Forever a Pretty Princess? Armor question.

[Suzaku]

I have a Dragonforged Set of Queen's Clothing, and no matter what gear I seem to loot and Dragonforge, it simply can't even get close to matching the durability of my dress.

I've been pushing my way through hard-mode BBI (not getting very far, but I beat Gazer), and just returned to Everfall moments ago after defeating The Dragon, but better loot simply doesn't seem to exist.

Am I doing something wrong, or just getting screwed over by RNG? I hear BBI is the place to gear up, but 90% of the time the stuff I purify is just curatives, and the other 10% are random weaker gear.

[Driz McFly]

You'll need to kill and then farm Daimon to get bitterblack armour lv. 3 (he's the fastest source for gear, chests take 3 in-game days to refill). Consult the chart here to see the gear available for your vocation http://dragonsdogma.wikia.com/wiki/Bitterblack_Armor_Lv.3

Keep in mind that for full outfit items like the queen's dress and other related items, you're seeing the sum of all of its parts. Individual pieces at equivalent rarity levels will outscale a full set outfit like that. Also once you go dragonforged and up, armour pieces start offering debilitation resistances as well, which can outweigh a measily 10-20 points of raw magick/phys resistnace.

edit - fixed various grammatical mistakes :P

[Suzaku]

Not sure how likely I am in getting to Daimon in my current state. I was able to beat Gazer, but once I got to the Dark Bishop, I was literally unable to harm him.

Other durable enemies in that island seem to take a while to defeat, which also has me wondering what I'm lacking in offensive capacity, as there are videos/comments boasting kills that take me 5x or more to defeat (for example, I can barely tickle a condemned gorecyclops, but posts on the wiki say "do this and it should die in ~20 seconds". I attempt to follow their example, and end up dead or simply bored after 10 minutes and 1 bar of hp down...)

I did notice that the game compares a single item to an entire outfit. I grabbed all of the best gear I had, put The Dragon down to Dragonforge the entire set, and while the defenses were closer, the pierce/strike resistances were still ~40% lower on the cobbled together wardrobe, not to mention plenty lower debilitation resistances across the board.

[Nicholas Steel]

Originally posted by Thryll:

You'll need to kill and then farm Daimon to get bitterblack armour lv. 3 (he's the fastest source for gear, chests take 3 in-game days to refill). Consult the chart here to see the gear available for your vocation http://dragonsdogma.wikia.com/wiki/Bitterblack_Armor_Lv.3

Keep in mind that for full outfit items like the queen's dress and other related items, you're seeing the sum of all of its parts. Individual pieces at equivalent rarity levels will outscale a full set outfit like that. Also once you go dragonforged and up, armour pieces start offering debilitation resistances as well, which can outweigh a measily 10-20 points of raw magick/phys resistnace.

edit - fixed various grammatical mistakes :P

If only there was a website or program that let you easily see combined totals of multiple individual pieces... then you could easily compare sets of individual pieces against full suits!

You'd think this'd be one of the first mods or tools released for the PC game but alas everyone is stuck thinking fashion matters more -.-

[Driz McFly]

What vocation are you?

[Suzaku]

Originally posted by Thryll:

What vocation are you?

I've been switching around a bunch, maxing pretty much everything. I usually focus on the strider/ranger/magic archer, and plan to probably switch over to Magic Knight, since it was pretty fun when I was messing with it.

I have been able to deal with Daimon once so far, using Strider and spamming Skull Splitter with quad-stacked Tagilus's Miracle. I tried with Magic Archer earlier, but was just getting nowhere, though I have gotten a stronger bow since then, and making use of those +strength/magic potions seems to do very nicely (as I was unaware that Fornaval was such an available source of them).

So in short, I've finally started to see my strength increase, and gear is slowly rolling in. My main issue now is finding an effective rift crystal farming method to purify everything I'm obtaining.

[Driz McFly]

You can add me on steam if you wish! I'll rent your pawn and generate you some sweet RC.

