about a good bit but shot down.
Also that limbs fly of at random is pretty dumb. I noticed arms with over 100 brute damage before and was confused because other servers delimb if brute reaches 100 in one limb. If i remmeber rigth, havent playd anything other then CM in a while, and then only yogs.
Delimbs in CM are, afaik, a damage threshold then RNG roll.
So if the damage threshold is 50 on a limb, then you’ll never have it delimbed if the damage stays under 50, but once it exceeds 50, then additional hits roll for a chance to delimb it.
So if you want to avoid decaps and delimbs, then you actually have a way to mitigate and avoid it: Let your old wounds heal up before fighting again. It might not guarantee avoiding delimbs, but it does a pretty good job of preventing them, and is how I handle things when playing without a helmet.
both of the recent instances of random delimb that have been shown here were from the point of view of a fully healthy individual.
it may be true that there is a threshold of damage that needs to be reached first in order to achieve a delimb but that point is trivial to reach with any combat caste and still easy as a non-combat caste.
xeno damage, and in some cases marine bullets, do plenty enough to unarmoured body parts (or heads) in just a few hits.
letting your damaged parts fully heal before you intend on taking more damage is sound advice but i believe the whole point being made here is that there was no prior injury leading up to the delimb.
which in return loops back around to the initial reason for this thread, the armour linking which reduces that burst of damage taken in a short timeframe to limbs and thus making the scenario more unlikely.
