balance Why Brigandine Helmets Suck, why you should never make one, and why that's a problem

[Byrnorthil]

I've been doing a lot of theorycrafting and testing on the armor systems in Vintage Story recently. I've redone the shields page on the wiki and intend to do some touch-ups on the armor page soon, after I get in some final testing to confirm my suspicions. Having also recently completed a set of steel plate on my own survival world, I figure I may also write a progression guide to armor here on the forums which hopefully explains some of the less intuitive mechanics more thoroughly than the game does. It was while collecting all this experience and turning it into a working theory that I made an annoying realization:

Brigandine helmets suck. Not because they don't do their job, but because it's pretty much never worth making one when you could just make a chain helmet instead. In fact, you might come away after reading this thread asking yourself "why would I make any other helmet when I could just make a chain helmet instead?"

Brigandine is the budget armor set. You might think that's what lamellar is for, but lamellar's strength is not that it's cheap, it's that it's easy to make. Metallic lamellar doesn't require leather, and doesn't need a helve hammer to finish in a reasonable amount of time, and I want to say that accessibility puts it in its own space apart from all the other metal armor sets. By contrast, brigandine requires the exact same steps as the other armors, but sets itself apart by being not only very cheap but also very durable, and therefore having a very low upkeep cost. To give some perspective, a set of tin bronze brigandine (1100) has nearly twice the durability of a lamellar set (600). So, once you have the infrastructure set up, a set of brigandine is a much more logical long-term choice, especially in a multiplayer playthrough where outfitting everyone with stronger sets would be prohibitively expensive. It doesn't have the best stats, but it gets the job done and will probably tide you over till you're able to progress to the next tier and/or save up enough for your endgame set.

On the exact opposite end of the scale, chain armor has fantastic stats, offering great protection while simultaneously having almost no downsides when worn. When I first started the game and was setting up goals for myself, I questioned why I would ever want any armor set other than chain, and maybe a plate set for spooky times. And then I used it. The answer: chain is very inefficient in terms of ingots per smack. It's much more expensive and time-consuming to craft, while coming with a significant durability penalty. While an iron brigandine set will give you a respectable 50 durability per ingot, chain gives you 20, which is two and a half times worse. In the worst case, a couple of back-to-back encounters with nightmare enemies could leave you tens of ingots down in a matter of minutes. So (with the arguable exception of steel) chainmail is generally not suited for heavy combat situations or for players who get into lots of scuffles, instead being a good catch-all set and the armor of choice for bowmen.

So, what exactly is the problem? We have a set that maximizes efficiency at the expense of mobility, and a set that optimizes mobility at the expense of efficiency. Seems like a well-designed tradeoff, and if we stopped here it would be. The problem arises when we stop restricting ourselves to thinking about sets and start thinking about individual armor pieces, allowing ourselves to mix-and-match a more optimal build.

The crux of the problem is this: the game is inconsistent with which costs and benefits vary by armor slot. Up-front costs and protective values vary wildly by slot: helmets cost much less than chestpieces, and, even though their DR values might be identical, their actual protective value to the player scales with their coverage (chance to get hit)[cogmind players wya]. In contrast, for reasons I do not understand, armor's downsides when worn do not scale with the slot at all, and armor durability scales in effectively the opposite direction from what it should, with chestpieces literally getting less durability per material used to repair them. Helmets have comparatively bad defense/downside ratios, but pretty much never break and are repaired basically for free if they somehow do. I've made this and that thread talking about these mechanics individually already, but I was motivated to write this one when I realized these mechanics were collapsing interesting choices into brainless optimizations and actively taking away from my enjoyment.

You may have noticed that the two attributes which don't scale with armor slot both happen to be the attributes chainmail specializes with. It has terrible durability in exchange for having basically no downside without sacrificing defense. So, what if we craft ourselves a chain helmet? Suddenly chainmail's big weakness is simply no longer relevant. It doesn't matter that your helmet has terrible durability, because a chestplate of the same tier is always going to break first. And because helmets have the same downside multiplier as chestpieces, you get an outsized mobility boost by swapping your hat for chainmail without giving up much in terms of defense (when swapping from scale) or cost (when swapping from brigandine). It's always optimal to have your chestpiece be bulkier and your helmet be lighter. The same logic also applies in the other direction: If you're currently wearing a chain armor set, you can get a sizable durability and defense boost at little cost by swapping your chain chest out for a scale one, or even plate. You can have the best of both cakes, and eat them too. And the interesting tradeoffs between the different sets kind of evaporate away outside of niche use cases.

