Best Equipment (and sword) in Game

[renoraider]

Managed to finish a game, barely alive. What was the best equipment you guys got? I stuck with a decent level celtic helmet, a short chainmail, some nice rank 6 greaves, and a free sword I got in the third campaign after capturing a convoy guarded by Philip's heavies. Turned out to be the best sword I've found in the game, 6 smithing rank and 8 material rank.

Having high int makes the convoy capture easier while high virtue made it so the blacksmith crafted it for free after telling my chara the metal I found (consul gifts it to you so opinion might be involved) was valuable stuff.

[Elna]

Yeah, that sword seems to be the best one. Once you can safely kill all those captains and chieftains I pretty much stopped buying new sword and just took improvements from their dead bodies. You can also get at least 2 lvl3 chainmails from those fights, so once you can afford to start with the short chainmail there is really not much of a reason to buy anything else. For Helmet i like to stick with Celtic one aswell, preferably a 2awa one. You can either buy a lvl3 2awa for ~120 coins sometimes, or get lucky and win some foot race for the helmet of a dead comrade and earn a lvl4 2awa one. Greaves i've personally never really cared about. Legs are even harder to hit than arms and if you don't heavily mess up there should really be no need for them.

[renoraider]

I tried a new game while using a trainer. The highest tier I managed to get was a lv 6 greaves, level 5 chainmail and level 4 helmet. Most of the time merchants give you level 3 stuff, with occasional 4 and a rare 5. The highest I ever got was the lv 6 greaves and even then only that one time. Mind you that was even after I froze the time and with max stats already. So yeah, it's often better to get just decent equipment (lv threes) then scavenge anything better.

[thebadman]

You can sometimes get better sword from market, but swords better than 4/4 are very, very, very rare.

Chillax has best headgear and greaves in terms of cover, if you have high virtue you can be awarded high quality greaves with 0 quickness penalty from foraging minigame.

Best mail is probably shop one with highest arm cover?(Though we do not see how much cover is ignored by enemy weapons, it might be better to go with +cover to legs after all for ~50% cover there.)

Sword from caravan iron is usually best in game, second is chillax sword then one of many officers you slay or from shop if you have high enouth INT+AWA to roll good swords.