Specialised armor buff

[Bots]

My issue with the armor is: Heavy corporate is best in every scenario. (Picture included)

Unknown enemy? It has 55% ballistic protection(vs60% ballistic), has 50% melee defence(vs riot 70%), has 40 laser defence (15 less than ablative), 25 energy defence (15 less than ablative) AND has same bomb protection as ballistic.

WHY use any other armor if you get universal protection that is MUCH more usable than specialised protection?

In comparison to heavy corporate armor

ablative pro: moderately better against laser and energy compared to heavy corporate

ablative con: no explosion protection, no ballistic protection, no melee protection

In comparison to heavy corporate armor

ballistic pro: BARELY better ballistic protection

ballistic con: worse laser protection,  NO energy protection, NO melee protection

In comparison to heavy corporate armor

Riot pro: 70% melee defence vs 50%

Riot con: NO bullet protection, NO laser protection, NO energy protection(stunbaton protection btw), NO bomb protection.

 

The buff suggestion is:

Buff ablative armor Laser and Energy protection by 30% so its 85% laser and 70% energy

Buff ballistic armor Ballistic and Bomb protection by 25% so its 85% ballistic and 55% bomb

Buff riot armor protection by 10% in Melee and add 50% energy protection so its 80% melee and 50% energy protection(so you can't get easily stunbatoned in riot gear).

[dessysalta]

These armors do a lot. Looking at the raw numbers is kind of a fool's errand unless you've seen them in combat time and time again. It might not seem like much, but using those things against their intended targets makes a ginormous difference, and anything above ~60% is basically negating the vast majority of fights short of being magdumped by 3 people at once—I once dumped ~15-20 5.56 rounds into a guy with ballistic armor, some point blank, only for him to walk his ass to medical and live. Now if my buddies had lasers or swords, would he have wanted the heavy armor instead? Probably, but that sort of gets into why specialized plate carriers are used at all if you're not entirely certain what you're going against.

Plate carriers are already fairly decent, the specialized ones' whole purpose is to be used by people/officers who know absolutely-for-sure they're going to be dealing with them exclusively. Otherwise, stick to generalist. The heavy carrier and helmet are purchasable for negligible TC cost and given to several antags (most notably mercs) for free. Security getting two of them when they have 4 (5 counting the warden) officers is plenty when you consider the opposition is going to be at least on par; part of picking your weapon is understanding the matchup and being ready to GTFO or swap if you see a specialized carrier on the field, likewise as a secoff look at the weapons on their person and plan accordingly.

If you buff their armor even more you're probably going to end up with more people rushing mindlessly into combat as tanks, when as security especially you should be playing as a team and strategizing, pulling back, and acting with fear for your own life. It's worth considering that security will almost always have homefield advantage of medical, operations, research, command and to a degree engineering; they don't need better armor with the entire crew behind them. That and most secoffs will know when to swap their plates back out long before they get shot to death, if they make a mistake.

And part of the reason they aren't stronger, I'm guessing, is because if we gave sec the god armor by default they would never reach out to RnD/the machinist for anything specialized because they wouldn't need it.

[Loorey]

Hello, I semi-regularly play security, and I can tell you what I think:

Armor is good in its current state. No, heavy armor is not always the best case because whatever gimmicks an antagonist team decides on will usually also dictate their choice of weaponry. And you, as a security officer, the warden, or the head of security, can always make a judgment on what is best for the situation. I wore ballistic armor playing security recently when an officer point-blanked me with a burst rifle, and I got zero damage out of it. No, the specialized armor is not "useless" or offers barely any more protection.

[VeteranGary]

I might be forgetting, but I believe these values make a bigger difference in actual play when you taking the armor piercing characteristic into consideration. I don't know how it actually works in code, assuming its up to a certain damage resistance threshold it ignores? I know certain ammunition struggles immensely trying to fight against someone wearing ballistic armor, something like under ten damage per hit. Keep in mind most ballistic weapons deal around 20-29 damage, so a 50-60% reduction is strong as it is.


Ablative rarely ever sees any use just because it just isn't worth it in 99% of cases, most energy weapons cause extreme pain which is the real threat and the slowdown of being a specialized armor isn't worth it. Pretty sure most people would consider the default sec armor over it just for mobility.

[Bots]

Wait armor actually stops bullets here? How does it even work?

[UltraNumeron]

WIth how slowly tension builds before any violence breaks out usually with the server culture here, it's usually pretty simple to quickly see the main weapon types antags are using since they are quite few and buy gear in advance rather than having an armory. So its not too difficult to judge the situations armor needs.

And on the other hand, security already outmatch antags in nearly every engagement and emerge with little to no losses, so a buff to their armor is pretty much the inverse of what is needed to have climactic fights with tension and consequence.

[Arbiter_Ambrose]

To cut this message short, sec strong antag weak and low number comparatively in most situations.

Yes, personally as antag I feel like security outnumbers most antag encounters too much to allow them some wins now and again and that ruins the tension a bit, you need to be wise and you often don't get to roleplay it out well if you want to win against sec as a antag, so armour buffs would simply worsen that issue, not saying security is bad as of now, just a bit smothering to the ability of antags to actually win which is to be honest, their whole job so I don't blame them.