Assassin's Creed Odyssey armor guide: the best armor for assassinating in Ancient Greece

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Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a massive, sprawling RPG filled with loads of new features to learn and master. Start your odyssey on the right foot by checking out our basic tips and tricks guide.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey is full of places to go and people who want to kill you. Luckily, it has a pretty in-depth and flexible armor system that gives you lots of ways to mix-and-match your way to some pretty cool old-world fashion. There are a lot of options, though, and that's where our Assassin's Creed Odyssey armor guide comes in.

Just like its weapons, Odyssey has a lot of different styles of armor that come in various levels of quality. Any armor can also be engraved, which gives you skill or stat bonuses—the more rare the armor, the more engravings it can hold at once. At the top of the pile are the Legendary armor sets, special variants of existing armor styles that add extra bonuses for wearing all five pieces at once.

A big part of Odyssey is just looking rad, though, and that's where Odyssey's upgrade system is a real fashion-saver. If you have a favorite helmet or entire suit of gear, you can spend money and resources at a blacksmith to upgrade it all the way up to level 50.

One last thing: There's not really such thing as a best armor in Odyssey. Depending on how you're playing, it might be worth it to have a lower level pieces of armor that offer a useful buff that augments your playstyle.

Stats

Each piece of gear you find in Assassin's Creed Odyssey has three main stats that you should pay attention to. They are level, rarity, and the main stat.

Like your character, gear has a level that indicates its overall strength. You always want to try and upgrade or use gear that is close to your level.
Rarity determines how many traits a piece of equipment can have. Like most RPGs, rarity goes from common (white), rare (blue), epic (purple), and legendary (orange).
For armor, the main stat is, well, armor. This determines how much damage is mitigated from enemy attacks. For weapons, this stat is DPS or damage per second, and determines how much your attacks hit for.

Engravings

Once you've unlocked an engraving, you can use it as many times as you want.

Engravings are a kind of item that you earn by completing various in-game achievements, quests, acquiring Legendary gear, and killing certain enemies. Each one offers some kind of buff, like increasing your assassination damage or making all arrows poison arrows. There's a lot of them and they come in various tiers of strength with Legendary engravings offering extremely powerful bonuses that augment certain skills.

Just by playing the game, you'll start to amass a large pool of engravings that you can then use to add extra buffs to your armor. The biggest thing to remember is that once you've unlocked an engraving, you can use it as many times as you want and can always change the engravings you added to a piece of gear. Experiment and find the right combinations for you.

Regular armor

The best defense

What good is a shiny set of armor if you don't have a weapon to kill the baddies attacking you? Our Assassin's Creed Odyssey weapons and skills guide breaks down each weapon type and which skills complement them best.

Regular armor is randomly generated with a random rarity rating and selection of engravings. There isn't a rhyme or reason to the engravings: I've found heavy plate armor with bonuses to assassination damage and flimsy cloth robes with bonuses to warrior skills. Though you can't change or remove the these inherent engravings, you can always add more and change the ones you add.

These types of armor don't offer a bonus for wearing a complete set, but they do look nice when they're worn together. You can spot armor suits by their names: Traveler's armor, Tracker's armor, Athenian armor, Spartan armor, Brawler's armor, etc.

All of these non-legendary armors show up regularly in loot drops, so keep an eye for a rare one with lots of room for engravings. Since you can always upgrade the level, a good piece of gear with a 10% bonus can stay a 10% bonus from level 5 to level 50.

If you get a piece of armor that you don't want, you can either sell it or dismantle it. Drachmae is in no short supply in Odyssey, so we recommend you dismantle everything you don't want (aside from Legendary pieces) so you always have an ample supply of materials for upgrading.

Legendary armor

Spoiler warning: This next section contains light spoilers for Odyssey's story.

Unlike the other types of armor, Legendary armor is one-of-a-kind. It can't be dismantled for parts or sold, so every piece becomes a collector's item sort of by default. Legendary armor has plenty of room for a lot of engravings, and it also comes with a set bonus, an extra buff you get for wearing the entire set.

For the most part, Legendary armor comes from a few key sidequests and primarily from hunting down different branches of the Cult of Kosmos. Each member you kill will award a specific piece of an armor set, but since many cultists are above level 40, it'll take quite a while before you complete a full set and unlock their powerful set bonus.

All you need to know is that when you complete a set of legendary armor, all of the pieces you've collected get upgraded to the level of the last piece you found from the set. So don't waste precious materials upgrading pieces you won't really use until after you've collected the full set.

Without giving away who, what, and why you'll be killing people to collect legendary sets of armor, I've catalogued the names of the suits I've found and the bonuses that come with collecting the entire sets. When you get to the point where you can start hunting them down, this list will give you an idea of which sets you want to look for.