Is there a point to light armour?

[Brids17]

There's enough medium pieces with no dex limit to cover the entire party and even some of the worse ones still match what light armour offers. Stealth checks are useless is the vast majority of cases so I just don't see the point of ever wearing it...

[OnlyOffensive]

the only point in light armor is some stealth shenanigans, which doesnt have much use on practice.I guess you could make some stealth oriented gameplay for fun or smth

I mean there are strategies for killing bosses from greater invis passing checks and they cant do anything, idk if thats fixed and its dumb, but it exists ( ed )

[jonnin]

Originally posted by OnlyOffensive:

the only point in light armor is some stealth shenanigans, which doesnt have much use on practice.I guess you could make some stealth oriented gameplay for fun or smth

I mean there are strategies for killing bosses from greater invis passing checks and they cant do anything, idk if thats fixed and its dumb, but it exists ( ed )

This is totally accurate in BG3, but again, in D&D itself, or tabletop, stealth is much more important to a rogue and a party. You sneak into the well guarded castle -- 5 people do not assault a keep and win easily because the enemy are morons who only come at you a few at a time with no alarm (even shout/ring a bell etc) system or anything. It would be like the gnoll fight of act 1, where the hyena books off to get more guys on you rather than stay to gnaw your ankle. Of course, in such an endeavor, you can silence yourself AND invisible yourself at higher levels, being virtually free from armor noise or other problems.

[northernwater]

I never multiclass. I play casters and the best gear for a caster is not armor.

[northernwater]

Originally posted by OnlyOffensive:

the only point in light armor is some stealth shenanigans, which doesnt have much use on practice.I guess you could make some stealth oriented gameplay for fun or smth

In my honor run I used stealth all the time. I Rogue soloed Orin and Sarevok using stealth and invisibility. In my second honor run I'm in act 2 and I have used stealth even more extensively. I just now beat Balthazar with a total group loss of 15hp - 1 hit.

[Jane Shepard]

Only thing I will say is maybe you should stop trying to "optimize" and play the best. It's a RPG... you know what that means? It stands for "Role Playing Game"... maybe you have a Character who just uses Light Armor cause that's what it is...

Man, tell me you are a DMs worst nightmare without telling me your DM hates you...

[Brids17]

Originally posted by Cazzy The Smol Bolt:

Only thing I will say is maybe you should stop trying to "optimize" and play the best. It's a RPG... you know what that means? It stands for "Role Playing Game"... maybe you have a Character who just uses Light Armor cause that's what it is...

Man, tell me you are a DMs worst nightmare without telling me your DM hates you...

If a DM requires his players to play poorly, on purpose, he's doing something very wrong.

[FuNb0Y86]

Stealth is a thing for me. I almost always ambush when possible. I constantly use a rogue type to stealth inside combat, and you can still pass stealth checks while inside vision cones as long as you're outside darkvision range.

Light armor is super important for rogue types that rely on in combat stealth to set up combos with other PC's.

At the end of the day, it's really all about style of play. I use significantly less resources per play utilizing stealth than I do when not.

[JacobTheViking]

My Stormsorcerer is the arcane caster that I have right now. I didn't choose Mage Armor as a starting spell, so having enchanted light armor is the way to go.

[SlicerDicer]

in original D&D only thieves could pick locks and hide in shadows (meaning hide where there is no cover). now everyone can.

[ULTRA]

Originally posted by jonnin:

Originally posted by ULTRA:

It's just for balance reasons, the monks and barbarians are meant to be the guys taking the hits for the rogue

but, off topic, rogue is the worst balanced 5e mess I have ever seen. Its dps output is poor, its hit points are poor, its AC is poor, and its skill set can be replaced by literally anyone unless all your locks are like level 25-40 and you need the double specialization in SOH all the time + items to open anything (even then, knock scrolls... or rogue dip)

a pure rogue's sneak attack, if you can get one every round, ok, its high burst damage when you start seeing 4d6 or better. That gives them, dual wield, around 10d6 damage with magic weapons and + damage bling & dex finesse etc. A fighter or barbarian, swinging a 2h greatsword 3x (barb rage or fighter extra attack 2nd time), is doing 6d6 +6 rage just from weapon damage, +3d4 element enchanted weapon, + 15 str damage or more, ... so all that weakness and its equal to or not much better than a far better designed class. The pure rogue may be a great tabletop experience but its absolute trash in a pure hack and slash game like this one where combat is almost the entire game.

far as light armor goes, though (back on topic!) ... it still should be better than a naked sorcerer. And again, the problem is simply that double dip int dex... a 16 dex sorcerer shouldn't have a sword bounce off of it better than a guy wearing armor. Remember what this stuff IS .. its not a leather jacket, its layers of leather with some metal plates over the vitals, or heavily waxed and can't be cut easily -- it will stop a sword slashing attack, but not a well aimed thrust, in other words. A bathrobe, typical wizard attire, won't. And blah blah dragon scales .. ok, sure, bit of deity in the machine... I can buy that as the answer, but ... its bad mechanics.

