Strength (and heavy armor) is bad

[bwhetherington]

Strength is, in almost every regard, worse than Dexterity. Whereas with light armor, your AC scales up just by you increasing your Dexterity score (which you would do anyway), you need to keep acquiring new heavy armor to scale up your AC.

Perhaps we could change it so that heavy armor works similarly to light armor, in that your AC scales with your Strength score, either up to a limit, like with medium armor, or with no limit, as with light armor.

This would have knock-on effects for classes like Cleric who do rely on heavy armor for AC.

[JamesMcClung]

The exceptional cases of a non-Strength character using heavy armor could be replaced. The Life, Nature, Twilight, and Order domains could add Wisdom to AC somehow, perhaps instead of Strength or Dexterity. Clerics of the War and Forge domains probably have a high Strength anyways. Tempest could go either way.

Or these classes could just eat the loss. AC powercreep is bad enough as is.

[bwhetherington]

One other one that comes to mind is the Armorer. I feel like they could just be changed to use Intelligence instead of Strength, just like their attacks with it.

[bwhetherington]

I feel as if more broadly, the problem is that with light armor, leather and studded leather are readily accessible, and the player is free to scale their AC up with Dexterity, which they'd be increasing anyway. With heavy armor, it's on the DM to provide better armor (splint and plate armor), and that takes the agency around scaling AC away from the player.

[bwhetherington]

Also, another point - should medium armor be able to scale off of the wearer's choice of Strength or Dexterity? I feel like that's a lower impact change.