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.