Can someone please explain to a relative newbie how armor class is accurately calculated? I am trying to determine the maximum AC for a 16Cleric/14Bard/10RDD. On the PW I play on, there are no items greater than +5. Thanks in advance for your help.
Quote: Posted 03/09/05 00:01:50 (GMT) -- Dalinoth Aligansaar

Can someone please explain to a relative newbie how armor class is accurately calculated? I am trying to determine the maximum AC for a 16Cleric/14Bard/10RDD. On the PW I play on, there are no items greater than +5. Thanks in advance for your help.

Well, let us see. Start with base AC of 10.

To this we add/sub the dex bonus.. i am assuming dex is 10 (+0) for the example. Note: when looking at armor, the most full plate, for example will allow is +1 from dex.. so having 14 dex is pointless (for ac purposes if you are going to use full plate).

full plate gives ac +8, so ac is now 18.

Add a tower shield, +3 to ac, ac becomes 21.

Now, the only other ac we get is from the rDD class, and we get an ac bonus on lv 1, 5, 8, 10. so we add 4 to get an ac of 25.

To get more accurate ac, we look at the +bonus on the items. If you have +3 fp and +2 tower shield we would add 5 to the ac to get ac 30.

There are ac bonuses from cloaks/rings and dodge bonus too. I am not terribly clear on dex bonus, but with a cleric lvl of 16 you shouldnt worry bout cloak of protections. Use the lv 1 spell Shield of Faith (+5 ac at lv 15).

After this, there are ways to tweak the ac even more, through the use of bard songs and things like that, but Ill let someone more knowledgable than i try to explain that.

Hope that helps (and i hope i am accurate! it is late)

Peace The number that you should end up with will look something like this if you get all +5 items using a shield:
10 (base) + 1 (dex) + 4 (haste) + 25 (helmet, shield, armor, boots, amulet) + 8 (tumble) + 4 (rdd) + 1 (mage armor) + 11 (full plate/tower shield) + 2 (armor skin): 66.
The things that avado forgot to include were: tumble, haste, and armor skin. I'm assuming you can get haste from items. If not, you can subtract it from the total (or get it as a spell/scroll/potion, though it has low duration).
by the way:
helmet: deflection ac
(also given by many other items, such as cloak, but does not stack, and so helmet is the most common place to get it from.)
tower shield: shield ac
full plate: armor ac
(also given by bracers, and possibly others, but does not stack, so body armor is the most common place to get it.)
boots: dodge ac
amulet: natural ac
If you plan on getting over 11 bard levels, you can toss in at least 2 more from the song, so 68. And with a curse song, that would effectively be 70, since you lower your opponents AB by -2.
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Have I mentioned I hate IGMS? LOL i didnt forget! Just didnt put it in! If you look at the question, it is IMPOSSIBLE to make an accurate response to his question. He gives us nothing to work with, other than the 10 rdd lvls. SO the only proper response to the question is 10 base + 4 rdd lvls = 14 ac.

Anything else is speculation. I was merely tryin to show him how to find a BASIC ac. But thanks for the lesson! I am by no means an expert in ac!

Peace Thanks yrtsns for the explanation - much obliged...