Armor and all its things

Armor is based partly on weight, partly on quality, and if I'm not mistaken, its effectiveness is dictated by your hidden defensive score. I could be wrong on that. My strategy is usually to just don whatever shitty piece of crap is most convenient and fits my character's theme and strength score best, and run with it. I miss my character who wore a full set of gith armor.

Armor won't do a whole lot against huge hits. The reduction appears to be a flat amount, so it's way better against smaller hits (yay, another reason why strength >>>>> all other stats) while shaving 5 damage off a hit for 30+ damage isn't that significant. The reduction seems to be affected by defense and possibly agility (or else agility affects defense, nobody seems to know exactly).

Armor is pretty significant in PvE because NPCs roll random stats and often don't hit particularly hard, so you can get a lot of survivability out of wearing heavy armor. It'll let you fight a lot longer before you need to rest, and it's a pretty big deal early on where even crappy animals can beat you up fast enough that it's tough to get some good skillgains before you have to run.

In PvP, it's mostly useless because the things that kill you are huge hits and other shit that doesn't care about armor, i.e. backstab, magic and poisons. You're never gonna die to some guy hitting you lightly twenty times, which is why elves are so godawful. You die to someone grievousing you in the face three times, reeling you on each hit. Helmets do appear to help a lot with stun damage, though, and don't usually weigh much anyway.

The only slots that are really worth wearing armor on are chest, head, neck and wrists. Any more than that is unnecessary, although if you can get to wear pants and sleeves without moving up to the next encumberance level, you might as well do that. With enough strength, you can also wear armored gloves and boots and waist armor, but these slots get hit rarely and have a reduced damage modifier so it's not particularly worthwhile.

There's a few types of back armor, but I don't think you can get hit on your back outside of special circumstances such as being subdued or unconscious, in which case you just die anyway, and backstab possibly targets your back as well but does so much damage that reducing it by a few points is moot. Considering the extreme weight of back-slot armor and the rarity of getting backstabbed, this isn't worth considering.

There's also shoulder armor for some reason which I have to assume does nothing as you can't get hit on the shoulders. They could give some base defense boost, but I find that unlikely. Unless you have so much strength that you truly don't have to pay attention to weight, just wear head, neck, chest and wrist armor, and optionally pants and sleeves if you're a EX-strength human or better.

The helpfile for Defense seems to suggest that a higher defense score makes armor more effective.

On the topic of defense helping armor, i have noticed lately when i hit a random that instead of my attack simply bouncing it said your attack on 'fuckhead #1 is deftly deflected by their 'bracer type bracers'
So it could actually be that it affects it. Or im a wierdo and broke the game

The helpfiles are mostly from a different era of Arm. Pretty much all the code info you can pull from them is good.

It seems like staff have general guidelines to follow when adding new gear, and it's been that way for a handful of years. So newish armors will generally be lighter=less protective and vice versa.
You get some small exceptions to this when they're mastercraft, and when they have exceptional materials.
Older gear likely hasn't been changed, and will still have wildly varying stats. Most of it sucks.
A few things are really really good. This applies to weapons and armor.


Races seem like they have different natural armor scores to me.

I thought it was just their higher endurance, coupled with whatever armor they're wearing, that caused more bouncing blows... right?

Actually, pretty positive that's what it is. Desertman can correct me if I'm wrong, but codpiece-era Gritshaw had AI endurance for a human, and I remember bynners bouncing off his manliness during sparring sessions.

I thought HG endurance, while greater, wasn't as huge as their die rolls for things like HP, stamina and stun would lead you to believe, whereas dwarves get a natural armor bonus. I suppose an interesting experiment would be to make a dwarf warrior, prioritize: end, agi, str, wis, and see how that goes.