Yaarel
He Mage
Officially, those feats are wildly overvalued. By far. They’re garbage feats.
Mage Armor teaching AC 18 requires 20 Dex. By the level at which a character would have that, they can also have +1 Studded Leather, reaching the same AC, which only loses 1 AC while fighting beholders.
"+1 studded leather"
I prefer the design that keeps magic items out of the balance equations.
The +5 Dexterity happens automatically, because the benefits from investing in Dexterity fighting incentivize it.
Mage Armor = Plate Armor
So, no, Mage Armor isn’t equal to Plate.
Further, by the time a Dex character has a 20 Dex, the Strength guy probably has their Plate.
That is the point. When the Str character gains Plate Armor 18 AC, the Dex character would have Mage Armor with an equal 18 AC.
Mage Armor = Plate Armor
Lastly, you’re mixing comparisons ina way that obfuscates the truth.
If wearing medium armor requires two feats for you, you aren’t playing a class that can have Mage Armor without taking a specific subclass or a feat. Fighters, Clerics, Druids, Barbarians, Paladins, Rangers, all have medium armor. Everyone but wizards and sorcerers get at least light armor.
So, for half the classes, Mage Armor is a couple extra AC, at most. If they wanna be a Dex character.
That confirms the other point. "Mage Armor is a couple extra AC."
In other words, Mage Armor makes Dex fighting strictly better than Str fighting for "half the classes" that lack heavy armor proficiency.
For 4 other classes, it’s the same as a +1 to AC.
For Wizards, it’s 1 less spell slot used per day. For Sorcerers, it’s the ability to take a feat in order to burn 1 first level spell slot per day.
For warlocks, it saves them an Invocation.
Don't oversell it.
A spell that lasts for 8 hours, is effectively equivalent to ‘always on’. Virtually, the Wizard is swapping out a level 1 spell slot for armor proficiency.
At this point, the design might as well have made Mage Armor a class feature of the Wizard class.
In bounded accuracy, a feat that grants +2 attack rolls would be a huge deal. Notice, such a feat doesnt even exist in the Players Handbook.
Conversely, because of the exact same math, +2 AC is a big deal.
The design math is, roughly:
Light armor +2 AC → 12 AC
Medium armor +2 AC → 14 AC
Heavy armor +2 AC → 16 AC
Meanwhile Plate Armor 18 AC is pretend-balanced by high gp cost.
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