Combat gear: Headslot

[Potjeh]

Cape doesn't have an agi penalty.

[Valten21]

Was thinking that the whole thread, went to second page... and there it is. Both benefit you while fighting in combat, but one doesn't drain agility!

[Sevenless]

Note: I fight using pure unarmed at the moment. I don't really consider low Q bronze weapons better than a decent UA level at this point.

For the sake of the situation, lets discuss Q20 helm vs Q55 bear cape. Further to add to this is that my strength/agility are both under 100, meaning that as of yet the str/agi effects are quite noticeable.

Bear cape ~Q55
+23 str
+/- 0 agility
0/35 armor class

Bronze helm ~Q20
0 str
-4 agility
50/50 armor class

The agility effect exists, but I'm not sure if I consider -3 to be a killer. Bronze plate supplies a significantly heftier penalty and I'm already wearing that.

The biggest effect lies in the relative strength bonus from what I can see. If you look at the wiki's formula for punch damage, 50*sqrt(STR/10) there's an interesting effect in that. IF I had only 10 strength, the bear cape boosts my strength to 33. Because of the square rooting effect, that's a whopping 81.6% increase in damage (50->~91). Where as at 100 strength the damage bonus drops to 10.9% (158->175).

So while I can see that endgame helmets have a lot better benefits than the bear cape, early game the % increase in damage is so strong that I don't think it can really be ignored.

Anyone else have thoughts to add?

[Norsu]

It's worth considering that you can in fact measure the real increase to your basic punch damage and determine it's value to you relative to the reduction provided by a helm.

i.e at 10 str your q55 bear cape will almost double your result from that punch formula from 50 to 90.
At 50 str, the boost is down to 23 damage.
At 100 str, it's 17 damage.

I guess it's worth noting that there is no point where the cape provides the same amount of boost+reduction as the helm does reduction. You obviously can't look at it in that light though, as offense and defense will have relatively different values to each player. For example, if you intend to only fight farmers, you won't get any use at all out of a helmet.