You've got your dream set of armour - maybe it's
Ghost, or
Boar, or even
Angel. Great stuff, but oh those repair bills! You won't always be hunting the biggest mobs you can handle, and the overprotection will cost you dearly over the long and grinding hunts of your EU hunter's life.
Pixie with plates will do nicely for smaller argos, and
Rascal does the same job, a bit more expensively. What about drones?
Valiant+6A, or
Paladin+5C will do the trick!
What's that? You haven't got all those armours? You couldn't possibly carry them all, along with all of your fabulous loot? Never fear, Kobold is here!Here's me wearing my
Kobold (no feet yet!):
Click for full size.Kobold is not cheap as chips, like Pixie or
Goblin, or even Rascal, but it is much less than Knight
or Paladin, and way less than the fancy big mob stuff. Here
are its tt and market values (according to Entropedia):
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If you want to follow
the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid), or are on a budget, then make your single back-up armour Kobold, and for this reason: versatility.
Here's the protections it offers:
Doesn't seem like much, at first glance - 3 cut! Am I kidding? Nope. In fact, 3 cut is often plenty for small mobs. Apart from specialised attacks, most mobs' attacks fall into 3 main categories: pure impact, impact & cut (I/C), or impact/cut/stab (I/C/S). Pure impact mobs are often large anyway, like Ambulimax, or Falx (90% impact, so a ring-in here). You'll need heap big impact protection for them - use your top grade impact kit. For the small ones like smaller Exos and Berycleds, for example, 13 impact protection is quite sufficient. I/C mobs most often hit with more impact than cut - Faucervix, Argonauts and Calamusoids are 75%/25%, Combibos are 60%/40%, while Molisks are 2/3 impact and 1/3 cut. Most of the damage is carried in the impact component, so that is where you need the main strength. 3 cut isn't much, I admit, but it should suffice for smaller mobs if your gun is big enough.
And by the way, there's nothng wrong with just a little fapping - at least it skills, unlike expensive visits to the repair terminal!
There are plenty of exceptions to this pattern of attacks. Phasms turn the usual I/C division on it's head, with 20% Impact / 80% Cut. You just don't run into a Phasm, though, unless you're actually trying to! The common Armax is 50% impact/50% stab: you just wouldn't choose to use your Kobold for them, so it's not a universal cure-all. It's just damn useful.
And what about the specialised attacks? By definition, you can't cover them all in one armour, but Kobold does cover Cold, and very nicely too. Kobold is the armour of choice for all professional or obsessed Feff hunters - all those among us who just gotta get another Korss, no matter what! (Just ask The Salamander!)
8 burn though. What's that good for? Well, by itself, not much. Put on some plates, however, and bots beware. Which is what I really want to say about Kobold. If you have a good selection of armour plating, Kobold comes into its own. 3 cut really is low, but as a base for 3A, 5A, or even 5B plates, it is perfect. In fact, you wouldn't want it any higher than 3. 3A or 5A will make it 7 cut. If cut is 25% of the attack, that means you are ready to absorb the full cut quota from the first 28 points of an attack, which is pretty significant! 3A lifts impact to 18, and with 5A it becomes 20, almost 3/4 of 28, and for many mobs, the impact attack is 2/3 or less of the total.There are many serious mobs with an average attack at or below 28 points of damage. With good fapping, a higher average level of attack could certainly be accomodated.
So, what about those Drones? 5C or 6A plating renders Kobold well able to deal with nearly all Drones and smaller Warriors:
As you are no doubt aware by now, getting the right set-up for hunting is a balancing act. The power of your gun has to be sufficient to protect your armour from hits (and you from death), while your armor should be as efficient a choice as possible, usually requiring that your fap also be sufficient. All of these things, in turn, depend upon your relative skill levels in combat, defence, and health. To conclude this examination of Kobold Armour, I include some tables from the Damage V Armor Calculator, available at Entropedia
here. These tables show damage and decay with various possibly useful platings, depending on your own case, against three typical targets of the Kobold warrior. Damage figures show maxima, rather than averages.
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