Armour Protection System The protection system is what you see when you do an 'eq'. This protection reduces the damage you take. Protection is affected by a number of factors: - Your skin (racial protection). - How much armour you are wearing. - The types of armour you are wearing. - How many 'slots' your body has. - The protection spells you have in force. - Your skills (Combat sense) - The type of attack are you getting nailed with. Racial protection is always there and gets added to any other protection you might have directly (armour and protection spells). Armour is factored in by seeing how many 'slots' or body locations a player has, which of these slots are covered with armour and how effective each piece of armour is. Armour protection is not directly added to your protection value. Unlike most other MUDS, you do not have an Armour class (AC) which increases by then same amount for each player when they wear a specific armour. Here, when you wear an armour, it protects based on how much of your body it covers. For races with more slots, this means the armour will cover less of their body and protect much less. Races with more slots will need to wear more armour to gain the same protection as a race with fewer slots. The bottom line is you want to cover ALL of your slots with armour to get the maximum protection you can achieve. Just wearing a super breastplate isn't going to help when your arms/legs/head go unprotected, and if you have more arms etc... well, there will be more unprotected areas that critters can hit easily. Armour protection is very heavily based on the types of armour you wear as well. Multi-slot armors protect MUCH better than wearing single slot armours covering the same slots. (For example, A suit of full-plate will protect much better than wearing boots, leggings, breastplate, gloves arm guards, and a helm). Multi slot armours also withstand damage much better because they are big, and are easy to repair since its one armour piece rather than a lot of smaller ones. Spells are also a critical factor in protection. Conjurers, Druids, and some of other (religious) guilds have spells that will augment your protection. These spells will show their effects in 'eq' just as if you had a suit of magical armour over your own. Note: Magical spells will not let you reach the best protection possible on their own. Armour will not let you achieve the best protection on its own either. You must use these in conjunction to achieve the highest level of protection possible. The skill combat sense enhances one's ability to use protection, both armour and spell enhanced. This is a measure of the training one has had in deflecting blows with an armguard, or sliding to take a slash on the shoulder rather than on your unprotected head, or even (in rare cases) absorbing all of an attack by balancing the attack with your best protected spot. Combat sense is reflected in your 'eq' display. The higher the skill, the better protection you will achieve with the same armour. Tailoring your protection through spells or juducious choices of armours to a type of protection may be helpful when facing specific attack types. If you are going to adventure in an area with predominately sword wielding guards, you may want to boost your cut protection while ignoring the other 3 types. Likewise if you are going to fight creatures that claw or bite, you may wish to concentrate more on stabbing and cutting protection, while reducing your general and bashing protection. There are many attack types. Watching the types of damage messages you get when taking (or dealing) such abuse will help in figuring out the different types, and what types of protection works best against them. Some spells allow large increases in protection against specific attack types at a reduced cost as compared to more general 'blanket' spells. Also, some armour types are designed specifically to deflect certain attack types. Experiment and see. See also: -- help wear -- help compare -- help armour list (this is a good one to read) -- help armour [armourtype] (eg. help armour breastplate)

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