Arcane Armor Rit on an Armor tag

Draven

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I’m curious if anyone thinks they’ll see caster characters (Adepts/Scholars/Spellswords) wearing their maximum in physical armor while also carrying a 30 pt AA. I see this as particularly interesting for Adepts who’ve hit 10 HM.

AA would be their standard armor, but the physical armor (with Mystic Smith) would be their emergency armor that they could refit in 3 seconds should the need arise (for some reason they can’t wait a full minute to refit the AA).

I could even possibly see this with Scholars.
 
I don't see why this wouldn't work? The only hiccup I can see is how stringently you want to consider the inability to use a normal suit of armor while using Arcane Armor.

If you view it as "Any Arcane Armor you have on you that is not currently at 0 Armor overrides any other armor you're wearing", then the Arcane Armor has to be breached before you could Mystic Smith your normal suit and use it; this is my personal take on how Arcane Armor works, which makes the Mystic Smith backup less than ideal, since the primary scenario in which the quick refit is needed is when dealing with nasty Carrier Attacks like Doom or Confine, and it's unlikely that you'll be brought to exactly 0 armor.

If you view it as "You can switch back and forth between Arcane Armor and any other suit you're wearing by refitting one or the other", then you can wait until your Arcane Armor is at just a few points before refitting your normal suit of armor; Arcane Armor was, I believe, ruled to prevent you from using any Rituals present on a suit of armor it's suppressing, so you couldn't use the Mystic Smith, anyway, which I think renders the combo no more viable than just refitting the Arcane Armor.

ETA: Found a couple of posts from Polare back in the archived playtest forum that support the "no using Rituals on armor that isn't 'active'" interpretation.

This post says that you only gain the benefits of enchantments on armor you're actually wearing, and this post says a suit of armor only works when you're wearing it as Marshaled, and in the case of an enchanted suit, using the correct tag.

Combined, these throw out interpretation 1 (although I'll still run my own that way if I ever decide to use any, because it's easier in my head) because you can always choose to refit and switch between Arcane Armor and normal armor that way, but it does support the interpretation that you couldn't wait until the Arcane Armor got low and then Mystic Smith your regular suit to switch, since Mystic Smith would be on an 'inactive' armor tag.

You could theoretically get around this by putting the Arcane Armor on something relatively small and simply throwing it off your person to avoid the normal refit time for the switch, but I feel like that's somehow a violation of the spirit of how Arcane and regular armor are supposed to interact.
 
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I’m curious if anyone thinks they’ll see caster characters (Adepts/Scholars/Spellswords) wearing their maximum in physical armor while also carrying a 30 pt AA. I see this as particularly interesting for Adepts who’ve hit 10 HM.

AA would be their standard armor, but the physical armor (with Mystic Smith) would be their emergency armor that they could refit in 3 seconds should the need arise (for some reason they can’t wait a full minute to refit the AA).

I could even possibly see this with Scholars.

This seems fine.

I think pretty much once you choose to start refitting a different suit, all other armor suits go to 0 besides the one being refit, in this case you could use mystic smith to quickly get your new suit back up. In the same way that taking off your helmet or bracer means you can't get any benefit from the armor you were just wearing.


Some things to keep in mind, which I think are probably important.
If you're rocking 15, and you use empowered armor, you could probably mimic a 30 suit of arcane for the 10 minutes.
I don't think you can refit one suit while wearing another, so if you're hit or whatever you're taking body damage.
I don't consider this particularly problematic or exploitive because you'd have to be wearing the 15-20 points of armor all the time. Thus nullifying some of the benefits of arcane armor, while picking up some of the benefits of physical armor.
 
I think pretty much once you choose to start refitting a different suit, all other armor suits go to 0 besides the one being refit
Is this the intended interaction? I always thought that whatever points were left on the suit you were wearing remained until the refit was complete, same as if you were repairing a damaged suit that wasn't at 0. The rules around Arcane Armor say you have to complete a refit before you can switch to or from it, but having no armor at all during that time seems... counter-intuitive.
 
Yeah, I don’t think it would be exploitative either. I think you’d see it happen in small mods where the character took an unexpected amount of damage and needed to get back into the thick of things with an amount of armor that’s RightNow if suboptimal. Empowered Armor would make that resource even better, to be sure.

Like @Sage of Legaia, I didn’t think refitting put you at 0. If you’re refitting a partial suit and get interrupted, you don’t drop to 0.

That being said, that’s different than switching your suit.

Hm.

If the intention is that the switch occurs at the start, then yeah, you would be at zero. If the switch happens at the end, then you would have whatever was left before. However, I don’t know if that was ever a defined in the book.
 
It's not written anywhere. I'm just going through the logic of it.

Let's say you are going to switch from a 40 suit of physical armor to a 30 suit of physical armor because you want to take your helmet off. So you're wearing a 40 suit, and you take your helmet off. You're armor is no longer valid, now you're refitting the new 30 suit that you put on.

I think that's a fairly straight forward interpretation of how that'd play out. Given that it's the easiest to logic through, I'd apply it to all situations of armor swapping.

But, it's all based on how I feel. Very little in the book.
 
While the scenario you ran through is true, the reverse of that scenario isn't true; if I'm currently wearing 30 points of armor and have a 30 point tag, putting on a helmet to raise my maximum possible armor to 35 doesn't mean I have to refit the entire thing unless I want to switch the tag, and even then, refitting to a new 35 point tag shouldn't mean I've lost the 30 points I had if that tag is still on my person, because I'm still wearing enough armor for that tag to be valid. (I'd have to dig up the post, but it was posted somewhere in the playtest forums that you can have multiple armor tags on you, but only one is 'active' at a time; the example used was a 20-point enchanted armor and a 60-point mundane armor, and it was quite clear that you could carry both but only use one, so long as you were wearing the armor for the tag you're using properly.)

The rules are also pretty clear that a suit is only refit at the end of the timer, not at any point before; if you're at 5 armor, start a refit, and get interrupted at 59 seconds, you're still at 5 armor. I don't see why that wouldn't be the case just because you've switched from Arcane to mundane or vice-versa, so long as you're still wearing the physical armor you're switching to or from.

I feel like this should added to the Arcane Armor scroll, regardless.
 
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