[Suzaku]

Sounds great! I don't know how the whole online thing works, but I'd be glad get any help I can.

[Ta'veren]

Maybe it's because I graduated from Dark Souls Academy, but don't get hung up on stats for clothing.
If you like that awful dress, go ahead and wear it.
Or wear whatever you like, it really has very liitle impact on your encounters, with the exception being resistance to debilitations.

As an example, you might have have 100% stagger and knockdown resistance armor and gear (Strider/Ranger Oblivion set with Hellfire/Balsphemer cloak). Let me assure you the Eliminators will still be able to knock you over and step on your head before bludgeoning you.

So, my little piece of advice. Wear what you like, and makes you like the look of you and your pawn. And play the game, not relying on so-called protection of the armor.

I have every level 3 armor set gold rarified by now, but like the look of a few things (Abyssinal set, Golden Lion top, etc.), and pretty much swap those out as I feel.

Doesn't affect my pawn survivability (still mostly dies from random things like jumping off a cliff, or being hit out to space by those Eliminators, or mostly DEATH come calling with his scythe). She's pretty heardy no matter what I dress her in.
And it doesn't affect my survivability either, because I know the game by now. I only die when I kill myself at disapointing chests.

[Corlain]

Armor probably matters less in hard mode... because you still die in 1 or 2 hits, so if your armor doesn't let you take even one additional hit, then it isn't doing anything regardless of what the numbers say.

[Nicholas Steel]

Originally posted by l_hamalainen:

Armor probably matters less in hard mode... because you still die in 1 or 2 hits, so if your armor doesn't let you take even one additional hit, then it isn't doing anything regardless of what the numbers say.

I survive multiple hits just fine in Hard Mode... also (unrelated to your post) in regards to Fashion being more important, no one can see YOUR character but yourself! Other people can only see your pawn!

[Suzaku]

I can take a fair beating on hard mode with my dress, as long as I avoid non-fire/ice magic attacks. I noticed that when I first swapped out the dress for a full set of random gear, I had some basic goblins messing up my hp pretty quickly, while being stepped on, burned, and tail-whipped by dragons did little.

It really is saddening that it feels like I have very high-tier defenses from a dress that popped up in my bank just for playing, though. I'm doing a bit better in general after swapping some skills around, and getting some decent lvl 2 BBI weapons, and even put Daimon down now. Once I get some gear stacked up, and the crystals to purify them, I'll play dress-up again and see what I can make.

[Fallenliam]

Ok so the dress is a "full body" set. This means you have to actully add up everything you plan on equiping to see how it fairs (if your wearing the set that is). I find armour and m def matter against diffrent foes. While carring two sets of armour would be a nightmare having potions that give me high magic def lets me wear a very high armour and not worry about magic so much. I carry about 5-10 of them depending on where im heading or what part of the game im in. Only chug against monsters who use magic and mack sure i kill them before it runs out.

[Nicholas Steel]

It's very tedious adding everything up, and the game represents stuff with the use of icons rather than text so its hard to actually tell what kinds of benefits the piece is providing you with. The game also fails to display when a stat returns to 0% so you can't easily tell if you've lost something in some cases unless you're very familiar with the icon designs and notice one disappearing in the in-game comparison.

Yes you can look the items up on a wiki but since there's no good website for comparing items you're gonna need a spread sheet or something to consolidate the information for the pieces you're looking at because its annoying having the information of each piece that you're interested in spread out instead of all in a single location.

[Draescan]

Originally posted by l_hamalainen:

Armor probably matters less in hard mode... because you still die in 1 or 2 hits, so if your armor doesn't let you take even one additional hit, then it isn't doing anything regardless of what the numbers say.

Armor helps when you have the HP to supplement it. If you're sitting at around 3k hp and you get hit by the more powerful foes in the game ( Daimon's double arm sweep, Undead Dragon's Bites, Gorecyclopes' mace swings ) you'll almost always be in the need of a strong healing item. It seems at about 5k hp you can take around three hits from them and keep trucking.