AC or damage?

Increasing AC or damage output, what would you choose?

  • Increase AC

    Votes: 6 27.3%
  • Increase damage output

    Votes: 11 50.0%
  • Other (please elaborate)

    Votes: 5 22.7%

Herzog

Adventurer
I've given up on the specific request, and am resorting to a more generic approach:

In D&D 3.5, given the option of either improving your AC or increasing your damage output, which would you choose?
 

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Some enemies have high AC, some have lots of hit points.

In the first case, you need higher attack to pass their AC. Your own AC or your damage aren't that important. By making more attacks, you may have higher hope of hitting them though...so its up to you to decide when you have that option.

If they have lots of hit points, you power attack all you can, because you know you will probably hit - you just need to do damage.

Most of the time though, you are going to fight something that will do lots of damage to you...in this case you will need to have high AC yourself (enough to survive till you kill it).

In a recent dungeon I had to hold the line for many rounds, until the sorcerer killed the hordes of zombies. I had no hopes to kill them myself though, so yeah, my 26 AC helped a lot.

So, over damage vs AC I like to have the option to choose according to my needs every round. (TWF with shield like you do/power attack/combat expertise help with that)

I know this is not the answer you want, but its the answer to what you asked now :p


To answer your other question, if you get attacked often get armor, if you feel that you do very little damage get the bashing (it will cost you a fortune, but if this can't stop you, nothing will :p)
 

I'd generally take AC. AC is what gives you the time to do other things. If I was playing a barbarian, then damage, otherwise AC.
 

High AC keeps you in the fight longer.
But by damage, do you mean per single attack or per combat round.

I played a paladin with an outragous AC (57 +/-) but he also had taken levels in Anointed Knight which gave him (3 times a day) an extra highest bonus attack AND he had a Speed enhanced Ancestrial Relic that gave the same.

At his peak it was 6 attacks a round and really hard to damage him (in melee anyway) I could have taken some new sheild feat that was in the Players Handbook II for a total of 8, but the DM begged me off.

With all these attacks, even average dice rolls ended up with a double-handfull of dice and some devestating damage. Throw a few crits and smites and thing got sick.

I still got to go with AC. A tanks roll is to stand in front and sheild the fireball slingers/eldrich blasters that stand in the back and do the large damage dealing.
 

A mix. You increase hit, damage, and AC together gradually over time, you don't overdo one to the detriment of the others. For one thing, with 3E's exponential costs structure, that's incredibly inefficient. It's also self-defeating. Being a game, if your attack/damage/AC gets to a point the DM finds too high, he will simply adjust the monsters to compensate.
 

For my current PC I'd take a constitution bump ahead of all other things. But then again, I'm playing a HP monster PC. If I have to choice damage or AC, I'd choice damage because a dead monster doesn't hit any AC no mater how abysmal it is.
 


The question is wrong.

As a crude rule of thumb, +1 AC = +1 AB = +2 damage. If you follow that you're unlikely to go wrong with a typical melee character. Feats like Combat Expertise or Power Attack let you move bonuses around to better fit the situation.

I'm not sure about other types of bonuses, but I'd guess save bonuses are worth 1/3 per point, while hit points are worth 1 per level x hit points. So +1 to all saves, or the Improved Toughness feat, is roughly equal to +1 AC or +1 AB. DR I'm even less sure about, but let's say it's 1 for 1. DR 1/something = +1 AC = +1 AB.
 

I voted "Other" because for me, the answer depends upon the PC's personality. Most of my Monks & skirmishers are stupid-hard to hit. Most of my armored warriors hit for a ton.

Sometimes, I also take into account the nature of the party. I was playing a Orc/2 Ranger in a campaign and went with a 2WF build. Then, as it turned out, the party was full of very squishy casters and a single rogue. Mine was the only warrior. After a couple of sessions where he got dropped every fight, I changed his off-hand weapon to a spiked shield. The effect was immediately obvious in the next session: the AC boost kept him alive, which kept others alive...and he could still do decent damage with his bash. He didn't fall in any combat.

In the long run, it didn't matter, since that session ended when the rogue finally opened a door (he'd rolled poorly) just as my charging brute was trying to blast through it. On the other side was the entrance to a system of underground caves, and a pair of sub-5 rolls resulted in my dude taking a header into the chasm just a couple feet beyond the portal.
 

I choose other as well personally i perfer to spend equal amounts of time and money on both mechanics unless im making a character dedicated to one or the other. But if i was forced to choose probably damage output one) its incredibly fun to roll lots of dice while other look on in jealousy, and two) as somepeople said before a dead monster doesn't hit back.
 

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