[Nils_Lindeberg]

Don't underestimate one or two points of armor. Against a battleaxe user, it won't do much, but against a rapier attacker, it makes a huge difference. And in the Monte Carlo simulations we did, we matched different characters against all other characters, and armor wasn't a bad choice.

What mattered was DX, you wanted an adjDX of one more than your opponent, and no more. If you had more than that, it seemed like the build would do better with more armor or higher ST and a heavier weapon.

What the simulations didn't take into account was two major things:
Armor is great when you have to go through several consecutive fights, with or without a Physicker in between, like a dungeon. Winning a fight is still important, but the simulation didn't give any "bonus" points for winning while taking zero hits yourself, which is a great advantage in a dungeon.

The other huge difference is the many against one situation where armor is great if you are on the "one" side, and a big weapon is great if you are on the "many" side.

But armor has a sweet spot the higher you go compared to the opponents' average damage. Chain+tower shield is almost an auto-win against a rapier-wielding opponent if your base DX is higher than 10. But that is where HtH or aimed attacks against the head and such come in. But overall, people tend to overestimate the use for a high adjDX. The simulations didn't support this, and real play supports survivability and that means more armor and ST (for more wounds). In the end it was way more balanced than I thought it would be.

And the 11/13, 12/12, and 13/11 builds did well as expected. But 9/15 and 15/9 were not so far behind as expected. And even 9/12/11 javelin expertise builds were somewhat competitive. With a 10/14 build, you can still do well, the differences were small.

One shouldn't underestimate the advantage of one or two points of armor when it comes to knockdown (8 damage), stun (5 damage), and going down to weak status (at 1-3ST).