There are a couple of other tangential issues, like the fact that wearing full sets is more aesthetically pleasing and should therefore be usually optimal, or that chain helmets really have no excuse for not costing leather, but imo they don't matter nearly as much as the reality that I don't find the current system to be as interesting as it could be, and is clearly supposed to be.

Make brig helms great again!

[ifoz]

I think the devs mentioned in a recent interview with Mongster that 1.23 might have something to do with armour, and I'd be quite happy if it did considering that as of right now, the armour system feels a bit underbaked in my eyes.

The armour system works and does its job somewhat well enough, but I do think hit chance is a bit of a weird inclusion for a game like this.
Hit chance workes as a system in something like Morrowind, because they were still kind of figuring out the line between old-school RPG and action gameplay. But in a game with a 3D world and supporting systems for multiple hitboxes per entity, I don't know why armour doesn't function in a more realistic way when the game chooses where you get hit. It's also difficult for the player to figure out this is how the system works, as it is not very inutitive.

A drifter can swipe at your heavily armoured ankles, but if you get unlucky, the game might just apply that hit to your unarmoured head and have you take the full force of it.

All other possible armour updates aside (armour layering, more slots, making gambeson more necessary) I think one of the most important changes would be doing away with the hit chance system and introducing a more dynamic one. It'd be pretty interesting to see if players would prefer to armour their legs more heavily to help defend against drifter hits, or their torso to better protect against things like bowtorn bolts.

Edited May 17 by ifoz

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, ifoz said:

The armour system works and does its job somewhat well enough, but I do think hit chance is a bit of a weird inclusion for a game like this.
Hit chance workes as a system in something like Morrowind, because they were still kind of figuring out the line between old-school RPG and action gameplay. But in a game with a 3D world and supporting systems for multiple hitboxes per entity, I don't know why armour doesn't function in a more realistic way when the game chooses where you get hit. It's also difficult for the player to figure out this is how the system works, as it is not very inutitive.

A drifter can swipe at your heavily armoured ankles, but if you get unlucky, the game might just apply that hit to your unarmoured head and have you take the full force of it.

All other possible armour updates aside (armour layering, more slots, making gambeson more necessary) I think one of the most important changes would be doing away with the hit chance system and introducing a more dynamic one. It'd be pretty interesting to see if players would prefer to armour their legs more heavily to help defend against drifter hits, or their torso to better protect against things like bowtorn bolts.

I think the hit chance system is fine, but could use some fine-tuning to make it better, which seems to be essentially what you've suggested here. For example, torso should have the highest chance to get hit, since it's the biggest target area, with legs and head having proportionally smaller chances. However, different slots could have different injuries, meaning that the player will need to make decisions on what they want to invest in. A heavily armored torso might protect you from a lot of damage, but leaving your head underprotected could leave one at risk for much more serious injuries. However, putting the heaviest protection on one's head might not be the most ideal either, if helmet choice actually affects things like visibility or perhaps even sound(maybe everything is muffled when wearing fully enclosed helmets). Likewise, different armor types might protect from different kinds of injuries.

In keeping with the above, enemies could have different weights on which areas they prefer to attack, or even can attack. Crawling drifters might only be able to attack a player's legs, while the others can attack torso and legs. Thrown rocks could always have a chance to hit the head slot, with the tier 3+ drifters also being able to potentially strike the head giving their longer arms, but at a lower chance than hitting the torso or legs. Shivers tend to lunge at the player, so maybe they have a higher chance of hitting the player's head or torso rather than legs. This kind of logic could also be applied to creatures as well, in that they can have different "slots" in which they have chances to receive appropriate negative effects, or perhaps some of them could have small "killboxes" where the player can do devastating amounts of damage if they manage to hit the creature there(like a locust's butt or a headshot on a wild animal).

I do want to note though, that I don't want to stray too far from simplicity. The system shouldn't be as easy as Minecraft, but combat also isn't the entire focus of the game. One of the strong points of the current system, in my opinion, is that it's simple enough to pick up and start playing, without needing to remember a bunch of rules for, while also being nuanced to allow the player some creative decision making.

[MKMoose]

19 hours ago, Byrnorthil said:

It's always optimal to have your chestpiece be bulkier and your helmet be lighter.

