Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Why is Heavy Armor Underpowered?

I don't think heavy armour is necessarily underpowered for Act 1, but it drops off steeply by Act 2, and is backstabbed again by the best heavy armour in Act 3 requiring no proficiency.

This isn't unique to heavy armour. Itemization in this game is rather bad for many classes and/or playstyles, to an extent where a careful search for balanced mods is required to re-balance. Dex builds eventually get spoiled for armour, yes, but they struggle with *weapons* that aren't Phalar Aluve for a sweet while.

The itemization is one of the weakest aspects of the game outside the incentivised playstyles, alongside the incredibly bugginess and underpolished Act 3. If you don't want to respec every couple levels, you're going to suffer at some point.

Early on, you're essentially trading AC for better mobility and higher damage (ignoring the possibility of Hill Giant elixir addiction here). That's fine enough for Act 1, as it makes sense monks and such would be harder to hit. They're nimble. It's their *thing*. It's Act 2 where issues arise, and make no mistake, they're here because there were no thoughts spared, the same way there were no thoughts spared about how unbalanced access to so much hill Giant Strength was from level 1.

Larian has a history of being really bad at balancing, mostly through thoughtlessness and allowing exploits. It is what it is.

Heavy armor gives high AC without any need to invest on DEX.
On top of that, in this game most high quality heavy armors come with additional damage mitigations ("absorbs X points of damage") when not even some significant buff ("Blade ward as a permanent cast").

That said, I do agree that it's the Medium Armors with no DEX bonus restriction that are complete bullshit. All the convenience and none of the drawbacks may sound awesome, but in reality this type of design ends up narrowing down your options to just one, because it becomes implicitly far better than anything else.

It sort of feels like their design was done with older DnD rules in mind... Y'know the ones where spell casting is restricted when wearing armour and resting required removing the armour (So if you were ambushed while resting somewhere not completely safe, you'd not be equipped)...

But since 5e ditched basically everything interesting about armour classes... You have medium armour being objectively better than light armour/robes without the DEX limit... (Lets not even get into the comparison to Barkskin... A level 2 spell that requires Concentration and doesn't even get ANY DEX modifier, let alone uncapped...)

It's so weird to have mages running around in Medium/Heavy armour because there's no drawbacks (Besides missing out on some robe bonuses, of which there are few that are particularly noteworthy)... I mean, it makes sense for like a Tank Wizard that's using Heavy Armour and Abjuration School to nullify damage. But it's strange to see your normal Fireball slinging Evokers and Sorcerers clad in armour...

To say nothing about the Medium Armour Mastery Feat which specifically boosts your max DEX bonus with Medium Armour from +2 to +3 which is completely irrelevant when you simply use some Medium Armours that don't have a limit anyway...

I must admit that it works pretty well for me, because I didn’t *find* any medium Armor without DEX limit. And my wizards typically wore robes, because they had no armor proficiency (I needed the talents for more interesting stuff).

The only thing that really made a difference is the heavy Armor without proficiency requirement. That’s a must-have, and that may be a balancing problem. But I actually was rather overjoyed to find it: finally a way to get out of an AC problem I had for one character for a long time.

I guess it would be a problem in a PvP game.