Metal Armor or anti-rifle vest?

[player1]

So, what is better for heavy armored build?

Anti-rifle vest or metal armor?

It seems that vests generally are superior against bullets and anti-rifle vests even more. Very effective against low caliber rifles.

While metal armors have good damage resistance over everything.

Also, auxiliary metal items like helmets and boots. Are they worth reduced movement?

Discuss...

[Ryzak]

Metal armor in my opinion, at least in the long term. Early game the anti-rifle vest with its triple damage threshold can make you largely immune to rifles, end game the metal armor, reinforced with three plates and a regenerative vest accomplishes the same thing with very high resistance to mechanical/thermal/energy while healing any damage that does get through. If you generally don't care about armor penalty, metal armor is the way to go.

[UnLimiTeD]

For melee, go with some mobility.
With ranged weapons, go nuts.
Unless you're a psyker, of course.

Of note, a lowball shield genreducing the damage taken just enough for the rest to be soaked by armour can also work well.

[newageofpower]

Early game, antirifle vests make most small arms bounce off of you. Late game, even 100 DT will do nothing vs 1000 critdamage snipes.

Metal armor can get some sick high% DR. For the other slots, consider your build.

Metal helmets reduce Perception (and thus CTH). For assault rifle builds capable of unloading a magazine in one turn, this isn't a big issue; you'll kill most enemies anyways, and the with a high quality crafted metal helmet you can come close enough to capping your mech/heat/energy resists (assuming high quality metal armor) you are basically invulnerable to those types of damage.

But this would be a big no-no on a sniper rifle build; misses are so frustrating you really need to have NVGs on at all times.

Metal boot Striders can make you very mobile, but metal/metal boots have sick mech/heat/energy resist. One issue is other resistances; with a padded metal helmet you get either electric or cold res, with infused mutant dog Leather tabi you can get a ton of acid res. Making dog Leather boots, unfortunately dramatically cuts the acid resist.

Still, if you place armor into all 3 slots you can be invulnerable to mech/heat/energy, a decent resistance to Bio (if bio vest on metal armor) and acid (if infused mutant dog Leather tabi), with a small amount of either electric or cold resist (depending on helmet padding).

This build has weak electric or cold resist, and completely lacks another. A variation is using boots instead of tabi, which lets you grab an extra set of padding, but greatly cuts the resistance from Leather material;not recommended (unless you love Striders. I do.)