Running mixed armor can be argued to be a very realistic incentive. Granted, helmet being lighter is a bit questionable, and it can look odd and arguably ugly with what we currently have in the game, so we would need to get more historical armor with more deliberate balancing to reach what I would consider a decently historically accurate armor system, and I don't know if the devs have any interest in that.

If you go by real, historical armor, then you get something like this:

• early medieval (not later than around the 10th century) - typically just wool, sometimes padded textile with a metal helmet at best; more expensive armor could involve a mail shirt, in certain regions lamellar, scale or something of the sort (antiquity also saw some interesting metal breastplates, greaves and the like, but we're generally in the medieval period in VS),
• high medieval (~11th-13th century) - more mail in sleeves, leggings and a hood, and some small plate components, though poorer troops still often relied primarily on gambeson (other regions of the world saw some similar and some different developments, but we don't really have armor of those other regions in the game either way, except for lamellar which is arbitrarily unavailable in iron and steel),
• late medieval (starting in the 14th century and more properly in the 15th century) - high-coverage rigid plate armor actually appearing in meaningful quantity; some metal pieces often put on elbows, forearms, shins and knees, but full articulated plate still quite rare and expensive, so most common soldiers would rely at best on brigandine or mail and mixed, often partial limb armor.

Compared to the actual historical armor development, VS armor is really strange in that almost all improvement comes from the metal progression, and almost none comes from iterating on the basics, improving the technological processes, designing new armor, and a whole lot of physical labor required to make that armor to higher and higher standards. Real lamellar and brigandine was often superior to simple chainmail and scale, but in-game they are just worse but cheaper - scale especially tends to be given too much credit in media, where in reality it was often the cheap alternative to lamellar or mail.

In most historical contexts, the type of armor worn by a soldier was dictated by their status and wealth as much as by balancing practicality with survivability, if not more, and level of protection for more influenced by the armor's general quality and layering of different components than by the selection of armor type and metal tier.

VS, as a game, inherently doesn't have the same balance levers as real life, the progression has its quirks, some things have to be simplified, and you can't just tell the player that they're too poor to ever afford plate armor, but I do think that there's a lot that can be gained by designing a system that actually tries to emulate real armor in some capacity, instead of taking a few terms for types of armor, repeating them across the metal tiers with no respect to historical acuracy, and assigning almost arbitrary stats to them.

 

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I do want to note though, that I don't want to stray too far from simplicity. The system shouldn't be as easy as Minecraft, but combat also isn't the entire focus of the game. One of the strong points of the current system, in my opinion, is that it's simple enough to pick up and start playing, without needing to remember a bunch of rules for, while also being nuanced to allow the player some creative decision making.

As much as I agree with this, I would say that the current system does already introduce too much complexity despite being actually rather shallow - it's very wide and may seem deep at first glance, but within the at least ~27 armor sets (more if you count same-tier metal variants and stuff) there is very little in the way of meaningful differences. Everything can be pretty much boiled down to three debuff tiers - armor with few or no downsides to wear at all times, small penalties for regular usage without sacrificing mobility, and heavy debuffs for maximum protection in combat-heavy situations. Add on the matter of time and cost to craft, which is what gives lamellar a small niche, and that's basically all there is to it.

You could easily achieve nearly the same level of depth with about a third of the armor options, while ideally also making sure that none of the options end up practically useless like now happens with pretty much all copper and bronze armor except situationally lamellar.

Edited May 18 by MKMoose

[ifoz]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

scale especially tends to be given too much credit in media, where in reality it was often the cheap alternative to lamellar or mail.

I always thought it a little bit odd that VS' scale armour is something you wear over the top of chainmail, rather than just being its own standalone armour type.
I mean I understand the intent is to have it be a middleground point between chain and plate, but I think the debuffs might be a bit too heavy to feel like it has much use. I think most people probably just craft chain or craft plate, and leave it at that.

I think half-plate might be a better choice for a middleground option, and then have scale as its own cheaper set. I can also imagine half-plate theoretically being handy in the world of VS, where attacks are mostly in the form of shivers biting down on you, or bowtorn bolts. Using plate to protect the most vital organs would probably be a good idea, while chain could cover the areas that need more flexibility. It's also why I think brigandine could be given a bit of an upgrade (it is plate armour, after all) and then scale made to fill that niche of the cheaper yet easier to maintain set.

