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I agree with HWalsh !(?) again? (!)
This is the reason to have bulk right? So that fiddly numbers like ACP and movement penalties are not necessary. If the issue is "well then everyone would wear full plate" then perhaps we could up the base bulk to something like 12 or even 15, but have expert armor proficiency reduce the effective bulk of heavy armor, or give access to feats that do it for you.
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To be fair, your attempt to give the abilities numerical values lacks weights. There is a school of thought that says damage trumps almost everything. A dead enemy removes the need for AC and TAC, for example.
Personally, I would remove that section of your post and let the rest stand because I agree with you: Strength is sad and ACP is needlessly punishing.
I thought for sure ACP wouldn't survive into the new edition. It always seemed like the reduction in speed is *more* than punishing enough.
Armor Quality (and Material) affects Check Penalty. For example, I think Legendary Mithril Half-Plate* has an ACP of 0.
*What most people are actually thinking of when they imagine a plated fantasy warrior.
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i read an article, there was a 14 yo girl at a fair. She had basically a plate armor, while in the box she couldnt carry it - while wearing it she could run, do cartwheels etc
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Assurance in Acrobatics?
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A video relevant to the topic that I've posted elsewhere.
Wearing armor would have some impact on the person's top speed and their ability to do cartwheels or other acrobatics. I suspect anyone who can do acrobatics in full plate armor would do them better outside of plate armor. However it's not as absurd as a 40% reduction in speed -5 check penalty and a in a game where bounded accuracy makes that an even larger penalty than it would be in previous games.
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I don't think the realism angle is an important point here; it's never mattered before, and it isn't going to matter now.
What matters is that being reduced to 15 movement speed is awful, and god forbid you try to play a gnome against type and get dropped to 10 speed. Right now we have a paradigm where choosing to run heavy armor makes your character less fun to play as you spend multiple turns slogging your way to where the light armored Rogue gets to in one. Even if heavy armor is strictly better in terms of AC nobody is going to want to deal with that.
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Good old mithral is nerfed to heck too. Used to make a breastplate my favorite armor.
Have high enough STR ignore all those unrealistically borked armor penalties, and everyone (except melee martial haters, that is) will be happy!
Even 5E managed to do that, despite its clunky failings on many places...
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Yeah, I never saw a reason to bother with heavy armor in PF1, and that seems to continue in the playtest. The penalties for the armor outweigh the benefits. The higher item qualities and special materials help a bit, but don't seem to help enough. With legendary and mithril it looks like you can get full plate to a -1 armor check penalty, but it looks like the max dex, speed and clumsy trait are untouched. I'm still way behind in my reading, so maybe there's something I'm missing, but this still looks fairly bad. Especially since that legendary mithril plate costs a mountain of gold and won't be available until very high levels.
The fact that dex modifier cap + AC always equals 7 does seem to ensure that heavy armor is only useful for someone without any real dex at all. Maybe the math should be changed so that the dex mod cap + AC is 7 for light, 8 for medium and 9 for heavy, so there's actually a reason for heavy armor. Numbers can be tweaked of course, but the general idea being more armor can be more protective. And possibly let special materials or item quality improve the dex mod cap and speed penalty.
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Fighter and Paladin gets higher proficiency with heavy armour compared to other others, so they have effectively higher AC with heavy armour.
No one else has heavy armour proficiency without multiclassing into Fighter, which only grants Trained, unless one becomes a Gray Maiden, who can get up to legendary in its special full plate-like armour.
So heavier armours have an AC advantage, even if you max out the Dex bonus.
Only eventually, for the bulk of the game (and at all for many campaigns) this won't matter.
Yes, fighters and especially paladins are eventually obliged to put on the heavy suits, because they're forced to get bonuses in them and nothing else. But paladins from 1-6 and fighters from 1-10 have little reason to 'upgrade.' The speed penalties alone are atrocious, and directly penalize a melee fighting style.
For most characters, I'd be pressed to put them in anything past chain shirt. (Hide has a really high check penalty for the narrow math on this system). Maybe scale mail.
Fighter and Paladin gets higher proficiency with heavy armour compared to other others, so they have effectively higher AC with heavy armour.
