I should really start to take notes where the useful items are found. I think quite a few of these protective items shown above were simply bought from traders. But yea it's not easy to decide which item is best to take up the slot. I hate changing gear for different situations. The only time I do this is with the gloves of thievery. My bard puts these on during exploration, but when it looks like battle is coming up, I'll change them forwondrous gloves (which gives +1 AC and extra bardic inspiration). But that's the only instance I swap back and forth.
I find the hats also incredibly silly. Except on my dwarven bard actually. I think it suits her very well. But she's the only one in all my PT's where I can say this.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/6BmsKKi.jpg)
Personally, I like "Conan" or "pulp-magazine/peplum-movie"-like representations of armor. If I had it my way I would provide 3 "skins" in the game. One cartoonish/manga style, which is what they have now, a second pulp-magazine like style, which I would choose, and maybe a third more hstorically correct, Lord of the rings like style. I quite like the Dunkles character look in your party and you're right that a funny shield form would really spoil it.
I may look to mods again in the future when things are stabilised. I had some representational mods in patch 5, but after patch 6 nothing worked anymore. I had to delete everything and reinstall from scratch. Backups of the save files didn't load anymore either so I lost everything.