Armor Usage

[Elystole]

Here's something odd I've noticed about armor usage: While I stopped learning armor usage when wearing soft leather, rigid leather, leather scale, or brigandine at around 250 ranks, I continued to receive the armor penalty to my rolls.

This has resulted in the frankly awkward situation where I'm going around in mail and plate to train armor usage in the hope that one day I can return to wearing lighter armors and not see my skills penalized so severely. I'm not sure if it is a bug or a design decision, but I thought I should point it out as I would think that so long as the chance of failure was fairly high then we would continue learning the skill.

[criticalfault]

I can't say for sure, but if this system is working the way i believe it is. You'll never undo all of the penalty. Armor use just gives you the lowest possible penalty. So say soft leather is a -25% unskilled, even the most skill person (with 1000s of ranks) would bring that down to -5%, while full place mail could have -90% but cap at a -20%. Each armor as its more protective, would then have a higher "lowest penalty". This keeps people in full plate mail from matrix dodging attacks and having premo soaking capacity. Again I'm not positive, but I think this is what I've seen with armors.

[Elystole]

I was thinking that it is a skill check of your armor use versus a target for your armor so the higher your skill, the better your chances of succeeding. You'll never be 100% in the clear just like how even though my defenses outclass my opponents they still occasionally get a hit in. More what I'm commenting on is that the skill cap for the lighter armors seems pretty low compared to the chance of failing that roll.

Then again, I'm still not completely sold on the idea that the damage absorption offered by the lighter armors is worth the encumbrance and skill penalty. I'm sort of training armor use in the hopes that drakolin scale will be worth it. This is something that I wish I had more data for.