While we don't see much new world armour to guage how humanity handles the supernatural threat, the scrap armour traders can wear does provide a bit of an idea. Mostly it looks like it is designed to only protect the vital organs (plate over the heart, metal spine running down the back), with other pieces probably designed to stop shiver bites being as damaging (the legs having strips of metal strapped to them). The helmet is interesting, since the antler-like attachments and the eyes on the rim don't really offer any strategic advantage, but I'd guess are for intimidation. Rust monsters do have a chance to run away when they feel threatened, so maybe that's a valid strategy for defence.

Edited May 18 by ifoz

[LadyWYT]

32 minutes ago, ifoz said:

While we don't see much new world armour to guage how humanity handles the supernatural threat, the scrap armour traders can wear does provide a bit of an idea. Mostly it looks like it is designed to only protect the vital organs (plate over the heart, metal spine running down the back), with other pieces probably designed to stop shiver bites being as damaging (the legs having strips of metal strapped to them).

Don't forget the village guards. From what I recall, they seemed to wear leather and gambeson, which in some ways is a little strange since they clearly have access to iron. However, perhaps they prefer lightweight armor that is more easily maintained since the fields produce plenty of flax and the local hunter surely provides lots of hides. Iron might be a very limited supply and thus more valuable for tools, weapons, and trade.

 

36 minutes ago, ifoz said:

The helmet is interesting, since the antler-like attachments and the eyes on the rim don't really offer any strategic advantage, but I'd guess are for intimidation.

It could just be for decorative purposes too, or some deeper meaning(it's a stretch) given that certain drifters have "antlers" and there are "eye" motifs scribbled in certain ruins. Granted, it's more ideal to have something functional that keeps you alive, rather than something that will just make for an attractive corpse, but the traders aren't really armorsmiths either. From a character design standpoint, it makes them look more interesting visually, as well as fits the idea that the "armor" is just stuff that was cobbled together by someone who did the best they could with what they had.

[Chuckerton]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I think the hit chance system is fine, but could use some fine-tuning to make it better, which seems to be essentially what you've suggested here. For example, torso should have the highest chance to get hit, since it's the biggest target area, with legs and head having proportionally smaller chances. However, different slots could have different injuries, meaning that the player will need to make decisions on what they want to invest in. A heavily armored torso might protect you from a lot of damage, but leaving your head underprotected could leave one at risk for much more serious injuries. However, putting the heaviest protection on one's head might not be the most ideal either, if helmet choice actually affects things like visibility or perhaps even sound(maybe everything is muffled when wearing fully enclosed helmets). Likewise, different armor types might protect from different kinds of injuries.

But i feel like if the armor system gets retuned for hit chances to be proportional to target area you may as well just make player health be multiple hitboxes as its more likely an enemy attack does actually connect to the largest hit area. It would be similar to a fine-tuned RNG system anyway with incoming damage but then the player can have some agency with what kind of injuries they want give with outgoing damage. Kinda goes back to what ive been saying in that hunting thread. I wish players could target enemies in a meaningful way beyond just removing health, but i feel like that should be a two-way street. 

Also, love the idea of fully enclosed helmets muffling sounds and hampering visibility. Not that i feel that plate armor needs a nerf given how expensive it is to make but i feel like it would complete the "tank" feel of plate armor. 

[ifoz]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

It could just be for decorative purposes too, or some deeper meaning(it's a stretch) given that certain drifters have "antlers" and there are "eye" motifs scribbled in certain ruins. Granted, it's more ideal to have something functional that keeps you alive, rather than something that will just make for an attractive corpse, but the traders aren't really armorsmiths either. From a character design standpoint, it makes them look more interesting visually, as well as fits the idea that the "armor" is just stuff that was cobbled together by someone who did the best they could with what they had.

I do also wonder if the eyes have any cultural significance to the traders - we know they have a lot of superstitions and folklore, and eyes are used in a number of real world cultures as a way to ward off evil. Traders actually have multiple eye motifs - the scrap helmet has red eyes above the rim, and one of the trader-specific Nadiyan hoods also has a red eye painted on the back of the head.
That Nadiyan hood though is also a colour match for the 'shady' jacket, so it could also be the eyes mark something to do with a sketchier individual. Maybe someone who is fine buying stolen goods?

Edited May 18 by ifoz

[LadyWYT]

9 hours ago, Chuckerton said:

But i feel like if the armor system gets retuned for hit chances to be proportional to target area you may as well just make player health be multiple hitboxes as its more likely an enemy attack does actually connect to the largest hit area.

