This is just about the stats of armor, not bothering with the massive anachronistic portrayal of KCD’s armor/helmet roster or why in god’s name the cuirasses are all flatter than Kansas. But, what in the hell is with the stats of helmets in KCD? They make zero logical sense, there is no consistency between them and they seem to be purely decided by programmer favoritism instead of actual effectiveness. So just to start this off, I compiled an image macro of the ones with the wonkiest stats-
To start off, why is the Venetian Bascinet worse in protection than the Hounskull, arching/preorder klappvisor bascinet, and the ‘italian’ bascinet? The Venetian Grand Bascinet, along with all great/grand bascinets in general is the greatest amount of protection you can receive short of wearing a frogmouth to the field, and should be flatly superior to every other helmet in terms of surface area protected by solid steel plates and visor reinforcement. The helmet is designed to take massive impacts head-on and shrug them off, yet for some reason in the game it’s worse in protection that objectively inferior helms (purely in the consideration of protection). Obviously there should be a trade-off, it’s a bloody big helmet that should have a poor vertical angle of vision, encumber the wearer- in exchange for having stats that should make it the most durable/protective helmet in the game.
Now for those uninitiated in armor mechanics and medieval history, while helmets with aventails (or amusing scale aventails which weren’t widespread), aventails are helpful but not terribly protective when it comes to keeping your neck intact. All of the bascinets in that picture look awfully protective, but in truth the neck is still vulnerable to penetrating attacks such as bodkin arrows, thrusts with polearms, or even thrusts with extremely tapered sword points enabling the penetration of maille links. Which is what led to the rise of great/grand bascinets, the continued use of great helms up until the early 15th century, and the development of the Bevor to be mated with sallets and kettle helmets.
Additionally the venetian grand bascinet will protect more sufficiently against blunt force trauma, as the single best way to absorb trauma is with a solid plate. The typical bascinet (like all those pictured0 will have the actual solid helm portion terminate around the mid-neck, possibly even the jaw on some helms, with the rest being protected by a padded liner and aventail.
Likewise the scale aventail of the arching klappvisor is no justification for its fairly bloated armor rating in comparison to other helmets. Scale is easily defeated with an upward thrust, which is probably why scale aventails were so rare/possibly relegated purely for show IRL.
In a similar manner, why is the open faced bascinet more durable and protective than the bascinet with a full maille veil protecting everything but the eyes? It should be rather obvious why an open faced bascinet will offer less protection than something with a greater surface area encased in metal… yet this isn’t the case in the game. Hell the maille veiled bascinet is weaker than the Slavic nasal helm, even though it and its construction is straight out of the 12th-13th centuries and should be inferior in every possible way.
Also, why is the houndskull so high in armor rating (along with its klappvisor brother on the far left), even though it lacks an aventail by itself, and has gigantic visor slots that wouldn’t even stop an arrow or a bolt?