Brigandine Armour

[Sheffie 1,120]

Why suggest another armour type?

• Many players would appreciate the option to wear a prestigious, high-performance armour type that doesn't have the exclusivity or the sky-high prices of drake hide or dragon scale.

 

What is it like?

• Brigandine armour consists of a layer of small metal plates sandwiched between layers of leather. This provides more protection than leather, but more flexibility than plate.
• Brigandine will look exactly the same as studded leather. There's no need for the hard-working art team to do anything to make this a reality.

 

How is it made?

• Each piece will require...
  • two leather armour pieces of the appropriate type
  • rivets (the same amount you'd need to make one studded leather piece)
  • metal lumps of the same weight as the leather piece - note that this metal will determine the material type of the finished piece
• Leatherworking 50 will be required to make the simplest items (boots), and 70 skill for the most complex (jacket).
• Repair and improvement will require leatherworking tools and material.

 

How does it compare to other types of armour?

• Item weight: double that of studded leather.
• Damage reduction: half-way between studded leather and plate.
• Movement speed: same as studded leather.
• Armour penalty: Medium.
• As you'd expect, each piece will have the bonuses / penalties corresponding to the metal used in its construction.

[Archaed 2,280]

Isn't this just studded leather armour? I'm confused as to the goals and the items, it just sounds like "buff studded leather to be more protective" 

[Sheffie 1,120]

It's a bit more than just studded leather with a buff. It brings in a metal type, to allow for moon metal bonuses, without requiring a continued supply of moon metal for maintenance.

 

But if you want to say it's just studded leather that is more expensive and does a better job, I won't disagree. Certainly certainly from an art standpoint it is.

Edited September 8, 2022 by Sheffie

[Finnn 3,303]

this makes studded pointless.. and is kind of the same thing... just make it option to upgrade existing studded into this with mm and put some insane difficulty to fail and waste some mm in the process, since later it wont require any but be best armor in the game before dragon tier.. or tincans

[Archaed 2,280]

6 hours ago, Sheffie said:

It's a bit more than just studded leather with a buff. It brings in a metal type, to allow for moon metal bonuses, without requiring a continued supply of moon metal for maintenance.

 

But if you want to say it's just studded leather that is more expensive and does a better job, I won't disagree. Certainly certainly from an art standpoint it is.

I missed the metal type sorry. 

 

My other question would be how does this place versus chainmail? 

[Manachan 96]

This is actually a great idea. It is totally period correct. A brief search of the interwebs revealed that Wurm is one the the few without  some form of brigandine. With the addition of one new blacksmithing item ... "Brigandine plate" and a requirement to add  a certain number of "Brigandine plate" to the basic recipe for studded leather you have it!

[LockeHalfblood 3]

Frankly anything that gets us away from the drake and scale nonsense is fine by me. Recently brought a whole slew of new folks to a public slaying and their despair was palpable when they saw all the top-tier armor, and how much they'd have to do to even hope to have some...

[Davih 1,340]

I don't think it's currently possible for an item to remember the metal it was built from without becoming made of "that" metal, and therefore being improved with a metal-improving-toolset. You either get the bonuses from metal or the LW toolset.
It would probably require odd and complex modification of how the code works for armour or items in general.

[Sheffie 1,120]

7 hours ago, Davih said:

I don't think it's currently possible for an item to remember the metal it was built from without becoming made of "that" metal, and therefore being improved with a metal-improving-toolset. You either get the bonuses from metal or the LW toolset.
It would probably require odd and complex modification of how the code works for armour or items in general.

 

That's a good point. On the other hand, some pretty weird combinations are certainly possible, and if you've improved a dredge you know what I mean.

[Archaed 2,280]

If its made of a material, it would need that material to imp, so if it's moonmetal, for balances sake it MUST require moonmetal to imp. 

 

Frankly, this is just chain without wanting to imp with moonmetal.

 

And for the record, studded leather IS brigandine, it's just abstracting parts for balance. 

[Davih 1,340]

46 minutes ago, Sheffie said:

 

That's a good point. On the other hand, some pretty weird combinations are certainly possible, and if you've improved a dredge you know what I mean.

Well, a dredge is technically made of (birch)wood, therefore requires wood toolset to get improved. The odd thing is being a blacksmithing item and not requiring wood to get built, but doesn't violate the rule i said earlier.

[Sheffie 1,120]

Fine, if you really want to argue technical points about what the engine will and will not allow, go ahead.

