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

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?

Heavy Armour is OP.

Act 1 it completely sucks though, when it's just crappy 14 AC which is the same as medium armour like the Breastplate +1 or Githyanki Half Plate.

But once you get Adamantite Scale and some of the later heavy armours that get that +2 (Or +3 for the Hellplate) DR it becomes super strong.

+2 DR from heavy armour, +3 DR from Heavy Armour Mastery feat and Warding Bond and you take literally 0 damage from most attacks. AC is low? Who cares, hit me for 0 damage all you want.

Ask wotc.

Heavy Armour Mastery at lower levels is awesome. One of my favourite picks at lvl 4.

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.

It seems like the issue is itemization. On the one hand you have some medium armors that grant full dex mod to armor, and on the other hand the bonuses on heavy armor are not inspiring.

Full dex mod on medium armor is too strong, when you consider that it also gives initiative (as has already been pointed out). If this were reduced to granting an additional +1 or +2 to AC from dex then it would still be very strong without completely eclipsing heavy armor.

At the same time they need to put some sources of full plate earlier (act 1 for sure), and make full plate +1 accessible in act 2. Alternatively they could buff the damage resistance component. -1 or -2 to damage doesn't feel like a big deal, but a -5 or -10 would be impactful enough that I wouldn't mind getting hit.

In Ac 1 AC 16 HA is available very early, at lvl 3, then lvl 5 unlocks AC 17 at all Good Merchants, two AC 18 in the Mountain Pass map ...

That's not too bad. I may have been remembering early access when AC 16 was not available at all in the earlier patches. Full dex to medium still makes it fairly easy to surpass heavy armor if you are so inclined. With dex gloves you can do it while still dumping dex.

Thinking of it, the fancy Mediums should be capped at +3 DEX bonus to AC.
And/or HA Mastery Feat could be bumped a bit?
The Medium Armoury Mastery be made more interesting - +4 DEX bonus?

If you give the fancy mediums a +1 or +2 additional dex bonus then medium armor mastery should be changed to add another additional +1 (it may do that already, not sure whether its additive, or just sets the bonus to +3). +2 normal, +2 from special armor, and +1 from feat gets you to full bonus from 20 dex.

I do still think heavy armor should be buffed a bit too, to compensate for the (likely) low initiative.

I actually like the restricted initiative die in BG3, because you can actually plan a build around going first. Compensating heavy armor with more tankiness instead of less would make for an interesting tradeoff.

I agree that the armor is a problem.

Basically, everyone wears the same thing. So why do other sets of armor exist? All smiths should just make a handful of armor types.

There should be more draw to wear each individual set of armor. I'm talking about non-magical sets of armor competing with each other.

The medium armor having a full dex bonus is bad. It's so bad, in fact, that it completely negates a potential feat.

(Speaking of feats, there's a similar issue. Only certain ones are good, or rather, certain ones are *so* much better than others that the others never get chosen. It's just bad design all around, and I blame DnD for that.)

Yes, and it makes you really miss out on the fun ones, especially if only get three of them. Two go into attribute improvement and the remaining one is probably going to be alert.

As not to derail - I often take non ASI feats. True that from a pool of maybe 5 ...
Back on topic - I very often take Heavy Armour Mastery. At lvl4 the -3 to damage is a life saver. Later the bonus loses relevance. I support an increase to DR at higher levels - 8th? Maybe if taken again?
Medium Armour Mastery IS good - +1AC (i.e. +3 DEX bonus), a bonus to Stealth, but as there are MA with +3 DEX bonus out there, not to mention the Yi-Ti thingy with unlimited DEX bonus, it ends up "meh". Had it not been for the aforementioned armours I'd had strongly considered MMA.

Umm, Adamantine Scale Mail is medium armour lol. Just proving OP's point.


