I was wondering if anyone had done some quantitative analysis on how badly different levels of hinderance affect your ability to evade. For instance, a sample experiment:
* Wear enough armor to achieve the desired level of hindrance. Be careful not to wear an arm-worn shield(I believe there's a big where arm-worns are not included in hindrance appraisals).
* Withdraw enough coins to get yourself exactly to the edge of Lightly Burdened, to standardize weight.
* Fight a single creature that you can comfortably dodge at the desired level of hindrance; stance down your evasion to the edge of where you can comfortably dodge it. While doing this, be careful to avoid engaging multiple creatures or letting yourself get far away from solidly balanced.
* Note your current level of hindrance, and how many effective ranks of evasion it takes you to dodge at that hindrance. Repeat the experiment unhindered to establish a baseline.
I would perform such an experiment myself, but unfortunately I don't yet have enough evasion to dodge even rats at the higher levels of hindrance.
It seems hard to make an informed decision about which armor type to use without such information; do tertiary plate armor users face a 20 rank evasion penalty or a 100 rank evasion penalty when maxed for hindrance? Is it a percentage penalty(for example, 90% of raw evasion) or a raw rank penalty? In the first case, the evasion gap would grow as you progressed, which would be very undesirable.
Any information is appreciated.
