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 strongest monsters will have high to-hit ratings however and will rarely be dodged, so absorb is more important than evade.

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 weight of an armor reduces a character's ability to evade attack. Therefore, a Knight that equips Knight's Armor, the heaviest armor in the game, will be unlikely to avoid many attacks.

Body
Body armor comes in several flavors. Heavy mail offers high protection at the small cost of reduced evasion, but can only be used by a few classes. Shirts or robes generally offer poor protection, and are intended for use by mages and wizards. Armlets offer varying levels of protection with good evasion and can be used by all classes, but at high cost.

Head
Helms add more protection than body armor alone, but only the Warrior, Knight, and Ninja classes can equip more than the most basic helm. 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.

In the table below, when two names are reported, the first one is from the NES version, the second one from the PSX and GBA remakes.

Default sorting is by price. Armors that can only be found but not purchased are listed afterwards, as more valuable; their listed price is twice the selling price, because every armor can be sold for half its purchasing price; anyway, their Price cell is shaded in gray.

Special effects:
 * Item: use the armor from the "Item" menu to cast a spell; alignment (B/W) and level (1-8) of the spell are noted as well; in order to use it as an item, it is not relevant whether the weapon is equipped or not.
 * Elements: Fire is strong versus ice attacks; Ice is strong versus fire attacks. The Dragon Mail protects from fire, ice and lightning too.

Many armors can only be equipped by specific characters. The tables below reports all of them, abbreviated as follows:
 * wK: Warrior and Knight
 * tN: Thief and Ninja
 * mM: Monk and Master
 * rR: Red Mage and Red Wizard
 * wW: White Mage and White Wizard
 * bB: Black Mage and Black Wizard

Recommendations
Buy armor parts only if a character has an empty slot. This means only purchase armor parts early in the game: body armor in Cornelia, gloves in Pravoka, caps in Elfheim, shields in Pravoka and Crescent Lake.

After that, every useful armor part can be found for free in chests and dungeons. Purchasing further armor parts would be a waste of money.

When equipping armor parts, give priority to those with special properties.

Notable armor sets
Armor parts can be grouped into sets. The parts in a set have generally some of the following in common: (1) same name; (2) same users; (3) nearby location; (4) similar special properties.

Light armor
These armor parts can be used by every character, with justy few exceptions. In particular, they are the only armor parts that can be worn by the White Mage/Wizard and the Black Mage/Wizard.

Heavy armor
These armor parts are mainly used by the Warrior/Knight and by the Ninja. Some parts can be used by the Thief and the Red Mage/Wizard, but these two classes will generally get better protection from the light armor parts.

Some notes:
 * Steel set: all the parts were named "Iron" in the NES version.
 * Leftovers set: the Bronze gloves can be found for free; the Buckler shield is a must for the Red Mage/Wizard and for the Thief; the Knight's armor should be avoided because it is extremely expensive and it has the worst weight in the game.
 * Mithril set: (nothing to note).
 * Elemental sub-sets: equip two parts that protect from different elements; note that there is no protection from thunder element.
 * Diamond set: (nothing to note).
 * Ultimate set: all parts have special effects; if your team includes both Knight and Ninja, split this set between them.