Adding a helm will give you all the penalties and none of the benefits except head protection of chain hauberk.

~Paul

Armor accessories are only good if they're for RP purposes or they provide some benefit beyond just being armor. For example, a rogue might want flaring leg greaves for sweeping or gkicking. There's a gorget (neck armor) that casts Song of Mirrors. There are vambraces/bracers from the Erithian boat in Velathae that provide stat and skills bonuses to TWCers, hurlers, and brawlers. Otherwise, armor accessories are worse than body armor in pretty much every way.

Oh dear! Your answers, Dan and WYN, made me cringe. My main wears a helm, gauntlets and boots of rolaren as part of her RP. They are a matched set, much prized many years ago. She's also in plate with 148 armor ranks. Is she hurting herself a lot with the accessories, or can she keep her RP going?

A couple of extra pounds of weight to fit your RP isn't that big a sacrifice. Since you're already in full plate, you're not trying to bump up AsGs with tack on pieces.

My casters use those HCP helms from an event which saves me needing to spend like 30m trying to find some 7x-8x HCP doubles. (since I care most about headshots)


The Nalfein Kitten

So let me see if I have this straight .... If you want to be in better coverage but are poor you can boost it by using accessories and that cuts the price down for those of us who don't have 30 million silvers sitting around to buy the better armor? But if you can only wear hauberk, say, then adding a helm or something will bump you up into an armor category that you aren't trained for?

Which would also presumably mean you need to know what accessory actually boosts you. Is there an article or a chart on Krakiipedia that might make sense of all this? I find the armor charts with their round time adders and action penalties etc. highly confusing.

Also ... My main's boots are actually armor, not footwear, so am I correct in assuming that counts in the encumbrance thing if not the armor hindrance thing?

>So let me see if I have this straight .... If you want to be in better coverage but are poor you can boost it by using accessories and that cuts the price down for those of us who don't have 30 million silvers sitting around to buy the better armor?

Kind of.

>But if you can only wear hauberk, say, then adding a helm or something will bump you up into an armor category that you aren't trained for?

Not exactly. Keep reading.

>Which would also presumably mean you need to know what accessory actually boosts you. Is there an article or a chart on Krakiipedia that might make sense of all this? I find the armor charts with their round time adders and action penalties etc. highly confusing.

Yeah, there are several. The most straightforward one to start with is actually in the "Art of the Bow" article; go figure:

http://www.krakiipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Bow_%28guide%29#Armor_Crit_Divisors

Note the "AG Name" column and the "Coverage" column. (The letters in the Coverage column stand for Torso, Arms, Legs and Head). You'll see that in any give armor group, each successive sub-group covers more of the body. When you are wearing a base armor and add an accessory to a body part that is not covered by your base armor, then all of your armor hindrance (spell hindrance, maneuver penalty, roundtime adder) are bumped up to that of the lowest armor sub-group in your base armor's group that covers the location where your accessory is worn.

Examples: You are wearing a leather breastplate (armor group scale, sub-group 9, covers the torso only). If you add arm greaves to this, you will be hindered as if you are wearing curibouilli leather, as it is the lowest scale armor sub-group that covers the arms. If you are wearing augmented chain (chain, sub-group 15, covers torso, arms, and legs) and add some leg greaves, your armor hindrance will not change at all (you'll merely gain the added weight of the leg greaves) because your current base armor already covers the legs. Back to the leather breastplate, but this time you put on a helmet. Now your armor hindrance will jump all the way up to that of brig (sub-group 12), because that's the lowest scale sub-group with head coverage.

If all you're concerned about are the physical (i.e., non-spellcasting) penalties of a given armor sub-group, then take a look at the "RT" column of this chart:

http://www.krakiipedia.org/wiki/Armor

Multiply the value in that column by 20; that is how much Armor Use Skill is required to minimize the physical penalties of a given armor sub-group.

Now, as for the benefits of armor accessories: Adding armor accessories to uncovered locations raises the crit divisor in those locations to that of the base armor (for the arithmetic phobic: it protects those areas slightly better). It does not change your AvD or CvA. Adding unspiffy armor accessories to already covered locations gains you nothing. Adding spiked, flaring, padded, etc. accessories anywhere allows you to gain the spiffy benefits of that particular accessory in that particular body location (e.g., wearing a flaring helm allows for the chance of an armor flare on a headbutt). These do not always stack or add in completely perfect ways if your base armor already is spiffy in some way.

-Dan