does ac need a rescale? (in General)

after the recent ac discussion we had in one of gl's strat posts, i have been thinking hard about whether i agree with the idea that it needs to be rescaled. my opinion may very well be biased, but i tried to take some time to contemplate just that before i weighed in on the issue.

much has changed with ac and its workings since cb2 came about, protection is now gone and we have steel skin as well as each plus granting less ac. i basically see ac as working in three main ways, possibly four:

ac used with steel skin for physical damage reduction
ac used alone for physical damage reduction
ac used alone for magical damage reduction
ac used with steel skin for magical damage reduction (not sure if i am correct in the way i think this works)

in the first case the opponent can always train dm higher than your steel skin to counter the physical damage reduction. it is fairly expensive and can be enhanced by use of the tat slot but that is a pretty focused strategy.

in the second case it is likely cost prohibitive to get full damage reduction. anyone care to figure out the cost?

with magic reduction, the cost is going to be much more expensive to obtain major damage reduction. if steel skin still works the same way with magic, it would still be fairly cost prohibitive. using a mage shield on the team will help a ton, but that is also then focusing somewhat strategy wise.

after looking at all of this, i am not convinced that ac would need a rescale. if jon hadn't modified the whole mechanic, i do believe it would have needed constant adjustment the way i feel the n*b bonus amount still does but in this case i think he had great foresight.

I think if you are going to take the time and invest that much money into AC then by all means you should be immortal

You don't want to know what it would cost to make you 100% immune to physical without SS.

no

i forgot the other ac related parts of that particular changemonth (june 2008). jon also added shocking grasp as well as boosting the damage on the es & vb.

AC is pretty much useless without SS. I may be slightly biased here, but I think that AC is well balanced with appropriate counters in place already.

At these levels SG isn't much different from any other DD except decay.

I hit Slayer's wall for 2-3m regularly with SG

Maybe AC needs a new implementation. Its the only thing in the game which operates using percentages to such a large degree (there are some small bonus percentages).

What if AC + upgrades were changed to a linear, or very soft curve and each point reduced an amount of damage rather than a percentage of damage.

Just as you hit against someone with AMF, RoBF and MgS all together for 2-3 mil.

sg would have been a better counter if it gave a much smaller increase per point but included base, plus and steel skin granted ac. the bonus damage could have been set at the same .167 as the reduction granted by ac.

I think I've suggested this before, but I think AC should be an asymptotically increasing function.

for example say that every 10 AC reduces the damage taken to 90%. 20 AC would not give you a 20% reduction, but a 19% reduction (.90 * .90). A 400 AC would reduce damage to about 19% - quite respectable.

I'd still love to get rid of encumbrance and make it so that weapons did something similar and any weapon could be used at any level.

I still believe encumbrance killed the game and that is why we see participation dwindling.

There has to be a counter to the ability to dish out 20+ mil damage in one round. If some one invests that much NW into armor, they should expect results.

You also have to give up a tat slot, have less NW for a weapon, and take some pretty hefty penalties to dex and skills. SS can be also be dispelled. I think high AC is a specialized strat and it fine how it is. Its difficult and time consuming to get it to that level of reduction.