Having negative AC

[Scraper]

Based on some comments in another thread where the discussion briefly touched on AC, I was wondering about having negative AC. Personally I find that as soon as I find =of the dog or =reckless attacks, I always wear them. I'm usually sporting a fairly light weapon so the damage gets pretty high pretty quickly for when I need to melee stuff.

I have a vague idea about AC. I'm guessing the higher your AC is, the harder it is for monsters to hit you. Also a higher AC means less damage taken from the strikes that do hit. i.e. higher mitigation.

Is the above true?

Secondly, does having a negative AC, as my current @ has, increase the chance for monsters to hit me and increase their damage or is it calculated as having 0 AC?

[UglySquirrell]

I don't usually worry about my armor untill I start encountering Vrocks, level 40 or so. then I work on getting it to a decent level these guys are really dangerous with low AC.

[Jungle_Boy]

If I remember right AC only affects monsters to-hit chance and there is a max to-hit for both player and monster is 95%

[BlueFish]

It seems to have a large effect on damage too.

[Derakon]

Yeah, AC is also damage mitigation for the more common attack types. If I recall correctly it caps at something like 60% damage reduction at AC = 300? That's almost certainly not quite right, but you get the idea.

[Scraper]

I think I read about the mitigation somewhere - not the numbers but just that AC mitigated incoming damage.

My question was more related to whether or not negative AC actually increased the incoming damage or if the damage you receive from having 0 AC was the same as having say -10 AC.

[Timo Pietilä]

It seems to have a large effect on damage too.

That's correct. You definitely want to have high AC when fighting Morgoth, it reduces his melee-damage quite a lot.

It doesn't work on all melee though (confusion melee by Titans go thru without reduction for example), and does nothing against ranged attacks.