GrizzlyBulwark
Makes heavy armour worth wearing: physical resistance that scales with the set, a stagger guard so you keep swinging, and enemies that come for you instead of your friends.GrizzlyBulwark
Heavy armour in Valheim asks you to give up speed and gives you very little back. This makes the trade worth taking: the heavy sets turn away physical damage, hold their footing instead of being staggered out of every swing, and draw enemies onto you and off the people standing behind you.
Nothing here touches light or medium armour, so a bow build and a Fenris build are exactly as they were.
What it does
Physical resistance. A full heavy set turns away part of every blunt, slash and pierce hit aimed at you, scaling from 8% on Bronze up to 20% on the Deep North heavy set. Elemental damage is untouched on purpose, so shamans, casters and anything that burns are still the answer to a wall of plate.
Stagger guard. Stagger is tracked separately from health, which is why maxed armour still gets knocked out of its own animation. A heavy set shrinks how fast that meter fills, up to half on the heaviest, so you can plant your feet and keep swinging. It changes nothing about the damage you take.
Aggro pull. Creatures choose whoever is nearest and nothing else, so in a group fight the target is decided by footwork rather than by who is built to survive being hit. Wearing a heavy set makes a creature that has already picked one of your friends come for you instead. It only ever redirects a fight that was already happening.
Which sets count
Bronze, Iron, Wolf, Padded, Carapace, Flametal and the Deep North heavy set. Helmet, chest and legs must all come from the same set; the cape is yours to choose.
Membership is a named list rather than an armour-value cut-off, so a set counts as heavy because it was designed as heavy. Each set's resistance is configurable, and setting one to 0 drops it from the mod entirely.
Why heavy armour needed this
The game reduces a hit to damage² / (4 × armour), but only while your armour is at least half the incoming damage. Below that it falls back to plain damage − armour, where a point of armour is worth exactly one point of damage and nothing more.
That threshold is the whole problem. Maxed silver holds the line up to a 156-damage hit; a one-star Fuling Berserker swings for 195, drops you onto the flat branch, and takes more than half your health in one blow. Padded moves the line to 192 and still does not clear it. No amount of armour you can actually wear fixes this, because enemy hits grow faster than armour does.
Resistance is applied before armour, so shrinking a hit first is worth far more than the number suggests — the armour formula squares it. A 20% cut lands around 36% off what reaches your health bar, and more importantly it can carry you back onto the good branch.
On a server
Install it on the server as well as on clients, and the server's settings become the settings, pushed to every client on connect and locked unless you are an admin. Your own config file is never overwritten, and your local values come back when you disconnect.
Solo worlds, and servers without the mod installed, just use your own settings.
Requirements
Configuration
Every setting has a description in the Configuration Manager, grouped into Physical Resistance, Stagger and Aggro.
License
MIT. See LICENSE.