[Suggestion] Harnesses

Well, I'm a bit of an old timer, and I was fooling around, watching my collection, and I keep looking at all those fancy Harnesses armors and I feel a little sad that they don't see any play.
So, maybe I'm just beeing nostalgic, but I remember when Harnesses were a thing (and whirlwind, and encumber but that's not the point hehe.), and I thought maybe we could go back to the stacking Harnesses mechanic.
When those cards didn't count as cards to discard at the end of the round, stacking lots of them was the best of armors. That was really annoying at that time, but I don't thing it will remain the same, because the card pool has grown large enough to give a wide variety of solutions. There are nice forms of removing armor now, and I think it will give new live to cards like Punishing Bolt or Touch Of Death. I think the build that would suffer the most would be vamps.

What do you think? Not the best of the ideas to go back to a past mechanic?

 

Um, unless I'm horribly mistaken, I believe Harness stacking was only implemented briefly on the test server.

 

Really? wow, now I'm not even sure myself lol. I have a mental image of myself hitting a wall of harnesses, and hoping to drop a Bewlin's Baffling Bauble (when it discard 2 cards) because I was unable to make any kind of damage, but that was like 2 years ago, so now that you said that, I'm not sure lol.

 

Pretty sure Short Perplexing Ray was changed during the same test period too. That one they kept.

 

Anyways, what do you think about the stacking mechanic? would it be good?

 

The trouble is that I can stack 5 x Enchanted Harnesses, 2 x Chain Harnesses and 1 x Officer's Harness by using General Jelom's Helm, Juniper's Jumper and Nasrum's Moccasins. So that's 15 damage prevention for each hit, plus perhaps a couple of blocks/dodges. It would be vulnerable to a small range of attacks, but you're basically making fighters invulnerable outside of these.

 

a compromise could be "harnesses don't count toward the hand card limit, you can only keep X harnesses", where X is an arbitrary number? 2? maybe 3? I'm leaning toward 2 but that punishes officer harness

 

Balance Changes Round Three

Spoiler

Harnesses
We felt harnesses needed a buff to be playable, and we pushed them a lot by making them not count toward your hand size limit at the end of the round. This had two downsides: it made Officer’s Harness irrelevant and terrible, and it made Enchanted Harness way too strong. It also clogged up hands. In light of issues, both on paper and in practice, we’ve decided to revert the stacking change to harness armor cards.

That is to say, harness cards besides Officer’s Harness will once again count toward your hand size limit.

Personally, I think it could have used some more testing or tweaking but Harness stacking generated metagames that were all about Harness stacking vs Penetrating/armor removal. Punishing Bolt wasn't really an answer to Harness stacking since each Harness prevented half or all of the bonus damage. Touch of Death is better but not found on many great items.

 

Yes, that was more or less what i remembered hehe.

I really like this idea.

I forgot Punishing Bolt isn't penetrating, my bad. I can see why they reverted it, but I want to see them some play hehe. Chain Harness and Leather Harness are dead cards at the moment. Even Enchanted Harness does not see a lot of use

 

if harnesses had their own hand limit, officer harness would need a nice buff.
What if it was a pure reaction instead of an armor card?
Saying "whenever you take damage, reduce that damage by 1"
basically a glorified reliable hide... that would prevent penetrating damage... and that wouldn't be discarded by the likes of sundering armor...
if you were limited to have at most 2 of them, I think it would be an interesting decision compared to enchanted harnesses?

 

I really think reverting the stacking buff was correct, a year later.

A lot—the vast majority—of armor cards are overvalued and not worth using. Leather & Chain Harnesses are only two among them. I think in some later balance update we could possibly make a lot of armor cards slightly better in ways that don't vastly change hand dynamics.

 

Officer's and Enchanted harnesses each have niche uses they fill nicely.
I'd like to see Chain and Leather harnesses made playable, but I don't think stacking is the answer. They're both rare cards, so they can be complex. Perhaps give each a bonus vs. different damage types?

 

have them affect all rolls, maybe? ("woah this armor is so lightweight everything in combat goes smoother", lucky charm, bloah bloah)
I finally can see myself using laser magic when two enchanted harnesses boost the casters erratic rolls.

 

Flavor doesn't make sense for a leather/chain harness to be boosting the effectiveness of laser weapons. Although it would be cute if there was some kind of "battery pack" armor (harness) that boosted laser rolls.

 

I still think giving them -1 to the required roll for all harnesses will make them decent.

 

Just checking -- does the bonus a harness gives to armor rolls, apply to the same harness? e.g. Enchanted Harness having a required roll of 5, but in practice 3, because of the 2-point boost?

 

yes. Two are a perfect Armor 4.

 

I think the way to go would be to have every harness but officers make your max hand size 3. But additional armor buffs would be great too

 

Just keep the mechanics simple and add a die to all non-officer harnesses. This would actually make things simpler because now all harnesses will succeed on a 4+ die roll by default, right now officer's is the odd one out. Would make sense for the same type of armor to have the same chance of prevention naturally. Then the die roll is added which makes them better. Chain harness is never really supposed to be good anyway. It's a bronze armor card and as such it should always be inferior to reliable mail, the main type of armor that already blows most other armors out the window.

 

i suggest replacing the whole harness business with something totally different. Its room/placeholders for better stuff.