Hi, so I created an account here on the forums just to give feedback on the armor sets for 1.0. Since we're still far from the stable release on July, I figured there should be a lot of time for a rebalance.
I find that a few armor piece benefits are too unbalanced for early game. A good example for this is the Rogue head piece which gives a 2/4/6/8/10/20% increase to loot stage. The problem with the tier 1 benefit is that 2% is useless early game to mid-game. To even get a boost at 2%, you'd need to be at level 50 (50 x 0.02 = 1, so a total of 50 + 1 = 51 loot stage). This essentially makes the early tiers useless.
My suggestion is that for the early tier levels, a flat loot stage bonus will be used instead, something like:
Tier 1: +3 loot stage (no percentage)
Tier 2: +5 loot stage (no percentage)
Tier 3: +10 loot stage (and 5% loot stage bonus)
Tier 4: +15 loot stage (and 7% loot stage bonus)
Tier 5: +20 loot stage (and 10% loot stage bonus)
Tier 6: +25 loot stage (and 15% loot stage bonus)
I think this scales well with player progression, the moment they reach tier 3, they should already be at a level where the percentage boost would yield an increase in loot stage.
There are also other armor set bonuses that don't make sense, for example the Raider set bonus is Crit Injury Resistance at 45%. Sounds nice but the Enforcer chest piece literally gives the same Crit Injury Resistance (but at 40%). My suggestion would be to remove the Crit Heal from the chest piece and move the Crit Injury Resistance there just like the Enforcer set. Faster Crit Heal isn't really useful anyway when you have Crit Resistance from the chest plus from food/med buffs. The set bonus should be something like Grandpa's Moonshine no longer giving blurry vision. For a set meant to be the end game melee build, I feel like not removing Grandpa's Moonshine blurry effect is wasted potential (the item itself is already expensive to buy on traders plus very tedious to craft requiring max Cooking skill books and materials are not renewable, why punish players for a late game craftable item?)
The Lumberjack boots stamina regen is kinda pointless too since it only works when running. Why not replace it with something like Increased Honey drop rate from harvesting trees 1/2/3/4/5/10% chance? A player that wears the lumberjack set won't be spending time running around too much so I think this was wasted potential. That on top of the book that gives increased honey drop rate (5% only) would stack it to 15%. 5% was very low anyways, averaging about 1 honey for 20 trees cut. Plus we need something more reliable to honey drop rates since a lot of the Grandpa recipes at the end of the Cooking skill books require honey to craft. Traders don't always sell them and they are rare in tree stumps (not to mention tree stumps spawn so little and only in the forest/snow biomes). The Farmer boots already provide Seed Harvest chance so we can do that for the Lumberjack too.
Other minor nitpicks:
- Scavenger head piece XP bonus is too little. Salvaging already provides meager XP plus in the early game, you'd be salvaging at most with a stone axe or wrench and it would take forever to salvage stuff. Probably something like 20/40/60/80/100/200. Increasing the XP to 3x the normal amount isn't really something big compared to mining late game or going at a Tier 5 POI so I don't see how this is an issue.
- Preacher arms are too overpowered at 10/20/30/40/50/60% increased damage to zombies when majority of the enemies in game... are zombies. I know it will become relevant when Bandits will be added since those aren't categorized as zombies. The biggest threat right now are cougars and normal bears but you won't normally meet them in quests or horde nights. This effectively makes other damage bonuses obsolete like the melee/ranged damage bonuses. My suggestion would be to cut the bonus to half at 5/10/15/20/25/30% while keeping the other armor pieces the same.
- The Rogue armor set bonus at max 30% more cash/dukes is way too little. You rarely ever find dukes in loot crates anyways, and even if you do find them, they are a small amount. The ATMs on average are like 500 cash, at 30% more, that is... 650. An armor set bonus for 150 more cash on an ATM that you rarely find on POIs... Maybe boost it to something like 30/60/90/120/150/300%? At 300% more, 500 then becomes 2000 cash which would make wearing the full armor set useful.
- Miner and Nerd armor set bonus are pretty much useless. At max tier for 35% less tool degradation is too little for wearing the whole set. All this just to save 1 repair kit which costs like 1 mechanical part and 1 duct tape, resources that are really easy to acquire. I think this should be changed. The miner should be increased drop rates for silver/gold/diamond or make it so tools don't degrade at all. The Nerd set I can't think of anything else but it needs to be changed since it overlaps with the current Miner bonus.
- Specific weapon damage boosts like Farmer arms (rifle damage), Ranger arms (revolver/lever damage), Nerd arms (baton damage), Enforcer set bonus (.44 damage and reload),and Nomad arms (radiated damage) should be buffed more since they are niche and overlap with the Raider arms (melee damage) and Commando arms (ranged damage). The Raider and Commando arms basically make the other arms obsolete. Plus the Farmer arms only max out at 20% for rifles while the Commando arms max out at 60% AND cover all ranged weapons. Too unbalanced if you ask me. Maybe something like 15/30/45/60/75/100%?
- The Enforcer head piece obsoletes the other barter head pieces since it covers all items and both buy and sell. Everyone playing on a server keeps it always.
- Assassin Tier 6 bonus is only a 10% boost to sneak damage at 10/20/30/40/50/60%. Why not just double it to 100% just like other benefits? The Hidden Strike perk already gives in increments of 50% plus the sneak candy on the vending machine also gives 50%. When zombies target you, you lose the stealth damage bonus anyway so I don't really see a point in trying to limit the damage bonus.
- The Farmer set bonus at 40% more health from food is kind of pointless since it's not like you'll be short on food. Maybe make it double health AND have food buffs last twice as long to make it stack with Iron Gut in the Fortitude tree.
@faatal Hopefully this isn't coming off too critical. I just think a lot of the armor pieces need a rebalance or a change in perk.
There's a lot of wasted potential on the benefits for the armor pieces. The dev team could review the perks in the skill trees and perk books and try to see if they can be used on the armor pieces instead to make them stackable.