Is heavy armour still the Cinderella?

[JoelF]

I played a dwarven defender in battle plate (from races of stone). It took a sphere of annihilation to kill him. Heavy armor let him get his AC up to the mid 40s without defensive stancing, at 19th level. I admit the mithril variants were popular, but I think only because playing a straight fighter tank (or defender to use 4E terminology) wasn't too popular.

 

[mach1.9pants]

I thought I saw it mentioned somewhere that a fighter class feature or power was going to allow them to either ignore ACP or add their stat bonus when using Heavy Armor. Maybe both. Would definitely been a good benefit for the beat-on guy.

In R&C they say that the Ftr (only) can take a feat to allow them to use their dex bonus in heavy armour, I hope this is still in.
Characters in my campaign often use heavy, but I have also ruled out the base movement reduction, which is rubbish IMO. Yes heavy armour will certainly reduce you max running speed (runx3) but reducing your normal move around stuff, no way. I have been loaded up with all sorts of combat kit and had no problem moving quickly in short bursts, but sustained running was really out. And a full load of kit plus bergen is much more problematic than a nice set of plate armour IMO!

 

[Stalker0]

There are a few 4e mechanics that help bring the advantage back to the heavier armor.

1) Longer combats. Because the first round isn't so critical, that first round of running into melee for the fighter isn't as critical. This makes speed a little less important.

2) Better run mechanics. Running now adds +2 squares to your speed. Percentage Wise, this actually helps guys in heavier armor more than light armor.

3) AC stays competitive. In 3e, as levels go up, unless you were truly committed to your AC you were going to get hit regardless of your AC. Many creatures literally needed 1's to miss you, making your armor worthless. In 4e, AC and attack bonuses scale together, meaning that every point of AC is important.

This is combined with the fact that now hits against your AC can cause secondary effects, like being knocked prone. Having a good AC also reduces your vulnerability to these attacks.


I'm not saying 4e has fixed the armor problem, but there's definitely the potential.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Mithril Tessellated +n Full Plate is the bee's knees. My barbarian used that, as did that game's DM in our other Eberron game. Full movement and speedy donning in a pinch are both very nice.

Brad

 

[Gort]

Every character in my longest running game wore the armour that suited their class. Clerics and fighters were in full-plate armour because they wanted to put their good stats in strength, constitution and wisdom, not dexterity.

I really haven't witnessed this alleged shortage of characters in heavy armour.

Oh yeah, and what "weaknesses" are we talking about? Clerics and fighters suck at skills, so it's not like they're losing much by taking anything but full plate.

 

[zoroaster100]

We recently reached 20th level of a long running 3.5 edition campaign. The armor choices of the characters remained fairly constant with a few minor shifts for some characters. The wizard, the arcane trickster and the barbarian/fighter/monk/dragonslayer did not use any armor. The bard used leather armor. The fighter and cleric used magic full plate. Those last two used heavy armor throughout the game, and I'm pretty sure they chose the best alternative for themselves to maximize combat effectiveness.

 

[small pumpkin man]

This is one of those per group, do you use a battlemat, what level do you play at things, the access to magic items PC's have and just player/GM mindset makes a lot of difference, so you see a lot of variety.

Due to certain house rules, our groups always seen a lot of Adamantine fullplate, so I don't really know what the OP's talking about.

 

[Graf]

We saw something similar (though the Paladin's mount with move 60 kept him pretty metalled up).

Given 4e's emphasis on speed and movement it'll be interesting to see if they can fix this.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Speculating based on what we've seen or heard, I would think that heavy armor is actually going to have to offer more in 4th edition than it did in 3rd edition to be used.

In 3rd edition, heavy armor offers 1 point of AC potential versus other standard armors, but it is a lot easier to reach that potential, so in most situations, the net gain is three points of AC, a few stat points (that don't need to go into dex) and a significant portion of gold (that doesn't need to go into enhancing dex). In return for that, the heavy armor wearer has to take a movement penalty that only sometimes works out to be significant (and which can be somewhat made up for by using mithral fullplate with a barbarian level or dragoncraft fullplate with a barbarian level) and some penalties to skills that they generally don't use.

In 4th edition, OTOH, it looks like the armor class delta is likely to be smaller if you can't add your dex to AC in heavy armor and, while the speed difference will be smaller (5 to 6 instead of 4 to 6), the inability to add dex/int to the reflex defense sounds HUGE. (Imagine how many people would wear heavy armor in 3.x if it penalized your reflex save--I'm thinking you'd probably have at least 50% of the heavy armor users say that a point of AC is not worth the reflex penalty). Furthermore, heavy armor also seems to penalize both the skills that oppose grab (a feature seen on several of the previewed monsters and thus likely on a significant portion of the monsters in the game). Imagine if heavy armor imposed a penalty on your grapple check in 3.x as well as giving you a reflex save penalty.

For all that, it had better give a pretty significant AC boost or it won't be worth it.

 

[mach1.9pants]

In 4th edition, OTOH, it looks like the armor class delta is likely to be smaller if you can't add your dex to AC in heavy armor and, while the speed difference will be smaller (5 to 6 instead of 4 to 6), the inability to add dex/int to the reflex defense sounds HUGE. (Imagine how many people would wear heavy armor in 3.x if it penalized your reflex save--I'm thinking you'd probably have at least 50% of the heavy armor users say that a point of AC is not worth the reflex penalty).

AFAIK heavy armour only means you cannot apply your INT/DEX to AC not Reflex Defence.