How significant are additives?

Having not seen any armor layer, metal sheet, or plate armor crafts, I was curious how much of an impact the 36 armor layers and 12 metal sheets would provide on a full suit of completed plate. I weighted the materials as best I could but made a few mistakes in the process, including leaving out the armor layer of the chest piece.

I focused on physical defense and fire resistance, because, fessors.

It looks like you can get an additional +3–5 physical resistance but the fire resistance is paltry. The physical resistance doesn’t seem like a lot, but going from uncommon to rare with additives is ~44% increase in resistance, from about 11.5 to 16.78. And these numbers don’t include the reinforced padding I accidentally left out.

How much does quality of gear impact stats?

These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt and only looked at as a range, because my sample size is tiny. However, it looks like quality of gear can really impact stats. One thing to keep in mind is that I used the highest quality components as effectively as I thought possible, which meant weighting the chest piece with as many of the best armor layers as possible, and crafting with the best materials.

It looks like the amount of resistance increases 5–15% per grade (poor, uncommon, etc), with less pronounced increases in basic armor.

How superior is this basic armor I’ve been hearing about?

It’s pretty superior right now. There are exceptions, and I have been exploring using mail and leather instead.

There’s one place basic armor is definitely superior. For bards or any role that doesn’t require attack power or support power to be effective, basic armor is indisputably amazing.

For every other role, I do think there are some options.

How does basic armor compare to plate?

Basic armor has significantly higher mitigation than plate currently.

Despite being labeled as plate, the basic armor actually has the stats of mail. Because leather and plate are both balanced around the concept of organic damage resistance, which barely exists currently, mail and basic armor have significantly higher effective mitigation.

Consequently, basic plate offers the highest mitigation in the game currently. With the current stats and meta, the only time I can imagine using plate is when you’re fighting a group that doesn’t include confessors or druids and you need to do more damage or healing throughput. This seems like an incredibly niche case.

How does basic armor compare to mail?

This is a result I didn’t expect at all, but mail may actually be viable in some circumstances.

While it doesn’t have the same level of physical mitigation that plate and basic plate do, it does offer some elemental mitigation, increased sprint efficiency, and the ability to pick up +350 support power and/or attack power.

This support power and attack power translates to significantly higher healing or damage, but it comes at the expense of your survivability. I think a case could be made for going either direction: running mail and both armor passives, or running basic and using those passive slots for something more defensive in nature.

What is the crafting experience like currently?

This research took me over five hours to complete, and while it only required around 80 total crafts, organizing the mats, transferring them between accounts, using a corpse as a trading window, and figuring out a theory to maximize efficient usage of resources was incredibly time consuming.

Assuming everything was pre-planned and organized, a rough estimate is that would cut the time required to about 25%. I understand that it’s a design decision to make specialty, one-off crafting require a lot of time. What I don’t know is how all of this will work with factories, mass production, blueprints and vessels.

I haven’t dug in here yet. Will crafting only be accessible to those with a metric ton of free time?

Do armor crafts have similar leverage points to weapons?

Most weapons have a few components that provide more leverage for your investment. For example, on two handed maces, only two pieces have an impact on PCM, and they aren’t the head, which is the most expensive component.

With armor, there also seems to be leverage points, but it requires more research. The metal sheets are very time consuming to make, whereas treated steel and coal were proportionally very low investment. Likewise, the copper in the last stage is easy to make blue or purple as it’s only a stack of ~10, and I’m presuming that it’s weighted equally.

I’ll be adding this sort of subjective metadata to the JSON project for crafting recipes that I’m working on.

The material types for the metal sheets are probably irrelevant at this point because the stats are so low. There were a few other crafts where the materials were not relevant as well.

What does sprint efficiency translate to?

One of the primary numbers on gear is sprint efficiency, but it wasn’t clear to me exactly what this did or whether higher was better. Logically, it made sense that plate would have a lower sprint efficiency but how much does 5.5 translate to?

To figure this out I recorded a video and took timestamps at the start and end of sprints. It seems that leather and mail provide roughly 8% longer sprints than plate and basic.

How much additional healing do the armor passives provide?

The matching plate/leather/mail minor disciplines provide 350 support power, but they aren’t usable when you’re wearing basic plate. However, basic plate has the best mitigation in the game at this point. How much healing is sacrificed when using basic plate?

Healing with just normal orbs resulted in a 29% increase in healing from 350 support power, and additional support power seemed to scale linearly up to around 1,000.

I intend to dig more deeply into the healing stats after the next patch. At present, field surgeon and standard bearer are very broken.

Thanks

TaCktiX for editing this post and being a style nazi

Tark for helping out with mats and providing the leadership buff

Anhrez for contributing mats and always being happy to help and answer questions

Jah for contributing a bunch of mats and discussing theorycrafting ideas and questions

Littleone for interrupting a game in-progress to help out

Xarrayne and Malefric for proofing the content and making stylistic suggestions

Scree, Michael and the Stealthed and Malekai teams, for building a group of theorycrafters and programmers who value open source and are working together to build what ArtCraft can’t get to immediately.

It was the Guild Doctrine post’s tendrils that finally hooked me into Crowfall after being a patient observer since Kickstarter.

And the other people who contributed much-needed mats when the campaign worlds were down. Couldn’t have done this without you all!

Additional Reading

Technology: Server Questions

Capture the Flag: July 9th, 2017