Heavy Armor - No Avoidance?

[Ajo]

<div>I got a lvl 17 Swashbuckler. I noticed several levels ago that I didn't have any avoidance. It was 0%. I was thinking <em>"hmmm, why?"</em>. Then I read somewhere that if one has too heavy armor equiped the avoidance drops to 0. Is this true?</div><div> </div><div>How can I tell if something will be too heavy? (aside from equipping it to see if the avoidance changes).</div><div> </div><div>Any input would be appriciated.</div>

[Mathe]

<div></div><p>Your Parry and Defense probably just fell too far behind. With full chain and from the offensive stance, I have over 25%. The actual bonus for using leather to avoidance isn't worth the mitigation drop.</p><p>There are for argument's sake 5 types of armor with the avoidance favoring the lightest, the progression is:</p><p>Cloth > Leather > Chain > Plate > Empty Armor Slot (having nothing equipped in the armor slot really lowers avoidance)</p><p>The armor difference is pretty major if you drop 2 or more armor types down the line, but dropping one it isn't that much, but the mitigation drop is. That is why Bruisers and Monks still primarily wear Leather unless they get a really, really good Cloth piece, even though they are avoidance tanks, a very minor extra amount of AGI doesn't compensate for a significant loss to mitigation.</p>

[Carna]

<div></div>When you hit level 40 is about the only time this really becomes a mater of consideration. If you can't afford the Ebon chain the Augmented leather is likely to be an attractive alternative as it's actually pretty balanced armour from a Rogues perspective, it half the price or less of the Ebon and better than the cheap chain alternative.

[Mathe]

<div></div>Actually in that tier, I got my entire set of augmented armor for the price of one Ebon cluster at that time. Ebon was over a platinum, each piece of the leather rare was 8-9 gold. Taking rare crafted leather armor over cheap chain armor because you can't afford the rare crafted chain is a good choice. Only a couple tiers have such a huge price discrepancy between those two rares, and T6 and T7 haven't really appeared to have remotely the same gap.

[Luk]

<div></div>The gap in rare prices is a demand and supply thing, when alot of us were level 40-50 and using ebon, rare harvests were just that "rare" an ebon cluster on my server cost 2+ plat, and since 14 classes used ebon as their armor and 10 classes for weapons, prices stayed very high, but were stable, on the other rare leather was used by 4 classes, so the drop in price was significant due to lesser demand. With the introduction of DoF, and for a little time before that, rare drop rates were modified by SOE so that rares were harvested more frequently and thus, the prices came down, tier 5 rares prices have dropped significantly so that they are affordable by most, or easily obtainable by just going out and harvesting.