Armor

Armor is what stands between your hit points and a dragon’s breath. On our shard (ServUO, Endless Journey / AOS rules), every piece you wear contributes resistances that soak a share of each damage type. A good suit is not about one heavy chestplate — it is about covering all six body slots and balancing five resist numbers under a hard cap.

The numbers in the tables below are the base values defined per piece in the server source. The amount that actually shows on your paperdoll adds bonuses from the craft resource (ore or leather type), exceptional quality, and any magic properties — see Materials and Suits & strategy.

How armor works (AOS / EJ)

The five resistances

Modern armor is rated by five resistances, each reducing one damage type:

• Physical — swords, arrows, most melee and physical spells
• Fire — Fireball, Flamestrike, fire-breathing creatures
• Cold — frost spells and cold-based creatures
• Poison — Poison spells, poisoned weapons, venomous creatures
• Energy — Energy Bolt, Lightning, and energy attacks

A resistance of N means that damage type is reduced by N percent. Each armor piece you wear adds its resists to your totals; the paperdoll shows the sum across all worn pieces. Damage is applied against whichever resist matches the incoming type, so a fire-heavy suit melts to an energy mage.

The 70% resist cap

Player resistances are capped. In ServUO Server/Mobile.cs sets MaxPlayerResistance = 70 — no single resistance can exceed 70% no matter how much armor or how many bonuses you stack. Suit-building is therefore a game of reaching 70 in the types you care about without wasting overflow. (Some monsters and special effects can lower your effective cap; the 70 ceiling is the normal player maximum.)

High Magic Resistance skill works the other way: it raises your resist floor (PlayerMobile.GetMinResistance), pulling low resists up toward a minimum at GM Resist, so a Resist mage is never fully naked to any element. See Combat (advanced).

Strength requirement

Every piece has a Strength requirement — heavier materials demand more. A plate chest needs 95 Strength; a leather chest only 25 (AOS values). Wear a piece below its requirement and you suffer the consequences, which is why low-Strength casters lean toward leather. Some armor mods and resources lower the requirement. See Character & Stats.

Meditation penalty (mana regen)

Heavy and metal armor chokes mana regeneration. ServUO’s RegenRates.GetArmorMeditationValue checks each worn piece’s meditation allowance:

• All (medable) — no penalty (leather, cloth, and most mage-friendly armor)
• Half — subtracts half the piece’s scaled armor rating from mana regen (studded)
• None (non-medable) — subtracts the full scaled armor rating (bone, ring, chain, plate, dragon, stone)

The penalties from all worn pieces are summed and divided, dragging your mana regen down. Two escapes exist: the Mage Armor property (and Spell Channeling) make any piece count as fully medable for this calculation, and on Stygian Abyss / EJ rules non-medable metal armor instead grants inherent Lower Mana Cost (a small tradeoff that helps melee-casters). Full mechanics — including why mages favor leather — live in Meditation & Mana.

Body slots and the “suit”

Armor covers six body slots, plus the off-hand for shields:

Slot	Pieces
Helm	helmet, cap, coif, circlet, kabuto
Gorget / Neck	gorget, collar, mempo
Chest	chest, tunic, bustier
Arms	arms, sleeves, sode, pauldrons
Gloves	gloves, mitts
Legs	legs, leggings, kilt, skirt

A full suit is one piece per slot. Because resists add across slots, a complete suit of a modest material easily out-resists a single heavyweight chestplate worn alone. The chest contributes the most armor rating (its scalar is the largest — see below), but every empty slot is resist you are leaving on the table.

ServUO scales each slot’s pre-AOS armor-rating contribution by a fixed table (BaseArmor.ArmorScalars): Gorget 0.07, Gloves 0.07, Helmet 0.14, Arms 0.15, Legs 0.22, Chest 0.35. The chest is roughly half the suit’s rating.

A note on the old Armor Rating

Before AOS, armor used a single Armor Rating (AR) number rather than five resists. Our shard runs AOS/EJ rules, so resistances are what matter in play, but the underlying ArmorBase value (the ar= column in the tables below) still feeds the pre-AOS armor rating and the meditation penalty calculation, which is why a higher-AR plate piece punishes mana regen more than a low-AR leather one.

Materials

Materials run from soft cloth and leather up through metal mail and plate to exotic dragon scale and gargish stone. Each row below is the base resist profile of that material’s chest piece with its Strength requirement, base armor rating, and meditation allowance, taken straight from the per-piece source. Other slots in the same material share the resist profile but carry lower Strength requirements and armor ratings.

