I'm curious how are the armors set up in the client?
Do all armors have the body included in the model? If so; why?
All you really need to do is make sure armors have the same skeleton and they're weight painted properly.
This way you could just model the armors, weight paint them and that's it. No need to animate the armors themselves since they use the same skeleton = same animation.
Edit: Mod please move this post to the Q&A thread
Edit2: Or delete. I downloaded one of the armor models and yup they're separate alright