There are lots of changes coming to the game with this pack. And to me a lot of them feel unfinished. Today I want to as briefly as I can talk about how I feel about the AC changes.

To me Ac is the thing that keeps other from hitting you. And DR is how to lessen blows that land. In my mind they are two very different things. And together they make up how much damage you end up taking in a given combat.

This gives us a clear progression of how one can excel in AC or DR or anything. Want to hit guys with AC of 40 on a 2 and better you better get your to hit to a 39, but if you run in to someone with a 60 AC you need those 20s. Aka it is liner and simple to understand. Hence when DnD switched to the d20 system in 3.0 it revitalized the game as a whole.

Now lets DDO this thing.

You have an AC of 60, fairly simple to get with little effort. And you can tank/play Vod on normal no problem. Sure you take a few hits but you would say you’re a 90% miss tank.

IF you walk into the harbor for a favor run to help your pal earn some TP you are totally untouchable but the mobs that caused you issues when you were level 3, aka a clear progression.

And if you go in to An ELOP you get hit all the time, it is like you might as well not have any AC for all the good it does. Yes is a bummer. But you really haven’t progressed in to that level of AC yet.

Now lets look at the things to come.

You get to an AC of 120 real simply now. And you do that same Vod but watching the numbers and hits you are getting missed 60% of the time. But your new magic DR is taking a lot of the hits smoothing out your damage but you are taking more damage over the whole of the quest. But feels a lot smoother. And you sit aside that feeling of “I am getting hit more with an AC twice as high as before, but the quest seems easier… “.

You go help that same friend do the same favor run and WTF? Level 3 kobolds are hitting you? With that 120 AC, that is not right. But it is for a quick 3 min quest it will be fine. But it feels very wrong.

Now that ELOP your AC is working a ton better then before from 5% miss to 50% miss and that feels great.

And you think if getting hit 50% of the time feels this good what would it feel like to get hit only 80% of the time. So you work and you grind and you lose DPS for AC. And it takes a long time and lots of work but before you know it your AC is 190.

And we do those same 3 quests and in Vod your getting missed 70% of the time. Kobolds are missing 80-85% of the time and in the elob you clawed yourself to 60-65% miss chance. And you start to think all that for what? Less then 20% betterment, why did I bother?

Excellence is gone.

Will it be nice to have my happenstance AC mean something? Hell yes.

But will anyone try to be better then what is easy? I don’t think so. As it stands, there is a reason to GO AC. Once you’re there you feel invincible, and you say how it was worth it. When people ask me about AC I say go big or go home. Soon I will say why would you try to go big?

Can Turbine fix Ac? I think so I like the system as it stands right now with one change. There needs to be a point of AC compared to the attacker’s Bab that puts the defender at a set maximum miss chance. When I did my posts on leveling my SD fighter I ran down some of the raid bosses according to the ddowiki, and most of their Babs were in the 70- 80 range with the Elob being out side of the list in the 100s. But I think that if someone has 1.x-2.0 more AC then the attackers bab give a fixed AC miss chance of 90-95%. Then going big Ac still matters as apposed to get what is easy and be happy with your 50ish miss chance.

Anyway, I will say Turbine is really selling these changes. And people are buying for now. But lets see how they feel once don’t bother with AC becomes be happy with what you have because it doesn’t get any better.

Hopeful I am wrong, but knowing I am not.
❤