Originally Posted by
Blank4u47
seriously? so you are saying that damage resistance in the form of pv from an inhuman level of toughness should somehow be penetrated after the armor ON TOP OF IT has already been penetrated? right. I make no sense.
I never said it was some kind of magical defense source, just that the source of protection differed from the rest of the armor and should be treated differently.
But it does
not differ. Skin is skin, muscle is muscle.
You may be tough but a sword cuts through soft tissue with the same ease for all living beings.
If it penetrates eternium
metal armor, how much easier it is to penetrate
skin, even on the toughest of people?
And yes, it does so on top of the armor, that's the whole point.
you just described a critical hit. a hit to a vital region causes double damage. if its a penetrating hit, it circumvents all pv not because its in a vital region, but because it "punched through".
This message isn't generated for critical hits only, it also appears when your PV is ignored. Step in front of a greater moloch in full armor and let it hit you repeatedly.
It doesn't make sense otherwise because a character wearing only artifact items in all slots should be untouchable since artifacts are indestructible - PV ignoring monsters would fail to penetrate it because penetration means physical damage/destruction.
Yet even in that case, they keep hitting and damaging you. The only reasonable way to explain it, is that PV ignoring hits do it:
a) by punching through destructible armor (like killer bugs damaging my eternium plate mail repeatedly as I get hit)
b) by circumventing indestructible items and hitting weak spots directly
Both indicate armor ignored, only in different ways.
now that makes no sense, because if they hit you in the first place, they went around your shield. and it does actually block penetrating hits, but they call it something else... a miss.
Actually, the message is "you block the *foo*" but that's another story.
The idea of using a shield is based on the fact that it takes on the blunt force of the attack and because there is only air behind it - not body as in the case of armor (unless the attacker is lucky and stabs the hand that wields the shield - still worse than hitting the chest or belly).
A shield is meant to form a buffer so in case a weapon actually penetrates it and gets lodged in, it only hits air until further penetration is halted by the hilt reaching the structural part of a shield.
Shields negate the advantage of range in melee combat, hence why a master of shield protection using a large shield should be able to block ALL penetrating hits when he's actively defending (i.e. coward/very defensive tactics settings).
This is all wishful thinking though, adom is far from successfully emulating real melee combat and it only uses a rudimentary system that is meant to be fun and not realistic.