I'm nearly done writing a detailed armor guide. It basically agrees with the other posters here. The high priorities are offensive abilities and shock, fire, and freeze resistance.

Yea. Our armor/defense system is basically just non-functional.

First, the defense system has relatively questionable and ill explained mechanics- rather than taking a percentage per hit and absorbing it, the game subtracts out a linear amount of damage that it has prevented. This means that the damage resisted is largely dependent on the number of hits you take, and since that number is typically kept fairly small it's easy for it to become obscure. If the knight dies in 3 hits anyway, why does it matter?

In normal and (I think?) advanced modes as well as lockdown, you have a base defense that's invisible to you, such that any defense lower than some amount is handed to you for free. So if you wear say, half one armor half the other, you get zero benefits in these areas as the game hands you defense until you get to a threshold anyway.

Things like sonic mode then reinforce the above. If you're not explicitly low on health, sonic mode will save you by keeping you at 1 HP whenever you encounter a fatal blow. In the end this works to grant armors that don't protect you considerable defensive prowess. It's why even proto-gear works in T3.

Status resistances aren't much better either- being lit on fire or shocked is a huge detriment. Fire cancels your sonic mode and chips away at your health and breaks your ability to charge while shock makes you very likely to get hit and locked into taking damage repeatedly-- the upside to these statuses being that their resistances scale well. Poison however isn't nearly as bad as either of these- it prevents you from healing and makes your damage a bit worse, but it wears off quickly and does zero damage. It's unpleasant, but not nearly as much as fire/shock and you should almost never be worrying about resisting it. Being frozen is a huge detriment, but also one that's almost unavoidable-- even with tons of freeze resistance, you're more likely to get hit before the timer wears off. The only upside to freeze resistance (and why you should vaguely aim for it on harder areas) is that it prevents you from getting frozen in the first place at times. Curse is by far the most broken however. It's better to resist curse using weapon slots than it is curse resistance, and even then relatively unnecessary on levels that aren't ultimate firestorm citadel.

The armor system itself also makes no sense.

The bulk of armors in the game right now are completely irrelevant to how players play the game today and generally poorly suited for much of anything. The problem is that they don't give the correct buffs and the developers seemed to have not realized just how central offense+utility stats like charge time reduction and attack speed increased are to the game.

Take the typical driver strategy for example- you want to be all over the place, spamming charge shots in and to do that effectively, you need charge time reduction on your guns. The normal hits are good, but they aren't going to be your money maker when it comes to taking stuff down. They require you to stand closer, play more aggressively and won't be doing as much damage in general.

Armors that grant you charge time reduction as a gunner:
1. Padded lines at 5*
2. Mask of Seerus
3. Chaos at 5*
----
4. high tier Trinkets
5. high tier sprite perks
6. Unique Variants that require a considerable # of crowns

Which is to say that you can not, will not, without buying the T2 operation crimson hammer, be able to get handgun charge time reduction to pull off that strategy. Here's a list of handgun lines that are going to be significantly worse prior to reaching 5* and getting that padded, Seerus, UVs, trinkets, whatever up:

Autoguns
Drivers
Magnus/Tundrus
Catalyzers (hardly counts)
Tortofists (really really hardly counts)

This is something that really limits your options and completely changes the way the game is played in T2 VS T3. If you do plan ahead and try for the best possible gunner loadout you're going to be limited up until the moment you reach 5* and get everything heated.

The same is true for sword and bomb users, but with even more limited "options", most of which being traps. Swords really need charge time reduction because it's what makes them tick and for bombs it's literally the only path. Without charge time reductions, you're really stuck with just your sword's normal hits, which are strong but not nearly as strong as that beautiful brandish or divine avenger charge, sweeping everything into oblivion. Bombs are the same way, but without the ability to do anything but charge, and nicer charges.

The armor that we do have, the ones that I said were bad are all things like damage vs slime: med and attack speed increase: low. The defensive boosts that those off armors give are nice and all, but without having some strategy or play style to go along with it, meaningless. You can't just go out and have your strategy be to have a bunch of defense and deal next to no damage, because even if that worked, you'd be leaving your more offensively focused team members vulnerable while you struggle to be useful, launching half as many attacks after walking at half the speed. On top of all that, you've got black kat that have good resistance AND the best offense AND the best utility.

