Best armor choices for unarmed combat


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Slime Squisher

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 09:19

Best armor choices for unarmed combat

I'm running a troll at the moment who was lucky enough to find swamp dragon armour lying about in the dungeon. Is this a suitable endgame suit of armour, or am I better off saving scrolls for something else?

Also, does dexterity or strength have a major effect on the dps of unarmed combat?

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 10:08

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Well, I have the same question.
I'm looking for an armor, that doesn't rise my UC delay.
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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 10:10

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Personally I've used up to GDA on a Troll of Ashenzari with UC and it worked fine, had no problem clearing Zot. And that is the heaviest armour in the game. From what I understand you get worse accuracy penalties to UC than when wielding a weapon when using more encumbering armours. So supposedly you should stick to light/medium armours, but that's not really that important from what I've witnessed. I remember someone said that Trolls also get a bonus to their accuracy with claws. The SDA will serve you well for the entire dungeon I believe, but you might want to switch to FDA or SDA (Storm) or PDA (assuming you're lucky to find that one lying around of course) and enchant them as much as your scrolls of enchant armour allow you to.

Equipping a shield affects UC more thant body armour even if you max your Shields skill (9 for shield, 15 for large shield on Trolls, Ogres, Formicids) to remove the normal shield penalties (to spellcasting, accuracy, whatnot). It adds a random delay of 0.1-0.2 (not sure about this exact number but it's there) if I remember correctly to your unarmed attacks every time and removes your off-hand punch, which admittedly doesn't do THAT much later in the game. Most people not using Blade Hands or Dragon Form invest in a Shield because even with its drawbacks, it is still a nice extra source of defence.

STR + DEX don't matter that much when it comes to the damage of UC, unless you're running Blade Hands, because that spell gets an immense boost to damage from both stats (I think it adds (STR+DEX)/2 to its base damage?). Dragon Form also adds your Str score to its base damage if I remember correctly.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 10:18

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

TehDruid wrote:From what I understand you get worse accuracy penalties to UC than when wielding a weapon when using more encumbering armours.

It actually adds attack delay.
TehDruid wrote:It adds a random delay of 0.1-0.2

It's 50% chance for additional 0.1 delay.

Cocytus Succeeder

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 10:23

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Probably you were using gda, because trolls can't use cpa.

Anyway, I'd ideally aim for a fda or mda (depending on how many spells I want to cast and some other things), but while sda isn't so great you have one *now*, while you don't know when you'll find one of the other.

So I'd suggest to enchant to max that one, if you're lucky you'll find enough ?ea to enchant another armour (quite unlikely tough) otherwise that is fine to win
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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 10:24

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Thanks for pointing these out Sar. :) I don't play as much as I used to.

As nago suggested above, it's perfectly fine to go with Swamp Dragon armour. Holding out on scrolls to enchant a possible future armour lowers your possibilities of seeing the midgame through quite a bit.
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Dis Charger

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 10:27

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

TehDruid wrote:Personally I've used up to GDA on a Troll of Ashenzari with UC and it worked fine, had no problem clearing Zot. And that is the heaviest armour in the game. From what I understand you get worse accuracy penalties to UC than when wielding a weapon when using more encumbering armours. So supposedly you should stick to light/medium armours, but that's not really that important from what I've witnessed.

Heavier armour can make some of your attacks take more time, that's why lighter armour are recommended. That does not mean that you cannot use GDA !

I personnaly like 'light' dragon armour (swamp, mottled, ice/fire). A SDA in early game is a good armour, you should use it.
Trolls do not have a lot of armour slots, you can use some scrolls on it, GD hide isn't guaranteed : one in the hand worth two in the bush !

Edit : ninja'd, but I find this strange :
Sar wrote:
TehDruid wrote:It adds a random delay of 0.1-0.2

It's 50% chance for additional 0.1 delay.

