The Drunken Lizard Pub

From the game data:

Enemy Armor:
Enemy armor is between 5 and 37 for most enemies. General Ghorr has 45 and Korren has 65. Eschalon starts with a 50% chance to hit; armor reduces by 2% per point while to-hit adds 3% per point. Therefore, to get a 99% hit rate against any regular enemy, you'll want a ToHit rating of 41. To get that with Finesse mode on, you only need 31. With Power mode on, you'll want 61.

To get a 99% hit rate against Korren, you'll want a ToHit of 60 -- that's 45 with Finesse on, or 90 (!) with Power mode on.

Enemy ToHit:
Enemy ToHit is between 4 and 40 for most enemies. General Ghorr has 53 and Korren has 75. Therefore, to reduce the hit rate as low as possible purely from armor, you'd want 85 Armor to be proof against any regular enemies, or 138 (!) against Korren.

Conclusions:
Getting ToHit to 60 is actually quite doable if you put lots of points into a weapon skill, put some points into the right attribute, wear equipment with bonuses and cast Bless and Nimbleness. Since those things will mostly raise your damage as well, this is worthwhile even if you plan to rely on, say, the bow feat.

I believe getting to 85 Armor is also pretty doable. However, casting Invisibility is a lot easier.

Nice work Slarty, I was wondering about this recently - thanks!

Indeed, this is great info. Might I ask how you came up with it?

Also, has anyone thought much about efficiency of armor vs. dodge? Given the revelation posted elsewhere that DR is just the percent chance to take half damage, I can't see putting many points into armor skills. On the other hand, I believe each point in dodge is a single percent chance to avoid a hit, so you'd need to pump it up pretty high to be worthwhile.

SpottedShroom wrote:Given the revelation posted elsewhere that DR is just the percent chance to take half damage, I can't see putting many points into armor skills.

Seriously? That sucks. Man, I've wasted a lot of skill points, then. Explains why I was seeing some weaker critters sometimes do way more damage than I thought they should when they managed to hit me. Crap, that blows.

Slarty: thanks for the info.

Dodge is definitely better than pumping either armor skill. However, dodge is still ridiculously bad -- while it is theoretically possible to get Dodge into the 90's if you spend almost 30 levels worth of skill points on it, for the vast majority of the game it won't even be as effective as a Chameleon spell, let alone Invisibility. There is really no reason to invest in ANY defensive skill in EB2, beyond maybe getting Endurance to a reasonable level of 10 or 15 early on.

SpottedShroom wrote:Indeed, this is great info. Might I ask how you came up with it?

It's organized pretty neatly in the game data if you look in the right place. I just stuck it in Excel and did some sorting.