This, is why the only truly worthwhile armors are limited to a handful of class armors and glass cannon sets.

What? Armor is useless? Before a hit and after.

As you can see, I go for high armor despite playing Elite T3. It helps me dish out more damage because I know that the penalty of getting hit isn't so high.

There have been many threads about this over the years. They tend to appear in the Wiki Editors forum, because that is where the nerds of Spiral Knights congregate. Here are some examples, although it's hard to get a simple answer to the question.

http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/71603
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/77945
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/79503
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/94227

My sense, from reading these threads over multiple years and then vaguely remembering, is that damage defense does surprisingly little. (And heat and damage UVs only slightly improve "surprisingly little", and thus are not worth thinking about.) That's why my armor guide prioritizes status resistances and offensive bonuses, like everybody else.

No. That's why the armor guide that I linked in post #3 does not recommend it.

This has been discussed many times, because it's been a "problem" for multiple years. My short answer is: Three Rings needs to change the way that damage is calculated, so that protective armor actually protects.

For example, when you take damage in Chaos, you should really feel it. (The way things are currently set up, Chaos actually has pretty decent damage protection. Only its status resistances are terrible.)

This kind of rebalancing is not easy to do, especially because the balance needs to work for PvE and PvP simultaneously.

I do not play much anymore, but I can safely say that almost all my armors that are used have some kind of buff on them. CTR, ASI, damage, or MSI. I have a few specialty armors for Shadow Lairs or Danger Missions, but those are because protection from the the particularly nasty status combination for those areas outweighs the use of increased offensive stats.

I have a lot of armors... most of them are purely for cosmetic use. Hell, I have an Arcane Salamader set sitting in my inventory that was made 100% for costume because I had the cash and time to run a Lair to make it. Why would I use it over the armors that give a buff of some kind or offer some other useful combination? It has Normal/Elemental defense, standard Fire resist for a 5*, and Slime/Beast low... while Slimes and Beasts deal Piercing making it an incredibly poor choice if you actually wanted those bonuses instead of a generic damage bonus for some ungodly reason. I like the design of it (although I rarely use it) but for what should be a top tier armor due to it being from a Shadow Lair it is exceedingly sub-par.

I have a Shadow Max Dread Skelly set in my inventory as well, and it doesn't see much use either because the damage received while in it from appropriate sources vs the damage I receive in Chaos set from the same sources is not big enough to actually make it more useful unless for some reason I REALLLLLY need the Freeze resist as well.

Also when you take into account that the game emphasizes not getting hit over defense it almost feels like they're aiming for you to go for armors with buffs. You can't get hit if everything is dead.

~Gwen

Haha, yep, I am still around. And I still play, albeit rarely. Even made one of the new guns, Winters Grave. Didn't bother with any of the new armors for above said reasons. I do not see a reason to post usually anymore, as very little new actually comes up.

~Gwen

We see a lot of "stun + other status", but neither the BKC or chaos set has negative stun resistance, so it's easier to look past it. If they were both weak to stun, we'd see them struggling in more places.

I do play for defense, because my playstyle tends to be rather careful (if boring for some). So even if defensive armors are nigh useless, they do make me feel good at least. =D

I do agree that SOME armors are way too specialized for their own good. For example, Silvermail armor line. Shadow/Piercing, poison/curse, Undead High. It's very useful in exactly ONE scenario: Concrete Jungle, where you encounter poisonous slimes and zombies. That, and semi-useful at Graveyards (where you can get inflicted with curse). Both levels are pretty rare to boot.

In general, curse and stun status are so situational they are generally not worth defending against. Usual sources of stun are Lumbers, Gremlin Demos' charged attack, Gremlin Thwackers' throw, and regular Greavers. Only with the latter it's somewhat hard to avoid and thus needs resisting. Same with Curse, you only get it if you use Faust charge a lot, with mobs being either extremely rare or event-only.

Regarding Padded Armor and it's alchemy, um, tree... It's a decent way to plug holes in your loadout (for example, something to wear on shock slimes levels), but it can't be your main armor anyway. Just too much work to cover even the most basic scenarios.

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~Gwen

fixed

Ooh, that's interesting! I never knew! Is it equivalent to the amount LD gives you as well?