Bug? Important notice about armor stacking (especially for PvP'ers)

Some news on consumables.

It seems Armors of Salvation stack properly, but War Supplies don't (they are included in the 25 armor cap). I've seen a report that Drake Kabob doesn't work at all, but I haven't verified that myself.

EDIT: Armors of Salvation do not stack properly after all; like War Supplies they are included in the 25 armor cap.


In other news, Cracked Armor is bugged as well...

This is a very large oversight. Frankly, the armor cap idea is severely flawed to begin with. Instead of capping the amount of armor you can have, they should have just decreased the ability to stack it - a.k.a. nerfed skills that grant additional armor. The armor cap is equivalent to a damage cap (limit the amount of additional damage somebody can do with an attack)... It's just a stupid idea that confuses players and leaves a bunch of holes where A-Net can misfire on the execution of such an idea... which we observe to be exactly what happened.

A-Net, stop doing stupid shit and start listening to the PvPers that are on the test crew. They are smarter than you!

Firstly, A-Net seams to believe there is a disconnect between what the players of their game want and what is profitable for their company. Since when did producing goods and services that consumers want and need become unprofitable?

Secondly, since when has A-Net known what the players want and need more-so THAN THE PLAYERS THEMSELVES! If A-Net just listened to the test crew (very capable representatives of the GW community), the game would be much more enjoyable for the most amount of people. A-Net is just acting irrationally... no ifs ands or buts about it.

*note that I am not a member of the test crew nor am I affiliated with them - just a supporter of their efforts to make this game great.

Good post. i do think Test Krewe certainly has a role to play in the way the game is run, but it definitely needs a shake up of how it operates. Too many of the players currently on the team, are playing the game twice a month + mat, and not contributing anything constructive towards TK efforts. Ofc the argument "lol gw 2011" could be brought up here, but there are certainly a lot of "newer" players who would have opinions more beneficial to anet than having a team full of players from 2006 who dont play anymore, who apart from a select few, just dont care.

We're already talking about a relatively small pool of skills ~40 (of which 6 are PvE only).

They shouldn't listen to PvP'ers right away. Too many are a bunch of ragers that complain every time they lose ^^

Trolling aside, I do think it's rather a bitter pill for people who invested in oldskool weapons and shields only to find out they are worse than the new inscribable ones. Oh the irony! ....I would think this is something they want to fix.

so those +10vs plants/dwarves/orges/dragons are pretty much pointless if you are using IAU.

That could free up alot of inv spaces!

As I pointed out earlier, IAU is anomalous.

IAU already bypasses the armor cap, so with this glitch in mind, it shouldn't affect the shields. However, as additional testing with cracked armor and such pointed out, the intire system is .

Right now, there isn't any point making claims regarding armor stacking outside of the ones you've personally tested. Usually, I'm the the guy to talk to when talking GW mechanics (I spend waaaay to much time playing GW), yet I'm completely baffled by this oversight.

Though armor stacking should never have gotten nerfed the way it did anyways. For those not aware, the reason why they nerfed armor stacking was because of paragons after NF release. When stacking shields on top of SYG and "Watch Yourselves", intire teams (in PvP) were taking less than 40% of the original damage. There also were other very broken mechanics (7 Seconds of "Incomming!" which made party members take 50% less damage directly, the energy engine for Monks, ...), but the point is that armor stacking was never nerfed to increase the "general balance" of the game, rather than an indirect nerf to Paragons. Paragons... which ironically 4 years later got nerfed out of all their utility and party defence making the initial "armor stacking nerf" another one of the many typical Anet "double nerfs". -Where they completely destroy 2 aspects of a certain builds whereas 1 would've been enough, and most of the time both nerfs don't even affect the root of the problem-

IAU not only bypasses the armor cap, it also bypasses cracked armor (and armor penetration!). It's really bugged. Furthermore, high enough armor boosts actually make you immune to cracked armor!

IAU clearly needs to be nerfed!

Joking, but seriously, we've just discovered this but ANet must've known about it for quite a while. And since they haven't done anything about it so far, is there any reason to believe they will, now that it's been found by the general public?

And let's say they did, are you not the least bit afraid of the "fixes" they might choose? If you wake up tomorrow and IAU no longer gives any armor bonus -- problem solved right?

Given what the Live Team considers nerf priorities in PvE skills, not really. Though if upon reading this they 'fix' IAU (among other things) and don't take the opportunity to overhaul the rest of the system simultaneously it would be pretty ridiculous.

shotty programming is all i got to say. very lazy on anets part.

With Watch Yourself and Stand Your Ground nerfed to crap in PvP, I don't think the armor cap serves any purpose anymore. Use getting rid of it as an excuse to nerf SY!, since that skill's ridiculous bonus was a way of circumventing the cap in the first place.

In the meantime, flaggers ought to pay more attention to their fortitude spears when defending the base. In other situations resilient weapon isn't reliable enough, or could just as easily be weapon of warding.

I didn't know that armor was even capped at all, wow!

To me, this whole thing seems very counter-intuitive. Many recent updates have gone to great lengths to remove counter-intuitivity from the game (I think I just made up a word). Therefore I can only see A-net wanting to fix this.

I'd like to clearly know what this armour cap applies to and how it works, from an in-game source, rather than having to read a fansite forum. Counter-intuitive...

And all this about IAU and Cracked Armor...I'm not going to even get into that! PvE'rs, PvP'rs, and traders alike all need something to base their gameplay off of. So, we must have a standardized and bugless armour system.

Can you imagine, for instance, if health de/regeneration was not shown in "pips", and we unknowingly tried to stack de/regen up to 20 or higher? Similar thought process here. You wouldn't stand for that, so you shouldn't stand for this!

Yeah, we found that IAU not only stacks to above the 25 armor cap, but it actually functions outside all armor parameters. It bypasses the armor cap, it bypasses cracked armor, and it bypasses armor penetration.
- You always get the 24 armor from IAU, there's no way it can be lowered.

I wrote before that Armor of Earth makes you immune to Cracked Armor. This was not entirely correct. After a lot more testing, we figured out that:
- If you use a skill or combination of skills and effects that gives you +46 or more armor, Cracked Armor plainly does not function on you any more.

This means that if you use a skill that gives you just below 46 or just above 45 armor depending on the breakpoints (for example 8 vs 9 earth magic for Armor of Earth), you win or lose more than 20 armor if you are affected by Cracked Armor.

Wow, what a mess.

It seems to me that the best solution is probably just to remove the armor cap.

@Curo: In keeping with your ideas for clarification, I wish they simply showed the current AL as a small number next to the corresponding body slot in the inventory window. And it should be updated in real time, just like attribute rank is when you use skills that affect it, like hp and energy regen and degen etc. Then bugs such as this would become much more obvious. (Not to mention that it would eliminate the need to test AL through indirect means.)

They had something like that in D2. Everyone called it the LCS, or "Lying Character Screen," because it was hopelessly inaccurate.

Well ok, I guess I should add it should be accurate. Just having false numbers won't help much.

Well... what armor level exactly? Only the universal AL against all kinds of damage, or the conditional things like physical damage, or elemental damage (which one: fire/water/lighting/earth)? If physical, should it be blunt, piercing or slashing?

And even this is never correct in combat, since you can have insignia that modify the AL during your actions - if you are above or under 80/60/50/20 life, or due to the number of your minions, spirits, skills recharging etc...
If you are hit simultanously from different damage types, different AL apply at the same time.

If you want a correct AL display, it has to be displayed next to every number that tells the amounts of damage you take during combat, which would be somewhat confusing.