Bone Armor skill

The Bone Armor skill determines your ability to manuever in and protect yourself while wearing Bone Armor.

Usage

Simply WEAR one or more pieces of Bone Armor in combat to learn this skill.

Training Strategies

The bone armor that is currently available protects primarily against slicing damage. Hindrance for Bone armor lies somewhere between heavy chain and heavy plate. Stealth hindrance for bone lies between leather and light chain. Protection against piercing damage is not good and is terrible versus impact. High hindrance and poor overall protection makes bone armor's usefulness extremely limited as most slicing attacks are coupled with impact damage.

Notes

Bone armor is generally any armor that's not made primarily from metal, leather, or cloth. Anything from bamboo armor with interwoven finger bones to a giant tortoise shell would fall under this category.

Standard Statistics

The base protection of bone armor follows this template:

Fair (3/11) protection and Fair (3/11) damage absorption for puncture attacks.
High (6/11) protection and Moderate (4/11) damage absorption for slice attacks.
Low (2/11) protection and Low (2/11) damage absorption for impact attacks.
High (6/11) protection and Good (5/11) damage absorption for fire attacks.
Low (2/11) protection and Low (2/11) damage absorption for cold attacks.
High (6/11) protection and Good (5/11) damage absorption for electrical attacks.

The base weight in stones for bone items follows this template:

Type	Weight	Coverage
Armor	600	chest,abdomen,back,arms,legs
Shirt	400	chest,abdomen,back,arms
Greaves	75	legs
Mask/Helm	75	head,neck,eyes
Vambraces	50	arms
Gauntlets	35	hands

Note: Not all bone items have been weighed by MAMA's, but the ones that have all follow this template.

Without considering total hindrance, it seems the best setup for bone armor is a 5 piece set from the shops. They all appear to have the same stats but weigh 250 stones less in total. The total hindrance could be different, and is worthy of investigation.

Armor Sets

There are a number of festival and store-bought bone armor sets available. Access to the always available store items is restricted by either guild or Premium subscriber status. It is currently undetermined whether the festival bone armor is superior in defense to the store-bought armor.

• Yellowed Bear Bones - 710 stones - Essential Sects Shop

1. Mask crafted from a large yellowed bear skull
2. Gauntlets shaped from discolored bear bones tipped with sharp claws
3. Suit of armor crafted from yellowed bear bones

• Ironwood Plates - 585 stones - Goods for Life

1. black leather helm reinforced with a multitude of ironwood plates
2. scale shirt crafted from a multitude of overlapping ironwood plates
3. pair of articulated ironwood gauntlets
4. pair of articulated ironwood greaves

• Matte Black Woven Reed - 460 stones - Skin and Bones

1. matte black woven reed breastplate
2. matte black woven reed vambraces
3. matte black woven reed greaves
4. matte black woven reed gauntlets
5. matte black woven reed mask

• Painted/Skulls - 460 stones - Paladin's Guild, Emporium

1. scarlet canvas-backed bone breastplate
2. painted bone mask
3. bone greaves etched with grimacing skulls
4. bone vambraces with silver skull clasps
5. painted bone gauntlets

Minimum Hindrance

As a community effort, if anyone is using bone armor, please post hindrance values for wearing only full sets of bone armor.

1. Necromancer with 71 ranks is fairly/fairly in the Yellowed Bear Bones set.

Commentary

Bone armor is mostly trained at this point for:

1. Extra TDPs
2. Those who want to be able to create this armor when it can be crafted by players
3. RP Purposes
4. Those who want to do something a bit out of the ordinary.
5. The expectation that higher quality bone armor in future releases will be a viable "Heavy armor" option for stealth characters.