Does Armor Class even matter?

[minionofgruumsh]

I'm not that far into the game (I haven't even taken care of The Stag Lord) and it really feels like Armor Class is incredibly irrelevant... I've been thinking this for a while, but it's come to a head after entering a cave and getting ambushed by wererats. Just wererats. Not wererat Fighters, not wererat Bruisers or anything. Just wererats. I have Valerie leading the group's formation and she's in Full Plate with a Tower shield. Her armor class is 25. Even considering they are ambushing from hidden, her flat-footed AC is 23. And the wererats just *tore* through her, not missing once and dealing upwards of 20 damage in some hits and I even saw 23 and higher. And this was on multiple savescums.

I have looked up Pathfinder wererat stats, and their attack rolls have a total bonus of +4. This means they would need to roll a 19 or 20 to even make contact while Valerie is flat-footed; 10% chance. Assuming the standard-stat shortsword, rolling a 19 and 20 meets the threat range, but they would need to roll a 19 or 20 *again*; 10% of a 10% chance is 1%. With a damage roll total of 1d6+2 (between 3 and 8, between 6 and 16 on a crit) and a 1d6 sneak attack bonus they should be doing only a maximum of 22 damage. To hit higher than 15 damage should be 1% of all attacks made against her. And she should only be getting hit 10% of the time. And yet she gets hit with such frequency and so hard that she may as well be wearing tissue paper.

I am using custom difficulty to set all toughness and damage values to "normal" and flat values of 1 where appropriate, so it's not like I'm jacking the difficulty up or anything like that. So is the AC formula different for the game, or something? The game doesn't show rolls + bonuses like you can turn on in Baldur's Gate so I don't have the data to work with and dissect. :/

[Balzaphon]

Some bossess they designed with ridiculous hit chance and regular enemies are really gimped

And there are some mistakes

for example

"Another fun encounter in this zone is a group of 4 sleeping bandits. If you disarm the traps these unlucky fellows are completely unaware of you. You can approach, buff, position and open the fight as you see fit. The problem is that Owlcat forgot to put in flat footed AC and Coup De Grace meaning these sleeping NPCs have the same AC asleep as standing defending themselves."

[minionofgruumsh]

Originally posted by Balzaphon:

Some bossess they designed with ridiculous hit chance and regular enemies are really gimped

And there are some mistakes

for example

"Another fun encounter in this zone is a group of 4 sleeping bandits. If you disarm the traps these unlucky fellows are completely unaware of you. You can approach, buff, position and open the fight as you see fit. The problem is that Owlcat forgot to put in flat footed AC and Coup De Grace meaning these sleeping NPCs have the same AC asleep as standing defending themselves."

Well, these two wererats I'm talking about are just normal mook enemies. Not bosses. I finally managed to get through the spoiler-gated thing you put, after several tries and after blowing a good chunk of my limited-resource abilities before initiating it and getting lucky with stealth and trap-disabling rolls. The biggest problem was my entire party getting affected by fear as soon as combat started.

I'm just wondering if there's any point to Armor class or if I need to just forget armor or the idea of someone being able to tank stuff and just go full-nuke mode and just have everybody loaded up with quick-cast damage spells and ranged weapons...

[wendigo211]

AC is still useful, but you have to change your expectations. You are correct that under normal circumstances 25 is a good AC for a under level 5 character. It is, however, inadequate in this game. You need to be thinking 28+ and preferably 30+. Try a monk/empyreal sorcerer main. You should be able to manage a 27 AC at level 1 and a 31 at level 2. I know it sounds wierd, but I've always used mages as my tanks in my 3.x games, they do it better than any other class.

The big problem is they balanced the difficulties with stat increases without paying attention to what that means for d20 spread. We aren't using continuous distributions and if you push past need a 20 to hit, or the enemy needs less than a 1 hit you, you do break the underlying ruleset. The ruleset is broken on unfair, and damn close on hard. On lower difficulties it is manageable. But you do need to build efficiently (Valerie is the opposite of building efficiently).

Having said that, paying attention to the rolls, the enemies do get flat-footed bonuses against you in circumstances when they shouldn't (i.e. you're engaged in combat and they aren't attacking from stealth). This is a bug, and hopefully it gets patched out eventually. That can be part of the extra hits you're seeing.

[minionofgruumsh]

Originally posted by wendigo211:

Try a monk/empyreal sorcerer main.

But I don't wanna play a monk/empryreal sorcerer. I wann play my half-orc Eldritch Scoundrel who casts cc and invisibility/stealth so he can hit things with greataxes and falchions from the shadows. >.<;

Originally posted by wendigo211:

On lower difficulties it is manageable. But you do need to build efficiently (Valerie is the opposite of building efficiently).

But I specifically left everything at "normal" and x1 values to *not* be at higher difficulties (yes, I allow enemies to crit and turned off the Death's Door thing to make it more "core ruled", but I haven't made efforts to *boost* the difficulty from flat...)

