Does armor type affect damage mitigation?

[sox7d]

In between poop socks, it'd be awesome if some people from the top guilds started parsing numbers and gave us an EQ mythbusters on things like the effectiveness of AC across different classes, wearing armor vs no armor vs a little bit of armor, how the hybrid group penalty works, and effectiveness of STR and ATK all with quantified, empirical evidence. Too much bro science floating around this game.