Armour (skill)

Version 0.31: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

The Armour skill improves the effectiveness of your armour and reduces most of the penalties associated with the more cumbersome varieties of body armour.

Aptitudes

At	Ba	Co	DE	Dg	Ds	Dj	Dr	Fe	Fo	Gr	Gh	Gn	Hu	Ko	Mf	Mi	MD	Mu	Na	Op	On	Sp	Te	Tr	Vp	VS
2	2	-1	-2	-1	-1	0	N/A	N/A	1	1	-1	8	0	-2	-3	2	1	-2	-2	N/A	-1	-3	1	-2	-2	-2

Felids, Draconians and Octopodes cannot train Armour due to their body restrictions.

Useful Info

Each level in Armour skill will:

• Give bonus AC, equal to ~4.5% Base AC per level. ("Base AC" is the combined AC of all your armour, excluding AC from their enchantment)
• Reduce body armour encumbrance by ~2.22% per level.

This reduces the penalties to evasion, spellcasting, and Ranged Weapons. Note that body armour also penalizes the Dodging skill; this penalty is not impacted by Armour skill. It won't reduce the stealth penalty, either.

Strategy

Armour skill provides a percent boost to AC and a percent reduction to encumbrance. Therefore, you don't need a specific amount of Armour skill to wear a given body armour. If you're playing a Fighter, for instance, you'll want something heavy like plate armour - whether you have 3 Armour skill or 15 Armour skill.

Strength has a big impact when determining what body armour you should wear, arguably more so than Armour skill. As an arbitrary example, say you have 10 strength and are considering swamp dragon scales. For this specific character, gaining +2 strength would be worth more than ~6.92 levels of Armour skill (the exact value also depends on Dodging skill).

In the early game, the impact of the Armour skill is relatively small, so you may want to train offensive skills first.