And I don't see why Valerie should be unplayably poorly built; it's an NPC the game *gives* you. I'm not a min-maxer and I would think that putting everything at "flat" and "unadjusted" values (at least as far as I'm understanding the nomenclature of the difficulty settings) wouldn't require "optimized" characters. And I'm not one for building optimized characters, I go with ideas that seems cool to me and then try my best to make them work; see above main character for this game. ^^;

But yeah, I guess if they've changed armor class functionality and stuff so that it doesn't matter, then I'll just do snipe-and-kite tactics on everyone like I did for the Baldur's Gate games. >.>

[LordBlade]

Enemies have MASSIVELY inflated stats. So yeah, a lot of the time your AC is meaningless. When you have basic random Bandits with +10 or more base to hit along with +10 or more from Strength bonuses (really? bandits with 30+ strength?), they couldn't care what your AC is. Many enemies will hit you unless they roll a 1.

[Akogooth]

High AC is nice but because of the bloated BAB and AC's of some enemies its not the solution to all questions. Even if they didnt implement Animals with BAB 10+ and AC's of 25+ there where the touch attacks of magic casters.
For defence, i like to use a henchman tower shield fighter and valerie (same build but bad ability scores) they have an AC of 31 and 32 atm on L7. Normal enemies dont hit them only on a crit. the special ones hit often enough. (done whererats yesterday... they still hit me but this time i got them down and the loot is nice)

[Darkfireslide]

The wererat fight is one of those cRPG "You're not supposed to do this until later" fights. Kingmaker has a lot of dungeons and such with monsters that will outright kill you if you decide to fight them without being a higher level. This adds content to the game by allowing smart players to return to previous areas to kill previously difficult monsters and get some good loot.

The wererats themselves aren't normal wererats. They have had their stats inflated due either to a class template or just through raw stat boosting. One way or another, they are a difficult fight, requiring probably around a 5th-6th level party to have a decent chance at beating. When you find fights like this in the game, avoid them and remember them for later because the loot is usually well worth the effort.

Some people see this as a negative design choice and while I understand that perspective, I'm not going to weigh in here whether or not I think it's a good thing. This is just how the game is and it's trying to teach you early on that there are some things you just can't do.

Valerie herself is garbage and shouldn't be relied upon until you get items to boost her strength and give her a feat like power attack so she has some teeth on top of having a decent AC. 25 AC is good at 2nd-3rd level, but you will continually need to improve that AC to stay relevant. Having a Cleric like Harrim to cast Shield of Faith helps a lot with this, and Linzi's Inspire Courage is essential to evening the odds for a lot of early combats. Jaethal's judgments help a lot, too, for team-based fighting, and she can heal the party like Harrim can, and so can Linzi.

Think of this less like a "I'm the chosen one" style of RPG common in most RPGs (despite the "You should be the baron" storyline) these days and think of it more as "I am a very small part of a much larger, more dangerous world" and never ever assume that you will be able to win a fight without a lot of planning, party buffing, and good tactics. And even then, despite your best efforts, you just aren't ready sometimes.

As a side note, Valerie is trash until you give her feats like Weapon Specialization and Power Attack and I myself spearheaded a thread to buff her strength to 16 so she's not completely useless. Realistically she should have a stat spread like 16/16/16/9/14/15 for her archetype and backstory, but alas alack, the devs/original campaign designers left us kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ on that one. Animal Companions are better teammates than Valerie, despite what her AC might have you believe. Fighters are already a mediocre class as-is and Tower Shield Specialist is easily the worst of the 4 possible types of Fighters, even when properly optimized and functioning correctly.

[minionofgruumsh]

Originally posted by Darkfireslide:

The wererat fight is one of those cRPG "You're not supposed to do this until later" fights.

Really? Huh... then I don't know where I should be... I'm only level 3 and this was the only un-explored dot on the map for me and I don't have any other leads on advancing the main quest (all my side quests are either completed or one for completing the main quest or dealing with doodoo-gnome who I found leading some kobolds and then lost him again.

[Darkfireslide]

You misunderstand. Sometimes there are fights in areas you /are/ supposed to be in, that you are not supposed to win at that specific time. The area you are in is probably fine, but that encounter is supposed to be one you come back to later.

[omegazeda]

well i am still going to take armor focus and dodge for my magus and cleric!

[minionofgruumsh]

Originally posted by Darkfireslide:

Sometimes there are fights in areas you /are/ supposed to be in, that you are not supposed to win at that specific time. The area you are in is probably fine, but that encounter is supposed to be one you come back to later.

Well, that was the only thing to do in that area. >.>

If I had any indicator that it wasn't where I *needed* to go, I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to get into it. :D

[Darkfireslide]

I understand that. This game isn't perfect and the wererat fight is something that gets criticized a lot. You're not alone. But I've found so far that if you're not supposed to be somewhere the game is pretty vocal about it, while if you are in a good area for your level it will feel like you actually have a chance in fighting. Yeah, if you don't feel like you had even a remote chance of winning, just back off and go somewhere else.

[Maverick]

That fight was really rough for me. I had Valerie and my Paladin tank side by side with the Bard and Cleric behind the wall providing healing. Amiri and my Paladin where the only two that could bust through the DR using great swords. My Paladin did have a Single Smite Evil that got through on that annoying Alchemist one though. Tough fight overall.

[Jean-Luc]

Sometimes harder challenges are intemixed with easier ones and are meant to be done later on. You explore and see what's what, simple. The game's not a corridor.

[zero4us]

Wait until you fight Hargulka the Troll King, Greater Enraged Werebear and Crag Linnorm! Now feel the pain... :-)