[Taran]

There's magical elven and dragon scalemail. The drops of leather might be increased a bit to compensate for the slight AR loss.

[soMa]

I agree 100% now with the ar lowered to get med and would be ok with it.
Leather should not be the same ar as metal armor unless it's magical.
so as long as the magical armor stays high in ar and still hard to make just like the high end Metal armor is, it evens out.

Adding better meditation and taking a slightly lower hit in ar to leather armor makes it well worth it. That is if they do add better meditation to it.
which is yet to be seen.
Ramza is right...

If the drop is increased that's even better for leather, and hope that the meditation is taken into consideration.
which I would much prefer the meditation idea over increasing the drop rate

[Lamby]

There's magical elven and dragon scalemail. The drops of leather might be increased a bit to compensate for the slight AR loss.

Sorry to be so negative but I dont see the upside here...
Providing more leather drops wouldn't make a difference because hey will be worth more trashed than as armor... People barely wore/bought it when the AR was good.
As for magical elven or dragon they are too difficult to make to be worth selling/wearing.

[Taran]

Not anymore though, chance to craft those armors were increased and dragon scalemail AR was bumped up.
The reason for this is to get players to buy more mid- to high end armors from other players to promote armor crafting.

[Lamby]

Not anymore though, chance to craft those armors were increased and dragon scalemail AR was bumped up.
The reason for this is to get players to buy more mid- to high end armors from other players to promote armor crafting.

Woohoo! I gotta check that out

Edit: Nope. Way too resource heavy to be worthwhile. Lunar armor is a joke because of how difficult it is to collect the actual lunar bones and it costs an unbelievable 32 of them for just the chest piece alone moreover i imagine after all the effort the AR wouldn't be much. Same thing with dragon mail, I could mine all day and not get 3 daemon ingots which is needed for just one article of the dragon mail set. Elven is the exception which isn't that resource heavy but its AR is shit (43 for exceptional, why not craft unexceptional blood rock and save the effort?).

[Raziel_]

Not anymore though, chance to craft those armors were increased and dragon scalemail AR was bumped up.
The reason for this is to get players to buy more mid- to high end armors from other players to promote armor crafting.

Yeah... the chances on crafting those magical are better.. but yet they have bad ar and requires a lot of resources.. not to mention the high bs skill required...
also the studded leather is ridiculous how hard to make an exceptional... 17% exceptional chance for studded armor...

Woohoo! I gotta check that out

Edit: Nope. Way too resource heavy to be worthwhile. Lunar armor is a joke because of how difficult it is to collect the actual lunar bones and it costs an unbelievable 32 of them for just the chest piece alone moreover i imagine after all the effort the AR wouldn't be much. Same thing with dragon mail, I could mine all day and not get 3 daemon ingots which is needed for just one article of the dragon mail set. Elven is the exception which isn't that resource heavy but its AR is shit (43 for exceptional, why not craft unexceptional blood rock and save the effort?).

couldn't have said better ;D

[Loki]

This only makes sense on AoS or publish 17/18 servers because leather provides inferior protection from weapons and magic damage. Since here the AR is similar and most spells ignore armour anyway that isn't the case. I'm not saying no, it isn't even my place to say no, but I think you need to think about the implications all round. If leather gives more mana and pretty much the same AR then everyone will use leather, end of story. Even slightly lower AR will still be leather for all, because small AR differences are much less valuable than mana.

As for leather being inferior and a set back for people who RP using leather, RP wise leather should provide less protection than metal, if you're RPing you have to use leather then you should be happy with the RP-logic that leather is not plate and doesn't protect like it. On IN1 Goblins happily used leather, with no helm (the goblin mask did not allow it) despite the fact that it was significantly weaker protection (over 20 AR lower than the best armours).

[Lamby]

I just erased my what I wrote because I really don't want to continue with the argument. If leather needs to be ruined then cheers... I have no problem working with plate.

[Eru]

I still think meditation and stealth bonus based on AR would be nice. The problem with default UO armor is that it only allows for plate since it has the highest armor with no penalties. (minus to Dex, etc)

I'm thinking a +10-20 skill-point bonus equivalent to meditation at 0 armor, then it should give diminishing returns up until about 40 AR, including shields.

The problem with this is that it will just encourage people to unequip their plate, meditate, then reequip their plate. :/

One of the base reasons people want other armors is for a different appearance though... what I could do is add new armor models to the game, but that my affect the UO aesthetic.
Check out this page for samples; http://www.uo-pixel.de/gump/komplett_ruestung_set

[Loki]

Thing is we have a real problem right now of people not using expensive or good gear, this would only make it worse. I'm sure there is a solution to make things more interesting without breaking the system more, but I'm not sure what it is, none of the suggestions so far are quite right to me though, most of them I fear would lead either to overuse of leather, or compound existing problems with getting people to wear decent armour (especially in PvP).

[Habibi Jones]

Thing is we have a real problem right now of people not using expensive or good gear, this would only make it worse. I'm sure there is a solution to make things more interesting without breaking the system more, but I'm not sure what it is, none of the suggestions so far are quite right to me though, most of them I fear would lead either to overuse of leather, or compound existing problems with getting people to wear decent armour (especially in PvP).

Solution: Create tailoring clothing which requires 60 armor to equip. Give the clothes some good bonus and make them expensive/hard to craft.
Make some meditation clothing...
Make some stealth clothing...
Make some magic resist clothing...
Etc, etc.

The key is to make these clothes powerful and coveted, this makes them expensive and gives much more incentive to wear good armor as well as group up and down PK's who are wearing expensive mage clothes.

[Eru]

I'd prefer something that is more of a blanket rule, such as lower AR = more meditation as an example.

The problem with adding specific stats to specific pieces of armor is that it has to be done manually to each thing you're modifying, plus if later we decide it's unbalanced, we have to modify each one manually again, or remove them all again manually.