Ever wonder if armor was worth wearing? Not sure if a single round headshot will kill a player wearing full heavy armor? Been curious about whether wearing armor on just one leg gives that leg extra protection? Finally, here are the answers . . .
First of all, I want to thank Dredly for hooking up with me in RS:V multiplayer to run the testing. He deserves just as much credit for the results.
Now, my goal here is to provide the conclusions from of our tests, not all the numbers. Trust me, the conclusions are much more valuable. As such, I'm not going to type out a big list of how many bullets it takes to score a kill against a target with various guns and against various armor types. I'm going to provide conclusions.
First and foremost, we discovered that RS:V operates on THREE ARMOR CATEGORIES. These three categories correspond directly to the bars of "armor rating" that you see in the setup screen. There is light protection (0-3 bars of armor rating), medium protection (4-6 bars of armor rating), and heavy protection (7-10 bars of armor rating).
So, if you choose to wear leg armor on your left leg and not your right leg, your right leg will not actually have less protection. Rather, your entire body (except the head) will be protected to the same extent according to the ARMOR CATEGORY that you fall into.
However, your character's body also has distinct TARGET ZONES: the head, the chest, the arms and the legs. A shot to the head, regardless of your ARMOR CATEGORY, will kill you. If it takes 4 rounds to the chest to kill your target, then it will take 5 rounds to his arms or legs. If you are using a silencer, then it will require an additional round in each of those areas. Here is an example from our tests:
MP7A1 Weapon System (distance: 25-30 yards)
LIGHT PROTECTION - 4 chest shots - 5 arm shots - 5 leg shots
MEDIUM PROTECTION - 5 chest shots - 6 arm shots - 6 leg shots
HEAVY PROTECTION - 6 chest shots - 7 arm shots - 7 leg shots
So, it doesn't really matter WHERE you wear armor, it matters HOW MUCH you are wearing. Ideally, you would want to have 0 bars, 4 bars or 7 bars of armor rating, because those are the ratings at the bottom end of each ARMOR CATEGORY. You get the the full benefits of that category without sacrificing any mobility.
Anyways, I hope this information is useful to the RS:V community. A very big thanks again to Dredly for helping me run all the tests.