Taking 0 damage from "most attacks" doesn't matter. Who cares? Enemies that deal low enough damage that you can reduce it to 0 also have extremely low attack rolls.
Therefore, their chance of hitting you in the first place can be reduced close to 0 also. And not getting hit in the first place is objectively better than taking 0 damage when you do get hit, because attacks often come with additional effects that require a mental save, like bleeding, paralysis, etc.
AC being high is better than DR being high. Especially because these encounters where DR can reduce damage to 0 are not difficult encounters in the first place.
The point of armor is to survive encounters you otherwise wouldn't. If you would survive the encounter either way, then it's not really doing much for you. Any health it saves you is irrelevant since you can gain it all back with a short rest.

But there are encounters in this game, in honour mode, that aren't trivially easy. Where bosses do enough damage to one shot some characters. Or where a character gets paralyzed and takes a bunch of big hits in a row.
And damage reduction is not gonna save you in those cases, where a reduction of 5 damage is meaningless because attacks are dealing 20 damage at minimum in the first place.
AC is way way better in that case. Yuan-Ti Scale Mail will get a high dex character to 24 AC before even adding other effects, AND it adds +1 to initiative.
And that's on top of the insane bonus you get to initiative just by investing in dex, because this game uses a d4 for initiative rolls. Not to mention rangers can get a +3 bonus from their class, absolutely crazy in this game.
What advantage do heavy armour users get, in exchange for losing all this? Pretty minor special effects that you can easily get from other sources by the time you can actually obtain the armour in question.

The ultimate irony is that the best heavy armour doesn't even require heavy armour proficiency to wear.
That's how afraid of making player choices matter Larian is. They made the best heavy armour available to every character.
So if you really can't help yourself and you just love that helldusk armour fashion too much, well that's fine. You don't need to make any investment toward it whatsoever.

Also, I'll add that Heavy Armour Mastery is not a good feat. It might be worth taking once you've exhausted all the other good feats for a martial character, but that's never going to happen in BG3 or most official 5e adventures, because the level cap is 12.

A list of feats that are better for a martial character than Heavy Armour Mastery:
- Ability Improvement (2 ability points are better than 1 point + 3 non-magical DR)
- Alert (DR doesn't matter if the opponent doesn't get to take a turn in the first place)
- Athlete (never wasting a turn translates to fewer turns your opponents get to take)
- Great Weapon Master (self-explanatory, build-around)
- Sharpshooter (self-explanatory, build-around)
- Polearm Master (self-explanatory, build-around)
- Tavern Brawler (self-explanatory, build-around)
- War Caster (self-explanatory, build-around)
- Savage Attacker (self-explanatory, damage => kill your foes before they can take their turns)
- Sentinel (self-explanatory, build-around)
- Martial Adept (I would never take this in BG3, but I'd take it before taking Heavy Armour Mastery)
- Resilient (I wouldn't take this either, but proficiency and +1 to WIS saving throws is better defense than 3 non-magical DR, since the deadliest conditions have WIS saving throws)

Finally, Warding Bond generally isn't worth casting either. So many better things for a cleric to do with a level 2 spell slot.

And just to be clear, I do use heavy armour in this game. But not because it's good. It's objectively worse than light or medium armour.
Even on the strength builds I like to play, you usually want dexterity gloves for the initiative, so you're better off with Yuan-Ti Scale Mail.
But I just like the way heavy armour looks. It's the coolest looking armour, and it's not THAT much worse than light or medium armour.
So it doesn't hurt too much to use heavy armour. That means it's a matter of personal preference, basically.

The point I'm trying to make is just that heavy armour should be objectively better than medium armour, but with a higher cost.
It shouldn't be a largely cosmetic decision that doesn't really affect how much damage you take.
You should be substantially squishier if you don't invest in heavy armour, taking damage more often and in higher numbers.
But instead, you're actually slightly squishier if you DO invest in heavy armour, which makes the investment worthless.

