Magic Armor is too strong in Dnd 5e! Here's why.

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Handing out +2 hide armor is just funny tho.

Curiously enough, the only person who doesn't want Magical Armor is the Armorer Artificer, because Magical Armor doesn't allow the subclass to infuse the armor, wasting opportunities at higher levels...

I just want to say I agree at levels below 11 but once you hit that 11th level unless you're AC is in the high 20s everything hits.

Magic armor giving a greater benefit to characters that already have a high AC seems more like a feature than a bug, honestly. High base AC typically implies heavier armor and shields, which is going to be most common with pure martials and half-casters. The game seems to be designed around the assumption that, on average, those characters are going to have higher passive AC, since the AC-boosting abilities heavy armor classes get tend to be more modest than the emergency AC buttons granted to classes that tend to wear lighter armor. Compare the +2 longer-duration Shield of Faith given to Clerics and Paladins versus the +5 panic button of Shield for Wizards and Sorcerers. Biasing magical armor rewards towards characters with lower base AC seems like it would be kind of a stealth nerf to martials on average by decreasing the passive armor disparity that usually develops between front line martials and casters. My view: bias the magical armor rewards towards whatever types of armor the non-caster or half-caster players are wearing.

When I DM, I give out magical armor because I want my monsters to miss more often than they hit. A player who has invested in defensive features should be rewarded with more attacks missing them. This is especially true of any frontline class who takes the attacks so his backline allies don't have to. Any player who acts as the party's defender should be attacked repeatedly and rewarded appropriately. When I play the defender, having all those attacks miss, the feeling of invincibility, is what I play for.

For a standard table, it's probably fine to hand out magic armour. It will most likely go to a melee frontliner and let them feel cool by shrugging off all sorts of attacks. The exponential increase in survivability is true, but only insofar as the only attacks are vs. AC. As long as there are other ways to threaten the party, you're fine. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if one person shrugs off hits all day, if they can't protect their party the survivability is meaningless, so they're still under threat even if you can't hurt them. 5e also creeps into auto-hit territory with some high-level monsters (bounded accuracy massively favours the attacker) which can leave a sour taste in people's mouths if they wanted to be an armour tank. Magic armour can help ensure armour tank builds don't completely fall apart at high levels when it's too late to rework a build. Better than telling someone "tough luck buddy, should've gone Resistance/HP/Spell-tank instead, this is on you for not reading the monster manual, better luck next time eh?". In high-optimisation games where everyone's using the full defensive onion, yeah, probably best to avoid magic armour.

Playing path of exile for an exorbitant amount of time has taught me that the difference between 80% and 81% elemental resistance is massive That 20% of hits that blow past your defenses is 100% of the damage you take. So the 1% of resistance is worth 5% of all elemental damage you take. It only becomes more valuable the closer you get to 100% resistance. From 98 to 99 resist would mean a 50% damage reduction. Because the 2% damage that gets through is 100% of the damage you take. Always imagined armor in dnd to work the same way, only with a base soft cap of 5% (crit chance on a d20) because all the damage rolls that get past your AC is 100% of the damage you take.

This may sound broken But it doesn't matter as much once you hit CR 11 and enemies start having +10 or higher chances to hit regularly, at that point it reaches the scale where magic armor starts to be needed just to make it so multiattacks don't risk dropping you every round in one creature's action. It only gets more rugged as CR increases further, so yes at low levels magic armor is a lot, but from level 10 onward it becomes pretty needed (especially if you are one of those poor martials)

the only reason I ever wanted magic armor was after encountering Gray Oozes when we were far away from civilization the Fighter had -2 chainmail for like 10 sessions after that

I remember seeing a build back on the 3.5 character optimization boards that built around as low an AC as possible. The reasoning was that below a certain threshold, an extra point of AC doesn’t mean much (the difference between AC 10 and 11 when enemies all have +12 to hit for example), so if you’re below that threshold, you might as well sacrifice what AC you have for something actually beneficial. I doubt I’d ever play such a build, but it was an interesting idea keying off of the same concept. I recently had a divine soul sorcerer whose main survival tactic was the sanctuary spell for that reason. I wasn’t going to be able to get his AC up to a reasonable level, and I wanted to focus on support and healing anyway, and if I want to deal damage, I usually resort to polymorph, maybe after a quickened fireball to soften the enemy up.

The thing I have found the most frustrating, is when one party member has an AC of 13 or 14, while another member has an AC of 21+shield spell. As a DM it makes balancing slightly more difficult than it feels like it needs to be.

That joke at the start about seeing an enemy wielding a magic item and know immediately how to get it had me laughing so hard

If you have someone who uses heavy or medium armor, I recommend springing for specific effects rather than ac bonus, like resistance to damage types, adamantine, or Mithral. It still lets the armor user feel powerful and tanky without ruining bounded accuracy system.

I'm sorry, the arms race is real even in fiction. But seriously if you translate it to real life, magic armor would be more common and valuable than a magic sword.

Yep. Stacking AC is the only superpower available to martials, really. If your AC is upward from 22, your DM will hate you. Of course he can just use more casters in encounters...

Something we did in our campaign is that we got to commission armor for everyone in the group. It didn’t bump up the AC that type of amor already gave, but instead a resistance of choice when we selected it. It also gave our martials a small buff that after taking the elemental damage we were resistant to, it would give us a d6 of that element on our next melee weapon attack. The casters got jewelry like a necklace or armband that gave this same effect without the AC buff. Our options were Thunderboar — lightning Fireboar— Fire Hydra— acid Cryovain (dragon)— ice

I've never had issues providing the party magical armor to pump their AC that's because by the time that it would trivialize challenges, I'm not targeting AC anymore. Continuously targeting AC as a DM tactic is not only boring but repetitive. I target saves instead or use abilities/spells with no saves. this makes other defenses such as saves or high hp/resistances valuable. it makes the party think of other forms of defenses such as obscurement, conditions, blink/mirror images, cover, illusions, etc. or they might change tactics to the best defense is a superior offense (control, killing the enemy via alpha striker). There's no jealousy either as i give set clear expectations of what magic items they can expect to get, who's supposed to get it (via wishlisting) and we have a homebrew rule that limits the amount of magic items a character can have (both consumable and non-consumable). So everyone's on an even playing field and it's a matter of player choice with the same amount of resources as the other person.

I think it's a very interesting topic you bring up here and I never really thought about how the seemingly-linear increase in AC actually ends up being an exponential increase in survivability. That said, I don't think I see this as a bad thing. I think it's okay for the characters who invest in being hard to hit to become increasingly harder to hit as they progress in their adventure than the characters that are less focused on it. I think it also gives great opportunities for these differences in character builds/concepts to be reflected in combat, with the heavily-magically-augmented-plate-armor-wielding-wall-of-rage/righteousness being far more capable of taking hits from exceedingly dangerous foes without feeling them than the squishy people who typically are trying not to get attacked in the first place.

Another way to look at it is to try and look at what it does to how many faces on the dice are a succesful hit. An extreme case being if you need an 17 or above to hit a character, and that character increase their AC by 1, instead of 4 faces of the dice being a hit, only 3 faces of dice, which means a full quarter (25%) less hits for you. While if you only need a 2 or more to hit, and the target increase their AC by 1, you go from 19 possible hits to 18. Which is almost 95% of what it already was.