Serin-Delaunay wrote
Raising END to 1000 in wizmode and getting instakilled by a critical hit while naked makes it pretty clear that AV provides some kind of protection far greater than just being subtracted from damage values. :>
Sorry, my fault here for not being clear on what I meant.
All I meant was that, unless you knew the code behind it, the AV value you see in game isn't actually all that helpful to know except for making decisions on what armor is better than others.
i.e. you can see a new body armor and say "OH! This armor says 18! It must be good. But 18 what?" because it isn't a flat damage reduction or anything (and even then you can't see flat damage numbers.)
And the reason I brought that up was in the context of needing to have two different AVs for sharp/blunt damage - since the currently displayed value isn't really all that helpful I don't think it's something we need to worry about.
As it is, you need to put a metal plate mail on before you figure out that the bigger AV has its downsides like the DEX and AGI penalty, so I think it'd be fair to leave the AVs as is and have the players figure out that the "lower AV" flexible armors are actually better against blunt damage.
There's definitely benefits to wearing armor of some variety over going nude, I think it was covered in another thread (probably the "anything you don't want to make a thread for" thread) where, as far as I remember, there was some code that did a check to see whether you had a piece of armor equipped on a certain bodypart when doing the damage check and there were severe penalties for not having one - particularly for being bitten by canines.
Of course there's that on top of the fact that it has all the other nice effects like stopping zombies from inflicting leprosy, or being able to punch hedgehogs.