Exactly. Thing is that coverage gives you a vague idea of how much it protects, but while it gives a decent general idea of how it should work, it 1) prone to giving situations where it makes no sense and 2) not countered by a corresponding stat for attacks.
Maybe use coverage in a different way like.
Add another value to weapons that we would call hit area. The samler that area is the better it would fit through spaces in the enemy armor. Now make a formula for coverage and the weapons hit area like:
90% coverage and weapon with the best possible value == 1.
So we calculate like (1- 0.9) x 1/1 = 1/10 or 10% hit chance.
A weapon with a value of 2 would in that case have a 5% chance : (1-0.9) x 1/2 = 0.05.
Somehwat like that might work.
You still get barrels penetrating your armor but if the weapons value is high enough the chance would soon be extremely low.
Though potential factors like getting past armor versus making it more likely to hit vitals could make attack coverage both advantageous and disadvantageous.
yeah sure. Thats realistic though.
You may find it easier to put a dagger into a weak spot… but hey a guy without armor? I ll just slice of his everything with a swing of my axe.
I think it’s very important to establish exactly what is represented by a single “attack” action in Cataclysm. And also what a “hit” represents. As we increase the level of detail with which this is represented, we run an increasing risk of creating jarring moments of frustrating inconsistency.
The immersion of Cataclysm is due to a unique balance of detail and imagination.
To my mind, an “attack” action in melee currently represents a span of time, usually around 6 seconds, where one entity focuses effort on trying to harm another entity.
Yes but each attack in melee no matter how long it takes always results in a singular hit.
The problem here is not the amount of detail but the wrong details.
Or we could take ideas from Dwarf Fortress until it’s Fun enough. We already have coverage and material thickness being major armor factors. o3o
Yep lets have our 1 legged and one armed survivor wield a sword shield and crutch in one hand and run faster then he would with 2 legs and fight completely unhindered… df ammounts of fun 
Maybe that not Fun, but still. Whatever ideas prove useful.
Okay, being able to at the very least use a crutch to mitigate leg damage would be neat, but dedicating a whole skill to it and becoming superfast when it’s high enough is silly. owo
Right and that hit represents one creature successfully harming the other creature during those 6 seconds, assuming their effort is not thwarted by armor.
Barrels aren’t going to literally penetrate armor. But I doubt anyone would like to volunteer to put on a barbute helm and let me hit them in the head with a barrel. Almost every time, the barbute helm will save you from massive trauma. But you won’t say “the barrel didn’t penetrate so I remain unharmed .” Barbute helm doesn’t provide perfect coverage. And if I hit you above the shoulders (represented in game by “head”) I might just cause your head to move beyond a healthy range of motion, possibly even breaking your neck. If we are fighting one on one, I think this is astronomically unlikely, but if you’re flanked or mobbed as cata combatants often are, it seems to me that breaking your neck with the barrel becomes an entitling plausible possibility.
I think it would be useful to really explicate what bashing vs. Cutting vs. Piercing damage represent, and see if there might be a way to increase the realism of the way we handle damage and armor by reassessing damage value per damage type of weapons and protection value of armor.
For the record, I absolutely agree that the current system can and should be improved.
Each attack action is a single attempt to swing/stab/bash/otherdamagingverb your enemy, I don’t know of a reasonable way to model it otherwise.
You can imagine it however you want, but if you get down to the hit/damage/armor formulas, that’s how we’re treating it.
The attack area idea is an interesting one, instead of treating it as a ratio though, you’d probably say that an attack with an attack area larger than the “coverage gap” of a particular piece of armor can’t bypass it at all, so if plate armor has a “coverage gap” of 2 (probably very small), then nothing larger than two can bypass it, so must try to penetrate the armor instead. Where a ratio comes in is if the coverage gap is larger than the attack area, then the attacker would get a bonus to bypassing the armor.
Sounds reasonable. And would fix the problem i had with barrels fitting through smal gaps xD why didn t i think of that lol.