Sorry but that's an idea I have to shoot down. Heavy armour is obsolete as is, if we make scars give armour we may as well remove heavy armour from the game entirely.

Mmm, I have a different idea. As you get more scars, you get more used to recovering from damage? So your health gets lower, but you heal faster. Basically trading off stats for survivability. Could use that as an incentive to wear heavy armour to make tanking viable.

Chests rarely have anything fragile in them, I just kick them against walls until the lock breaks.

You can already wield a corpse of a snake, yes? Its blood is already poisonous, yes? How hard would it be to make it poison enemies when you smack them with it?

We could take things a step further by having self-learning AI. If a bear survives drinking poison, it'll avoid future bottles of poison. If a goblin waving a wand around survives it breaking in its hand, it tries zapping the next one it comes across.

I won't go into too much detail since I haven't been involved in development for some time now, but on armour and weapons balancing, that's a long standing problem we've been struggling with, with multiple ideas tossed around. If you're that well acquainted with the code, I recommend you take a look around the development forum.

On that note, I'm moving this thread.

You know what would be hilarious?

If the black market only spawned in black tiles.

You find it, enter, buy and leave, then it's gone to another unexplored tile.

It already does cap, if you or a monster get knocked into a wall there's a chance it'll incur damage.

Hum, I had an idea now that we've got crafting in-game. It'll be more of a stop-gap measure (it still doesn't address balancing) but it might be worth considering, to give plate mail a use if nothing else.

Building on Izzy's two material armours, how about a way to combine two "standard" armours for a hybrid one? One is used as the base, while the other is essentially scrapped for materials. For example, with a leather armour and a troll hide armour, one could end up with either:

1. A leather padded troll hide armour

In which the leather armour is scrapped, and adds a fraction of its weight and defense to the troll hide armour, becoming better than both, or:

2. A troll hide padded leather armour

In which the troll hide armour is scrapped and adds to the leather armour, which, while offering worse defense than the first option, also doesn't come with the stiffness of the troll hide armour and is still better than the original leather armour.

In similar vein we could end up with the likes of:

Steel plated leather armour
Adamantine-linked mithril chainmail
Ruby studded dragon-hide gauntlets

So on and so forth. Artifacts will naturally be exempt, which might tempt some players to forgo some named items in favour of such heavier equipment, preventing everyone ending up with the same end-game items.

Thoughts?

Weeell, there's a lot of different stone materials in IVAN right? Could do something with that. Or have the petrification affect everything in sight, so you could end up facing golem kobolds or something. I mean, I did find it hilarious that as a zombie you could change the material of your head, this might be a legitimate way of getting that more out there.