This has been bothering me as well. Getting a decent unarmored AC is difficult especially witout magic. i've been experimenting with combining monk and duelist levels into a fighter or barbarian but it all comes up ridiculously MAD and needing tons of dexterity to a point where you would have to go with weapon finesse and agile weapons.
AC is less important than HP on a barbarian anyhow. Look into some of the archetypes. The True Primitive only has armor proficiency in hide and bone armors, so no mithril there. The Invulnerable Rager gains DR earlier, and there are plenty of rage powers (e.g. Flesh Wound, Guarded Life, Increased Damage Reduction, Reckless Abandon, Renewed/Regenerative Vigor) and feats (e.g. Bolstered Resistance, Rebuffing Reduction) that are complementary. I'm sure it wouldn't necessarily be optimized, and it may be difficult, particularly at the early levels, but I think it's still feasible.
Guess what, a guy without armor has less ARMOR class. Dhu. The system must be flawed...
As was said finding ways to survive other then Ac is the way to go. For barb clearly HP and DR are the first line of defense. But there are other things you can layer over it to help.
The first big one is miss chance. Clock of lesser displacement is some of the best gold you can spend.
A reach weapon with the lunge feat. I am a big fan of reach weapons but they do have a bit of a whole. If you walk up and attack something it is just going to 5-foot step you and attack back on its turn. With lunge it can not and as a side effect you have an easier time getting full attacks in.
Back up plans. A sipping jacket is a good starter. You can then down a potion as a swift action. One of the very few times I find potions worth it. There is also an armor enchantment that gives a reactive heal but I can not recall its name atm. You would of course have to give in to wearing light armor to have something to enchant.
That all that comes to mind atm but I am sure there is more ideas to be had out there.
Start as Fighter. Get Mithral Chain Shirt, Good scores in Dex and Int, Build off weapon finese and an Agile weapon and then go Duelist once you can. If you have a few points left drop them into WIS and splash one level of Martial Artist Monk to gain access to Crane style, a couple more points of AC and flurry. Tiefling is a good race for this, stats wise, and you can also get a couple of points of Natural armor out of them to boot.
How about the Savage Barbarian from APG? Seems like it would work. Combined with some bracers of armor and Fighting Defensively I think it would be about right.
We've been building custom magic items >.> I know it's super cheating, but if you use the Magic Item Gold Piece Costs, you can create all kinds of AC.
Deflection AC (The best kind in my opinion) is only Bonus Squared X 2000GP
Natural AC is the same (Bonus Squared X 2000GP)
Others are the Bonus Squared X 2500GP, and for those others you can declare them to be luck, insight, sacred, or profane bonus.
A little easier for us since one member of the party is an item creation wizard. I dunno, work with your GM? You could use the Class Based Defense/AC bonus that D20 Modern implemented, or use the d20 Game of Thrones combat system, they have cool iterative parrying system.
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Another option is Magus (Kensai/Bladebound) with 2 levels of Monk (Master of Many Styles). Take Crane Style and Crane Wing as bonus feats. Add Dex, Wis, and Int to AC. Add Shield spell. Use Potions of Mage Armor until you can afford Bracers. Fight defensively with Combat Expertise (and the Threatening Defender trait).
You're unarmored, but your AC will be stellar, and if your opponent gets a lucky crit, you've got Crane Wing.
want good AC with no or light armor? play a kensai magus. dex and int (which both are great, especially with the prevalence of dervish dance) to AC, grab a mithral chain shirt (4+), pop a shield spell/wand (4) and youre ready to go.
Invulnerable Rager is much better than the Savage Barbarian IMO. The Natural Armor bonuses don't stack enough to be a replacement for armor, but the DR from Invulnerable Rager does. Besides, it just feels WRONG for a barbarian to use Fighting Defensively.
I just picture it as arrogantly swatting the attacker's blade away or doing the old "Put your hand on his forehead and let him fail to reach you" trick my older brother used to do.
Actually, proficiency with a madu shield reduces your penalty for both Combat Expertise and fighting defensively, and it's very barbarian flavored, if you're from below the equator.
