Now that we have Encumbrance, rethink PR weights ? (in General)

I was thinking mostly tank/wall gear needs to have a hefty decrease in PR weight, for instance, especially after the Encumbrance change.
Other items, like, say, a HoC too... almost makes you not want to increase AC on it at all.

Also, PR addition from tattoos might be ok overall, but probably not enough in some (ToA for instance, especially in case of weapons close to the WA already) and quite bizzare for fixed/capped effects tats (RoBF and ToE)... in some cases way too high, in others way too small (although you could argue then it's just right, ironically).

If anything, we could actually even drop the whole PR weight idea altogether... what do you think ? Good idea ? Bad idea ?
Complete drop ? Partial rework ? What needs to go up and what needs to go down (if anything) ?

no. there still need a way to distingish between a Single Fireball minion with only HoC and one with HoC+NSC+CoI+all other armors. on the other hand, a fair partial rework is ok, I guess.

Well... if you think about it, then what's the point of a mage with not just the HoC, but with both the HoC and rest of the gear ?
Let me explain...

When I was in my early phases of this NCB (it was before Encumbrance, so I didn't have to worry at all about NW), I would only use a base HoC and a RoE... while on defence, I would switch to a ToE, and add some hefty NW DB and AG (8 and 4 mil NW or thereabouts, if I'm not mistaking... now they're even larger).

I couldn't care less about all those additional items when attacking, as I was hitting a lot of people for 95%-100% challenge bonuses (and I mean, a lot, up to 20 or even more at any time)... on offence, I needed to keep my PR as low as possible, to get the best challenge bonuses... while I needed every last bit of extra defence power I could muster when I wasn't burning BA, and I couldn't care less about PR on the defence.
And I could keep doing the same thing even now, only that I really grew tired of the constant switching of items (that, and the fact I've hit MTL higher than my previous tat size, and with the PR addition from the tat, I sighed and left the DB and AG on permanently).


I only want to ask of you to think of similar stories, but not just with mages... with archers or tanks too, and various multi-minion teams... think how little PR matters on defence, and how much it HURTS you more than it helps you in offence a lot of times (not always, but sometimes).
And ask yourselves... then why the heck do we use the gear at all in the first place ? Unless you have a position where the gear will enable you to draw or win a large number of incoming attacks, you don't actually need it... and for attacks, you damn well wish you hadn't (well, at least until you hit the dead zone).

It DID make sense to have such huge penalties for gear enchantment levels, back when Encumbrance did not exist... and it makes slightly less sense because Weapon Allowance also exist (especially since it was halved)... it was needed since without any of them, you could have rented a huge-NW wall armor set, stuck a huge-NW rental weapon on it and gone on a rampage for high rewards.

The WA discouraged you from getting a too good weapon (now even more so), and the PR weight stopped you from getting too good armor... it was already cheched and balanced for people that still could want to fight upwards for near-100% challenge bonuses.
Sure, there still were a couple of smallish PR-weight items that did too much good for certain classes of people, but overall it was allright.
But it did little for the people in the 6/20 regen areas (since most of them already had PRs over the scores of people they can attack, and since they get no penalties for attacking down, they could care less about it), and the same could maybe be said even about some 7/20 people... so encumbrance was introduced, to make those in 6/20 (allegedly, the "mostly USD spenders area") feel the pain nevertheless, mostly the pain of huge weapons, but that of huge armor too.

But this change was overkill for a lot of the people below.
If anything, encumbrance should get a reverse style exemption, kind of like to the challenge bonus penalty exemption.
So, the same way 6/20 get no penalties at all for attacking down, so should 10/20 get no encumbrance penalties at all... the way 7/20 only gets 25% of the challenge penalties, so should 9/20 only get 25% of the encumbrance reduction... and so on.

Then, sure, there still remains the issue of just how much each plus on some gear needs to be "penalised" in PR weight...



...

Uh, sorry for the rant, it just came as I was writing :)
If it makes no sense at all to you, or if it shifts ideas mid-way, don't worry, my fault :p

Two words: nov's DBs.

Ok, so you meant these: Fuzzy Blue Slippers [0] (+262) worth $169,346,817 owned by QBnovice (C. Montgomery Burns)... what about them ?

Due to encumbrance, unless he uses them on a nearly 170-mil or so XP minion (I doubt even igot noname's "pacifist" has enough XP on a single minion for that), he would lose a certain percentage of his evasion rating (alongside several other things too)... and all at the same time adding 23.58% to the MPR as additional PR. The PR addition is negligible compared to the actual encumbrance-due penalties.

But yeah, I can see how that would be a problem for the really low MPR ranges, if somebody decided to make an "HP/evasion wall" minion with those things, and the penalty would negligible or zero for 10/20.
Well, I guess you could start with anywhere from 10% to 25% penalties at 10/20, and ramp them up as you go towards 6/20.

Still, I blame that a lot more on the method evasion is implemented with rather than PR weight and encumbrance issues... if both evasion and weapons pth would be reworked as a pure multiplier for "chance to hit/evade" instead of additions to the base chances, we wouldn't even be talking funny about a purely hypothetical +400 pair of displacement boots, especially since they also grant no defensive DX... so you WOULD have to train either evasion or pump DX in order to get ANY use at all out of DBs in the first place.

I'd support a removal of PR weights if and only if Familiars become subject to Encumbrance as well.

Otherwise, it's just too easy to make huge armors (like DB, NSC like Novice used to (and sort of still does) have, etc.) and just slap them on a Junction minion for huge bonuses without any real penalties.

Not like junctioned familiars don't seem to be getting popular enough already.