I prefer incremental changes best, which is why the revival patch was difficult to deal with.
The agi+strength changes from this patch:
-wpf reduction from gloves increased from x4 to x6 and low weight gloves increased
-IF based wpf reduction, with 5IF as the break-even point
-Wpf increases are higher at low WM than higher WM
-Large reduction in wpf penalties for ranged
With no IF and increased glove weight, even 210 wpf builds can go down to 170-180 levels in medium-light armor, -10 to -15 from before. Strength builds that max IF gain ~12-15 wpf even with the glove weight increase. The wpf gap changed from 120-200 to 140-180.
-It wouldn't hurt to make the penalty harsher, but the worse it's made, the more agi builds will just wear cloth and be even faster. Right now, it's set to Str/3 + IF, 6 at minimum for next patch (2 patches ago it was 10). Wpf is reduced exponentially the heavier the armor above the threshold. This is the best I can think of, any ways to improve it will be appreciated. Str/3 helps strength builds with low IF still, while IF helps all characters who want to increase it. I can always remove the 6 minimum, which will hurt players with strength below 18.
-I agree with difficulties. It'll take a while to compile a list for specific weapons, but it may be easier to just make a category X = Y-Z strength kind of thing. Balancers actually discussed increasing difficulties but we couldn't come to a good settlement back then. I think I pushed for too heavy scaling for people to agree.
-problem with buffing PS is that it also gives some power to agi builds who already get 1-2 shot. This will mostly just make it easier to kill balanced and strength builds, since it's tougher to bridge the 2shot->1shot gap than the 3-shot->2-shot gap.
-Only way to reduce acceleration for non-devs is to change the final athletics value after spawning. This means something like subtracting everyone's athletics by 1-2, or halve the scaling after a certain point. Either way, it'll make certain athletic levels useless, which may not even be so bad. I doubt that we can have non-integer skill numbers, but something like that would've helped. More cav/ranged would whittle these numbers pretty easily.
-I had a suggestion for different armor looms based on the weight class. It might be worth reviving since there's little activity. It'll be hard since the only people who can edit items are pretty inactive at the moment, even if it passes.
Overall, I'll try to make a thread about item difficulty and loom tiers, and remove the minimum threshold of 6 on the wpf penalty that helped heavy agi builds, in addition to the cav/ranged stuff that's being voted on. Ranged stuff = better damage on body shots/head shots, worse damage on limbs to better aid the increased accuracy. Cav stuff = remove 0 armor legs, change it to 30-50% bonus damage instead.
