WTF? Armour bonus to defense

[Prime]

I've been playing around with some armours, and I noticed that the bonus to defense provided by them does not appear to be the same as specified. For example:

 

An armour with a defense bonus of 8 will only increase the players defense by 5. For all the ones I tried, it always seemed to be (defense bonus - 3) = real bonus.

 

Also, if the player has lots of items equiped that increase the defense rating, equiping armour can actually bring the defense down lower than without. This appears not to occur with Jedi robes, perhaps because the bonuses are mostly 3 or lower.

 

Is something wrong here? Or am I miscalculating what the improved defense should be?

 

Funny that I never noticed this before. I guess that shows how little I use armour.

[Achilles]

I can't speak to all of your concerns, however I do know that equipping armor can decrease your defense if your PC/NPC has a high DEX. The DEX modifier is added to Defense, therefore an armor that has a low Max DEX modifier can actually decrease overall defense.

[stoffe]

Originally posted by Prime

I've been playing around with some armours, and I noticed that the bonus to defense provided by them does not appear to be the same as specified.

(snip)

Is something wrong here? Or am I miscalculating what the improved defense should be?

 

 

Defense in KotOR/TSL seems to work roughly like it does in Neverwinter Nights, behind the scenes, since they to some extent use the same engine.

 

The AC_DODGE_BONUS, AC_NATURAL_BONUS, AC_ARMOUR_ENCHANTMENT_BONUS, AC_SHIELD_ENCHANTMENT_BONUS and AC_DEFLECTION_BONUS constants in nwscript.nss still work to specify different types of Defense, though rarely used.

 

The different types of Defense stacks with eachother (ie Natural stacks with Armor etc), but the only Defense type where multiple bonuses stacks with other bonuses of the same type is the AC_DODGE_BONUS. Of all the other types it only uses the largest bonus if several are available.

 

And even then the Dodge bonus is capped at a max value, though I'm not quite sure what the cap is (12?).

 

It seems like AC_DODGE_BONUS that most force powers use is the same type that +Defense attributes on items use. The ac_enchant column in baseitems.2da is still used, though it is set to 0 (Dodge bonus) for all items as far as I can see.

 

I did some quick testing and when wearing gear with extra Defense bonus the Force Armor power did not give its full +6 defense bonus. However, if I changed it to use any of the other armor types, the power did give the full +6 Bonus.

 

Thus is it fairly easy for a well-equipped force-using character in KotOR to bump into the (Dodge) Defense bonus cap. If you have enough bonuses of that same type you'll not get any more.

 

The Defense bonus from high Dexterity however does not appear to be capped in such a way.

 

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So, what I was meaning to suggest in this longwinded way was: Does your character have any other items or powers on that grants Defense when you put on the armor? If that bonus + the armor's bonus exceeds the cap, you would not get the full bonus from the armor.

 

 

EDIT: Did some quick testing and changed the post around a bit...

[Prime]

Cool. Thanks guys.

[Guyver619]

Yeah, I guess I'm a bit late.. but I had the same problem when I was making my own armors, I was wondering what was going on until I remembered about dex bonus, and the armor I was using had a max dex bonus of 0.