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Balancing Protection Enchantments

In almost every setting where the player is able to choose what enchantments go on their armor, both survival and pvp, the player will opt for the generic Protection enchantment over any others. Once in a blue moon you'll see someone with Projectile Prot, or Blast Prot against a Wither (though it's hardly necessary). And there's a good reason people make this choice -- there's absolutely no use for anything else.

Normal Protection grants a maximum 64% resistance against literally everything except starvation, and there really isn't any threat in the game that is so great that someone would need the 80% resistance granted by replacing a Prot IV with Blast/Fire/Proj Prot IV, and it wouldn't be worth the loss of that 16% general resistance the Prot IV provided.

Combative encounters in the game could be much more dynamic if the normal Protection enchantment simply didn't work on everything. Protection should only be effective against melee attacks. Optionally, you could rename it "Contact Protection" or something, but I'm not sure it's necessary. If this change were implemented, there would be an immediate improvement to combat; instead of having a single optimal setup that you have to fight with and against, there would be interesting choices concerning which damage sources to try to protect against, and which weapons to bring to counter your enemy's defenses.

Now, there are a few concerns one might have about this change -- one might say there are just too many damage types for removing the generalist enchantment to be reasonable; or, what about protection against magic damage?

To the first concern, I think this could be mitigated a bit by combining Fire and Blast into one enchantment: Combustion Protection. And for the second concern, the addition of Magic Prot would be fantastic. The end result is still four Protection enchantments that now encompass all common damage sources, and which would create an interesting environment for strategy by removing a single optimal choice.

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• June 25, 2018 17:00
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  • June 25, 2018 19:31
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  This is the first decent idea on this site that I've seen in several days. Excellent work.

  I know this is likely to be unpopular, because it is a "nerf", but I like it. You are absolutely right that nobody cares about other protection enchantments, which is not fair. We should want to mix and match enchantments depending on our needs, not just get full Protection IV and be done with it.

  It needs to be named "Mêlée Protection", because accents look cool :P

  One thing I would do is have Mêlée Protection be as protective against mêlée attacks as other Protection types are against their respective damage sources. So Mêlée Protection would be very protecting against mêlée damage, but only that. That should not be unbalanced since base armor already protects from all sources, if I understand correctly.

  Last point: Magic Protection sounds good in theory, but I don't think it's a good idea just because you would only be able to use it against Witches, which are a rarer mob anyways.

  At the very least, this idea is worth experimenting with by Mojang.

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  • June 25, 2018 19:22
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  In that case the base protection should be buffed to be similar to the others.  Otherwise it goes from being the ultimate armor enchantment to being so weak that it's barely worth it.

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  • June 27, 2018 18:37
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  seems great in theory, but many people wouldn't like to have their armor made worse. I think a better way to implement this is to make specific protections stronger. or a way I think is even better would be to be able to stack specific protections, but general protection couldn't stack with any of them. that way, if you're high level, you could have several specific protections.   (stacking every specific protection would be pretty OP, but maybe you could just stack 2 or 3)

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  • June 29, 2018 23:21
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  So, this is why I'm hesitant to buff Protection's effectiveness against melee: I don't want to disrupt the balance of melee duels. Melee is such a common source of damage that to have the enchantment reduce its effectiveness just as much as rarer, often more powerful damage sources are reduced would be too much. A Sharp V diamond sword already only does 1.08 dmg to a player in full Prot IV dia armor.
  
  Now, I can understand the concern that players will now generally die faster due to having to sacrifice some of this Protection to ward against projectiles or magic; but I do fervently believe that being able to kill faster isn't all that bad of a thing in a Minecraft world where there are now a dozen ways to defend yourself (elytra escape, e-pearl escape, totem, shield, turtle master pot, natural regen + status effects from gapples is insanely powerful, etc.)

   

  As for the worry that Magic Prot wouldn't be useful in survival due to limited damage sources, I'll remind you that Protection enchantments can have secondary benefits. For example, Fire Prot reduces fire-based damage, but it also reduces the duration of afterburn based on the level of the highest-leveled piece of armor. Blast Prot does a similar thing, using the highest-leveled gear to reduce explosion knockback. For example, wearing two Fire Prot IV's and one Fire Prot II gives you the maximum 80% dmg reduction, but it also grants you a 60% reduction in the duration of afterburn (15% * highest level on armor, IV in this case).
  
