Early game armor, leather armor, bone greaves, badger vest, etc, break in one or two battles. I made a nice brand new q25 badger vest, went into a mine, fought two bats, took about 30 damage, and it broke. They're all completely useless to anyone but the biggest groups that can cheese bears and grind 100ks of LP to get decent leather/string.
Give them more wear capacity and make wear scale less with quality, idk. But for now your only hope is to get enough combat skills so that they can't hurt you as leather armor breaks in a matter of seconds.