Final Fantasy/Armor

Armor not only affects how much damage an enemy can do, but also affects your evasion and speed. There are four types of armor: body, head, arms, and shields. Each character class can equip a different set of armor:
 * Warriors and Knights use heavy body armor and helmets, and can equip large shields.
 * Thieves and Ninjas use lighter, but can still equip helmets and small shields.
 * Monks and Masters use only the lightest equipment and no shields.
 * Red Mages and Wizards can use most of the same equipment as Thieves and Ninjas
 * White and Black Mages/Wizards can use very little armor, and no shields.

Combat mechanics
Each character has an absorb and evade rating. Up to four pieces of armor may be equipped, each adding to the absorb rating and decreasing the evade rating. Thus higher absorb ratings are better while lower evade ratings are preferred.

The base absorb rating of a character is 0, except for unarmored monks/masters which have absorb equal to their level. A bug in the NES version causes the monk/master to have their absorb reset to the unarmored level on leveling up, until the armor page is visited again to correctly set it.

The base evade rating of all characters is 48 plus their agility rating. Every extra point of evade generally decreases the character's chance to be hit by 0.5%. The strongest monsters will have high to-hit ratings however and will rarely be dodged, so absorb is more important than evade.

Body
Body armor comes in two flavors: heavy mail which offers more protection but can be used by fewer classes, and armlets, which over less protection but more mobility and can be used by all classes. Given the choice, go with mail over armlets.

Head
Helmets add more protection than body armor alone, but only the Warrior, Knight, and Ninja classes can equip more than the most basic helmet. The most worthwhile headgear in the game is the ribbon, which offers little physical protections, but makes the wearer immune to all status effects.

Arms
As with headgear, arm protection adds a small amount of defense, but only a few classes can equip the best kinds. The most useful piece is the protect ring which blocks instant death attacks (except Petrification).

Hand
Off-hand items, generally shields, not only give protection, but they can randomly block a physical attack, resulting in no damage to the wearer. Equip a character with shield if possible, no matter how weak it is since a block absorbs all damage. Since the protect cloak technically isn't a shield, it can be equiped by most characters that cannot use shields.

Armor details
See the class details chart below for a more detailed list of which classes can equip each piece of armor, and note that some armors have further explanation in the special weapons section.