  So, my idea for Magic Protection would be that it not only reduces the damage taken from magical sources (instant damage, poison, and wither effects) by 8% per level, it also reduces the duration of all negative status effects by 15% * highest level on armor. So, wearing a Magic Prot IV helmet not only reduces the damage taken from that wither effect you just got by 32%, it also reduces the amount of time you have that effect by 60% on the moment of its application.
  
  An onslaught of shulkers would no longer levitate you up so high as to be lethal. A cave spider's bite is no longer enough to strike fear into your heart.

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  • July 02, 2018 04:49
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  Hey ShallowRook, thanks for the clarifications. I don't agree 100% with every single tiny detail you have here but I absolutely love the overall concept and so I'm just going to leave it at that. Again, thanks for posting :)

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  • July 02, 2018 20:21
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  Do you understand how the protection enchantments work?  There's a cap on how much they can protect you, and the specialized protection pieces work better than the generalized protection.

  https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Armor#Enchantments

  By choosing to go Protection IV on all your armor, you're maximizing general protection at the cost of better protection on other things.  If Protection is changed to only be against melee damage, it would not be overpowered to change its EPF values to match the other protection type enchantments because you would be balancing enchantments for melee damage, fire damage, projectile damage, and explosion damage.  In order to have two pieces protecting one type of damage you would have to sacrifice protection for another kind of damage.  So to have the same level of melee protection that a full protection IV set now gives you would have to be entirely unprotected against one of the other damage types.

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  • July 03, 2018 01:18
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  Clay, yes I do know exactly how Protection enchantments work. In my original post, I stated, "[A full set of] normal Protection grants a... 64% resistance against literally everything except starvation." I then went on to comment that 80% (which is indeed the cap) is provided by combining one Blast/Fire/Proj Prot IV with three Prot IV.
  
  I have clearly articulated multiple times that I know that other Protection types are stronger than the default, and the whole point of my response comment was to explain why I think it's fine for it to be weaker anyways despite becoming limited in its protective scope. Making the choice to use generalized Protection is currently uninteresting because the 64% it provides is already more than sufficient for pve, and incredibly powerful in pvp.
  
  I'm aware of what I'm suggesting and of all of its implications; yes of course wearing full Prot IV will now only be effective against melee and would thus drastically change pvp -- that's the point. If we buffed Prot to be just as powerful as the specifics, then wearing two Prot IV's and two Proj Prot IV's would grant you that same 64% protection against both melee and ranged damage than full Prot IV used to. Yea, sure, it would result in a vulnerability to splash pots and the fire enchants might become significant, but I wanted the change to be more drastic than a little tweak like that.
  
  The whole point is to make it that you're going to have to weaken your defenses against melee attacks in order to deal with alternative damage sources.

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  • July 03, 2018 18:28
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  Sorry.  But I still don't understand why you want to reduce the overall ability to protect yourself using enchantments so much.  I agree that protection is overpowered, but I don't do PVP.  I want the ability to protect myself at maximum against the threat of mobs, because they're a royal pain sometimes.  You seem to want to nerf the ability to protect yourself generally because it takes too long to kill another player.

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  • July 04, 2018 16:37
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  Yes, I'm certainly very focused on making pvp more dynamic, but I'm also rather bothered by how absurdly effective full Prot IV is in pve -- you essentially cannot die. Taking away its generality requires you to have to consider specific gear sets for specific outings, though to be honest most of those trips will still have full Prot IV at highest value because of how rare non-melee damage sources are in pve, and because generic diamond armor is usually enough against most things anyways if you're stocked up well.

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  • August 28, 2018 13:15
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  Well, Sharpness was already nerfed by 1.9, and at this point the only thing that really can be done to make other sword enchants more valuable is to make the mobs affected by them more dangerous. Power definitely should be nerfed (it wasn't touched by 1.9 and made bows very powerful with the armor nerfs), and Impaling isn't a generalist enchant -- it only affects aquatic mobs, which is super lame. Impaling really should be a generic projectile damage increase or something.

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  • September 15, 2018 11:52
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  Really good idea! But maybe you could combine two enchantments that have a similar effect in the game in a future update.

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  • August 09, 2019 03:06
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  I support this idea! Every time I see one of the alternative protection enchantments in the enchantment table I only think "why would I want that?". A game feature that is supposed to be a choice for the player really should require more thought.

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  • December 12, 2019 05:23
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  I really think this is a great idea!

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  • January 22, 2021 13:25
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  Yeah, one time I fell in lava, and didn't have fire protection, I thought I was a goner.

  But I kind of just... swam to the side and hopped out, ate until I stopped being on fire. I feel like that I should have to opt into fire protection to do that kind of lava-swimming for so long.