Put the HoS cape from Manta as a job reward

[saccharineChampion]

If memory serves, armor was only recently fixed to actually work properly, so that might alter some longer-time perceptions of armor effectiveness.

As for armor affecting decisions - it actually does affect mine when I have the luxury of discretion of who to attack. Without AP ammo, I definitely do more hit-and-run than trying to gun down a person who has armor, while against an unarmored opponent, I'll go for the gun down. Any armor that doesn't really communicate that it's armor would be a terrible "gotcha" to that type of consideration.

Flabor has an excellent post which unfortunately ended up as the last post of a page that got pushed away from being the only page two minutes after her post, so I'll briefly put it here.

Spoiler!

Armor is actually pretty important actually! I think this is poorly communicated (partially because it feels like what is and is not armor is arbitrary)

I did some light testing on my master branch, the cape is actually one point of armor better than a vest. Wearing it reduces damage from the .22 pistol from 22 brute damage to 8, reduces extinguisher hits from 10 brute damage to 3, and increases the amount of c-saber hits you can take until you are stunned from 2 to 3. It also reduces damage from screwdrivers from 5 to 0 (!) .

Again, I feel that part of why armor is very rarely thought about is because it's hard to intuit what has armor and how good it is. Someone wearing a vest and regular helmet might look way more protected than a dude wearing an HoS beret and cape, but both of those Actual Real Armor Items are worse than the aesthetically Not Armor items that... are armor? The mechanic doesn't really work if it's not very clear who is and who isn't protected, ideally players should be able to tell what is and isn't armor entirely based on look at the thing. The HoS cape isn't really the worst example of this though, (using medal rewards you have armor that looks nothing like armor and isn't always even armor), but I think that overall we should try to make Powerful Armor Items actually look like real armor for aesthetic consistency !!

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yeah who has ever in history saw a HoS wearing a cape and mistook it as not being armor and underestimated them as a result. i’ll take “shit that has never happened” for 500

That's wholly something that can and, if it hasn't already happened, will happen. When armor has such a great effect on damage as Flaborized pointed out with her tests, it's far from the realm of possibility.