Fencer Archive

What armor is good for fencers? Im always in battle and dont know if what I have is good enough.

Different armor does better against different attacks. Without knowing if you fight players or beasts its impossible to reccomend what kind of armor to wear. So what do you fight?

I don't wear armor. It drains HAM at a rate that just doens't make it worthwhile for us. The only time I equip my armor is when I am 1/3 down on my HAM, and can no longer use specials safely... Then I just equip and whack away....

Seena

You might want to look at gloves and boots that give a kenetic bonus. They do not cause a very significant HAM drain and seem to help a bit. You can get very high kenetic from chitin armor and a good armorcrafter can get the bonus as high as 50%. Sliced, the HAM penalty is an ok trade off. I also have a chest piece that I equip when approaching something using a blaster. You can hotkey the armor and equip and unequip it asneeded. Be sure to unequip it while resting. It slows HAM recovery a good deal.

Personaly, I use a set of low HAM Mabari and Tantel(boots/chest). My encumbrances are under 150 for mind and health and under 200 for action.I can make up for this deficit quite easily just by ingesting the types of food/drink available to a tier 4 artisan.

I won't lie and tell you that the protection this armor provides is awesome. It isn't... in fact it's pathetic! But in PvE vs. creatures, most of which seem to have an AP 0 attack, it helps out loads for damage mitigation. That 50% reduction in damage from AP0 attacks really makes life easier against say, a Desert Squill.

There's one problem with this armor combo right now though that really ticks me off, and that is that Mabari and Tantel armor protection stats (and worse, those very very expensive personal shield generators)sometimes randomly change when you log in after a long absence or change zones. As long as this doesn't affect Kinetic Damage(which it does, all too often) I use this armor. Hopefully the Devs will get around to fixing this GAME BREAKING problem someday but until they do logging in to find my armor stats un-borked is like winning the lottery.

Oh yeah. Against tougher foes I'll equip a nice little MK1 shield generator, and combined with my armor it REALLY takes the hurt out of those AP0 attacks. Shield gnerators act like a layer of armor on top of a layer of armor. So against AP0 attacks you'll get the 50% damage reduction TWICE, assuming of course that your buggy ass armor and shield generator are working against kinetic damage that day. >

One last thing. Don't even bother trying to use bone armor enhanced with Voritor hide/scales against critters that do kinetic damage. I found out the hard way that it doesn't work! Wonderful ain't it? The armor says it has 4 or 6% kinetic protection in theory but in practice it will absorb NO damage from kinetic attacks. pisses me off. Oh well, at least I got crafting experience for making the armor.

Thror thanks for the addition. I have a set of mabari that I do not use much because I cannot fit all the pieces on my hotkeys. I did not even consider the penalty to damage from armor class. I will have to experiment with this. Does anyone know how you can take advantage of nightsister armor plates?

Thanks for the response, i do alot of pvp, pve, and hunting. As leader of a guild your expected to do alot I have a chitin plate, legs, gloves and boots, 25% knietic, seems to work okay, just didnt know if any other armor is okay. Composite or marine is too heavy for us? or is the encumbrance that hurts us? I know when to switch armor and what is good for when, just looking for something good against pvp, blaster shots, and when hunting, how to help those huge hits, i hunt big game. thanks again for all the support, really gettin into the game. Any fencers are welcome to join the Space Pirates on Kauri. Look forward soon to a battle squad of nothin but fencer/ch's.

Sethlin Netril

Space Pirate Inc

Kauri

I have a full set of Ubese with around 50% kinetic resist. It does wonders. Yesterday with my 2h-curved sword (I'm testing out swordsman as well), and only 2h III, I killed a narglatch hunter solo for 3.4k xps (a whole 1/20th of the xps I needed for the next 2h level). I have medic skills, but I didn't even need to use them. Most whites do less than 20 damage to me. I carelessly wade in to lairs full of whites and yellows and basically don't worry at all about damage. Also with swordsman III I took out a lair that was popping out whites and reds. The reds were doing a whopping 35 or so damage per hit.

Yes, you have to tone down your special usage. At lower levels of fencer you're probably using a vibroblade anyway and so the special HAM usage is minimal anyway. I like ubese because you can get some really impressive kinetic resists (I basically only fight kinetic damage dealers, it's not that hard to do) and it looks good. My full set of ubese with these resists cost me around 30k on Eclipse. I've had it for a long time and the wear and tear isn't that bad. The jacket is about halfway gone and the rest of the stuff is 20% or less damaged. A new jacket will only cost me 5.5k.

I even had very good results wearing just a jacket and pants. That helped a lot when I first tried it with crappier armor (only like 30% kinetic resist), but I found that I was still taking a lot of damage when I got hit in other places and when I got a full set of really good armor I improved quite a bit.

So armor rocks -- but you need to know how to use it.

---
StGabriel

If they ever get it to workcorrectly Voritor enhanced bone armor protects against both energy and kinetic damage (as well as electrical and restraint). The good thing about bone is it's cheap as hell and has piddling encumbrance. If they ever get around to really and truely fixing armor layers I'd go with voritor bone for soloPvE hunting any old time.

As it stands right now, chitin and ubese are probably the "best" general use armor for melee. But I'm a HAM w h o r e so I don't tend to use it.

I wear/use only decent Ubese gloves and boots. I don't know many people in-game. Fencers aren't in high demand...most people who even remember me know me as a Doctor, so I don't know who to go to for good armor. But I'm considering going for a really suit of Ubese since the numbers on them defensively look pretty good...plus the armor looks tight also. But before I hit Novice Fencer, I didn't wear any armor at all. The benefits (i.e. looking cool) simply didn't even equal the penalties..style has it's merit, I'll be the first to say, even I have my limits.

It'd be so much easier if there were a set of armor that was geared for melee users moreso than ranged. And I mean in terms of reasonable HAM penalties as opposed to the resistances the armor offered.

I managed to wiggle on a whole suit of advanced composite and i am not going to take it off...my hand to hand seems the same to me and i take less damage from lasers.

Honestly in PvE, armor is the way to go. And since i am normally fighting creatures, my 50% kinetic bonus Chitin armor rocks. I have tried it both with and without with variety of my weapons and have found that as long as you are not spamming specials, or have a TOTALLY wack weapon, HAM costs should not be an issue. And when we are grouped i find that I AM normally the tank for the group, and that is the way i like it because i can get my licks in on the creature, and not have to run around (and thus be unable to hit) the thing if it is aggro on a ranged fighter who just starts kiting. Now fighting without my armor I have found is just a quick way to die. I admit the HAM costs for specials is much more reasonable then, but the damage you sustain from single target (yellow con or higher), or multiple weaker critters (white cons) will take you out of the fight rather quickly. When more than one target presents itself it becomes a real issue. But this is just what I myself have found to be the case.

I agree Ximma. My 60% kinetic chitin is absolutely fundamental in my playstyle. My entire argument relies on this example:

An enraged kimogila hits you for 1290 damage!

Your Chitin Armor chestplate absorbed 954 damage.

Plus most pieces were sliced about 1/3 off encumb. So I have decent regen rates even with the full suit on. The vblade works very well for keeping the target blinded and bleeding, and falling when they try to run away. Armor is worth it if you adapt your playstyle to it.