Armor Is Useless: Difference between revisions

== [[Video Games]] ==

* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'' games ''Morrowind'' and ''Oblivion'' a character's protection depends more on his skill with armor class rather than the armor itself, though despite that NPCs are almost always armored appropriately. This includes the existence of "Battlemage" profession, military mages wearing heavy armor. NPCs will occasionally [[Lampshade Hanging|reference this trope]] if the player asks them for advice. You're warned not to judge how tough a fight will be based on the amount or quality of your opponents armor or weapons, as the really powerful characters don't need these things to kill you.

* ''[[BioShock (series)]]'' 2. Yes, you are wearing a suit that can withstand pressure at the bottom of the ocean. No, that won't help against a gun. Or a wrench. Or fire. Or anything else, for that matter.

* ''[[Metal Gear]] Online'' lets you customize your player characters, where you have the option of giving him/her combat armor or helmets, but these are merely aesthetic accessories, and have no effect on how much damage you take. You still take as much damage as shirtless male characters or bikini-clad female characters.

** Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins has a variety of armors, most of which can take more than one hit. The trouble happens when you ''need'' a certain armor that can take only one hit to get past a certain point (especially the Angel Armor), meaning that once you lose the armor, you're hosed. Two ways, in fact.

* In the anime-themed PC game ''[[Shogo: Mobile Armor Division]]'', the enemies come in many varieties, some sporting basic uniforms, others power armor, and still others ten foot tall mini-mechas. The difference that makes in their durability is negligible: 100, 125 and 150 health points. All forms die to a single shotgun blast or a short burst from an assault rifle.

* While armor ''is'' quite important and tends to provide benefits other than sheer protection in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', these values don't necessarily correlate with the ''amount'' of armor. [[Breast Plate|Females get away with much less armor in general]], and an Eyepatch provides just as much protection as a full plate helmet, as long as it's given the same armor class. Another weird instance is the druid's bear form, which, despite not showing any armor whatsoever, magically ''quintuples'' the armor rating of his equipment, enabling the usually rather fragile, leather-wearing class to be a very capable tank which outranks full plate warriors and paladins in terms of sheer physical damage reduction (however, they can't use shields to block or weapons to parry, and have a rather limited array of abilities).

** In addition, Armor Is Useless when fighting elemental enemies whose elemental damage ignores armor, as do spells. Which kinda makes sense to some extent; getting hit by a fireball will probably melt you the same regardless of the thickness of what you're wearing—it may even be worse with metal armor if it's hot enough—but considering how the fire came from a flaming boulder, and therefore part of the damage is blunt force trauma, there's many types of magic for which you must scour your brain for the reasoning of how it damages someone, in that you'll survive a fireball from someone around the same level around you, despite how it's hot enough to ''set a boulder on fire'', which makes it kind of like a meteor...

* Armor in ''[[Might and Magic]] 6 - 8'' is only as good as three things: Your skill with the armor in question, The abilities of the enemy you're fighting, and how good your Repair Skill is. Given how many late game enemies had abilities that (a) ignore armor class and (b) break armor, you may as well rely entirely on magic resistance once you reach the [[Lost Technology]] section of the games.

** Leather armor is ''slightly'' more useful than the other armors - every class that ''can'' use armor can upgrade the leather skill to a level where this is no disadvantage to having one on, which meshes well with that it, as all armors, can carry useful bonuses that have nothing to do with armor class (there are no non-armor options for the torso slot), and in 7 and 8 the Grandmaster bonus applies even if the armor class does not.

* ''[[X-COM]]: Enemy Unknown'', mostly. The first armor you develop occasionally saves from getting their faces imploded - more often against the weaker weapons - and instead leaves them in dire need of first aid on the field and time in the infirmary when they return.<ref>Thus doing exactly what reasonable armor can be expected to do in real life; making what would have been fatalities into living casualties.</ref> It's another major development. When you make later [[Powered Armor]], a soldier hit where it's thickest, has roughly a 2/3 chance of surviving one hit from the alien weapon most common in late game. Of course, they are fond of firing full auto... What would be rejected in most games is here a crucial improvement from losing half the squad on nearly every mission.

** Tricky players note that advanced armor makes Auto-Cannon with high-explosive (and incendiary, but it's generally weak in this game) rounds an amusing close combat weapon, and that its flying version reduces Chryssalids from nigh-invincible instant death machines to mostly harmless. (While it also makes Silacoids completely harmless, [[Goldfish Poop Gang|that's not really a downgrade for them]].) The sequel ''Apocalypse'' has much stronger armor.

** ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'': The only "armor" you can buy for any character is "bangles," which are essentially large, heavy bracelets. You can see the characters wearing them, and occasionally even making motions as if they are trying to block or deflect attacks with them. As for how well this works... the way the game calculates damage means that defence stats in general aren't really worth the effort to improve (the most effective armor work by halving damage from physical elements), a glitch means that mdef ignores what armor is supposed to contribute to it, and you can cause your defence to role over if you raised your stats high enough.

** ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'': While most ''Final Fantasy'' characters equip armor, even if only in inventory, here characters do not wear armor, visually or no. In-universe they're covert operatives who often go undercover, and wearing heavy armor would blow said cover pretty quickly. Besides, with Guardian Forces and junctioned magic, they don't ''need'' it.

** ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'' has this rule too, to a certain extent. Nobody wears armor, aside from the crusaders, who are practically the ''[[Redshirt Army]]'' of Spira. Any playable character in the entire game, however, can only equip a weapon and an arm-guard.

** ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]'': Subverted in the opening sequence. Some poor sap had a gaping hole in his armor, right in front of his throat. Three guesses where he was shot, and the first two don't count.

* In ''[[City of Heroes]]'', your powers are completely divorced from your appearance, so armor really ''is'' useless. At least for protection, anyway. If you choose to wear armor, it's typically for conceptual reasons or looking cool.

* In ''The Siege of Avalon'' Anthology, the action takes place in a castle under siege, which had run out of good quality steel months earlier. Consequently, the armor and weapons coming out of the armory are pretty much worthless—one soldier calls them "tin swords and paper armor," and one of your earlier optional quests is to locate a cache of steel in the ruins of the town outside (though you only get a sword, not armor, for completing it). The real determining factors of whether you survive are how many hit points you have, how quickly you heal, whether you heal yourself using magic (and how good you are at it), and how many hits you actually take. Even the enchanted armor you can pick up toward the end of the game is more useful for the enchantments than the armor they're attached to.

* None of the possible PCs, or your companions for that matter, wear armor in ''[[Jade Empire]]'', and it doesn't affect their defense at all, although amusingly several incorrect descriptions of you by enemies describe you wearing head-to-toe suits of armor.

* ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'' was based on the D&D ruleset, so armor was completely useless for around half of all possible characters at higher levels and only moderately useful for the other half.