Lear's hauberk

Version 0.18: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

A well-made golden hauberk that covers all of its wearer's body parts. It includes a chainmail coif, chausses and maille gauntlets.

the +27 Lear's hauberk

+27 chain mail

Fills your body, head, hands, and feet armour slots

Desirability

Lear's hauberk is an extremely unusual piece of equipment, filling four equipment slots in exchange for a massive amount of AC. To wear it, you must be able to wear chain mail, hats, boots, and gloves. It is by no means an ideal piece of armour; the chain mail base armour is cumbersome, and losing that much equipment access will rule out many useful intrinsics and resistances. Also, while its AC bonus may look impressive, the loss of any AC from the helmet, boots, and gloves slots offsets a lot of this (assuming +2 versions of each of these items, the hauberk is effectively reduced to +18, or even less once you've got some Armour skill training under your belt). That being said, a character who finds it early on, possibly before finding equipment to fill the extra slots with anyway, can suddenly find himself absurdly well-protected against the threats of the early game, and if you can find all the resistances you need from your weapon, jewellery, cloak, and shield slots, it can serve all the way through to the Realm of Zot.

History

Lear's hauberk was added in 0.13, replacing Lear's chain mail.