Does AC matter anything at tactician difficulty?

[Iso Koala]

I am playing on tactician, and while I find it fairly challenging, I feel that AC is just meaningless in it; every hits my guys even if I have AC 22 in act 1.

I feel that I just have to put focus on dmg myself, and not care about my AC at all, since enemies hit me with every attack anyway.

[BigJ]

It does quite hard. To the point I may even encourage to go for higher ac over bonuses.

[jonnin]

AC scales poorly in this game (it did back when LO was best under THACO too. At high levels you were expected to buff up with many spells before fighting, or on the first round or two, eg bless, stoneskin, haste, blah blah -- there was no 'unhittable warrior' builds outside of stuff like NWN which let you become godlike in so many ways). By the numbers... if you have a 20 AC, and your opponent has a 20 in their stat (+5 to hit) and skill with their weapon (another +5 by the end of act 1 or start of act 2) and a magic weapon, they have a 60-75% chance to hit you in normal mode, let alone if they get (? not sure ? +2 to hit?) in tactician. +2 is 10% chance, so now you are looking at 70-85% hit chances at 20 AC, and 20AC isn't for everyone, that is a shield and strong magic armor or spells (usually, @#$%^ concentration ones).

But this isn't diablo, its D&D. The hordes are not low end enemy, they are as good as you and often outnumber you as well, so ... well ... the name says it all: tactician ... you need superior tactics. You can do to them what they do to you, in spite of their AC buff you can reduce their AC (slow, acid, whatever) and get advantage etc. The problem is that a lot of the tactics in this game are extremely cheap/cheesy, like strategic barrel planting.

[Fringehunter7719]

Originally posted by jonnin:

AC scales poorly in this game. By the numbers... if you have a 20 AC, and your opponent has a 20 in their stat (+5 to hit) and skill with their weapon (another +5 by the end of act 1 or start of act 2) and a magic weapon, they have a 60-75% chance to hit you in normal mode, let alone if they get (? not sure ? +2 to hit?) in tactician. +2 is 10% chance, so now you are looking at 70-85% hit chances at 20 AC, and 20AC isn't for everyone, that is a shield and strong magic armor or spells (usually, @#$%^ concentration ones).

+5+5+1 is +11, which means roll 9+ to hit, or equivalently 60% chance. Not 75%.

Tactician gives +2, making it 70%. And that can be commonly modified back down to 60% if you make use of high ground.

Of course, a lot of enemies don't actually have a +11 to hit. In fact the overwhelming majority of enemies in act 1 do not and are well short of that mark.

19AC is much easier to get in BG3 than in tabletop, due to there being no restrictions on weapon swapping and getting the bonus from a shield even when you have your ranged weapons equipped, combined with the ubiquity of enchanted +1 and +2 items available almost immediately on starting the game.

For example you can grab a +1 breastplate which is 17AC for a character with a 14 dex score (which you can respec any character to) the moment you get to the druid's grove. Any human, half elf, martial class (except monk), cleric or druid can then add a shield for +2 to be at 19 before you've fought more than half a dozen easy battles. Then you have the shield spell, warding flare etc. to add on top.

With the respec system there's no long term penalty for taking a 1 level dip for armor and shield proficiencies either.

[NegativeZero]

AC definitely matters.

I wish more enemies had higher AC on tactician. I felt like only ONE enemy had a really high AC in this game and I liked that enemy because suddenly SH's invoke duplicity was finally useful.

Like others have also said, turn off karmic dice. I think it's dumb on Larian's part to have that on by default -_- I had that turned off from the very start.

[Iso Koala]

I am not having difficulties with Tactician difficulty, I never had even at level 1. But I feel that upgrading my armor has very little to no meaning, if enemies get the initiative to attack my hardest armored guy frontline, they will down him 1st round. So its more of damage per round battle than avoiding damage; kill enemies before they take you down. I dont say thats wrong, but I hardly find any difference in survivalibity between an AC 15 and AC 21 character. They both get downed in 1 round just the same.

[NegativeZero]

Originally posted by Iso Koala:

I am not having difficulties with Tactician difficulty, I never had even at level 1. But I feel that upgrading my armor has very little to no meaning, if enemies get the initiative to attack my hardest armored guy frontline, they will down him 1st round. So its more of damage per round battle than avoiding damage; kill enemies before they take you down. I dont say thats wrong, but I hardly find any difference in survivalibity between an AC 15 and AC 21 character. They both get downed in 1 round just the same.

Do you have karmic dice off like a million people suggest in this thread? Or are you just ignorantly ignoring things? It seems like it has to be the latter since you think AC 15 and AC 21 offer no difference. That's probably why you can't keep your tank alive.

[Giganx]

I think on tactician enemies get a +2 to attacks and saves, so it's basically a -2 to all of your attacks and your AC.

So, AC matters but you're going to be missing a lot more than the enemies are.

[Snaef]

D&D 5e is based on something called bounded accuracy, you are expected to have a minimum 65% chance of hitting your target throughout the game, before factor like advantage are taken into account. You maintain this level of accuracy by increasing your primary attack stat to 18 @ level 4 and 20 @ at level 8.
Enemies on harder difficulty adds at least +2 to that, but players often have better armour then monsters as well.

[Ackranome]

Karma dice ruins this game.

[Mosey]

It's amazing how many people think Karmic Dice has any effect whatsoever on enemies since Larain explicitly told us it ONLY affects the players party and can ONLY help you specifically.

It hasn't affected enemies since something like patch 4 of early access. That's years, if anyone is paying attention.

[Menthur]

Originally posted by Iso Koala:

I am not having difficulties with Tactician difficulty, I never had even at level 1. But I feel that upgrading my armor has very little to no meaning, if enemies get the initiative to attack my hardest armored guy frontline, they will down him 1st round. So its more of damage per round battle than avoiding damage; kill enemies before they take you down. I dont say thats wrong, but I hardly find any difference in survivalibity between an AC 15 and AC 21 character. They both get downed in 1 round just the same.

thats why Alert is one of the most important, if not the most important Feat every character needs to pick