My attack delay sometimes went from 0.8 to 1.3 when switching from leather to chain...
Last edited by mopl on Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 11:34, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 10:46

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

That's because Sar is talking about the Shield delay penalty, not armour. I'm entirely unaware of how much armour affects your attack delay with UC.
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Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 11:28

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

So I just need to look at my attack delay?
Right now I choose between Steam, Pearl (also I haven't PDH), and GDA.
If it rise delay so my dps falls, so what's the point? I already have 30 AC in Statue Form+Stone Skin and 39% GDR.
I need armor in case I need kill (probably boss) someone quickly, and I'll use Blade Hands with armor.
Also, I need armor for 15 rune run, """""normal 5 rune game""""" is done.
Does this article outdated? http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Unarmed_Combat
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Slime Squisher

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 12:01

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Your attack delay is counted as follows (source: bots, "Unarmed combat" and "AEVP" entries)
AD = max(10, 1d10+2dAEVP) - UC/5.4 where
AEVP = (2/5) * ER^2 / (str+3) * [45 - armour_skill]/45.
ER = encumbrance rating

Example: with 27 STR, 15 armour skill, GDA:
ER = 17,
AEVP = 2.57
AD = max(10, 1d10+2d2.57) - UC/5.4. I am not sure how AEVP is rounded, but ~5AUT would be max and most often you'd notice no delay at all.
I hope it is clear enough; if it is not, probably you do not need the information anyway.

From my experience and as a quick guideline:
1) Just look at your attack delay and if you are not satisfied with values you see, consider changing to lighter armour
2) GDA is an option, although only at very high strength, decent armor skill and only if you really need its additional resists / AC.
3) Most of my unarmed fighters stick to ice/fire/pearl as the heaviest, but the real reason is not the attack delay, but spellcasting abilities.

GlassGo, in your case GDA is out of question because of spellcasting penalties. Pearl is probably the best if your spellcasting isn't hindered too much. Otherwise steam will do if you switch to statue form most of the time anyway.

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 13:17

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Thanks for great answer!
I understand you correctly?
With high Str (35 e.g.) I can keep delay to a minimum level - ~5 autons?

Right now I can wear ring mail without any spellcasting problem, and when I put on plate armor, Necromutation goes from 2% yellow to 12% red. With scale mail, Death Door goes from 17% red to 2% red, Necromutation doesn't change.
So yeah - I want PDA so badly. :o
Correction - not a plate armor, but Sif Muna's Indignation. It turned out, there is i HUGE difference in case of spellcasting (and nothing in description indicates it).
Maybe I will choose it.

And no, most of the time I just tabbing without worrying. SF only for special cases like TRJ. But now left only """"""""extended"""""""""" parts of Crawl, so I begin to think about every move.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 13:59

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

The effects of strength to moderate AEVP suffer diminishing returns after a certain point; stacking strength will continue to reduce AEVP, but it'll never reduce it all that far. You can graph that function Bart posted to get a better sense of where the diminishing returns set in, but the main thing to know is that once you have strength = encumbrance/3 (plus maybe a few points), more strength doesn't help much.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 18:05

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

I've posted the above formulas a couple of times in the past but it seems I've been beaten to the punch today. In my experience you don't really have to worry about "heavy ish" armor and UC, they go together just fine. I typically wear fire/ice dragon (pearl if you can find it and don't need rF/rC) armor most games. Train armor to about 10-15, have high strength (which for these armors, is basically around 15-18 strength, which should be quite easy to reach. You won't see much delay from your armor at all. Remember using a shield adds the 50% chance of + 1 aut delay, so if you're trying to check how much your armor adds, don't use a shield for testing, although I like shields in general.

Hell on my last monk I ran blade hands and a buckler, so that I'd be protected while not blade hands-ing. Only takes 5 skill, don't do this with a heavier shield, but hey. It was a resistance buckler, I like those :)

As to the very OP's question about str/dex's effect on unarmed, they are the same as on all weapon skills - they boost it a fair amount but not extremely. The exception is if you are using transmutations, which typically depend more heavily on your stats, and so transmutations + high stats has a stronger impact than unarmed + high stats.
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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 19:01

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Are good artifact robes out of this question?

