Blood of Steel: Armour Guide (How to Make A Good One)

Go to the main menue and click on the left side on “Hero Gallery”. Then click on “Armour” and you should see this interface:

Click on the “purchase Plate” button on the right side to open the Armour Plate store.
Here you see all the options available to get Armour Plates. On the one hand we can get a random armour plate for 1000 silver and on the other hand we can directly buy Armour Plates from level 1 to level 3. If you buy the random armour plate you will gain one random Armour Plate of the ones that are listed. Theoretically you have the chance to get a level 3 (best quality) Armour plate, but most likely you receive just level 1 (low quality) Armour Plates. When you click on any Plate a window with a description of the effects will open up.
In this example I clicked on the “Plate of Dexterity” level 1 and we can see it boosts our attack speed by 0.2%. If you click on the golden button you are going to buy the selected Plate. Buy now one level 1 armour plate of your choice.

After you have bought a plate click on escape to get back to the Armour interface.
If you do now a left click on the Armour Plate a small menue opens up with 3 options. Click on “Insert the Plate in the armor” to fill one of the slots. You will now use this Armour Plate and get the effects in the battle when using it. You could also do a right click for a fast insert. Also by right click you can remove armour plates by clicking on them in the slots or use the “Unload All Plates” button to remove all plates and they will appear again on the left side.

As you remember we could open a small menue when we left clicked on Armour plate on the left side. The second option in this menue is called “Decompose”. If you click on that button you are going to lose your armour plate and receive some plate shards again for it. Here are the decompose stats for the different levels of the Armour plates:

level_______cost_____refund___percent______loss
level 1______100______100_____100%_______0
level 2______400______320______80%______80
level 3_____1600_____1280______80%_____320

As you can see our armour has 24 slots, 8 for each category. We have red, yellow and green Armour Plates.

Red plates
The red Armour Plates are used to increase the damage of a hero. We have the “Plate of Strength” that increase our melee attack (good for melee heroes with high attack damage), the “Plate of Agility” to boost the ranged attack damage (good for ranged units only) and the “Plate of Dexterity” which increase our attack speed (good for every hero type, except melee heroes with very slow attack speed).

Recommendation: My personal favourite is the “Plate of Dexterity”. As I often play warrior I found it really useful against troops and especially enemy heroes. As melee hero you already deal alot damage and sometimes you get overkill on units, so more attack speed allows you to attack more units within the same time. Especially when it comes to a duel situation between 2 heroes the “Plate of Dexterity” shows effect. If you have higher attack speed than your opponent your hits will interrupt your opponents attack, so even if your opponent has a super high melee attack he can not win if you always attack faster and he can’t strike himself. But not only for melee heroes, but also for rangers this plate can pay off very well. In a ranged combat the side that takes out opponents faster gonna take the victory. I also thought of that ranged units can fire on command. So if you increase your attack speed and your soldiers always fire together with you, you maybe even increase with that the attack speed of your entire unit. But I don’t have any proof for that, it is just a suggestion. However “Plate of Dexterity” is the best for ranged and melee heroes in my opinion and should be taken at first to fill the red slots(if you later have many plate shards, that you can afford other Armour comps feel free to try it)

Yellow plates
The yellow Armour plates are used to enhance your survivability. The “Plate of Endurance” increase the heroes max. health points by a fixed amount. This can be good for heroes with ranged units as they tend to have a low amount of max. HP. The “Plate of Reflective” increase your armour stats and gives an extra protection bonus against stab damage (down attacks). The “Plate of Absorbant” also increase the armour stats and gives a protection bonus against blunt damage (crushing damage, dealt by heavy weapon units such as the Hammer Vanguard of Frederick I and some lancers).

