Ancient dragon skin items come up when you get to a high enough level. I've never had a cloak, but I've had boots, gloves, and a skullcap. The skullcap was even resistant. I love that you can get protection from walking on lava by wearing a hat, but if you wear resistant boots, they melt.
I'm not sure If you can see from the image but this character has ancient dragon skin boots, gloves and scull cap too. A previous character had an ancient dragon skin scull cap +10 all resistance which, was very handy. Until playing this character through I didn't know you could get a cape either. I also found sandals with it. This begs the question, are dragon skin leggins also available? ancient or otherwise? perhaps ancient dragon skin armor too?
According to the armor table in Eschalon RPG Wiki, most armor pieces (atleast chest, legs, boots, hat, gloves and cloaks I suppose) can be Ancient Dragon Skin. Items were changed in Book II so that we no longer have randomly occuring fixed items, instead we have randomly occuring random items (for example: in Book I you could find a lot of Rusted Chain Armor as loot and from stores. In Book II mostly everything is randomised in armor and weapons). Again from the Wiki: items have two "variables": type and material. Type defines base damage and weight and material increases damage and increases/decreases weight. The best thing you can find as a weapon would be Divine Ore Grand Maul for example. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That's a really long and poorly spelled wall of text...
From my experience of the game you have fixed item drops/pick ups and fixed variables. Aside from randomized Items as mentioned above. Fixed items might be certain chest containing potions or items. Another example of fixed items being keys either dropped or found. Their are other examples of this during the game. The other example being fixed items which are always generated on certain corpses/chests which 'level up' with your game play. So, the higher you progress in the game the better the item is generated. This is incredibly useful to know. If you deliberately leave this corpse or chest and come back to it later in your game you will always know it contains whatever but, you will get a better example of it.
palendrome wrote:The other example being fixed items which are always generated on certain corpses/chests which 'level up' with your game play. So, the higher you progress in the game the better the item is generated. This is incredibly useful to know. If you deliberately leave this corpse or chest and come back to it later in your game you will always know it contains whatever but, you will get a better example of it.
An interesting point about this is that certain aspects of the items in these chests do not scale properly. Ancient Dragon Skin boots (as a theoretical example) obtained this way will have a slightly lower armor rating, a considerably lower monetary value, and also weigh slightly less than similarly named boots purchased from a vendor.
Yes, I've noticed that too. As can been seen from the picture attached that's the armor stats you get for found items of ancient dragon skin (the value's change but always remain low) Isn't it the same armor rating as reptile hide? And that's worth much more. Found divine ore items are the same. These are supposed to be the hardest materials in the game after all. I've come across a divine ore maul randomly generated in a chest just the once and, it had far higher stats then fixed scaling items found elsewhere.