Difference between revisions of "User:Jdavis/Armor"

Latest revision as of 19:10, 20 April 2021

This guide helps you plan armor loadouts for play in the Clockworks. It is intended for beginner and intermediate players, although all players may find it useful as a reference.

What Does Armor Do?

Armor does four things: It gives you health, protects you from damage, resists status effects, and grants you abilities. In each of these four aspects, the contributions from your helmet and suit add to produce a total. (Your shield does not contribute; it protects only itself. For more detail, see my shield guide.)

Health

Armor gives you health, which greatly improves your survivability. However, health is rarely a consideration in choosing armor. Almost all armors grant the same amount of health, and the few exceptions are not worth considering strongly. At heat level 5 all armor gains one health point.

Damage

There are four kinds of damage: normal, piercing, elemental, and shadow. Each kind of monster attack contains a specific mixture of these types. Roughly speaking, beasts and slimes inflict piercing, gremlins and constructs inflict elemental, and fiends and undead inflict shadow. However, normal damage is often mixed in. For example, in Firestorm Citadel normal damage is inflicted by Lord Vanaduke, slag guards, and trojans.

Almost all armor protects against normal damage and one other damage type. When an attack hits you, your armor's protections are subtracted from the attack's gross damage to yield the net damage that you incur. For more detail, see Defense.

The overall importance of damage protection is not as big as you might expect. Highly protective armor might let you survive one more hit than weakly protective armor. Also, heat and unique variants improve your armor's damage protection only slightly.

Status

Shock, freeze, and fire are dangerous and ubiquitous. These three statuses should be your top defensive priorities — even above damage protection. Stun, poison, curse, and sleep are less threatening or less common.

Status comes in differing strengths. You become immune to minor status around +7 resistance. You become immune to moderate status around +9. It seems that you cannot become immune to strong status, even at +18.

Abilities

Armor can grant four kinds of abilities: movement speed increase (MSI), attack speed increase (ASI), charge time reduction (CTR), and damage bonus. All are generally useful, but their precise value depends on the weapons in use. For example, if you never charge your Dread Venom Striker, then CTR is not very useful to you.

There are four kinds of damage bonus granted by armor. Ordered from worst to best, they are:

• One weapon type against one monster family. An example is Sacred Falcon Keeper's gun construct+2. This kind of bonus is easily replicated using unique variants on weapons.
• All weapon types, one monster family. An example is Deadly Virulisk's slime+2. This kind of bonus can be valuable to hybrid knights on specific levels. However, it can be replicated using unique variants.
• One weapon type, all monster families. An example is Bombastic Demo's bomb+2. This kind of bonus applies to all six monster families, a few special cases (notably Vanaduke), and opponents in PvP. It cannot be replicated by unique variants.
• All weapon types, all monster families. An example is Chaos' damage+2.

Strategy

Balancing Offense and Defense

In choosing armor, your top priorities should be abilities and status resistance. Which one you favor depends on your experience, lagginess, etc. Damage protection and health are low priorities.

Try to obtain at least one piece of "glass cannon" armor: Black Kat or Chaos. These armors offer awesome offense and terrible defense. They are viable because experienced players don't need much defense and can afford status unique variants. Black Kat is hard to get, except for the 3-star helmet, which can be obtained during any Kataclysmic Confrontation event.

If glass cannon armor seems too dangerous, then consider one or two pieces of offensive armor, selected from the Sword, Handgun, and Bomb categories below. If you're hybrid, then mix and match these offensive armors as you see fit.

If you find yourself dying a lot with the offensive armors just described, then frankly armor is not your problem. You need more skill (or a better computer, or less latency to the servers). Be patient when fighting; don't charge into battle recklessly and get surrounded. Consider switching weapons; for example, Brandish-line swords are much easier to use than Cutter-line swords.

If you really want more defensive armor, then consider some of the Other armors below. But the extra defense is noticeable only in specific situations. For example, Dread Skelly is good in Heart of Ice and Dragon Scale is good in Compound 42.

"Just Tell Me What To Get"

The following plan should work quite well for a wide range of players. It offers a mix of offense and defense.

• Start working toward Chaos Cloak.

• Start working toward an offensive helmet based on your preferred weapon. For swords choose Vog Cub Cap. For handguns choose Perfect Mask of Seerus, Shadowsun Stetson, or Sacred Firefly Shade Helm. For bombs choose Volcanic Demo Helm.

• When a Kataclysmic Confrontation comes around, seek out as many black kats as you can. If you are lucky enough to find a Book of Dark Rituals, then you get the 5-star Black Kat helmet and the 3-star Black Kat suit. If you are unlucky, then you can still collect 70 Ancient Pages and obtain the 3-star helmet.

Heating

Recall that heat has only a small effect on armor: one health at heat level 5, slight increase in damage protection, no increase in status resistance, and no effect on abilities. In contrast, heat has a dramatic effect on weapon damage and CTR. Therefore you should heat your armor after your weapons. It's reasonable to keep your 5-star armor at heat level 1 or heat level 5, if Radiant Fire Crystals are scarce.

Unique Variants

Status unique variants can hugely improve your survivability, while damage unique variants have only a small effect. So prioritize statuses — especially fire, shock, and freeze.

Armor by Class

Because offensive bonuses are a crucial consideration in choosing armor, I group armors into four categories: Swords, Handguns, Bombs, and Other. Two armor sets — Black Kat and Chaos — are listed in every category, because they should be considered by every player all the time.

In almost all cases the suit and helmet are obtained identically and enjoy identical statistics. The seven exceptions, marked with * below, are: Radiant Silvermail has no matching helmet, Perfect Mask of Seerus has no matching suit, Divine Veil has a fiend bonus while Divine Mantle does not, and the four Kat armor lines have unusual and asymmetric alchemy paths.

Swords

For sworders, here are the main options, other than Black Kat and Chaos.

• Vog Cub: This is the most defensive Wolver armor. Its elemental and fire defense are frequently useful, especially in Firestorm Citadel. Its ASI helps you interrupt monsters and shield quickly.
• Skolver: The defense is less useful than Vog Cub's. The offense is more useful than Vog Cub's, because blanket damage bonus cannot be achieved through unique variants.
• Snarbolax: This armor is like Skolver with more useful defense. It is the best of the Wolver armors. But you can craft it only in the Shadow Lairs, so it is not easily accessible.

Handguns