Interesting crossover debate thread I read of the Dark Forest Aliens vs The Culture.
The Elder Races have overwhelmingly powerful weapons, destructive beyond anything the younger races in the Culture’s universe can imagine. However, the Culture has FTL drive—something that in Culture-verse terms is an Outside Context Problem for the Dark Forest-verse.
Shooting relativistic kill vehicles or lightspeed dual vector foils at a starship with a warp drive or hyperdrive and FTL sensors would be like trying to kill The Flash with a bow and arrows. He’d die if you hit him, but he wouldn’t get hit unless he wanted to or wasn’t paying attention. Reducing the speed of light is no impediment to technology that can already transcend the speed of light.
A Culture starship could just anime-dodge incoming attacks, and suddenly show up over the attacker’s homeworld to do something unheard of in the paranoid trigger-happy universe of the Dark Forest: gunboat diplomacy.
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Logged into DDO since there’s free stuff there now, saw one of my old character’s even older random items, and paused to reflect on just how completely outdated this shield has become over the years of patches and updates.
Large image and discussion below cut,
Modern implement bonus is equal to minimum level of item. This shield uses old subsystem where implement bonus equals 3 times enhancement bonus.
Modern enhancement bonus, in turn, scales with item level and scales parallell with other affixes. But this shield uses old subsystem directly from PnP where the major affixes (+1, Devotion, Axeblock) add up to a total value (the +10 at upper right).
Mithral as item material has been phased out of the game because of a series of unfortunate events that looked something like this:
Inevitable MMO-itis coupled with initially very faithful mechanics translation enabled people to go dumpster-diving until they accumulated various items of enhancement bonus to AC, profane bonus to AC, deflection bonus to AC, natural armor bonus to AC, sacred bonus to AC, dodge bonus to AC, primal bonus to AC, you name it. And of course Dexterity modifier to AC, which means you can also look for enhancement bonus to Dexterity, profane bonus to Dexterity, sacred bonus to Dexterity, insightful bonus to Dexterity, alchemical bonus to Dexterity...
This devalued heavy armor now that people can get very high AC without it and the marginal value of movement speed is greater
Devs decide they need to up the value of heavy armor, introduce a new stat called PRR (Physical Resistance Rating) based on your BAB times your armor heaviness*, which will reduce damage as a factor of 100/(100+PRR)
Oops, mithral full plate counts as medium armor and gives medium PRR, but we want full plate to always give heavy PRR
The armor code is spaghetti code because the game is ten years old and it’s hard to figure out how to make mithral do the right combination of selectively counting as one category lighter when desirable
Devs remove mithral armor from the game rather than deal with this shit
Devs remove mithral shields from the game too for consistency’s sake
Old items are unaffected but new mithral gear ceases to drop.
* Armor heaviness: Cloth/robes 0, light armor 1, medium armor 1.5, heavy armor 2.
Guild augment slots have been phased out of the game in favor of more MIC-like crystal augment slots.
Axeblock III is today considered appropriate to find on level 10 loot; level 18 loot would have Axeblock 5-6. Also, axeblock/spearblock/hammerblock no longer appear as random loot affixes, only on predetermined named loot.
The Devotion affix is about the only thing you’d be able to find on a modern random loot shield.
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