Conan Exiles Armor Guide: Weight Classes, Tiers And The Best Sets

Armor in Conan Exiles is doing three jobs at once, and most players only notice one of them. It stops damage, obviously. It also decides whether you can survive standing in the snow or walking into a volcano, which on this map is a bigger cause of death than any enemy. And by the time you are at the level cap it is the main place your attribute bonuses come from, which means the set you wear is part of your build rather than a layer over the top of it.

Light, medium and heavy is a dodge question

The three weight classes are not simply worse, average and better. What you are trading is the roll.

Heavy armor protects you well against physical damage and then takes your escape option away, which is a genuinely bad trade against anything that hits hard and fast. Medium is the honest default for most of the game: noticeably tougher than light, and you keep the mobility that keeps you alive. Our leveling guide puts the switch to medium or heavy at around the point you start clearing the Stygian city, which is the first place ordinary enemies come in groups.

The numbers on every piece

• Armor rating. The base value, and the one everybody reads first.
• Temperature resistance. Cold, heat, or neither. Covered below, because it matters more than it looks.
• Durability. How long the piece lasts before it stops protecting you and needs repairing.
• Weight. Both the dodge question above and a straight drain on what else you can carry.
• Attribute bonuses. Stamina, health, carrying capacity, weapon damage. At the cap these are the reason to wear one set over another.

Temperature is a second armor rating

The Exiled Lands run from desert to volcano to frozen mountain, and the map punishes you for arriving in the wrong clothes long before anything attacks you. Cold resistant gear is what makes the Frozen North survivable, which is to say it is a prerequisite for black ice and for the meteor fields where star metal lands. Heat resistance does the same job for the desert and the volcano.

Early on this is solved crudely: fur keeps you warm, and our leveling guide's advice to avoid the unnamed and skull marked exploration points until you have some is the honest version of it. Later it is solved properly, by sets that carry a real resistance number alongside their armor value, and a full set of those is what turns a hostile region into a farming route.

Ordinary, epic and flawless

There are three quality steps and they are unlocked in different ways, which is why the terms get muddled. Ordinary armor is what your knowledge points buy. Epic armor is the tier above it, gated behind the Exile Epics knowledge at level 60, and its recipes want hardened leather, which is a four ingredient craft of its own. The cost is charged per piece rather than per set, which is what catches people out. Royal epic pieces run twenty hardened leather each against forty five iron bars. Stygian Invader asks the same twenty, paired with eighteen star metal bars. Cimmerian Steel sits between sixteen and twenty five depending on the slot. A full set is five of those.

Flawless is not a knowledge at all. It comes from the person standing at your bench. Put a named armorer on an improved armorer's bench and the flawless versions appear, and an armorer who can make flawless armor can make the epic flawless versions too, which is the best quality in the game. That makes the thrall hunt part of your gear progression rather than a side activity, and our named thralls page has the settlements those crafters appear in.

The sets worth the materials

Three sets come up again and again once the ingredient lists stop being the problem.

• Godbreaker is the endgame heavy answer and the one to aim at for boss fights. Across the full set it is quoted at 1,320 base armor with five stamina, fifteen carrying capacity, three percent to strength and agility weapon damage, five heat resistance and fifty cold resistance. That cold figure is the part to notice: it makes the north a non issue.
• Silent Legion is the set players reach for in PvP, where the numbers matter less than the profile you present to another player.
• Voidforged Dragon is the strength build's set, with a very high armor value plus eighty health, ten stamina and six percent damage on strength weapons.

None of these is reachable without the leather chain behind it, so if a set is the goal, the work starts at a tannery rather than an armorer's bench. Our resources guide lays out that chain in order, and the thick leather page covers the animals you will be hunting for it.

There is a parallel route for weapons that does not involve a bench at all, and it is worth knowing about while you plan: our legendary weapons page covers the forty that come out of legendary chests once you are past level 60 and carrying skeleton keys. Everything else on this game is gathered in the Conan Exiles guide.