Armour

From MUME

Wearing armour lowers damage received. Two numbers are important here: absorb and max. Absorb is the relative % of damage the armour takes. However, the max determines the maximum amount of damage per hit the armour can absorb. If the % of the damage to be absorbed is greater than the max, only the max is absorbed.

Armour Types

The basic armour come in four types: cloth, soft leather, rigid leather, chain mail, and metal.

These types come in three levels (except cloth): normal, sturdy, and fine. Sturdy and fine provide less penalties and more protection than normal, fine being the best.

Cloth

Cloth adds to db (dodge bonus), but has no bonus to armour. Most plain clothes are as good as they can get, but of note are grey tunic (higher than average db) and white robe (db+spellsave).

Leather

Soft leather has low abs percent and low max absorb values. Rigid leather has high abs percent and low max absorb values. Certain leather items gives an offensive bonus, some warriors keep an offensive set for those occasions when high offensive bonus is a must and can switch from metal to leather very quickly.

Chain

Chain mail has low abs percent and high max absorb value. There are also a few other armour items of note. Scale mail has similar max absorb to chain mail but higher abs percent. White chain mail has similar abs percent to chain mail but higher max absorb value. Shining chain mail has lower abs percent than normal chain mail but significantly higher max absorb value.

Metal

Plate armour has high abs percent and high max absorb value. Also of note: metal sets do not have a particular helmet. Good choices of metal plate helmets are a large visored helmet (semi-artifact), a horse-crested helm, a great helm, a spiked metal helmet, or a full metal helmet or ancient metal helmet. Shining plate mail has the highest protection of any of the armour.

Magic Armour and Sanc

The following spells also reduce incoming damage:

  • Armour: Works as a separate layer of absorption. Magic armour has an absorption percent but unlike physical armour it has no max per hit. Rather there is a cumulative capacity, i.e. after a certain amount of damage the effect of the spell will expire.
  • Sanctuary: Sets an upper limit of damage per hit

Miscellaneuous

The way how incoming damage is processed appears to be as follows:

  • reduce by the absorption of the armour spell (if present)
  • the remainder is capped against the sanctuary spell (if present)
  • the remainder is reduced by the absorption of the physical armour

There is a modifier that increases the chance to hit weakly armored body parts vs better armored ones. The modifier depends mostly on the perception stat of the attacker. This mechanism means that the average effect of mixing strong and weak armour is less than the average of its parts, because the weak armour spots are primarily hit. It is thus recommended to wear similar armour on all body parts.

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