I don't think health should be bracketed to hitboxes, as that opens up the question...what happens if the HP for that area hits zero? Obviously, in the case of an area like the head, the target dies, but if it's a non-critical area like the legs or something, what happens if the area keeps getting hit? Does the target take no more damage than what they've already sustained(which doesn't really seem fair or make sense)?

To me, it makes more sense to let HP serve as an overall measure of how well the player can stay in the fight, and let enemies have a percentage chance to attack each different slot and apply appropriate status effects. No one-shots on the player, as that tends not to be very fun, but depending on the target the player may be able to leave certain slots open or wear less protection. On other creatures though, there could be special hitboxes that, if the player manages to hit them, more damage is done. That could lead to better hunting on large prey animals, or perhaps some smoother boss fights, without making every creature a potential one hit kill.

[Maelstrom]

On 5/17/2026 at 5:26 AM, ifoz said:

A drifter can swipe at your heavily armoured ankles, but if you get unlucky, the game might just apply that hit to your unarmoured head and have you take the full force of it.

Are you sure that is how the hits and damage are determined?   I am pretty sure that the hit location is determined and then the armor of that location is applied to the attack.

Edited Monday at 08:00 PM by Maelstrom

[MKMoose]

3 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

Are you sure that is how the hits and damage are determined?   I am pretty sure that the hit location is determined and then the armor of that location is applied to the attack.

There's only one hitbox, and the hit location is purely chance-based. It's 20% head, 50% torso and 30% legs, verified in current game code.

[Maelstrom]

My comment still applies.  Hit location determined THEN armor applied to determine damage.

[Diff]

18 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

My comment still applies.  Hit location determined THEN armor applied to determine damage.

I might be misreading the thread because it looks like the two of you are saying the same thing at differing levels of detail and not contradicting each other in any way so yeah both of your comments still apply. If there is a larger point/contradiction here please illuminate.

Edited Monday at 09:42 PM by Diff

[Chuckerton]

On 5/18/2026 at 9:24 AM, LadyWYT said:

I don't think health should be bracketed to hitboxes, as that opens up the question...what happens if the HP for that area hits zero? Obviously, in the case of an area like the head, the target dies, but if it's a non-critical area like the legs or something, what happens if the area keeps getting hit? Does the target take no more damage than what they've already sustained(which doesn't really seem fair or make sense)?

To me, it makes more sense to let HP serve as an overall measure of how well the player can stay in the fight, and let enemies have a percentage chance to attack each different slot and apply appropriate status effects. No one-shots on the player, as that tends not to be very fun, but depending on the target the player may be able to leave certain slots open or wear less protection. On other creatures though, there could be special hitboxes that, if the player manages to hit them, more damage is done. That could lead to better hunting on large prey animals, or perhaps some smoother boss fights, without making every creature a potential one hit kill.

I dont mean each body part has its own health bar, i mightve mis-spoken. I just mean you have multiple hitboxes, but one health pool, and the multiple hitboxes are just for determining what armor applies and what injuries are possible. So against an unarmored player a 3hp hit to the legs does the same as to the torso, but they would have two different sets of possible injuries. 

Basically what your idea was in the second paragraph but instead of a percentage chance to attack a different slot its just wherever the attack physically lands on you. 

Edited Wednesday at 03:58 AM by Chuckerton

[ifoz]

From the new devlog post on the Discord, it looks like armour is going to be fully reworked in 1.23, which is really exciting.
It also seems like they are moving away from the current armour style of mostly historical medieval armour, and toward a mix of styles that blend historical designs with materials and necessities from VS' world. There's a lot of cool scrap metal armour designs, among other designs themed around enemies/bosses.

While the devlog doesn't paint a totally clear picture of how it all works, it seems like each armour slot (head, torso, legs) will be further divided into a padding layer, mid layer, outer layer and decorative layer. The padding is reeds / rags / hide / fur / leather / gambeson, the mid layer is chain / scale / brigandine / lamellar, and the outer layer is plate.

Edited Wednesday at 07:24 AM by ifoz

[Helst_navngivet]

33 minutes ago, ifoz said:

While the devlog doesn't paint a totally clear picture of how it all works, it seems like each armour slot (head, torso, legs) will be further divided into a padding layer, mid layer, outer layer and decorative layer. The padding is reeds / rags / hide / fur / leather / gambeson, the mid layer is chain / scale / brigandine / lamellar, and the outer layer is plate.

This sound super cool!

I LOVE DETAILED ARMOR SYSTEMS!!!!!!