Balancing out AC and dodge

[Elbin]

I did some number crunching and identified a possible reason for the current imbalance of the two major modes of defense. It's also an opportunity to fix the issue.

There is a soft cap at what you can do with pure armour (AC), determined by the amount of AC you are able to stack. The same goes for dodging. However, there is also a hard cap for AC effectiveness - the Armor Piercing stat. Once you hit that (your AC>=dmg-AP), no amount of steel plates will save you. And here is the problem: there is no hard cap for dodging damage!

So I propose the following additional stat: Undodgeable percentage (UP). This is the lowest level of aiming you can get, when you subtract the dodge of the target. This way you'll always have some chance to hit, no matter what, and so will NPCs. It's practically the same as the AP, but applied to aiming, instead of the damage.

It is also intuitive to apply to different attacks. A revolver shot might have high AP (minimum damage on hit), but low UP (with the right skill and luck you can dodge it almost always); a shotgun blast has low AP (scattered projectiles, they actually already have a tiny AP in game!), but is hell to dodge due to the exact same property (UP of 20-30%, so no matter how good you are at dodging, you are hit 20-30% of the time); a squoyote pounce can be dodged (low UP) easier than resisted (high AP) (or maybe it's more logical the other way around?), an area type attack of some animal (bugs spitting, etc.) is easier to resist (low AP) than to dodge (high UP). Attacks that should be difficult to avoid altogether (sniper shot, nukes, deathclaw-level fauna etc.) have high AP and high UP, and should either be boss level NPCs, or balanced in another way (slow attacks, rare ammo, etc.) if they are available to players.

This way there is always some danger for dodgers, just like there is for men of steel. I can supply the spreadsheet if anyone is interested.

[BlitzCraig]

I had posted a simpler and easier-to-implement method of fixing this problem, but I actually like yours better - very nice

[Ryaca]

+1