Gothic 3 Armor protection vs monsters and monster damage.

Does armor offer any benefit vs monsters\animals at all in this game? Armors have protection ratings for blades, impact, and projectiles, but what kind of damage is done by wolves, lurkers, shadowbeast, etc? I just upgraded from leather armor to light mercenary armor, but monsters still seem to do about the same amount of damage. I think I remember this being brought up here in the past, did anyone ever figure it out?

a good bow is your best protection against animals

I dont think anyone who hasnt looked at the code knows.

The rumour was that pre-patch (before 1.08?) armour only soaked up 10% of the damage it was supposed to when fighting wildlife.

In the past Gothics the armour value simply was subtracted from the damage (with the caveat that attacks always made at least 5 points of damage, so you could take out a black troll with a dagger). That means that going from one low-end armour to another one might not see any obvious effect in the bar graph representation of damage done (say an animal does 50 points of damage and 5 is soaked up with the worse armour, 10 with the "better" one) due to the small relative difference. You could easily test it by going up against a lone scavenger with and without armour and look at the character screen, taking critical hits into consideration as they do much more damage than regular ones.

curiously undead said:

a good bow is your best protection against animals

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Unfortunately I have to agree with you, the shame is that bows are actually overpowered against animals in G3. Yesterday I killed a Shadowbeast with a Longbow, and I'm only level 12 right now.

In the first 2 Gothics you wouldn't even think of looking at a Shadowbeast with anything less than a level 20 character.

I suspect armor has low protection against animals - the best way to go is hitpoints and a large weapon (halberds, for example). Due to the great range of certain weapons, it is possible to swing your way through a whole bunch of animals without taking damage.

Truth be told, I seem to have less problems against animals when fighting in heavy armor, so armor might have something to say.

curiously undead said:

a good bow is your best protection against animals

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i totally agree.. with my Nimrod bow, i can take out those pesky stun-locking wolves/ice-wolves/jackals without getting er.. stun-locked..

I don't like the fact that the type of armor you wear gets no reaction at all from npc's.

If I walk into a Rebel camp wearing light Orc Mercenary armor, I at least want to hear a comment about it.

JDR13 said:

I don't like the fact that the type of armor you wear gets no reaction at all from npc's.

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exactly.. after clearing out Al-Shedim, now i'm running around in the Adanos robe & not a Hashishin or an Orc bats his eyes..

I realise it's a difficult thing to implement, but they did that kind of thin in Gothic 2 already (harbour - militia clothes). Gothic 3 is like the devs already said, unfinished. I think that they go the good way with their next project: smaller world, less npc's and a good story.

Armor in G3 does jack no matter what.
Even in CP 1.5 where you can get the armor upgrade - which was enhanced - you will only feel the difference when fighting things that hit HARD. Then the best suits reduce damage by about 1/3.
Ironically, a group of goblins will still bash you as if you had no armor at all (effect scales with dmage).

Spell resistance is more useful.

JDR13 said:

I don't like the fact that the type of armor you wear gets no reaction at all from npc's.

If I walk into a Rebel camp wearing light Orc Mercenary armor, I at least want to hear a comment about it.

Click to expand...

I actually didn't buy any faction armour for some time believing the other side would notice it.

I think it's fairly obvious that the hunter skills are meant for killing beasts so it makes sense that the bow is your best bet for killing animals especially with that big game hunter ability.

I decided to finally test this. A quasi-scientific test against one scavenger and one wolf outside Reddock gives the following statistic:

Unarmoured VS Scavenger:
3 hits did 14 damage each, 2 hits did 28 damage each.
Armoured (some crappy armour that gives 20-20-10 protection) vs the same bird:
3 hits did 7 damage, 2 did 13.

Armoured vs wolf:
2 hits did 26, I did 13
Unarmoured vs wolf
4 hits did 28 (then I died).

It's a somewhat small sample size, but it does hint at the following:

- Armour DOES have an effect at least against the tested subset of the wildlife.

- Damage is extremely deterministic, and critical hits (?) do roughly double damage

Armour probably reduces damage by a percentage rather than an absolute amount (which it did in previous gothics). Critical hits still seem to do double damage after armour effect has been taken into account, but could also be affected by the strength of the attacker as in previous Gothics (how can we examine this?).

Speculation:
Obviously there is some sort of mechanism to prevent a 100% protection (again different from the previous gothics where 10 points of armour could be the difference between life and death). Maybe more advanced creatures also ignore a certain percentage of the armour?

EDIT: The method was to simply let the beasts hit me and press "C" between each hit to record the change in hitpoints.... The tests are with patch 1.6.