	Material	Phys	Fire	Cold	Poison	Energy	Str (chest)	AR	Medable	Crafted by
	Leather	2	4	3	3	3	25	13	All	Tailoring
	Studded	2	4	3	3	4	35	16	Half	Tailoring
	Bone	3	3	4	2	4	60	30	None	Tailoring
	Ringmail	3	3	1	5	3	40	22	None	Blacksmithy
	Chainmail	4	4	4	1	2	60	28	None	Blacksmithy
	Plate	5	3	2	3	2	95	40	None	Blacksmithy
	Dragon scale	3	3	3	3	3	75	40	None	Blacksmithy
	Woodland	5	3	2	3	2	95	40	None	Tailoring
	Stone (gargish)	6	6	4	8	6	40	—	None	Tailoring

Source: Scripts/Items/Equipment/Armor/*.cs, chest piece per material. Numbers are base resists before resource, quality, and magic bonuses.

Reading the table:

• Cloth is technically the lightest “armor” but standard cloth lives on the clothing layer (BaseClothing, not BaseArmor) and contributes almost nothing on its own — its value to mages is that it is fully medable and dyeable. Gargoyle “cloth” armor pieces are a special case: they look cloth but are mechanically Leather material in the source.
• Leather is the mage’s and archer’s friend: fully medable (no mana-regen penalty), lowest Strength requirement, balanced low resists. Barbed/horned/spined hides (see below) push its resists up significantly.
• Studded trades half its mana regen for slightly better physical/energy coverage.
• Bone is a tailored medium armor (crafted from bone) with even, mid-range resists and a hefty Strength cost.
• Ringmail → Chainmail → Plate are the blacksmith’s metal line: rising armor rating and Strength requirement, no meditation allowed. Plate is the warrior’s standard — highest base physical and armor rating.
• Dragon scale is the exotic outlier. Its base resists are a flat 3/3/3/3/3, but scale armor’s appeal is the high resists granted by colored dragon scales layered on top, plus its even spread — there are no weak elements to exploit.
• Woodland (elven) mirrors plate’s profile but is tailored from wood/leather.
• Stone is the gargoyle heavyweight: the highest base resists on this list (and a notably high poison resist), reflecting its end-game material status.

Crafting and hides

• Tailoring crafts leather, studded, bone, woodland, and gargish armor. The leather line scales with the hide used: ordinary leather → spined → horned → barbed, each a distinct ArmorMaterialType with progressively better resists and armor rating. See Tailoring and Resources.
• Blacksmithy forges ringmail, chainmail, plate, and dragon-scale armor. The ore used (dull copper → valorite) adds resist and armor bonuses and a colored hue.

Shields

Shields occupy the off-hand (two-handed) slot and are governed by the Parrying skill, which gives a chance to block an incoming melee or ranged hit outright. The block rate scales with Parrying skill and the shield equipped — heavier shields block more but weigh more and demand more Strength.

Shield types run from the light buckler through wooden and bronze shields up to the heavy metal and kite shields, plus order/chaos and gargish variants. All metal shields default to Plate material and, like plate armor, count as non-medable — though on AOS/EJ rules a shield does not add to the meditation/mana penalty (only the six body slots do; RegenRates.GetArmorOffset skips the shield under AOS). A mage who wants to parry will still prefer a Spell Channeling shield to keep casting.

Browse every shield with art in the Shields catalog, and see Parrying for block-chance details.

Suits & strategy

Assembling a suit is about maximising resists under the 70% cap across all five types, on top of the armor and mana-regen profile your character can afford.

• Balanced suit — aim for the highest minimum resist rather than spiking one. A monster’s damage type decides which resist matters; a balanced 60s-across-the-board suit survives more encounters than a 70-physical / 20-energy one. Because resists add across slots, fill every slot before chasing higher per-piece numbers.
• The mage tradeoff — metal armor blocks meditation, so casters historically wore all leather/cloth and accepted lower physical resist. The Mage Armor property breaks the rule: it lets a mage wear high-resist non-medable armor (even plate) with no mana-regen penalty. Weigh resist coverage against Strength requirement and mana regen for your template — see Meditation & Mana and the seven-GM mage build in Seven GM templates.
• Colored armor from resources — crafting with better ore or hide both raises resists and recolors the armor; the hue tells everyone the material at a glance. Dull copper, shadow iron, copper, bronze, gold, agapite, verite, and valorite each add increasing armor and a distinct color (see the Hue Reference). Exceptional quality from a skilled crafter adds further durability and resist.
• Gargish & elven variants — gargoyle characters use gargish plate/stone/leather pieces (and cannot wear human-shaped helms); elves use woodland armor. They share the underlying material mechanics but have race restrictions, so build the suit for the race you play.

For training the skills that make a suit worth wearing, see Tactics, Parrying, and the Seven-GM templates. To browse specific pieces with art and item IDs, see the Armor catalog and Shields catalog.