Armour class

Version 0.28: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

When something injures you, your Armour class (often abbreviated to AC) reduces the amount of damage you suffer. The higher the value, the better.

The most common way to improve your AC is by wearing armour. Heavier and higher-AC body armour (and body armour alone) comes at the cost of EV and spellcasting, with Armour skill offsetting its penalties. Other pieces of gear, especially artefacts, may also increase your AC, and magical spells may temporarily boost it.

AC damage reduction

In general AC reduces the damage of attacks susceptible to AC by an absolute value between 0 and your current AC value. an AC of 10 will reduce damage by a random number between 0 and 10. This applies to damage that would traditionally ignore defense in other games, such as most spell magic and elemental attacks. However, this is not always precisely true. See the AC calculations page for more details.

Guaranteed Damage Reduction

Main Article: GDR

When taking physical damage in melee, guaranteed damage reduction will reduce damage. GDR% is equal to 16*(AC)^1/4. If GDR is applied, the minimum possible AC roll will equal (damage*GDR%) or (AC/2), whichever is lower.

List of Damage that ignores AC

• Torment and Holy Word.
• Smite and Damnation.
• Status Effects: poison, sticky flame, flay.
• Weapon brand damage: includes attack flavours and elemental magical staves.
  • Note that weapon brand damage is a percentage of AC-reduced damage in the first place.
• Specific spells: Freeze, Vampiric Draining, Static Discharge, Frozen Ramparts, Ozocubu's Refrigeration.
• Hex effects: Pain, Anguish
• The chilling blast breath attack of a white draconian.

History

In 0.29, Frozen Ramparts and Ozocubu's Refrigeration will check AC.