DND 5e sort of has the same issue, but you are kind of forced to use heavy armour if you're a martial character without much DEX, because you take an AC penalty for having a negative DEX modifier.
That works in 5e because you don't prioritize DEX on every character in 5e for the sake of initiative. This is ultimately caused by the d4 that BG3 uses for intiative rolls.
Because the die is so small, bonuses are disproportionately large. FIVE times larger than in tabletop. That's a big deal, because it's impossible for a character with a high initiative bonus to roll lower than a character with no initiative bonus.
In 5e, +5 to initiative is great, but your range is 6 to 25, versus 1 to 20. So it's still possible for you to roll a 6 while an opponent rolls a 20, or anything in between.
In BG3, +5 makes your range 6 to 9, versus 1 to 4. That means it's literally impossible for you to ever roll lower than an opponent with no bonus.
So you want DEX on every character that can spare it. That's why every character wants the dexterity gloves. If you don't have enough DEX, you'll literally ALWAYS go last in every encounter.
So because you're investing in DEX anyway, purely for the sake of initiative rolls, you aren't going to have an AC penalty for using light/medium armour in the first place if you're building your character correctly.
With no AC penalty for using light/medium armour, there's no reason to use heavy armour. That was the reason to use it in DND 5e, which you can see if you look at the armour table.

As I was referring to the Adamantine Heavy armour, imagine I wrote Splint instead of Scale


So most enemies in the game have extremely low attack rolls? Then why even both with AC in the first place? If they have low attack rolls, they won't be hitting you even with mediocre AC...

High AC is only relevant for high attack rolls. Alternatively, you can have moderate AC (Making all these low attack rolls still fail) and when they DO hit they deal 0.


Yes it is, because of how damage reduction works in combination with resistances.

A hit that does 20 damage? Reduced to 10 by resistance. Reduced by 5 from damage reduction. So now you're taking 5 damage from that attack.

Sure, taking 75% less damage from these big attacks won't save you /s

Meanwhile, these same Honour mode encounters get high attack rolls with extra modifiers so your 20+ AC still isn't making you avoid 95% of those attacks (Which also highlights the limitation of AC. No matter how high your AC is you cannot get more than 95% avoidance because nat 20 always hits. Meanwhile with DR you literally CAN get 100% damage reduced making things deal literally 0 damage to you)

Not to mention spells which don't always target AC. But still get reduced by Heavy Armour's DR. Your 24 AC medium armour won't do a single thing against an attack that doesn't target your AC.


Warding Bond is one of Clerics most OP spells lmao. It's one of the 3 spells Clerics get that actually make Cleric worth using in this game. 50% reduced damage AND +1 on all Saves AND +1 to AC... For a single level 2 spell slot?


Which is why you think Heavy Armour is bad.

Heavy Armour shines when you stack DR along with resistances because you reduce so much damage that it competes with fully invested Dex + Yuan-ti massive AC and in many cases outperforms it (Such as against high attack rolling enemies or literally any build that can't stack Dex out the wazoo)

What they really need to do is introduce a magical belt that gives a bonus to initiative and AC while wearing heavy armor. Call it "The Girdle" and stick it somewhere early on, that way the tanky warrior types have something to work with before the power ups with feat selection. Ringmail at 14 isn't very imposing, (it also gives me Minthara nightmares lol), but then to get the heavy chain or splint is a chore. I wish there was an option to purchase starting equipment with just enough GP to slide into something other than scale mail and maybe a cool looking helmet or shield and then have that pair off against the cost of the cooler melee and ranged weapons. Just so there's a bit of tug of war going on there between offensive or defensive archetypes with the initial kit selection.

Here's what the Adamantine Splint looks like with all the various dyes, images on the wiki

https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Adamantine_Splint_Armour

How it is that not even one of those very rarest of dyes is black on black is still beyond me. Like surely someone must just be trolling our goth demographic on this one.

Achieving Black Dye didn't really happen until the high middle ages, like mid 14th century when the technique was improved using Oak Apples, the gall-nuts created by wasps. Prior to that the best you could get really was like a dark blue from sea urchins (going way back to Phoenician times), or oxidizing the iron. As a pigment rather than a dye, black has been around since we learned the secret of fire from charcoal and burned bones, so maybe Bhaal could just let us paint the armor black? Oh well

I agree though the heavy stuff doesn't quite feel like it's competing with the light stuff. Kind of a pattern lol