No one else has heavy armour proficiency without multiclassing into Fighter, which only grants Trained, unless one becomes a Gray Maiden, who can get up to legendary in its special full plate-like armour.
So heavier armours have an AC advantage, even if you max out the Dex bonus.
Only eventually, for the bulk of the game (and at all for many campaigns) this won't matter.
Yes, fighters and especially paladins are eventually obliged to put on the heavy suits, because they're forced to get bonuses in them and nothing else. But paladins from 1-6 and fighters from 1-10 have little reason to 'upgrade.' The speed penalties alone are atrocious, and directly penalize a melee fighting style.
For most characters, I'd be pressed to put them in anything past chain shirt. (Hide has a really high check penalty for the narrow math on this system). Maybe scale mail.
I'd gladly take medium armour on a barb or ranger.
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This is because PF2 heavy armour is rubbish. After all, unless I misread the Craft rules, a 5th level Trained character can make a suit of full plate in one day. One day. And of course it's not made to fit it's wearer. After all, your elf PC probably picked it up off a dead orc. Who made it in one day.
And a 3rd level character can make any other armour or weapon in a single day too. Greatsword? One day. Longbow? One day. Crossbow? One day. Magnifying glass? Harpsichord? Alchemist's lab? Spellbook? One day. You can't buy a galley, but I expect you could make one in a weekend.
Oh. Maybe craft is broken. Yeah. That's probably it.
Since we can now upgrade items, one of the best armors in the game is Celestial Armor. It is common so very one can get it. There is no speed reduction or ACP. And it has some nice abilities built in. I plan to have my fighter in a chain shirt until I can find, buy, or craft a set of Celestial armor.
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This is because PF2 heavy armour is rubbish. After all, unless I misread the Craft rules, a 5th level Trained character can make a suit of full plate in one day. One day. And of course it's not made to fit it's wearer. After all, your elf PC probably picked it up off a dead orc. Who made it in one day.
And a 3rd level character can make any other armour or weapon in a single day too. Greatsword? One day. Longbow? One day. Crossbow? One day. Magnifying glass? Harpsichord? Alchemist's lab? Spellbook? One day. You can't buy a galley, but I expect you could make one in a weekend.
Oh. Maybe craft is broken. Yeah. That's probably it.
I'll take that kind of broken over PF1's crafting rules, where you would need ten months to make a suit of full plate, or about two years to make a gun. :-P
Regarding heavy armor, I'm in full agreement that the penalties for wearing it are far too steep. I always stuck to light armor in D&D 3.X and PF1 because the movement penalty wasn't worth it, and it's even worse now.
AC bonus and Max Dex bonus always total up to 7 in PF2, so there's no AC advantage to one armor over another; you should wear whatever fits your Dex bonus. But only the Fighter and Paladin get heavy armor proficiency, while everyone else would have to take a feat (or three) for it. That's supposed to be an advantage they have over other classes. As it stands, heavy armor is a punishment for not raising your Dex. (But if you do raise your Dex, you get punished by not getting the higher ranked armor proficiencies.) Oh, and the proficiencies don't affect your ACP at all, so being an expert at wearing heavy armor doesn't make it any easier to wear.
D&D has always exaggerated the effects of wearing armor, but a -5 and 10 feet of movement are a lot steeper in this system than they were in the last one. And if this is a new edition of the game, then isn't it an opportunity to not mindlessly repeat the mistakes of decades past?
(Ironically, they exaggerate physical restrictions but tend to completely ignore one of the biggest actual downsides of wearing armor: overheating.)
There's a choice between studded leather and chain shirt and between scale and chain, but half plate is clearly the best heavy armour, which seems like an obvious mistake.
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There's a choice between studded leather and chain shirt and between scale and chain, but half plate is clearly the best heavy armour, which seems like an obvious mistake.
Splint Mail is the best heavy armor.
1. 1 point lighter in Bulk.
2. 1 less ACP.
3. If you have 14 DEX, Clumsy is meaningless.
4. Cheapest heavy armor out there.
Splint Mail is the best heavy armor.
1. 1 point lighter in Bulk.
It's the same bulk as half-plate, but I was misremembering what Clumsy does.