tiny female armors!

[kikix12]

And... in actual physics... a suit of plate mail armor is just as useful against an archer as a bikini... As in: both are completely and utterly useless.

At least be accurate when you are trying to use physics to argue against something that is not even the point of the post.

One, an arrow, to be in any way relevant for armored person, needs to have a tip made of a material of the same or higher hardness. A wooden arrow is useless against plate armor. It can't do a thing, nothing, zilch, nada. You can send a million wooden arrows against a single person and even if all of them hit, if that armor really covers the entire body, the person will be perfectly safe. That is because no bow in existence is able to give a wooden arrow enough kinetic energy at any point of its flight to pierce iron/steel plate and the iron/steel chainmail underneath it. This is the lone reason why many cultures were completely wiped out when iron and later steel armors were originally used. Heck, this is one of the large reasons why Romans were so successful in their conquest. They had bronze armor against weapons of inferior material on top of their strategies.

Two, even IF the same material is used, the arrow have no ability to pierce the armor in most cases.
1) An arrow is useless if shot in a ballistic trajectory. The speed of its fall in an arc is not high enough for it to have enough kinetic energy to pierce any metal plated armor with chain mail underneath. The massive "rains of death" that are so loved in movies thus had incredibly low success in killing knights. Basically they could do that only if they managed to hit in-between the holes in the helmet (if those had any) or other parts of the armor (if any). They were successful at wounding and sometimes killing unarmored infantry, but knights?! No. The only knights that regularly died to them were those whose horses were hit, fell down or threw their riders off, and that were trampled afterwards before being able to get up.
2) An arrow rather rapidly loses its kinetic energy. After certain distance it will be ineffective, once again, for the same reason. And an additional one which is point 3.
3) Armors were made to deflect attacks. If you shoot in a straight line at someone in armor that charges at you, you can be almost completely sure you will not pierce his armor no matter the arrow. Unless you use one of the modern bows that strengthen the force and modern arrows that are more dangerous than anyone could dream of when bows were a thing, anyway. The reason is because the force will be deflected. The arrow will simply slide off to the side as that is the easiest path available for it to take. And physics like the easiest path. It will be a bigger threat to the squire behind the knight than it could ever be to the knight himself. This is exactly why "boob shape" is a suicidal idea for an armor, cause the breasts would cause attacks to slide towards the heart instead of away from it.
4) In actual combat, most arrows were massive misses. They were shot randomly early on for easy pickings, to obstruct vision, cause panic etc. When enemies came closer in they were used as nice deterrent to less armored cavalry as horses were easy targets. Though a horse could take a few arrows, even dozens depending on the location and the horse, before it actually was stopped, and heavy cavalry had armored horses as well. In closer range no one used bows. A sword or an axe were far more likely to kill while avoiding being killed.
5) Any plate armor have three layers. The deflecting plate, the mail that is meant to both distribute its weight as well as absorb the force of piercing attacks (like arrows) by "holding" onto the blades instead of the sharp point, and a leather armor underneath to prevent abrasions from the metal part, absorb blunt trauma from blunt attacks and...stop arrows that managed to pierce the metal parts but lost plenty of their force.

In other words, arrows required a number of circumstances to pierce an armor with lethal force. These circumstances did occur in real life...but were exceedingly rare in casual skirmishes. That's why bowmen were quickly routed if they did not manage to set up for a battle and had no means of preventing approach. Add to that the tiredness of archers from both pre-battle activities as well as repeated shots and you have miserable statistics for arrow kills. Don't get me wrong. They were a staple of just about any army since their invention and for a good reason...but they were never the scary bringers of death they are made into in games...until the modern times, anyway with the mechanical bows and specialized arrows.

[Tridus]

CONAN!!!! The ADVENTURER!!! CONAN!!! Warrior without fear! CONAN! THE MIGHTEST WARRIOR EVER! HIS QUEST. to undo the spell of living stone cast upon his family by driving the evil serpent men back into another dimension and vanquishing their leader, the cruel wizard Wrath-A-Mon.

You just made my day. Sometimes I think nobody else remembers that show.

D&D never even had tanks. It's 4e tried to add them... but it was a limited concept. Tanking itself doesn't work in any setup where you allow NPCs to ignore the little kid telling "yo momma" jokes and instead focus on his 4 teenage buddies behind him with guns and knives...

Tanking is an artificial construct made to enable gaming in a platform with a 'limited AI' that would have more complex logic based strategies easily outguessed by the player base (see Guild Wars 2 and it's resultant failure to have a dynamic combat system after the second month of the game's life when player figured out all the AI's tricks) who could then just 'take a step to the left' and ignore all fight mechanics...

Not strictly true. D&D has no tanks in the MMO sense. But in 3.5 with ToB, lockdown Crusaders were a thing. Build that right, and nobody can get to the people behind you because they're making DC 40 Reflex saves every time they try to leave the square they're in. I did one recently with a spiked chain and 30' reach. It was extremely effective at forcing melee opponents to deal with me via battlefield control.

