Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem - Kickstarter Update

Henriquejr spotted Kickstarter update #61 for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem:

Work In Progress: Defense and Resistance mechanic

Hi everyone! 

My name is Alan and I’m the resident game designer and community manager here at Wolcen Studio. I’m the one who usually writes these articles, even though I often speak for the team as a whole. 

Today I’d like to present two of the new features that you’ll be able to experience in update 0.5.0.3, the revamped defense and enemy resistance mechanics.
One of the challenges of building a modern Hack and Slash game like Wolcen resides in designing mechanics that are both deep and easily understandable to players. I always felt like armor in RPGs was difficult to conceptualize due to the reliance on complex mathematical formulas, which results in arbitrarily chosen numbers for armor values. How do you tell how much armor you need? Is 56 a lot of armor points? Plus I wasn’t satisfied with the current armor formula, as it was difficult to balance and forced me to give huge amounts of hp to the player even at level one.
The solution? Take the same basic principle of mitigation within armor range, but applied to the entire health pool once, complete with a way to visualize it.
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