 

We'll have three new armour types:

• "red brigandine armour, leather" (which purely by coincidence has the stats equal to the brigandine base plus the bonuses you'd expect for an item made of seryll) and which is crafted with seryll
• "gold brigandine armour, leather" (which purely by coincidence has the stats equal to the brigandine base plus the bonuses you'd expect for an item made of glimmersteel) and which is crafted with glimmersteel
• "blue brigandine armour, leather" (which purely by coincidence has the stats equal to the brigandine base plus the bonuses you'd expect for an item made of adamantine) and which is crafted with adamantine

It's no weirder than having white drake armour, red drake armour, blue drake armour, and so on.

 

The point is to allow people some of the benefits of top level armour without the grief of unique hunting/slaying or the astronomical expense of buying scale/hide on the after-market.

Specifically: after you've got the initial set, you can maintain it, in the field, without a forge, without the original expensive materials and without needing high quality materials.

 

Don't get me wrong. I'd love for an artist to spend some time tweaking the studded leather artwork, creating versions with different coloured rivets and maybe slightly different styling, but the goal here is to achieve a meaningful improvement without great development cost.

[Archaed 2,280]

In that case, as I've tried to explain why it's a no, I'll just be plain.

 

No, to gain the bonuses from moonmetal, the game is balanced by requiring moonmetal

[Ekcin 2,407]

There is another problem. For PvE, the advantages of scale and hide armours do exist, but they are not too relevant. They will protect no newbie from being eaten in the wild. For experienced players with FS beyond 70 (which is easy to reach if you do some PvE combat) they widely cease to have much relevance and recognizability, as usually, mobs are killed faster than they are able to deal damage.

 

And in critical situations like being surrounded by a pack of dogs biting and taunting in turn (rift beasts in pack are arguably the deadliest foes in Wurm PvE *) the best armour will not make much of a difference other than giving a few more seconds to run.

 

And I saw no major difference in this between studded and scale, certainly chain as well (only to name the more lightweight ones, same will go for plate). They may count in PvP, but there, the advantage is balanced against the risk of loss of the armour in case of defeat.

 

Now to the disadvantages of scale (can't tell of drake as I haven't one). Scale takes a lot of damage away from the fighter, but takes much of the damage itself. And it has a great penalty on repair. Even with higher repairing it loses ways more quality than any other kind of armour. That means, it is not an everyday's armour. To counter that disadvantage, it needs high level platesmiths, as combat damage to my observation scales inversely with quality like with tools, meaning that high ql takes relatively less damage. Therefore, it is ways more important to keep a scale (and prolly drake too) at as highest ql as reasonably possible than with any other kind of armour.

 

Comparable studded is more robust. And with some leatherworking experience (which is wider available than PAS, and faster to grind with a lot of useful items of all kinds) you may easily keep a worn out studded between 75 and 80 ql. This is why (unless I forget about) I wear my scale mainly to special purposes like rifts, slayings, impalongs, and just for bragging at all events . For everyday's use I prefer my high ql studded which also does not look bad.

 

I do not see, therefore, what "popularizing of high buff armour" should do. To balance it, it needed to have at least the same disadvantages as scale (-30% heavy armour penalty on archery and spell casting with scale). It needed to have at least the same disadvantage in taking damage during combat, and losing ql under repair. Given that such a brigandine armour would be widely distributed, and most likely replacing ordinary studded, it would be either seriously OP or not useful.

 

Last one: I recall how I went to slayings counting that it might take a decade to ever coming close to a scale. In fact I did not give up, but just the nearly impossibility made the goal challenging. I never came close, to be honest, only bit more than half. But finally, I had saved enough ingame to buy the rest (sigh, over 2g for it). It was attractive because it was hard as with reaching high skill. And yes, for NFI it is a goal too hard to achieve for most recently. But that is a problem of cluster separation which cannot be remediated by diluting armour qualities and properties, that were just another dumbing down.

 

* Packs of Hidden mobs in Treasure Hunt are similar, even often dealing more damage

Edited September 13, 2022 by Ekcin
addendum

[griper 535]

The "studded leather" that you often find in rpgs didnt exist historically.

It was really just a brigandine that was misunderstood.

[Ekcin 2,407]

Dragon scales that you often find in rpgs didnt exist historically either to the best of my knowledge.

[Idlamn 297]

On 9/13/2022 at 9:37 AM, griper said:

The "studded leather" that you often find in rpgs didnt exist historically.

It was really just a brigandine that was misunderstood.

I actually imagined the studded leather in Wurm was actually brigandine. I fashion it with plate arm protection.

What they could do is maybe add a skin for it. But I don't think it will add much visually from the existing studded one. That is ok also - we can just have a shorter version of it as a skin.

 

On 9/13/2022 at 9:46 AM, Ekcin said:

Dragon scales that you often find in rpgs didnt exist historically either to the best of my knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhal_(shield) - they could have also made armor out of thick leather.