Guild Wars 2

Recently since the April 15th update, I’ve witnessed an increased number of players who believe that the armor you equip has no effect on your final attributes.
I’ve even seen naked players not wearing their chest piece in solo queue believing that it doesn’t make a difference.
I’m strictly talking about defense (and consequently the armor attribute) as the armor you wear never had any effect on anything else in sPvP since the beginning.
I’m not sure if this has already been discussed on the forums or not and since the forum’s search feature doesn’t seem to work for me, there’s no way for me to find out.
So here’s the result of my testing:

I’ve attached 5 screenshots from the PvP build panel on top of the equipment panel. Needless to say, this test has been done on light armor and the different armor classes can yield different results.

In the first screenshot, I have all my armor pieces. The “armor” attribute being the combination of toughness and defense which is what is considered in the damage formula, sits at 2447.

In the second screenshot, removing the head gear, the shoulders and the gloves have no effect on the final armor.

However, in the third screenshot, when I put everything back on and remove my chest piece, it brings my armor down to 2144 (a decrease of 303).

Further removing the pants, bring the armor attribute down to 1957 (4th screenshot) and when removing the boots, my armor goes as low as 1828 for a total reduction of 619 armor.

Since I no longer have access to steady weapons I couldn’t reliably test it in practice but still, with no armor on, testing against the elementalist NPC in heart of the mists, I noticed an average of ~1620 damage on her non-crit auto attack (vapor blade) as opposed to a rough average of ~1210 damage with that same skill when I’m wearing my full armor set.

My conclusion so far is that the chest piece, pants and boots affect your defense where as the head gear, the gloves and the shoulders don’t affect it at all.

Most people already know this, and Anet has said this themselves.

The reason for that is that the 3 pieces you start with as a level1 freshly created character, is the chest/boots/pants.

I believe this is because newly-created characters don’t always come with shoulders/helmet/gloves. Based on your choices at character creation, you may have one or more of those pieces of equipment but you would never have all of them. Since your armor skin is now the same in PvE and PvP, it would be unfair for a new player to do PvP since he would be missing 2-3 armor pieces.

Anet likely didn’t want to remove the armor stats entirely because…well, we’ve all seen what happens in games where there’s no disadvantage to taking your pants off.

I took all my armour off on my Thief the other day and I lost several hundred points in the Armour Attribute.

… I’ve been learning to play warrior (last of 8!) all this time while on a giant, naked norn.
… I’ve been doing kind of well.

…

I can’t wait to put on some clothes!

As something a bit off topic… I’d like to mention that for a small amount of karma, you can buy WvW karma vendor blues that come with shoulders, gloves and helmets for the level 2. You can then get the look you’ve always wanted…

NevirSayDie.6235:

we’ve all seen what happens in games where there’s no disadvantage to taking your pants off.

LOL

Yeah, the reason I’m posting this is because I’m surprised at the number of people who still think that armor has no effect on you.
A person today told me to “go back to pve” for saying that your chest piece does affect your armor!

Ralkuth.1456:

As something a bit off topic… I’d like to mention that for a small amount of karma, you can buy WvW karma vendor blues that come with shoulders, gloves and helmets for the level 2. You can then get the look you’ve always wanted…

Actually, that’s really good to know. I’ll check it out.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Anet likely didn’t want to remove the armor stats entirely because…well, we’ve all seen what happens in games where there’s no disadvantage to taking your pants off.

This is going in my signature, thank you witty sir.

XacTactX.6709:

NevirSayDie.6235:

Anet likely didn’t want to remove the armor stats entirely because…well, we’ve all seen what happens in games where there’s no disadvantage to taking your pants off.

This is going in my signature, thank you witty sir.

I’m honored.