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 19:30

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Good artifacts are always a viable choice, it just depends on how good and if you actually have one. I tend to favor something with some base AC, though, because you are in melee. But a good artifact steam dragon armor would be an amazing choice, imho. I just never really see randomly generated steam dragon artifacts. Last game I had two randart GDA's, but neither one was particularly good, and I wasn't really set up to use an armor that heavy. 80% of the time I go with fire/ice dragon armor, 20% I'll use mottled or swamp dragon. Both are fine alternatives, I usually just like to get the additional rF/rC from the heavier armors, the encumbrance is really not a problem with some skill, and the ac is helpful.

As I've mentioned this run twice now, I'll link to the morgue: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/tasonir/mor ... 202635.txt The problem, of course, is that dobrazupa is down, so you won't be able to access it until the ISP resolves the problem. Hopefully it'll be back up in a couple of hours.

Edit: seems like CSZO (dobrazupa) is back up now, although a bit laggy. Hopefully you should be able to load the morgue, if you're curious. I was using a +8 FDA if you just care about the armor choice.

Lair Larrikin

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 19:48

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Or troll armour?

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Post Wednesday, 16th April 2014, 22:33

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

It's not the worst, certainly, but 4ac is a lot worse than it's competition of mottled dragon armor, 6 ac for the same encumbrance. Regen is more useful than rSticky, but you should probably pick up the regeneration spell instead. You're going to be running up to things and punching them, having a body armor with 6+ base ac is quite a lot of protection. 4 isn't terrible, and you can do it in robes if you really want, but I would rather err on the side of caution and get 8 or 9 from the common dragon armors.

Lair Larrikin

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Post Thursday, 17th April 2014, 06:31

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

And there aren't enough enchant armours to make more than one hide armour.

Crypt Cleanser

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Post Thursday, 17th April 2014, 10:42

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

tasonir wrote:It's not the worst, certainly, but 4ac is a lot worse than it's competition of mottled dragon armor, 6 ac for the same encumbrance. Regen is more useful than rSticky, but you should probably pick up the regeneration spell instead. You're going to be running up to things and punching them, having a body armor with 6+ base ac is quite a lot of protection. 4 isn't terrible, and you can do it in robes if you really want, but I would rather err on the side of caution and get 8 or 9 from the common dragon armors.

MDA has a little higher encumbrance than (troll) leather, and so it does not allow ozo armour. It may be a worse choice than these or steam DA if you're into ice magic.
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Abyss Ambulator

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Post Friday, 18th April 2014, 02:48

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

I think the best choice is a moderate-weight dragon armour (up to fire/ice/pearl), same as for any character.
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Post Friday, 18th April 2014, 08:37

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Well, I have found StormDA, but spell fail rate is too high for Necromutation, so I stick with +3 ring mail "Sohuvy" (worn) {rF+ Acc+4}. More than enough in Tartarus and Cocytus.
So I start to think, that all this DA is excessive.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 18th April 2014, 21:24

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

Necromutation isn't a good form for transmuters in general. Torment isn't as terrible as it feels at first, if you manage battles properly you should be able to get rid of anything tormenting you quickly. If you want to take much less damage from torment, use statue form. The 50% resist and rN+ (combined with whatever other rN you have) makes torment very weak. My last two 15 rune melee characters didn't even use statue form [one did polearms, the other blade hands] - they just straight up ate torments to the face. Use high regeneration and good offense and the fights will end quickly. Having abjuration for summoned fiends is also very convenient. Remember that plain old rN is highly effective at reducing torment damage as well.
Last edited by tasonir on Friday, 18th April 2014, 22:07, edited 1 time in total.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 18th April 2014, 21:35

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

You're right about necromutation being bad, but I strongly disagree that casting a spell that slows you is a good way to give yourself more time.

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Post Friday, 18th April 2014, 22:08

Re: Best armor choices for unarmed combat

duvessa wrote:You're right about necromutation being bad, but I strongly disagree that casting a spell that slows you is a good way to give yourself more time.

Fair enough. I edited the above post to not say "more time" but to "take less damage". Statue form will slow you down, but can be used to take less damage from torment, if you're worried about torment in extended.

Edit: Just to frustrate duvessa more: Both of those characters had time on their side though - they both worshipped Chei, so really, taking it easy already came naturally to them. Neither of them used statue form, though.

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