Masterwork Armor, price and enhancement

[James McMurray]

As has been discussed before, the AV armors, while technically power creep, are really just a smoothing of the curve. Without them there are major leaps in AC as you level. With them, the transition is more linear.

 

[catsclaw227]

Yea, I saw it much more as smoothing out the curve than power creep, once I got the understanding that the masterwork armors are generally intended to be part of the higher enhancement magic armors.

Without them, you get a huge leap all at one time.

 

[Nail]

I'm glad someone is asking about this because I am not sure I completely understand how this works... Is this right: You can have a +4 dwarven wyrmscale armor for 65,000 and it gives a +14 total bonus to AC (+10 and +4)? So all the masterwork armors are just -base- armor types that add nothing to the cost but have minimum enhancement bonuses. You can add whatever magic property you want. Correct?

Yep.

Put this another way:

The designers (belatedly?) did the math, and realized that heavy armors should have a +2 AC for each +1 enhancement. Without that, light armor + stat gets a better AC. To compensate, they changed the "base" (as you've put it) armor as the magic armor level increases.

AV just smooths out the bumps in PH implementation.

 

[Nail]

As has been discussed before, the AV armors, while technically power creep, are really just a smoothing of the curve. Without them there are major leaps in AC as you level. With them, the transition is more linear.

Exactly.

CapnZapp, didn't we have this discussion just a few weeks ago? 'salright!