Is Riot Armor worth getting over Flak?

[TinyForearms]

8 hours ago, Pipinghot said:

Yeah, when you're comparing blueprints it becomes important to look at the blueprint holistically, not just one value.

For example, if you want your set of ghillie armor to provide maximum protection against heat then you might ignore a piece you find that gives more armor but less heat protection, or if you're having trouble in cold zones then you might wear a flak piece that gives less armor or has less durability but gives you more protection against cold.

You have to evaluate every piece of armor based on what you want from that armor set, as you have discovered it's not as simple as just taking the highest armor value.

 

It's also important to understand that armor gives diminishing returns (same with saddles), if a saddle/armor is going to cost more resources then it needs to be worth the additional cost. Saddles & armor give a different amount of protection against alpha dino's than they do against regular dinos, and they give a different amount of protection against turrets than against explosives or against bullets/melee. Having said that, if you're not going to engage in PvP then the easiest way to think of armor protection in terms of the protection it will give against bullets & melee & most dinos.

25 armor reduces damage by 20% ( 1/5th )

50 armor reduces damage by 33.33% ( 1/3rd )

100 armor reduces damage by 50% ( 1/2 half )

200 armor reduces damage by 66% ( 2/3rds )

300 armor reduces damage by 75% ( 3/4ths )

400 armor reduces damage by 80% ( 4/5ths )
 

As you can see, the first 25-100 points of armor rating are the most efficient. After the first 100 points or armor rating a saddle needs to have much higher armor in order to give you better protection and very often the blueprints you find with higher armor ratings are quite expensive. It's pretty typical to see people put basic saddles on most of their animals and only make higher quality saddles on the animals they use the most for exploring, fighting and boss fights.

For boss fights you want the best possible armor & saddles that you can afford, but for everything else you have to weigh the benefits against the cost.

 

If you want a nice, neat visual showing the relationship between armor values and damage received, there's a good graph in this section of the Saddles page on the wiki.

https://ark.gamepedia.com/Saddles#Saddle_Armor

 

I somewhat knew that was the case, obviously for balance there can never be 100% damage reduction. though I never knew about the actual numbers involved, I just thought more armor, the better
But wow, saddles can actually go 400 armor? but i'm sure this depends on the dino that saddle belongs to. I've got a rex saddle that capped to close to 400% i know it's capped because I checked the crafting bonus 40%-30% bonus had no difference in value

 

6 hours ago, carbonark said:

Just to add to what pipinghot said, keep in mind that when it comes to armor you're almost always better off with durability over armor. As was pointed out you have diminshing returns on protection the further above 100% armor you get, however broken armor = no protection. In virtually every case something like 200 armor and 1000 durability would be better than say 400 armor and 200 durability.

As a side note saddles also have a durability stat, but it's hidden and unused but it does heavily impact crafting cost. If you notice two similar saddle bp's have wildly different resource costs one will likely have a lower durability. You can actually see the stat by throwing the blueprint on the ground and looking at the tooltip on the box

This i didn't know about saddle durability. They really oughta have had that reworked, I use my argent to craft items but I have blueprints that go above the 300 item carry limit (like a mosa platform saddle), requiring a tek replicator, though i have heard that there are BPs not even a tek replicator has enough slots for

but i guess i'm just thankful i don't have to repair saddles

 

[carbonark]

Generally any saddle can’t be crafted within a tek rep, likely isn’t worth crafting from a resource cost standpoint. Saddle armor caps at 124 (on official, I believe it’s possible to change this on unofficial) so generally a 70-80 armor bp is enough to reach the armor cap with crafting skill.