The thief is the only class AFAIK that gets an additional bonus action, which through various items can be used as literally just another action, and as far as the (exploitable) mechanics of this game, you can solo most of the content with just a thief because of the combination of bonus and cunning actions and there's nothing any of the enemies can do. As far as the tabletop, yeah, it's kinda poopoo and mainly for utility.

The thief is also the only subclass that can pickpocket everything in the game with 100% success by the end, which is another piece of exploiting this very exploitable game.

[Siliconangel]

So then it's pointless. It doesn't impact spell casting or movement in game, so short of some of them looking cool or having specific builds, there's no reason to ever use them.

That's the point. Exactly. **Better** armor is actually *better,* but restricted to martial classes. It's working by design.

Also dodge and defense is generalized in AC by design. It works. Trying to separate "dodge" as its own category makes very little sense.

[SlicerDicer]

Also what is kind of amusing that the mage armor spell (giving +3 AC) works with clothes but not light armor. because of mage armor the best clothes are are 1 AC better than the best leather.

it might be a partial limitation if you had to cast mage armor yourself. but due to game design choices it is easily cast by one of your hirelings.

btw my thief loves The Graceful Cloth. +2 dex and increase jumping distance.

[iamcorn]

Honestly even the 'good' light armors are only doing about as well as some mid tier medium armors. That said if your character wearing Light armor is getting targeted with attacks often you're probably not doing it right.

Overall the problem is more with what they chose to do with light armor, with it mostly only buffing stealth in some way, over actually managing to do anything. Which is more notable when you compare it to Medium armor that is built in to give you your full Dex bonus to AC or Heavy armor that just gives you either blade ward or proficiency with it while you're wearing it. Of course light armor is going to look bad when the best of it isn't even doing a fraction of what the mid tier medium and heavy armors were doing when you got them way sooner.

[Brids17]

Originally posted by Siliconangel:

So then it's pointless. It doesn't impact spell casting or movement in game, so short of some of them looking cool or having specific builds, there's no reason to ever use them.

That's the point. Exactly. **Better** armor is actually *better,* but restricted to martial classes. It's working by design.

Also dodge and defense is generalized in AC by design. It works. Trying to separate "dodge" as its own category makes very little sense.

No... Medium armour that gives 15AC is worse than medium armour that gives 17AC but medium armour and heavily armour properly compete with one another. Hell, even cloth armour competes with heavy and medium armour due to unarmoured defense. Explain to me how it makes logical sense to have clothing being better than light armour from anything other than the armour being in need of a buff.

[Siliconangel]

Originally posted by Brids17:

Originally posted by Siliconangel:

That's the point. Exactly. **Better** armor is actually *better,* but restricted to martial classes. It's working by design.

Also dodge and defense is generalized in AC by design. It works. Trying to separate "dodge" as its own category makes very little sense.

No... Medium armour that gives 15AC is worse than medium armour that gives 17AC but medium armour and heavily armour properly compete with one another. Hell, even cloth armour competes with heavy and medium armour due to unarmoured defense. Explain to me how it makes logical sense to have clothing being better than light armour from anything other than the armour being in need of a buff.

Because being so unencumbered, a trained specialist is leveraging their ability to duck, dodge, and weave rather than turn their shoulder and take blows off the reinforced metal bits. It's simple and it's logical. Things have different value for a reason - for both role-playing and logical reasons.

You might find a set of ring-mail armor which is normally just inferior to a set of plate armor, but you might choose to use the ring-mail instead because someone happened to enchant it with a powerful magic. You won't have the pure defense of the mundane plate armor, but you will have, say, the ability to use your reaction to negate all damage from a single melee attack.

Or you might use the ring-mail because that's what your character found in the dark pits of the dungeon he woke up in. There's no reason to make everything exactly like everything else, or to remove something from the game just because it's factually inferior to another option.

It's a give and take. Otherwise, you can just say, screw it, everyone gets 20 AC. But what fun is that?

Light armor is NOT supposed to be "transmog" heavy armor. It's not supposed to be desirable over literally better armors unless some skill or inherent magic makes it so.