Armour class is the headline number and the one most players buy on. It is a threshold, not a shield: a plate rated class 5 is expected to stop rounds rated below 5 and to be beaten by rounds rated 5 or above. Everything else on the armour and helmet pages — durability, coverage, weight, material — is about how well that threshold holds up during a raid.
Class versus penetration class
Read a plate against the ammo chart, not on its own. Every round carries a penetration class; every plate carries an armour class; the fight is the comparison. In the current chart:
- Pistol calibers top out at class 3–4, so class-4 body armour makes most SMG and pistol rounds a nuisance rather than a threat.
- The rifle calibers (5.56, 5.45, 7.62×39, 9×39, 5.8, 5.7) all reach class 5, which is why class 5 is where "serious" armour starts and why 5.56 M995 and its siblings are the rounds people talk about.
- Only 7.62×51, .338 and 7.62×54 reach class 6 and 7. Class-6 armour buys you real protection against everything short of those.
Season 7 removes the T5/T6 penetration RNG, so from 16 September the comparison behaves more like a rule than a probability, and the tier caps (T4 in Normal, T5 in Lockdown — see the difficulty guide) put a ceiling on what you will be shot with.
Durability is the buffer
A plate stops rounds by losing durability. On the chart, durability runs from 25 on the one class-1 vest to 125 on the heaviest class-6 armour, with helmets from 10 to 80. Every hit that the plate absorbs takes some of that; a plate that has taken a magazine's worth of fire is not the plate it was in the lobby, whatever its class says. This is the mechanism behind the common experience of "my class 5 didn't stop a class-4 round" — it did, for a while.
Two habits follow. Repair between raids (the traders offer it; repaired durability caps below new), and read the durability column as "how many fights", not as a bonus stat.
Coverage, weight, and the penalties
Coverage is how much of the torso the plate protects — a plate with high coverage stops shots to the sides and abdomen that a narrower one does not. Weight is stamina and speed: the class-6 vests and helmets are heavy enough to change how far you can run, and the chart records a movement penalty and an ergonomics penalty for a subset of items. On the equipment pages we show every one of those figures the wiki has recorded and drop the column where it has not, rather than print blanks.
Materials
The chart records a material for each piece: Composite and Hardened Steel are the most common, then Aramid, Aluminium, Polyethylene, with Titanium and Ceramic on a handful of high-class items. Morefun does not publish how material affects repair or degradation, and the community wiki has not documented it with numbers we can check — so this site lists the material and does not rank it. Buy on class and durability; treat material as a tiebreak until there is data.
Helmets specifically
The health system gives the head 35 HP, and a head at zero is death. That makes the helmet the highest-value plate you wear per unit of durability. Class-4 helmets are the largest group on the chart and the practical Normal-tier answer; class 5 and 6 exist for Lockdown and Forbidden, at a weight cost. Face covers and visors add coverage rather than class.
What to buy at each tier
The loadout-by-difficulty guide pairs class with tier — roughly class 3 in Normal, class 4 in Lockdown, class 5 in Forbidden — and the best armour page ranks what the chart holds. Whatever you pick, check it against the top of the ladder for the calibers you expect: the class-5 ammo page is the list of rounds that will beat a class-5 plate, and it is shorter than most players think.