Is ponderousness plate armor worth wearing?

[nordetsa]

Doing MiFi warrior. Killed Wiglaf and he drops +8 dwarven plate armour of ponderousness. I think the massive AC it gives compensate for slower speed...but I may be wrong here. Is this armor worth wearing? For later branches I might switch to scale males and such just for resistance, but this armour seems to be good for regular dungeon exploration.

And not having Chei as my god, btw.

[Galefury]

No. Being slow is terrible, especially for a melee character.

[giygas]

No, no, a million times no. That armour will get you killed.

For later branches I might switch to scale males

Why...? For later branches, you want heavy armour (crystal plate / GDA) assuming you are playing a pure melee character. Scale Mail sucks.

[eeviac]

I think he means dragon scale mails.

[giygas]

I think he means dragon scale mails.

Oh. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, just use GDA then.

[nordetsa]

Why...? For later branches, you want heavy armour (crystal plate / GDA) assuming you are playing a pure melee character. Scale Mail sucks.

But wouldn't scale mails with resistances be better than normal plate armor in some special cases? Sometimes during my play I come across plain plate armor and poison resistance scale mail. If I want to clear the Snake Pit, wouldn't wearing rPoison scale male be better (assuming you can't find other rPoison gear, which happened to me once)?

[Deimos]

Yes, but be aware that Snake Pit and Spider are pretty much the only places where a resistance is near-mandatory. I can't think of one other place where I'd rather be wearing a scale mail of x resist then a plate/crystal plate.

[KoboldLord]

But wouldn't scale mails with resistances be better than normal plate armor in some special cases? Sometimes during my play I come across plain plate armor and poison resistance scale mail. If I want to clear the Snake Pit, wouldn't wearing rPoison scale male be better (assuming you can't find other rPoison gear, which happened to me once)?

If you're playing an AC character, it's absolutely imperative that you stack that AC as high as it will go. If you have +0 scale mail, you might as well be running through Snake Pit or Spiders' Nest naked for all the good it's going to do you, whether it has rPois or not. Even if it blocks 90% of all poisonings, wolf spider fangs and naga halberds are still going to shred your squishy flesh-meats just by virtue of raw damage.

In fact, poison is not a very important resistance at all. It theoretically does a lot of damage, but all that damage is deferred until later, which means that it often never happens at all. Even if you're deep, deep, DEEP in the red poison, a single potion of curing returns you to normal status immediately. If you've only got one or two applications of poison, on the other hand, just retreat upstairs and wait it off.

The only time you should consider wearing scale mail over plate is if its armor bonus is higher than any available plate. If you've got an artifact +8 scale mail with favorable abilities, and you're comparing it to a bunch of +0 plate armours, then yeah, +8 scale mail is the way to go.