Yeah an armour system would be interesting. Especially if it affected both damage reduction and movement speed (or attack speed or dodge distance); and you could obtain different pieces of armour for different body parts (helm/coifs, vambraces, greaves, breast plate/hauberk) from loot boxes or the emporium and mix-and-match different pieces on your career character to get a unique cosmetic appearance and modify how tanky and mobile they are. But I agree, not till Vermintide 3 (or Darktide).
maybe something like:
3 armour classes: heavy, medium, light.
Each piece of heavy/medium/light armour gives you +5%/+2.5%/0% damage reduction.
Vambraces modify attack speed : -5% for heavy, -2.5% medium, 0% light.
Greaves modify move speed: -5% heavy, -2.5% medium, 0% light.
Breast plates modify dodge distance: -15% heavy, -7.5% med, 0% light.
Helms modify something like block speed because they occlude your vision or ranged weapon range or ranged damage or recticle size.
Then instead of giving tanky classes like IB and FK damage reduction talents you give them talents that allow them to ignore or minimize the negative affects of armour, like “all negative effects of heavy armour are counted as medium and medium is counted as light”. Don’t know what you’d do about slayer and zealot - maybe a passive like " cannot wear armour but frenzied state in battle gives them the damage reduction of medium armour (+10% total) with none of the negative effects".
The range of damage reduction available would be further restricted by what types of armour drop from commedation chests for each class. For example, Shade can get a heavy helm but only medium and light armour for other body parts, whereas FK and IB chests only drop medium and heavy armour pieces.
I find it a bit odd that the GK has a full suit of armour on and gets 0% damage reduction while a ranger veteran wearing a leather jerkin and no helm can get 30% damage reduction by using exuberance.
Currently the game tends to reflect armour/toughness as total HP instead of a separate discrete damage reduction. Though it does do that in a few specific cases such as IB damage reduction.
MMO style inventories with different slots per body part would be neat, but I think it would just lead to people collecting “sets” or horribly clashing meta outfits that are only worn for stats.
Interesting idea, but this would be a huge change to the combat system of the game. Not realistic when the game is over 2 years into its life cycle. Would make sense for a new game to make use of this as a core system right from the start.
Aren’t that would be way too complicated? Just adding a shield like in many other games would be more easy and let the costume stay as just a cosmatics. If there’s even an actual armour items, then balancing will be way more harder.
Not really. 3 armor catergories and 4 locations to wear them. It ain’t rocket science. Ten year olds playing pen and paper RPGs used to do things way more complicated back in the '80s without a problem.