Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Joe Liker" data-source="post: 6441966" data-attributes="member: 6777505">I was kind of on the fence about this spell for a long time -- I had no idea what to think and simply hoped no one would ever use it.But thinking about druids and wildshape, the intention of the designers suddenly seemed a lot clearer. Looking at it from that perspective, it even starts to make sense that the wording is so vague.This is primarily a druid spell. It is intended for use by druids. Druids are the only class that suddenly shifts in and out of armor on a regular basis. They couldn't clone the wording of mage armor because mage armor doesn't work with real armor. They had to word it so the spell is not overpowered if you are sometimes wearing armor and sometimes not.I think they were probably trying to avoid all jargon because maybe they weren't sure what the final terminology would be for things like &quot;base AC&quot; -- or if those things would even be rigorously defined. (It turns out they aren't, really.)So now I'm squarely in the camp where barkskin replaces the base AC that is normally set by armor unless you are already wearing armor that is better. Everything stacks on top of that, including Dex, shields, cover, and shield of faith.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Joe Liker, post: 6441966, member: 6777505"] I was kind of on the fence about this spell for a long time -- I had no idea what to think and simply hoped no one would ever use it. But thinking about druids and wildshape, the intention of the designers suddenly seemed a lot clearer. Looking at it from that perspective, it even starts to make sense that the wording is so vague. This is primarily a druid spell. It is intended for use by druids. Druids are the only class that suddenly shifts in and out of armor on a regular basis. They couldn't clone the wording of [I]mage armor[/I] because [I]mage armor[/I] doesn't work with real armor. They had to word it so the spell is not overpowered if you are sometimes wearing armor and sometimes not. I think they were probably trying to avoid all jargon because maybe they weren't sure what the final terminology would be for things like "base AC" -- or if those things would even be rigorously defined. (It turns out they aren't, really.) So now I'm squarely in the camp where [I]barkskin [/I] replaces the base AC that is normally set by armor unless you are already wearing armor that is better. Everything stacks on top of that, including Dex, shields, cover, and shield of faith. [/QUOTE]

Verification