Lear's hauberk
| 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, meaning players that cannot wear one or more of those items due to size (ogres, trolls, spriggans), species (tengu, formicid, draconian), 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 merge into you in water, so you should search for something different to wear unless you know you'll be fighting on land in the forseeable 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 (assuming +2 versions of each of these items, the hauberk is effectively at +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 magical 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.
