What type of armors are good for what type of characters?

[Katie]

I'm trying to understand how the recovery time affects how my character plays. Is it safe to say that you equip tanks with heavy armor and casters with light armor - and it will just work out? Or is there some hidden mechanics that make the obvious sort of setup work less well than you think it will.

Obviously, I want my casters to wear as good of armor that is required to not die - I'm not sure what DR is a good number to reach for though. But I also want to be able to spam spells.

[MTV]

For heavy hitters. Like guns and two handed. You want the best armor you can get. The attack speed is already slow. So it doesn't make that much a difference.

For faster weapons like bow and spell spam. You want light as possible. I typically like to give even my spammy classes at least medium armor. They go down too easy in light gear.

[Mormacil]

Depends on what they do. Against teleporters like shades and some rogues you might want to stick your casters into heavy armor. They tend to go for the lowest HP party members regardless of armor and can get around your tanks easily. But yes heavier is slower, has more an effect on fast actions then slow ones.

[Gregorovitch]

This is a matter of personal preference and may depends on your party make up and play style. Couple of points to consider:

The armour recovery penalty applies only to recovery time, not action time, so if a set or armour says 50% penalty this does not mean 50% more time from start of first action to start of second action, it means more like 25% more, give or take, but it also means that characters wielding fast weapons like daggers and rapiers are more affected by armour penatly than characters wielding 2H swords for example since a greater proportion of total attack cycle time for fast weapons (or spells actions etc) is taken up by recovery time.

My own experience, although I am sure there are those who will disagree, is that if a mage like Aloth is caught by some brute of a troll they have probably had it anyway whatever armour they are wearing so i always had them in robes for the casting speed bonus. I admit if I had the bottle to play ironman I might change my mind about that though!

Characters built for high interupt definitely benefit from light armour as they basically get more hits in that potentially cause interupts on the enemy. My dual wielding rogue for example was almost indestructable one-on-one in melee becasue she had most of her victims pretty much permanently interupted unti they were dispatched.

[White Knight]

Short answer...I don't know.

I found that lightly armoured charcters got beat down so badly and so often that they were almost pointless having around. My tanks obviously sought out the thickest and heaviest armours they could get. My spellcasters eventually wound up with the unique, enchanted medium armours I found along the way. Rangers and druids tended to go with light chainmail or thick hide, etc.

Speed was not an issue for me. Dying less and not having to rest as often, were.

[Lyle]

My personal rule of thumb:

Tanks - Heavy
Pure damage or casting - Light
Hybrids - Medium

Then depending on the character stats you can tweak it up or down further.
With high Perception and Resolve you can afford to use lighter armor.
With a high dexterity you might get away with using a notch heavier, if you feel squishy.

And then lastly you got the looks ofc. Not to be dismissed. Looks can override the above points if awesome enough :)


Since you are not locked into specific armor classes you can try out a few different sets and see what suits your team best. Loot often provides free samples.