So, ranged weapons seem overpowered at the moment. It really sucks when you get 1-shot while wearing the best helmet in the game.
I would suggest different defence types as a solution to this. With high tier armour being heavier plate or lamellar with a lot of metal while low tier armour tend to be thick cloth, it would make sense for there to be Hard armour and Soft armour.
Hard armour should provide a lot of protection against ranged attacks and cutting attacks (would recommend making ranged weapon their own damage type/s since they should all be piercing anyway and because the kind of physics of an arrow is very different to a spear, which also uses piercing). The reason hard armour should provide this protection is because ranged attacks don't have follow-through strength. A spear is held steady as it collides while an arrow might glance off or rebound if not hitting at a perfect angle. The difference meaning that more force is transferred through a spear than through an arrow or javelin. Plus, the hardness of the material makes it more likely for an arrow to bounce than to pierce. Even if it did pierce, there's no guarantee it would make it all the way through instead of simply putting a dent in it. Heavier armours also traditionally had thick cloth underneath. So even if it did make it through the metal it would be severely weakened and might not have enough remaining force to penetrate the cloth.
Soft armour should provide adequate cutting protection and slightly better blunt protection but almost no piercing or ranged protection.
I think this would help make heavy armour more worthwhile, while also not giving ranged weapons a direct nerf as they would still be effective against less armoured units.
You could also have a medium armour type that covers hard leather and chainmail. It would be fairly balanced across the board in terms of it's resistances, only having high defence against cutting damage. Less than hard armour but more than soft armour.
Realistically it should be extremely hard to get a solid headshot on a rounded metal helmet due to the very narrow window at which it wouldn't glance off. While it might make archery more of a bother for players if they're not able to 1-shot more heavily armoured enemies I think it would still make for better game balance.
Another alternative, following the same line of thought, could be to give armour individual damage thresholds and weapons different types of damage. For example, even if a spear doesn't penetrate armour, if it sticks then it might still wind someone due to the blunt force involved.
So you could give a heavy chest piece 36 piercing resistance, 15 blunt resistance and 130 cutting resistance. That way a 2 handed axe might have 125 cutting damage and 40 blunt damage. Meaning that an unmodified hit (no speed bonus or negative) might not do any cutting damage but it can do 25 blunt damage. So the total damage would be 25.
Using this you could more accurately represent the effectiveness of different damage types vs different armours and body parts. So heavy head armour might have 55 piercing resistance (due to the shape, as mentioned earlier), 100 cutting resistance and only 5 blunt resistance.
(Also, cutting damage is kinda wack at the moment. Got axes with about 155 base cutting damage while the best piercing damage you'll find is about 40.)
I would suggest different defence types as a solution to this. With high tier armour being heavier plate or lamellar with a lot of metal while low tier armour tend to be thick cloth, it would make sense for there to be Hard armour and Soft armour.
Hard armour should provide a lot of protection against ranged attacks and cutting attacks (would recommend making ranged weapon their own damage type/s since they should all be piercing anyway and because the kind of physics of an arrow is very different to a spear, which also uses piercing). The reason hard armour should provide this protection is because ranged attacks don't have follow-through strength. A spear is held steady as it collides while an arrow might glance off or rebound if not hitting at a perfect angle. The difference meaning that more force is transferred through a spear than through an arrow or javelin. Plus, the hardness of the material makes it more likely for an arrow to bounce than to pierce. Even if it did pierce, there's no guarantee it would make it all the way through instead of simply putting a dent in it. Heavier armours also traditionally had thick cloth underneath. So even if it did make it through the metal it would be severely weakened and might not have enough remaining force to penetrate the cloth.
Soft armour should provide adequate cutting protection and slightly better blunt protection but almost no piercing or ranged protection.
I think this would help make heavy armour more worthwhile, while also not giving ranged weapons a direct nerf as they would still be effective against less armoured units.
You could also have a medium armour type that covers hard leather and chainmail. It would be fairly balanced across the board in terms of it's resistances, only having high defence against cutting damage. Less than hard armour but more than soft armour.
Realistically it should be extremely hard to get a solid headshot on a rounded metal helmet due to the very narrow window at which it wouldn't glance off. While it might make archery more of a bother for players if they're not able to 1-shot more heavily armoured enemies I think it would still make for better game balance.
Another alternative, following the same line of thought, could be to give armour individual damage thresholds and weapons different types of damage. For example, even if a spear doesn't penetrate armour, if it sticks then it might still wind someone due to the blunt force involved.
So you could give a heavy chest piece 36 piercing resistance, 15 blunt resistance and 130 cutting resistance. That way a 2 handed axe might have 125 cutting damage and 40 blunt damage. Meaning that an unmodified hit (no speed bonus or negative) might not do any cutting damage but it can do 25 blunt damage. So the total damage would be 25.
Using this you could more accurately represent the effectiveness of different damage types vs different armours and body parts. So heavy head armour might have 55 piercing resistance (due to the shape, as mentioned earlier), 100 cutting resistance and only 5 blunt resistance.
(Also, cutting damage is kinda wack at the moment. Got axes with about 155 base cutting damage while the best piercing damage you'll find is about 40.)
