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Message: <blockquote data-quote="comrade raoul" data-source="post: 3157672" data-attributes="member: 554">The greater ablative ability is straightforwardly worse than greater fortification--it offers at best a 95% immunity to critical hits (and less than that, for characters with very high attack bonuses) and no protection against sneak attacks. So +5 should be right out.How should it be priced? Well, it can help here to do some math. Think of the attack penalty from the ablative ability like a very big bonus to AC, but one that only comes up some small amount of the time--whenever an opponent is trying to confirm a critical hit. (This is one of those times where it is really helpful to think of a roll to confirm a threat as working a lot like an extra attack.) So the value of the bonus is going to be proportional to the product of the AC boost and the frequency with which it comes up. So how often does it come up? That depends on the attacker's critical threat range. Let's test it with a 19-20 threat range.Given a 19-20 threat range, roughly 1 out of every 10 attacks will be a threat, yielding the "extra attack roll" that the ablative ability is helpful against. This means ablative will be helpful against, for that threat range, 1 out of 11 attacks, or about 9.1% of the time. If we multiply the magnitude of the bonus (+20) by the frequency with which it comes up (1/11) we get about 1.81--that means, for a 19-20 threat range, it provides a slightly smaller increase in expected defense than a straight-up +2 bonus to AC. Against most opponents, the greater ablative ability will actually be nontrivially less effective, because a significant amount of the AC boost will be overkill (if your enemy needs a 10 or better to hit anyway, a +10 bonus to AC is just as good as +20). It will also be nontrivially less effective against the large number of opponents who have a 20/x2 crit because they attack with natural weapons. However, it will be better (though in many cases still not quite as good as a straight-up +2 AC bonus) against opponents with larger threat ranges, or against opponents who will hit you all the time anyway (even if their attack bonus exceeds your AC by too much for your AC to be helpful, your armor will now still offer a bit of help against their crits). It also deserves a bit of an edge because, since players arguably have a reason to be risk-averse, benefits that remove some of the unpredictably in combat might (again, arguably) work disproportionately in their favor. In general, though, I think that ablative works pretty well as a +2 enhancement, although if you thought the risk-reduction element was very valuable, or you thought lots of enemies had attacks with high threat ranges or multipliers, you could certainly make a case for its being +3.</blockquote>

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