I know the threat title contains an assertion you maybe first have to argue about. Perhaps it is not underpowered. I think it is. I'm not a DnD player, so maybe there are hidden goodies in heavy armor. In the EA of BG3 there was no good heavy armor (except perhaps later from the Grymforge) and I thought the good and strong stuff will come later. I still have to find it in Act 3.
The best heavy armor seems to be the (legendary) Helldusk plate armor with 21 AC you can get from the House of Hope (I wasn't there yet). You can buy some very rare AC 20 armor for over 13,000 gold (I had the money but spent it for better stuff). The "normal" very rare heavy armor is at 19 AC. Why is the AC so low?
With the best medium armor you get 17 AC and the full Dex bonus applied, that's 22 AC (with 20 Dex), and you get a whopping +2 to saving throws in addition. The second best medium armor with full Dex bonus gets you to 20 AC and grants you initiative. A simple rare +2 medium Half Plate armor with the +2 Dex bonus grants you 19 AC. BTW if you fell victim to the argument you can dip Dex with heavy armor because you don't need it as no bonus is applied, you have potentially very low initiative, a bad feature in Honour mode. Heavy armor usually reduces all received damage by 1 or 2 (and not just some special damage like medium armor), that's a good feature, but from my experience not a compensation for low AC because in the hard fights you often receive high damage pakets at once.
So my question is, should better heavy armor not have 21 or 22 AC as regular number, to make it at least even or a little better to what (not hard to get) medium armor can achieve?
You make a great point and one I agree with. Heavy armor is pretty underwhelming in comparison to medium Armor and especially in the context of initiative. I mean, you basically have to have at least 14 Dex anyway if you want to be anywhere on the initiative table for the majority of the game - because of how Larian has done initiative in the game it gives more weight to your dex bonus than the die roll itself. You go 10 dex and the Tank is going last in the turn order every time and that's really not helpful.
So heavy armor can't do anything with that extra dexterity bonus...but you need to have it anyway? Pass.
