What weapon/armor plus at ECL 16?

[unseenmage]

What sort of AC and attack bonus is absolutely necessary for my ECL 16 character to not fail when they're in combat?

Eventually they should have minions to do the fighting for them but for now, I just don't know what plus I need to be buying.

Part of the character concept is to have a bunch of these same item which will cost 19,687gp apiece. I have 183,687gp left. