Armor skill really worth it?

[Mambus]

Hey guys,

I am currently doing my second playthrough and since skill points are kind of scarce in the vanilla grimrock I was wondering if there is any point in investing in armor skill for my fighter.

Investing in armor skill gives you proficiency with light and heavy armor that eliminates evasion penalty while wearing the respective pieces or armor. The thing is that apart from shield and cloak, fighter dont have much evasion to begin with, so the difference is not that big.

So it seems quite worth it to just wear heavy armor without the proficiency and save 16 skill points. With no shield (no protection, just evasion most of the time), my fighter can serve as a torchbearer as well :>

What do you guys think?

[Jack Dandy]

I forget about it for my tank- Just beefed him up with Vitality, throw every piece of heavy armor I see on him, and he does the rest.

As for the lighter DPS guy, I level him up to light armor proficiency and then cloth him in it.

But to be honest, I think any build can work if you try hard enough.

[Curunir]

For some reason I get the feeling that negative evasion scores (which you will get once you wear armor you're not proficient with), means you get hit EVERY TIME an enemy swings at you.

My Minotaur fighter is completely unskilled in armors and has evasion of about -15, but high protection.
My Human fighter has many points in armors and has good protection PLUS very good evasion.

What I notice is that the Minotaur gets hit VERY VERY often and always dies first. So I suppose the Armors skill is worth it.

[rossman86]

If you're going to use armor then get the skills. Evasion is arguably overpowered compared to raw defense so don't do anything that diminishes your evasion. If you don't believe me, try using an evasion rogue in the front line next to a heavily armored, no evasion minotaur and see who dies first against anything besides casters. And if you can get that lurker set on an evasion rogue, forget it he might as well be invincible.

[Pyros]

Armor is only worth it to unlock the armor types, but it's definitely much better to do that than wear the armor with the skills. If you don't want to put too many points, you could only get the lightarmor one and use chitin armor(you'll have to look for it though), it gives almost plate protection but it's light. You could get heavy armor much later in the game when you've found most of the Valor armor, but to be honest, even in full valor at like 70protection and 30evasion, my warrior was losing more hp than my frontline rogue with 12protection and 80evasion. The only positive is with enough points in sword and a good magical sword, the warrior did more attack damage, but not by much and only when not backstabbing(only 8points in assassination for first backstab bonus on my rogue) or when the sword proced an additional hit(magic sword).

For my hard team I think I'll run double rogues frontline, one unarmed other dagger. I'm just not seeing how to get high evasion on a warrior unless using lurker armor and unarmed, but don't see a point in doing that over doing it with a rogue.

[DJK]

On my second playthrough as well, but for the sake of experiment I started with a maxed out party of 16 in all stats and 50 in all skills for each party member... the snails never saw what smoked them

[mystrdat]

Only as high as heavy armor, but yes, that one is good to have so you don't lose 50 evasion with the Valor set.

[citizengrim]

Interesting tho. Currently playing on hard. Front row mino with eva 15 prot 31 full heavy armor (w/ heavy armor proficiency) and human rouge with eva 39 prot 20.

I notice that my rouge got hit alot more often compare to my mino, even with shield on my rouge.

[Poomermon]

I think weapon skill is more important than protection. The faster you kill your enemies the less you take the damage. That said you can use your skill tomes for your fighter to get both max weapon skill and heavy armour proficiency. My end game fighter has 27 evasion so putting extra points to armour can be beneficial. You also get +20 health and +1 protection from armour skill.

[Darklord]

I think weapon skill is more important than protection. The faster you kill your enemies the less you take the damage.

I agree, my Dodgy Rogue hardly ever gets hit, but he doesn't really do much damage.

Daniel.