Skate protection may not look cool to non skaters, but it saves lives.
Wear your gear.
I wear different gloves based on the situation. For general purpose riding I use a simple pair of fingerless bike gloves with a leather palm.
A more specialised glove with higher protection is the slide glove. I have a pair of Lush slide gloves v1
These gloves have a slick plastic plate on the palm that can be used to allow you to transfer weight to your hands and bring the board round into a slide or to allow you to assume a 3 point stance while cornering at speed for additional stability.
Essential. Wear it always. I often forget mine on short flatland cruises but am gradually training myself to wear it everywhere. I use a triple-8 helmet that I bought about 5 years ago for inline skating. Helmet technology has progressed so I am considering an upgrade to a modern pro-tec helmet.
Shoes get their own section. I was recently involved in a thread at Silverfish discussing resoling shoes. I'm going to use my shoes section to track the progress of several shoe experiments.
When cruising I generally don't wear much in the way of Knee or Elbow pads. I usually wear Knee Gaskets under my jeans, but more for support than for protection.
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When practising new techniques (board walking, sliding) I wear external knee and elbow protection in addition to the helmet and gloves.