[trevius]

Well, I find from my testing that the problem is actually caused by the range from min and max damage if you have it set to a small 30% difference, they will almost always be hit for the min damage. But, if you set it to a big 80% difference, they will still get hit for a good range of damage.

To adjust for players with high AC, you just raise the NPC's STR up really high and it will consistently hit harder and won't be hitting for the min very often. So, if you set min to 200 and max to 2000, you would probably want to set the STR around 1500 or so depending on the AC your players should be having for that encounter. With the min being that low, players won't be hit for min very often even after factoring AC, Discs, AAs and Shielding.

My point is that adjusting shielding in the way that it sounds like KLS has planned, won't really fix the problem some admins are seeing. If they have the encounter set wrong with a small min/max difference, they will be hit for min damage every time and if they use shielding or stonewall after KLS makes the new change, I believe they player would be getting hit for the same lower than enforced min damage every time.

Server admins have to set their encounters properly for them to work right. That is why I suggested a new tool be created to help calculate mob stats and DPS vs players for the old and new combat systems (under dev tools section).