Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dan'L" data-source="post: 5132674" data-attributes="member: 68954">(Sorry I didn't elucidate earlier; I had guests show up and games to play.)We're talking, as far as I could tell, about whether or not the system can tolerate a large initial spread in party AC.  To that point, it really becomes incumbent on those players whose PCs have low AC to take some large part of the responsibility for mitigating that onto themselves.Particularly in the case of controllers like wizards they should, and do, have their own ways to keep themselves off the tip of someone's sword.  (And really, isn't a controller a kind of a Defender working at range, anyway?)The system gives players the choice to deal with a low out-of-the-box AC in different ways.  For wizards, this includes taking feats which can improve their ACs; taking the staff wizard class feature to improve AC; taking utilities like shield to mitigate attacks; take attack powers with effects or zones that hinder the enemy's advance.Not every way of dealing with low defense scores needs to hinge directly on the numbers, and so in fact not every method does.Not every character class should be able to shrug off the same kind of attacks equally.  A player should try to identify the weak spots of their own defenses and play to shore them up through tactical play and build decisions.And yes, there will be times when your sorceror will be caught in the corner with too many sharp pokey things invading his personal space.  It happens, just like the Paladin getting spammed with v. Reflex at-will attacks.  If the DM wants it to happen, it's going to happen.The question then becomes how does the rest of the group change their tactics to take the pressure off their ally?  This isn't something for the crunch of AC to determine, but rather it is a time for individual and party play to have their moment.So, this is really all a long-winded and rambling way to say that a large relative low-high AC spread isn't intrinsically game-breaking; it just needs more carefully considered tactical play.  And the tools for this play can reside (1) within the builds for the entire party and (2) even within the builds for the single characters with low AC.-Dan'L</blockquote>

Verification