[2021] Feedback: Heavy Armor, Light Armor (and their skills)

Originally posted by JimmyIowa: The book helps, but it's only helps the mobility penalty, not all of them. And only when in combat.

It doesn't improve stamina regen, or noise in heavy armor. The stamina regen issue is very significant if you are a melee player both sprinting and striking in combat, especially on horde night. Running out of stamina even once is absolute death for the melee player on horde night (can't swing, AND can't run, byebye). So light armor is a life saver. And losing 25% mobility outside combat affects how much you can do during the day. You get 25% less done per day, fewer quests done while moving slower.

Basically the idea is losing 25% general mobility, being noisy, and much lower stamina regen, isn't worth 20% extra armor and 5% more crit resist to experienced players. Let's put it this way - I very rarely drop much in health, but I constantly get low in stamina, and always want to move fast. So it's no contest which armor is better, even with all books known.

I suppose for new players who tend to stand still in combat and die a lot, then 20% more armor seems appealing. But for someone who stays mobile in combat, the extra armor is vastly less useful.

Btw - no magazine is more common than others. I hit day 90 in my current game with extremely aggressive daily looting/questing, and was still missing some magazines. It's RNG for any given magazine.

Every extra percent of armor is worth more than the last towards overall damage mitigation. Going from 0% to 1% armor is a 1% reduction in damage taken; However gaining that same 1% when you already have 90% armor is actually a relative 10% decrease on your damage taken. (90-100 = 10, so 1/10 is 1/10th reduction)

So a jump from say, 70% to 90% armor is pretty massive, as it's basically a 66% reduction in incoming damage, comparatively.

Critical resist also, the difference is more like 10%; Which is significant as it's close to a comparative 50% increase over the amount light armor gives.

There are so many ways to manage stamina- Beer, coffee, many of the drinks, mega crush, etc that you can easily make the stamina regen reduction of heavy armor moot; Likewise, you can pick up Rule 1 cardio to offset sprinting stamina costs, pick up sexual trex to reduce melee stamina costs; there's a lot of ways to manage it and do well, to the extent that light armor is not necessity just because it has less reduction.

Also, the impact of armor on the amount you can do in a day is minimal in the long run- The moment you have a vehicle, like 90% of the impact is gone. Prior to having a vehicle, it takes like 3 seconds to unequip your heavy armor before doing the 1km sprint to your destination, and 3 seconds more to re-equip. And, honestly, by the time you're seriously equipping something besides padded armor, you've probably already got a vehicle.


It's all subjective though. I use each armor in it's own right- Light armor when i'm doing a sneak or agility oriented build, and heavy for when I feel like being up in the fray without needing to retreat constantly.

Originally posted by Pulikutya:

Originally posted by Jonnson: ...

This is also correct. We are going to get set bonuses, so it might change, but I have seen those builds. It is also possible to just outrun any bm horde. Either one (or a combination perhaps) can be used successfully. It can also depend on your settings.

The issue that the Heavy Armor perk has less value than its counterpart remains IMO.

Many perks have less value than others. However, Unless you're going into the agility tree, You're not likely to get the light armor perk to begin with. Likewise, unless you go into strength, you're not going to get the heavy armor perk.

Were they both in the same tree, Then sure, They could be judged on equal footing.

But they aren't. You're not going to go hard into a stat tree you have no interest in explicitly for the armor perk. So you're likely going to end up picking up the armor perk that is in the tree you end up investing more in. Similarly, the overall value of a given stat tree impacts the balance of the other perks within the same tree- Strength has several powerful perks in it already, so it's not very surprising that the armor perk in strength is slightly less impactful.

There's also some relativity going on here. Lets say light armor, for example using hypothetical numbers, reduces your stamina regen per second by 1.0 The max level of the perk then lowers this by 75% to 0.25.
Heavy armor on the other hand drops it by say, 5.0, this is then dropped by the heavy armor perk by 25% to 3.75.
Light armor's perk thereby makes an objective difference of 0.75 stamina regen, while Heavy Armor's perk makes an objective difference of 1.25. So really, which one is more powerful here?

Just by virtue of heavy armor having bigger numbers to begin with, it's perk is having a bigger objective impact even though it's listed percentages at a glance appear lesser.

In reality, if heavy armor also dropped heavy armor reductions at the same rate that the light armor perk does, light armor would be obsoleted as the heavy armor post reduction would have stats similar to light armor pre-reduction; and thats before factoring in mods. You'd have all the mobility, all the armor, and all the stamina in heavy armor; No tradeoffs, no 'this is good for this, that is good for that'.

Edit: And to add, Something being overlooked a bit is that you will likely never dodge 100% of incoming hits- So while it is true that dodging = 0 damage taken, Armor's value is for the hits you DO take. And you can dodge perfectly fine in both heavy armor or light armor. The difference is that in maxed out heavy armor when you take a hit, you lose 0-1 hp, while in maxed out light armor when you take a hit you lose 10-20.