PC Question about armor comparison in a19

Tehnomaag

Tehnomaag

New member
Has anyone done an analysis on light vs heavy armor in a19 tier by tier?

If not in which XLM are the armor values stored? in the generic items one?

For background information on why I am asking for it - we have a 5 man game on a 4x4 km mostly desert with zombie speed increased to jog(day)/nightmare(night) and delete all EQ on death plus loot quantity reduced down to 30%. No loot respawn but there is two traders who can reset POI's with quests. Increased wilderness zombies x2 and increased horde size. With these settings death is not a question of "if" but "when". So I have to plan a build that can function basically naked with only low tier self-crafted eq even for higher game-stages. Armor is, obviously, pretty significant consideration because with these settings you are not outrunning some dangers (dire wolves, zombie dogs, vultures have a top speed higher than a player can sustain). Both cities are mostly wasteland/bombed on this map. Tier 1 (padded/scrap) is assumed to be the default armor level, Tier 2 is nice to have, but not standard (sewing kits are rare), Tier 3 is probably not going to happen consistently. Assume zero mods on armor - mods are nice to have but are kinda resource heavy/rare to be relied upon.

I have gone into STR for a start (for a club which can be made out of only 5 wood and baseball bat is 60 forged iron/3 duct tape/30 wood/3 leather) and after I have decent melee skills I'll branch out into AGI (for xbow and Magnum for ranged work, plus some stealth and parkour). Meaning both light and heavy armor perks are an option. 

 
OK as I did not find the infromation I was looking for in the net I looked up the stuff in items.xlm file for a19.

Am I missing something? Am I misreading the XLM file somehow as I'm not done that kind of stuff for 7d2d before? But looking at the numbers I am seriously wondering why on earth would anyone with any ambition to remain even remotely mobile (including ambition to even walk around inside a POI) wear a heavy armor set? The perk tree seems to do practically nothing to mitigate the heavy stamina consumption which is a double whammy, as not only does it leave you less stamina to work with for cracking heads burning a lot more calories even on such a simple task as walking will make one hungry all the time? The light armor tree goes up to 75% reduction in some penalties, while for heavy armor tree the reduction seems to cap out at 25%. 

armors_a19.png

 
That 80% damage reduction turns into 90% with armor mods.. that's 10 points of damage taken from 100 incoming. The best set of military armor with 75% reduction, will take 25 HP. When compared at the extreme, the steel armor is 2.5 times better for DR.

In practice, I appreciate my mobility too much to wear heavy for normal activities, so I mostly just run with padded armor. I do gather a steel set over time, but I usually don't end up wearing it for anything else than horde nights, and that is after I get the Urban Combat book that removes the mobility penalties while in combat...

The only way I can see myself constantly using heavy would be that the mobility granted by padded isn't enough to evade the enemies, ie. using nightmare speeds or some other changes. 0% damage from enemies that can't hit you ... :)

 
you can always mod your items.xml for better protection/less stamina consumption/ more stamina regain etc. I did mod the leather duster to regain more stamina and increase running speed by 20%.

 
Heavy armor is weird because it kind of scales based on your game settings. The extra armor it gives you compared to light armor is mostly irrelevant because the increased speed from light armor is vastly better (you take 0% damage from hits you don't take in the first place and all that), but if you have zombies on Nightmare speed where it's impossible to outrun them without buffs, it flips around to Light Armor being almost completely useless outside of stealth (and for that you just keep a set of level 6 padded armor around, I do that even when I do run Light Armor because it's useful for POI raiding, I keep it in my motorcycle).

Heavy Armor is also better for Horde Nights (since you don't move around much) and if you're not bothering with stealth at all is marginally better for POIs but I typically prefer the movespeed. Personal preference there.

EDIT: Also, as mentioned, the stamina consumption of heavy armor is huge. It only applies to movement stamina drain AFAIK, but that's still pretty big if you're running around a lot. Would recommend keeping a set of padded armor for times when you're running around anyway.

 
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In a normal game, yeah I can see some point in regards of 75% vs 90% damage reduction being a huge difference. For a normal zed that does 20 damage on hit that is 5 damage vs 2 damage taken per hit. 

However, the way it works the difference is much more negligible down in mid range, Padded with its ~35% reduction takes, in the same scenario 13 damage per hit while scrap iron with its ~50% reduction takes 10 damage per hit. While all the penalties are the same as for the steel set! So you take a huge hit to the ability to evade incoming damage fully while only gaining 25% damage reduction over the padded set (vs the extreme 250% difference when well rolled and fully modded tier 3 set). 

Tier 2 comparison would sit, obviously, between these two extremes. 

But it is day 35 and I have seen whole TWO sewing kits. Have couple of Q4 military helmets and a Q4 mining helmet and thats it for notable armor drops. While I have died in that time some 6 or 7 times, each time losing all my armor because of the server settings (full eq delete on death). So for a normal "softcore" game, yeah, maybe at the exterme end when the char is fully kitted out in Q6 fully modded stuff heavy might make indeed some sense in some scenarios. But for that hell I'm stuck in (and enoying it I might add) I'm afraid the light seems to make more sense. Probably even for a horde night, as if one position gets overrun and you need to relocate to a fallback position double speed you will probably need that mobility more than you need the 3 damage difference between 10 vs 13 damage taken in. I might add that the delete-all-on-death makes a huge difference in how the game plays, its like a whole new game. As no longer are you all set when you get that Q6 main weapon or Q6 armor piece. There is an item drain and you will, eventually, lose it meaning there is a motivation to hoard more of them for rainy days when death comes, inevitably, knocking. Also zed's are substantially more challenging, it appears, if you are not rolling around in tier 3 armor set and tier 2/tier3 weapon of choise all the time. Especially at higher gamestages. Have reached GS 60'ish and the ferals are starting to appear in POI's occasionally. For that reason we have started doing larger POI's with 2 man teams. Although as we have also friendy fire on it adds a bit extra danger as you have to keep an eye out to not knock your mate silly when trying to take a swing at incoming zed. 

 
Loosely related, I noticed that the military and steel armor my group and I had accumulated appear to have been nerfed as of today's 19.1 patch.  I had several pieces of military that were 11 armor (one of them was 12) and now they all are all at 10.  All of the are g6 save for the stealth boots I'm using (g5) and those are now 9 armor instead of 10.  Couple of g6 steel pieces we had stored away are now 13 armor instead of 15.

Didn't see any mention of it in patch notes tho ☹️

 
I checked XML and it seems quality now influences armor value, max steel armor at quality 0 is now 11, at quality 6 still 15. Maybe this isn't new, but it is new to me. And there still is a random modiffier.

I don't know if already found stuff is being reset or reshuffled at update but my co-players and I didn't notice this in our current game and I think I looked at armor values on a few occasions. So ???

 
steel armor  for pvp... military for pve

thanks for the xlm ..i was still tryin to figure out why a 15 armor piece give me 16 ... i just understood 15.6 can exist  😛

 
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