Armor Class
Armor Class affects the ability for an attack to hit a target. The higher the value, the less often the target will get hit. Both players and monsters
can be targets because both have AC values. Even if an attack is determined to penetrate armor, a target equiping a shield may still attempt to block, so a "hit"
may or may not mean the target does get hit and take damage. Monsters can not block.
The final chance to get hit is a percentage and varies with monster level, player level,
monster to-hit and player AC (monster information can be found in Jarulf's Guide).
Total AC refers to the value displayed in the character screen.
The armor class displayed in character screen:
total AC = (AC from items) + Dex/5
The % chance for a player to get hit:
% = 30 + (to-hit% of monster) + 2*(mlvl-clvl) - (total AC)
Looking at this formula, you can see there is always a range of useful AC per enemy type. Withing this range, each point of AC will increase/decrease the
percent chance to get hit by 1%. For some enemies, this can mean that a significant amount of AC
is virtually identical to having zero AC! As an example using a level 40 player: any amount of AC lower than 221 will still produce a 100%+ chance to get
hit by a blood knight in hell/hell and the character might as well be wearing no armor (more on this below). Some other things to consider about armor class:
- It does not affect the chance for magical attacks to hit.
- It does not affect the amount of damage taken by a target.
- Walking or spell-casting has no affect on armor class (i.e. AC is not reduced by any amount when walking or casting spells).
Auto-hit
In addition to the percentage calculated above, there are "auto-hit" values which act as minimum hit percentages. If the percentage is calculated to
be lower than these auto-hit values, then it is set to the auto-hit value. This means that a player will get hit at least 15% of the time
by any monster (even a level 50 player by level 1 monsters). The auto-hit values vary depending upon dlvl:
- dlvl 1-13: 15%
- dlvl 14: 20%
- dlvl 15: 25%
- dlvl 16: 30%
- *arrows: 10%
- *players: 5%
Because of auto-hit there is a maximum amount of useful AC depending on character level (and enemy, of course). Any amount of AC higher than the useful
AC will have no additional affect and provide no additional protection from enemy attacks. Below is a table of maximum useful of AC.
- Difficulty: view values for a given difficulty
- Get-Hit %: Change this to diplay AC needed to achieve the selected % get-hit. 75% chance to get hit borders minimum useful AC values
- To view values for a specific character level, select it from the final column
- Maximum AC is compared to the toughest melee enemy, the Blood Knight
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