[Makeda]

Yeah, but everyone here is acknowledging the existence of glamour as a valid option, though. We understand it's magic that covers the actual set. You can wear a full set of armor and glamour it to make it look like a bikini, but it's not a bikini! It only looks like it (I really don't know why this is so hard to understand for some people). Is it silly? Well, in my opinion yes, but it's also the player's choice. Now try to wear the bikini alone, no glamour, the actual set. You'd get wrecked. That's the point, the game barely offers an actual bikini set and I'm fine with that.

I always figured my character actually WAS wearing a bikini, but it was magic shields that protected her...

Because...

As any heavy metal warrior standing on a field being shot at be English Longbowman or Mongolian Musketeers would have told you... that metal ain't stopping jack or jill. Arrows and bullets both would just go right through it. And the blast from a 12th through 14th century cannon wouldn't even bother to care - it's just see a tin can to crush.

It was made to protect cavalry during a charge into a line of melee or reloading musketmen. Slashing and blunt attacks, not piercing or high velocity. (actually it might have resisted the Mongolian Musketman better than it stood up against the English Longbowman - early ammunition was more like scatter shot if I recall right).

People often fail to realize that the power of a longbow arrow is greater than most bullets up until maybe WWII. It's just that it takes a lifetime to train a single archer, but you can throw 10,000 peasants into the field and give them cheaply made muskets and later rifles - and if half kill themselves from exploding equipment... it's no loss to you if you're a warmonger... there's more where those came from...

But as such... bows make quick work of metal armors. Take a highly sharpened ice pick to a sheet of metal and you can see this... and you're not even able to produce a quarter of the force with that that your medieval English longbowman had with his bow... Modern armor might be better - but we're not using that here.

[hynaku]

Didn't the amazons have tiny armors and look how strong they where. Think tiny armors helped them with movement and dodging attacks. I want see person in full plate armor swim across a river or under the ocean and not drown. But since don't really ever wear tiny armors because like to wear dresses so don't really have any say against them. most I ever do is when at beach that's next to my place is wear a bikini. My fantasy for armor would be to beat a primal in a fancy dress or nice top and fancy skirt.

[Camiie]

Hey if you're going to have a (final) fantasy it may as well be a fantasy in every sense of the word!

[MsQi]

Hey if you're going to have a (final) fantasy it may as well be a fantasy in every sense of the word!

Even fantasy needs a frame of reference. If it were fantasy in "every sense" it wouldn't have recognizable objects and characters would not have human like features, or even animal like, or features that we would recognize as features....

Sorry, that probably has very little to do with the topic.

[Lilseph]

I think you're missing the point, because you are doing exactly what I mentioned: Touching the extremes. It's either super fantasy where everything is possible or real life where it's the opposite. I did mention that in a magical world you can kill the super entity with a piece of bread. I did mention that, if this was irl, you'd get crushed in a second. I also think I haven't mentioned anyting related to "looking good", just practical EVEN FOR A FANTASY SETTING. And, again, I think that when it comes to design proper setting, you have to balance between some irl rules to make it credible and some fantasy elements to make it entertaining.

But that leads us to the following outcome: Every fantasy world has their mixture of rules. Sailor Moon has one, Saint Seiya has one, other Final Fantasies have one, and XIV seems to lean towards the most credible ones (in my opinion), where wearing an armor would protect you: It doesn't matter if it's the god of your mom, a powerful unnamed arrow, the powerful cannon of Shang Tsung. It protects you. They are made of rare materials, some attuned to certain energies or elements. There are more powerful armors that protect you against more powerful things, and they cover your whole body. That's the reason I got impresed with this game at first, because their armor design wasn't a bag of sexual fanservice, as you can see in some games nowdays. There ARE very few exceptions, but it doesn't discredit their whole approach.

Regarding my examples with D&D, I mentioned them and explained them, the same way you make all these historical references.

[Lord_Umbra]

This many pages for a FANTASY game.. people trying bring logic to a world without actual earth logic. If the game followed any logic based in our reality most of game would be non existent.

Let people have fun whole thing is choice & armours don't matter anyway when most armour we get in dungeons these days are mostly cloth with should guards or arm guards, take Skalla tank chest piece it is form fitting meaning it has f all protection outside of partial face/mouth guard & wouldn't protect us against any of bosses / regular enemies in game in a world with logic but we're not a logic world we're a magical fantasy world.

[Rhus]

Considering my current outfit is the taffeta loincloth dyed blue, green summer bikini top, claws of the beast and gagana sandals, dyed blue obv, with a daisy in my hair....I don't think I'm at liberty to take part in this discussion xD

[craybest]

why are people bringing real facts about armor protection and movement to a MMO forum? I'll never get it.
armor in this game and most other MMOs makes ZERO sense. it never aimed to be realistic anyway.