Hello all,

What ac value does it kick in at and does it have a cap?

Don't know. It has a cap.

First of all, sometimes when you put on an item you will get an echo that indicates that Gates is being put to use. I never thought to try and figure out if those echoes came at certain threshold (-100AC; -150AC) or if it only came from an item that bumped your AC a certain degree (likely more than -10AC.)

However, if I remember correctly, if you are completely naked and put on a decent piece of gear you will get the echo, meaning that it likely doesn't 'kick in,' but rather is a sliding scale that starts as soon as you're wearing any single significantly hefty piece of gear.

Only an IMM could say whether it has a cap or not, but the fact is that there is a hard limit to just how low you can get your AC with gear. After all, you only have so many slots. From what I could tell, though, it scales more steeply the lower you go (ie. -300 to -400 is better DR than -200 to -300.) By the time I got to -400 (though I also had resist and inherent stoneskin) I was seeing absolutely absurd damage reduction. I remember in one fight against the Archmage of the HTOS, my group was taking ***DEMOS*** and I was taking decimates.

Good luck with this awesome legacy.

If I just gear with decent armors, will I get decent mileage out of the legacy or should I research items with good ac values?

Thank you again.

If you want to get the best mileage, research gear there is plenty of it.

Also prep, Armor/stone skin/shield/aura and there are also other types that can -ac. But you can try it out to find out.

As I had it on a Villager, it didn't really matter because I couldn't use aura or shield anyway, but I never got the Gates echo when the Village healer would commune armor on me (-20AC).

I've had multiple Gates warriors. I never worried overmuch about which armor to wear. I DEFINITELY never chose to wear a piece of armor due to good AC over something that gave me a different stat such as +dam, +hp, -svs, +dex, +str...

The way I view Gates is this: With the Legacy, you generally have free stone skin-ish DR. Sometimes you might be 1% less than stone skin, sometimes 1% more, but it really isn't worth worrying about that deeply.

When I have a character with it, I almost won't wear non-armor gear (e.g. clothing) or other stuff that has zero AC value, and that's about as much effort I put into specifically gearing for it.

I could get a little more DR out of it if I really cranked out the AC, but, to me, doing the above is a good balance point between getting good value out of the legacy without paying too much elsewhere in your gearing strategy for it. I don't think it serves you to get 5% more DR as a warrior if you have to give up 30 dam and 5 STR or whatever to get it.

no more questions here