As you get further into the the game, armor will help your Hero and Shaman. The materials use to craft armor are obtained primarily from invader and ghost drops as you attack them. You can also get them from capturing resource tiles (farming rss), especially if your are the jarl who finishes off the resource tile. It is also possible to get them from Loki’s chests and personal, clan and premium tasks.
The materials come in 6 different levels:
- Simple
- Usual
- Unusual
- Rare
- Epic
- Legendary
The higher the level invader, ghost, resource tile or invader/ghost lair the higher the level of material you will get. From a level 1 invader or ghost you will get level 1 materials, from a level 2 invader/ghost you will get levels 2 and 1 materials when you attack an Uber invader you usually will get from Rare to Legendary materials
The Forge is where the materials are combined to improve the level or quality of the materials, craft the armor and manage the armor that has been crafted. when you combine materials it take 4 of one level material to combine them into the next level. As an example it takes 4 simple glass to make 1 Usual glass, 4 Usual glass to make 1 Unusual glass, … and 4 Epic glass to make 1 Legendary glass. So it takes 1024 level 1 materials to make 1 Legendary material. So, the higher the level invader/ghost the better material you will get.
There are a couple different opinions about when you should create your armor. The important thing to remember is that you can dismantle a piece of armor but only 1 of the materials used to create the item will be recovered. So if the piece of armor requires 4 materials to create, you will get only one of the 4 items back. Because of this many think that you shouldn’t create any armor unless you have enough legendary materials to create it. Others think that it is good to create your first set of armor using Unusual materials knowing that you will basically throw the materials away that were used to create the armor pieces.