Back on the topic of balance and Draconic Armor (this thread is a bit old but still relevant), there are a few basic things that can be noted for modded Minecraft:
- Usually, a single mod or small group of related mods, on their own, can be rather easily balanced. As more mods are added, it becomes more difficult to ensure that these mods are balanced against each other. In a kitchen sink pack it is essentially impossible - every mod would require extensive configurability.
- Different mods have different power curves. Some allow players to grow in power quickly but have have weaker endgames. Others require heavy investment but have a higher power cap. Still others, arguably including Draconic Evolution, permit both quick growth and a high cap, and thus in a large modpack players will tend to see these mods as being overpowered as they overshadow other mods.
- PvE-oriented mods will result in imbalance when they exist in a PvP-oriented environment.
While invincible armor can be nice for some (you can laugh in the faces of all the mobs as they try to kill you), I think that it would be more interesting if it were at least remotely possible to die. This is particularly necessary for PvP to work, which is likely the reason the rapier was invented for armor piercing. And then DE comes along and adds armor that block armor piercing. Are we next going to have a weapon that bypasses the DE anti-piercing? And then some new armor comes along that blocks that? You basically end up with an arms' race between mods.
A couple of examples of "invincible" armor:
- GraviChestPlate + QuantumSuit: Invincible to most damage types, including melee, projectile, blast, fire, and fall damage, and also blocks poison and wither (not sure about instant damage), but is still countered by things like Nano Saber, Rapier, and Gelid. Quantum also runs out of EU quickly in a sustained heavy beating.
- Draconic: Similar to the above but without weaknesses and the energy goes much further from what I have heard.
If I were in charge of balancing DE, I'd probably do the following:
- Remove or reduce the blocking of armor-piercing damage or other damage types that aren't supposed to be mitigated by armor.
- Bump up RF cost of using the armor. Perhaps instead of 10 million RF per piece, it should be closer to 10 billion RF, with usage scaled proportionately, so there's actually a point to making the highest-tier DE RF storage other than for bragging rights, and you'd then also need real endgame RF infrastructure (although then you run into the problem that players would require mods like Big Reactors to be able to use the armor - perhaps RF cost should be configurable so packs that allow large RF generation can have higher RF costs).
I think the overall root problem, besides the fact that multiple mods are unlikely to balance against one another, is that the combat mechanics are inherently simplistic, and while a few mods try to add to it (such as how TiC adds rapiers that bypass armor, or how Thaumcraft has runic shielding as an alternative/supplement to armor), most mods do little more than add weapons that do various amounts of damage or armor that blocks various percentages of damage from all common attack types, basically using the same mechanics from Vanilla. Personally I think some type of rock-paper-scissors gameplay where no single weapon or armor is objectively superior in most or all situations, whether in PvP or in PvE, would be an improvement over the current one-thing-is-the-best-and-everyone-shall-use-it balance that appears a lot. Including tradeoffs would make things more interesting and dynamic.
One idea would be to expand the damage-typing system that Minecraft already has, and perhaps additionally add some sort of "penetration" attribute to all damage as a measure of the ability of damage to punch through armor. Armor would then take the amount, type, and penetration value of a damaging blow and decide what should happen (percentage of damage blocked, durability/energy used, and other effects - it would be up to modders to make sure their armor doesn't simply block everything). The vanilla damage classes (e.g. melee, projectile, explosion, fire, falling, magic, void) would be used as a base and other mods could add their own damage types. Mods would then have to be able to alias their damage types to other types for cross-mod compatibility - so if another mod doesn't know about the added damage type it can treat it as a vanilla type or some other mod's type. For example, if Thaumcraft were to add a "Thaumic" damage type, it could specify the damage to be treated as vanilla's "Magic" damage by any armor that does not recognize "Thaumic" damage specifically.
Additionally, there should be an ability to deal "combined" damage where a weapon can specify that it does multiple types of damage together (e.g. 2 hearts of melee and 2 hearts of magic). The armor would then calculate how much of each type is blocked, add the unblocked damage up, and subtract it from the entity's health. This would allow multiple damages to be summed without the 0.5 second invulnerability interfering.
A more complex version could split damage classes into both a type (melee, projectile, blast, etc.) and element (normal, fire, lightning, magic, etc.).
By having the many different mods specify weapons with various types of damage, along with specifying how armor should block all types of damage individually, it would be possible to create a more dynamic combat environment (both for PvP and PvE) where no single option is best and adaptability becomes a powerful advantage - if you can select your equipment based on what the opponent is using, you can gain an advantage, but you must watch that your opponent does not see what equipment you have and adapt similarly. It would encourage players to try a variety of mods and build up various progression trees to expand their options for the various situations that they might run into. Perhaps the Quantum Suit would block all physical damage but magic would go straight through, and enchanting would not be allowed, leaving an opening to exploit. Or alternatively, magic would be blocked but take a very large chunk out of the EU, thus a few potions of harm and their armor is rendered inoperative. Vanilla armor would block a percentage of physical damage but the amount blocked would be reduced proportionately based on penetration. A mod could add an alternative armor that would be poorer at blocking general damage but be less affected by penetration. One would wear that armor against rapier users, and said opponents could respond by switching to a different sword. Another mod could add an armor that blocks nearly all damage but has a limited "shield capacity" of a couple hundred points or less that it can cumulatively block, after which it blocks nothing, and the shield would start regenerating if no damage were taken for a few seconds. Yet another mod could add an armor that blocks nearly all damage but becomes less effective when multiple consecutive blows are taken, allowing players to deal heavy damage by landing a string of hits and requiring the player using the armor to adjust their tactics to avoid taking multiple hits in a short window.
Note that a bunch of the above examples could probably be done without adding any fundamental mechanics, although I'm not completely sure since I don't know exactly how damage/armor works at the code level.
Note that it would still be very difficult to balance, since if any weapon or piece of armor stands out in any way, players will probably gravitate towards it. If one piece of armor is still much better despite specific weaknesses, most likely you will see both that piece of armor and the weapon that beats it as popular items - perhaps with an alternative armor that resists said weapon being used a bit as well and with everything else being niche items. Or if one weapon is much better than everything else, you're going to see everyone wear the armor that resists it even if the other types of armor are just as good or even somewhat better overall. Expanding the combat system to allow for more variety opens a path to improving the balance of the modded experience to an extent, but does not guarantee such balance, especially as the fundamental balance issue that all the mods are being made almost completely independently from one another (asides from specific interactions) will still exist regardless of what is done at a base level.