Sorry, but if all it has going for it is that it's valpurium, nobody's going to bother training in axes in hopes of using that. Having said that, you have a point when you say axes aren't too bad. Perhaps it's time to add some special axes? Like decapitator axes that perform worse than normal but have a high chance to behead enemies, or a Destroyer's War Axe artifact that has a chance to shoot a wand of striking beam or something like that.

Should probably write the lines in such a way that lets the players know that the quests are exclusive, but yeah that's a great idea!

Maybe that'd be worth it in other games, but with IVAN's dismembering system that's just begging to be turned into a nugget.

So basically what you're proposing, Izzy, is that we rework plate to have two materials, and the current armours no longer spawn in metal, essentially getting rid of the old plate mails?

Implementing stone armour to be "useless and cumbersome" means we still end up with junk armour that nobody uses.

You say it'd carry over, but there is no cloth-path for plate mail. It just turns to soft armour if you try changing plate to cloth. You have a point for magical metals, but even then, only those who go out of their way to get favour from Atavus or taming a guard in Attnam will use plate, and those have pre-requisites that are randomly generated. Nobody uses plate mail they find.

That'd be cool too. Point is, right now plate mail is next to worthless and that needs to change.

That's what I first said. Either the penalty rates, or some other functionality to make those penalties worth it. Before trying anything new like armour skills, we should attempt adding the damage types that have been around forever. Cloth would protect against blunt but not much else, chain would protect against pierce and slash, but plate would protect against all of them, or something like that.

This is my line of thinking as well. The code may actually be different, but in-game there is no real distinction between "soft" and "hard" armours; if you try changing the material of plate mail to fabric it won't be a "fabric plate mail", but just soft armour, and the reverse also applies, resulting in armours turning into plate mail. So an adjustment of the penalty rates should suffice.

The biggest problem with metal armours is the absurd penalty rates. Even without it, one would weigh the pros and cons of weight vs AV because the damn things are so heavy. Either we need to soften the penalty rates, or we need to add some other function to make them viable.

Cookie points for whoever finds the two puns I made.

Huh, you know him?