Armor refinement

Sooooo a bit nervous about spending money on some armor....got a +9 bark mail that was made for agi/dodge instead of guard, and expected my def to rise some since my previous bark mail had no refinement. It sure as heck did not .Does refinement just increase dodge in that scenario? If i had armor modded to guard would def increase with refine? Thanks in advance for the help guys

 

can't understand what you mean about this.
As for refinement, for weapon it will increasing base ATK using a (bit) complex calculation, while refinement for gear other than weapon (shield, armor, and additional) it will directly decrease the damage you receive by 1% per refinement increase.
here's an example:
Let's say your gear doesn't have any refinement and took damage 10k.
After that you refine your armor to +E (system will consider it as +10 for calculation purpose).
You took the same damage which was 10k but now you receive 10% less damage, making the final damage received to be 9k.

Now let's give a lil bit extra example:
the case continue from the last example. After refining the armor, you decided to refine additional too into +E.
After that you somehow took the same damage again, but since you have +E armor and +E additional, you receiving 20% less damage instead only 10% less damage (refinement damage reduction will work additively), making the final damage you receive become 8k damage.

If you're thinking about DEF in stat information window, nah. that DEF stat affected by 2 things (aside from the obvious DEF+ stat and DEF%+ stat), and that is armor remodel and armor(&additional) base DEF.
How things work will be like this:

Spoiler

credit to all players who's kind enough to share these info in the past and coryn.club for safekeeping it in their website guide

 

Wow......that sure as heck cleared up a tremendous amount of the inquiries I had in regards to this. I got light armor when i wanted heavy bc the additional stats lined up well with me and the price was right. It seems like with light armor the only advantage it has is flee bc everything else is even lower then norm armor -_- guess i spent too hastily . If anyone would like to buy or trade a crit/atk stat based +9 light bark mail im for it ;P . Any additional advice on any of this is highly welcome of course

 

Here's the real truth though: You only need 250 Defense at minimum to have 20% Damage reduction. (1250 Defense is around 30% Damage reduction, the Defense algorithm is really whacky so having an Adventurer Garb as a main armor isn't that much different from a Bark Mail)

 

Ummm ok this is absolutely news to me O.O this is going to completely 180 how i view armor and def in Toram. Still alot of details needed to manage it correctly of course ...for example does def have any other affect then damage reduction ? Do any other factors affect damage red? Why would the same def yield different damage red? Being a newb is rough these days -_-