Lear's hauberk

Version 0.28: 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 +18 Lear's hauberk

+18 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, meaning players that cannot wear one or more of those items due to size (ogres, trolls, spriggans), species (tengu, formicid, draconian, naga, palentonga), or mutations (horns or antennae 3, claws 3, hooves or talons 3) cannot wear Lear's hauberk. Merfolk can wear the hauberk, but the entire thing will meld into you in water, so you should search for something different to wear if you know you'll be fighting around water in the foreseeable future.

Lear's hauberk is by no means an ideal piece of armour; the chain mail base armour is cumbersome, and losing that many equipment slots will rule out many useful intrinsics and resistances that you could get by wearing enchanted or artefact equipment. Also, while its AC bonus may look impressive, the loss of any AC from the helmet, boots, and gloves slots offsets a significant chunk of this. Accounting for all auxillary slots enchanted to +2, the hauberk is effectively at +9 (and even less once you've got some Armour skill or overenchanted artefacts under your belt).

That being said, the Hauberk is favored to spawn in the early game, often before you can find (magical) equipment in every slot. Players who find this in a timely manner can suddenly find themselves absurdly well-protected against the threats of the early game.

History

• Prior to 0.28, Lear's hauberk was +27, and its generation was not favored for the early-game.
• Lear's hauberk was added in 0.13, replacing Lear's chain mail.