Armor Simulator

Armor Rating is not one number you can read off a table: it is a suit's base line, its magic level, its quality, its condition, your shield, a spell and a mastery bonus, stacked in a specific order. This tool builds the suit and shows what actually comes out.

Toggle each influence to see what it is worth on its own. For the model behind it, see Armor and Shields.

The chart plots damage that gets through against the size of the incoming hit. The dashed diagonal is no armour at all; the gold line is your suit. The gap between them is what the armour saves you.

What the chart shows

The line bends. That is the point cap: a single blow can never be absorbed by more points than your Armor Rating, so armour behaves like a percentage against small and medium hits and like a flat subtraction against very large ones. A 50-AR suit stops half of a 40-damage hit but only 50 points of a 200-damage one.

A second limit sits behind it: absorption is capped at 90% of any hit, so nothing is immune.

Reading the influences

• Armor line is the floor. A matched suit's total equals its per-piece base, because the six body slots' weights add up to 1.
• Magic level adds a flat +3 per tier to the whole suit — often worth more than moving up an armor line.
• Durability is the quiet one. At 0 durability a suit is worth half its rating, so a battered invulnerability plate can protect worse than a fresh regular one.
• Shield scales with Parrying and stacks on top at full weight. Parry caps at 100, so a shield is worth about half its base value at most.
• Protection spell adds +1 to +10, scaling with Magery. Against players it lasts only 60 seconds.
• Base Mastery is the big PvM lever, and it deliberately favours light armour: the bonus is level + (80 − AR)/100 × AR × level/10, so it gives proportionally more to a lightly armoured character and nothing extra above 80 AR. Switch the context to PvP and it disappears entirely.

The mana cost of armour

Armour also slows mana regeneration, and this is where a mage's armour choice is really made. Each piece adds base AR × its meditation penalty to your mana tick, divided by 4 across the suit:

A Grandmaster mage (100 Int, 100 Meditation) regenerates one mana per 1.0 second unarmoured. In leather that is unchanged; in plate the tick hits the 7-second cap, which is seven times slower. Bone is the deliberate middle ground — ringmail-level protection while staying castable.

Note the penalty uses the line's base AR, so magic level, exceptional quality and durability do not make it worse. A shield adds its own base on top — except wooden shields, whose penalty fades out as Parrying approaches 100 and is zero at Grandmaster. That is why a mage who wants a shield carries a wooden one.

Caveats

This models the physical armour pipeline only. It does not cover magic damage, poison, the dexterity and meditation costs of heavy armour, or Skill Mastery perks such as Parry's Unbreakability. Use it to compare suits, not to predict a fight.

Related

• Armor and Shields — every armor line, dex and meditation costs
• Weapon Damage Simulator — the other side of the exchange
• PvP Overview — what the PvP flag switches off