Padding

Armor that provides greater-than-normal protection against some form of attack is called padded.

Types of Padding

Different types of padding affect different combat results.

Critical (or Crit)

Will reduce the severity of the wound/effect of the wound caused by a damage source. Each critical hit in GemStone has certain effects associated with it, including a wide range of additional points of damage, any of three degrees of injury (from minor scratch to some degree of bleeding to severed limbs), and possible additional effects such as being knocked prone, or stunned and thus unable to act.

Crit padding can not reduce a critical that would have been rank 1 or higher to a rank 0. Characters have natural crit padding derived from CON bonus. GILCHRISTR's research indicates that 1 potential phantom damage is removed for each 4 bonus.

Damage

Will reduce the raw damage points inflicted by a damage source, but will not reduce the other non-damaging effects of that source (e.g. scratches/bleeding/severed body parts, stuns, or knockdowns).

Elemental

This can reduce damage taken from an elemental source, either from creatures that use fire/cold (these are the most commonly seen elemental creatures, but there can be others) in their attacks or from a hot/cold environment such as Pinefar and Aenatumgana and the Glacier on the cold side, or the Lava Flows on Teras Isle on the hot side.

Probably the most common elemental padding is a Bard making use of Sonic Armor (1014); this magical armor inherently has cold, heat, and lightning padding. Another source of elemental padding that has recently become available is from the Ranger spell, Resist Nature (620).

Natural

This is another facet of padding available through the Ranger spell, Resist Nature (620). Nature resistance is similar to elemental resistance in that it protects the wearer from a specific type of attack. Natural resistance lets the wearer withstand hits from nature-specific attacks, which include all offensive Ranger spells and Sandstorm (914).

Partial Armors

Padded partial armor gives full protection to partially covered areas by default. If an armor accessory with the same type of padding is worn over top of either full coverage or partial armor, then only the highest level of padding will apply. For example, lightly damage padded full plate in combination with a heavily damage padded helm would result in heavy damage padding on hits to the head and light damage padding on every other type of hit.

If padded armor is combined with specially enhanced armor accessories (or vice versa), then their bonuses will be averaged. Specially enhanced armor includes: differing types of padding (i.e. combining damage and critical padding on a hit location), armor that is resistant to specific damage types, blessed armor, TD enhancing armor, flaring armor, and spiked armor.

Availablility

A padding merchant is one of the more highly sought after types. Merchants may offer permanent padding, but it is usually very limited in number and quite expensive. More often merchants offer temporary padding, which lasts for several hundred hits depending on what the adventurer wishes to pay.

Temporary damage padding is also available through the Adventurer's Guild. Adventurers can have either somewhat or heavy damage padding added to their armor that will last for 50 hits.

Guardians of Sunfist members have access to Sigil of Minor Protection and Sigil of Major Protection which grant them 60 seconds of heavy damage or heavy critical padding, respectively.

Padding is available through the Premium point system at a cost of ((2 × Padding Level) + Enchant Bonus) × 100 points. For example, to add heavy padding to 4x armor it would cost 4000 premium points.

Critical & Damage Padding Chart

Name
wondrous
incredible
fantastic (standard claidhmores)
phenomenal
expert
superb
masterful
exceptional
very heavy
heavy (standard katanas)
decent
somewhat
fair
light
no padding/weighting (baseline)
slightly diminished
somewhat diminished
noticeably diminished
substantially diminished

See Also

• Armor Accessory & Padding Changes - REVISIONS - 5/31/05
• Changes to Padding and Damage Weighting - 1/29/2008