Recommendation: My absolute personal favourite is the “Plate of Reflective”! Why? Because the bonus against stab damage helps against so many weapons. Every spear/pike unit deals ONLY stab damage as they always do down attacks. As long the lances are not ready every lancer unit deals only stab damage. Every unit with sword can do swings, but they have the option and chance to down attack which means they deal stab damage then. I also asked on the official Blood of Steel Discord server for ranged attack damage category. It was said that ranged attacks are classified as ranged stab damage. I haven’t done testing with different Armour plates yet, but in theory the “Plate of Reflective” should protect you the best and prevent more damage than the “Plate of Endurance” could increase. The “Plate of Absorbant” increase the armour aswell, but in my opinion blunt damage is too rare in the game that it could pay off more than the “Plate of Reflective”.

Green plates
The green Armour plates can increase the attack effects or max. HP. The “Plate of Constitution” increase the max. HP by percentage (good for heroes with high basic max. HP). The “Plate of Penetration” makes attacks more effective against armour and gives an extra bonus against external armour. The “Plate of Shattering” also makes attacks more effective against armour, but gives an bonus against internal armour.

Recommendation: My favourite is the “Plate of Penetration”, because with my playstyle I am not in the need of an increased amount of max. HP so higher damage against soldiers can never be wrong. But why the bonus against external defence? Well you can look into hero statistics to find out in which way they are armoured like in this picture:

I have chosen Cesar, because he is one of the most played heroes in the game and many well armoured heroes(and soldiers) have similiar stats. You can see his external defence is way higher than his internal defence. So I assume (not sure) that the bonus against armour is granted in a percentage amount. So it should be way more effective to go against the higher number (external) than the lower (internal) one. I just know that increased max. HP don’t seem worth for me, because even if you have 8 times level 3 Armour plates you increase in Cesar example the max. HP by 84 (875max. HP x 8 x 0.012) and he has one of the highes max. HP. 84 is actually not that bad, but against most other heroes it means you can just receive one more hit before you would die. For me 1 more hit does not compare to increased damage of a hero against units.

As you know now the plate effects you decide for yourself which plates you want to insert in your armour. If you are a new player I recommend this methods:

• 1. Fill every slot with level 1 Plates at first, they are cheap and you can decompose them without losing any plate shards
• 2. When you have 1500 plate shards or more, remove a level 1 Armour Plate, decompose it and replace it with a level 3 Armour plate
• 3. Don’t buy any level 2 Armour plates! Your aim is to get the best armour one day, so every slot filled with level 3. If you buy a level 2 plate you lose 80 plate shards every time you decompose it
• 4. You sometimes get level 2 Armour plates from “Path of Heroes”. Of course you should use them if your armour isn’t maxed and sometimes its better to have a level 2 Armour plate thats not your first choice than a level 1 of your choice
• 5. Don’t use silver to get random Armour plates. You pay 1000 silver to get most likely a level 1 Armour plate, which means if you decompose it, you get 100 plate shards for it. If you would buy an entire level 3 armour set it means you had to pay 384,000 silver, which is the cost of 4 heroes of your choice. I only recommend to do this if you need the points for the daily activity (you get 10 for buying a plate and 5 for using 500 silver), but keep in mind the price is the same, even on low numbers!
• 6. When you finally achieved level 3 Armour plates in every 24 slots you can go for other level 3 plates of different categories. I don’t recommend to mix effects before, because you should know which effects you want and then get the max. possible of it
• 7. You have 2 different armour sets you can choose from before a battle. I recommend to make 1 armour set for melee heroes and another one for ranged heroes, so you can choose the most effective one for your battle

I told you know my knowledge about Armour plates. Still keep in mind that not everything I mentioned is a fact, but my view on some things. I have my biggest uncertainty with external and internal defence. Another explanation for this differentiation between those 2 types I heard from someone is that external and internal show the defence ability against melee (external) and ranged (internal) attacks. That would be a contradiction to the Armour Plates description, but as translation errors are quite common there is no safety to anything. So feel free to comment your experiences and tell me that I was talking mad ♥♥♥♥ 😛