For Teeth, san., and others making similar points, I quickly ran the analysis for raw weight, effective weight and gold cost. I don't know any formulas for punch damage, so I couldn't do anything with that. I'll edit this new into the OP when I have time. The most important part of any analysis is finding a way to sum it all up in one sexy plot. This is the best I could do:
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loginFind the base (non-heirloomed) armor value for your armor type on the bottom. Follow the vertical line for that value up to the color curve that you're interested in (blue for raw weight, green for effective weight, red for gold cost). From where they intersect, follow the nearest horizontal line across to the left and wear that type of gloves, at whichever heirloom level you can afford.
I wear Heraldic Mail with Tabard, so I find '40' on the bottom axis. I'm primarily interested in effective weight, so I follow the '40' line up to the green curve. I see that the intersection (where the dot is) is closest to the horizontal line directly above it, so I follow that line to the left and see that I should be wearing Mail Mittens.
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loginThe four 'None's are for comparing wearing no-gloves to wearing leather gloves of various heirloom levels. i.e. If you're trying to decide between bare hands and (+2) gloves, ignore all the 'None' lines except the 'None (+2)' line.
If raw weight (aka movement speed) is your ONLY concern, then wearing anything heavier than Padded Cloth for body armor justifies wearing Heavy Gauntlets.
This only falls into play if you have maxed out WM and IF. I didn't do the math exactly, but isn't it better to tank a point in IF for WM to wear say Plate Mittens or Heavy Gauntlets over Wisbys, since the 3-5 additional armor is more then the 2 hp you get from 1 IF. (Again, not sure if 1 WM offsets the heavier gauntlets)
Yeah, the thing I liked about my analysis was that it was clean and simple. When you consider changing your build as another variable, it gets much more complicated.
Just thinking about it quickly and not really running any numbers:
- Going from Wisbys to Heavies adds 5.2 effective weight, which will cost you 5.2% of your WPF (assuming you're already over 10 effective weight). This is 6-8 WPF if you're in the 120-150 WPF range.
- Adding one WM gives you about 8 WPF if you're in the same range, so that's close to a break even.
- Dropping one IF will cost you roughly 3% of your HP (for an approximately 65 HP build)
- To be worth it from a survival standpoint, the increase in armor (5) would have to decrease your incoming damage by more than 3% (yes, it gets more complicated when things like glances are taken into account). You could figure out if this is the case by playing with some of the damage calculators out there, but I bet it's true.
- This would probably be a good solution for the proficiency/armor problem. There are other effects though. You'll probably move a little slower from the extra 0.7-1.3 weight, and you'll definitely lose more money from the expensive gloves. Probably close to 100k per gen. You will however get a lot more punch kills