Game Mechanics - Overflow Armour Penetration (2024)

Currently if you have excess armour penetration (e.g. blade staff on regular enemies with their high armour penetration), it

to using a weapon with just the right amount of armour penetration.
*This is simply to my knowledge. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

My suggestion is to

(deteriorating as you add more) overflow excess armour penetration to deal extra damage, or even have a chance to inflict a variation of Bleeding on enemies that deals a DoT (damage over time). I'm not sure exactly how to balance this, or if it would affect powercreep at all, so feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Alternatively;

There may be various accessories which have varying effects on weapons when used in conjunction with excess armour penetration. This would exist as an alternative to the above suggestion, and would instead add several accessories that apply debuffs in place of excess armour penetration, perhaps increasing the duration of said debuffs hyperbolically.

Stellar Mastodon 267 said:

You mean, put a cap on the amount of armor penetration we can get? No thanks. That technical drama he boost is all that’s getting some of us through out master/legendary playthroughs.

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No; I mean that if you have more armour penetration than the amount of armour the enemy has, it deals extra damage depending on how much extra armour penetration you have.

CannedPotato said:

I like the idea but there are a handful of weapons that rely only on penetration to deal damage and make up for it by consistently hitting for a decent enough amount of damage like the blade staff, making penetration able to overflow and make enemies calculate with negative defense would make them way too powerful.

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It'd be a lot less powerful than the base armour penetration, and it would stack hyperbolically, meaning after a certain point it doesn't do much. Essentially, there still remains an upper cap of how much extra damage you can do.

Although I do see your point; Blade Staff could easily become one of the best crowd control weapons in the game with this implemented. I'm unsure how to balance this.

Perhaps utilising the alternative DoT Bleeding debuff I proposed in the OP could work instead, or some other debuff that reduces mobility on enemies. This would give it more utility rather than damage output.

At that point rename the stat to "flat damage increase"

Anyways, no. Armor penetration is there to ignore armor. If there is no more armor to ignore logically more points on the stat will do nothing.

Going deeper into it, certain weapons have innate Armor penetration because otherwise they would lose a huge amount of DPS to defense, and conversely gain a huge amount of DPS from armor penetration. Without this innate armor penetration these weapons are practically unusable without armor penetration and potentially extremely strong with it.

Blade Staff is a good example: there was a bug that made armor penetration work like this (to some extent) and it made it stronger than intended.

J Bame said:

At that point rename the stat to "flat damage increase"

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It's not a flat increase though, it's deteriorative. Obviously it needs more balance, this is a very rough idea.

J Bame said:

Anyways, no. Armor penetration is there to ignore armor. If there is no more armor to ignore logically more points on the stat will do nothing.

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I understand that, but realistically thinking armour penetration would continue to penetrate even if there's no armour left. A bullet that can go through a wall and still retain velocity and power will continue to do so unless it is stopped.

J Bame said:

Going deeper into it, certain weapons have innate Armor penetration because otherwise they would lose a huge amount of DPS to defense, and conversely gain a huge amount of DPS from armor penetration. Without this innate armor penetration these weapons are practically unusable without armor penetration and potentially extremely strong with it.

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Yeah, I was thinking it being affected by the weapon's base DPS, and scaling with that.

J Bame said:

Blade Staff is a good example: there was a bug that made armor penetration work like this (to some extent) and it made it stronger than intended.

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Huh, didn't know about that. I imagine Blade Staff would've been overpowered on crowds in that context.

IgnisCervus said:

It's not a flat increase though, it's deteriorative. Obviously it needs more balance, this is a very rough idea.

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The only difference between armor penetration and a flat damage increase is that armor penetration is limited by how much armor the enemy has. Without that limit it may as well just be a flat damage increase.

IgnisCervus said:

Yeah, I was thinking it being affected by the weapon's base DPS, and scaling with that.

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dont overcomplicate it

J Bame said:

The only difference between armor penetration and a flat damage increase is that armor penetration is limited by how much armor the enemy has. Without that limit it may as well just be a flat damage increase.

dont overcomplicate it

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I'll think into it a bit more, see if I can balance it out without being too complex.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it