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This got me to thinking. I'd like to see a good Bbn/Martial Artist (Monk archetype) build. I'm playing with it, but not sure what archetype for a Bbn might work best. It'll have MAD issues, definitely...but I use the grid system, which softens that problem...so...race, archetype, feats, rage powers...and magic items. Monk's robe, obviously...
Crane Style and fighting defensively.
Unarmed Fighter 1/ Master of Many Styles 2. That gives you all three of the crane style feats by level 3. That is more than enough. You hit like a Full BAB class with TWF, but you are extremely hard to hit one on one. When fighting defensively, you can get +4 AC (+2 for fighting defensive, +1 for crane, +1 for 3 ranks acrobatics), which would make subsequent hits of a Full attack even harder to land. The only real problems you see are mainly from multiple opponents, but you should try not to get ganged up on anyway.
You do not even need to stat yourself out like a monk. You can go with an average WIS and go with light armors just fine. You might want to stick with a One handed monk weapon, since your choice in fighter and weapon training got restricted, but the temple sword is the same as a long sword, so major loss.
Ah, that is true. I tend to forget the exotic monks weapons that monks are not automatically proficient in. That is the trade of the unarmed fighter: you lose martial weapons, but you get some of the bizarre and useful ones in return.
So bonuses to trip, feint, and +1 AC for the build while having all the same statistics in other regards. I suppose that bludgeoning is also a more common type for getting around DR too. It also has a certain sense of style with the defensive fighting. It looks like it could even be held in a pocket or pouch for convenient use.
This got me to thinking. I'd like to see a good Bbn/Martial Artist (Monk archetype) build. I'm playing with it, but not sure what archetype for a Bbn might work best. It'll have MAD issues, definitely...but I use the grid system, which softens that problem...so...race, archetype, feats, rage powers...and magic items. Monk's robe, obviously...
I haven't played it yet, but I was tinkering with a Martial Artist/ Urban Barbarian build I liked. Temple sword, trip build with Brutal Stomp. Looked pretty solid.
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i have a barbarian who has over 120 hp at 7th level and hits pretty damn hard also. he has an AC of 10 and is completely viable.
basically you dont need ac to build a character, and you dont need to have an unarmored type character either.
you just need to figure out a way to build the character you want to play, while still having it be viable. one way is as i described above, a different direction is to have snake and crane styles active with combat expertise. they have many, many way to play a defensive character, or low ac character, that is functional.
Crane Style and fighting defensively.Unarmed Fighter 1/ Master of Many Styles 2. That gives you all three of the crane style feats by level 3. That is more than enough. You hit like a Full BAB class with TWF, but you are extremely hard to hit one on one. When fighting defensively, you can get +4 AC (+2 for fighting defensive, +1 for crane, +1 for 3 ranks acrobatics), which would make subsequent hits of a Full attack even harder to land. The only real problems you see are mainly from multiple opponents, but you should try not to get ganged up on anyway.
You do not even need to stat yourself out like a monk. You can go with an average WIS and go with light armors just fine. You might want to stick with a One handed monk weapon, since your choice in fighter and weapon training got restricted, but the temple sword is the same as a long sword, so major loss.
If you have a racial bonus feat (like humans) you can even get the full feat line by level two. Just take dodge as 1st level, crane style as racial bonus and go two levels in master of many styles.
The drawback of master of many styles is that you can't take it with martial artist, which means you have to start lawful, which in turn means you can't be a barbarian without alignment switch.
Admittedly, you could buy bracers of armor instead of actual armor to pad your defenses without resorting to armor.
Luckily, as a fighter, there's a point where your attack bonus is high enough to resort to fighting defensively. Saw this formula here that was pretty good for calculating how much of a bonus to attack rolls you really need to be able to hit an AC of an appropriate CR. So it's a good way to eyeball when fighting defensively won't hurt you.
If you're using a high point buy (25+) a Sacred Mountain Monk/Kensai can achieve a pretty nice AC without armor. Crane Style and a blocking weapon will help but you prolly want dervish dance. Also if you can handle the cheeseness change alignments for Urban/savage barbarian and dip into Alchemist for more Dex.
But really the amount of work it takes to get your AC anywhere near that of the Big Stupid Fighter in heavy armor is painful.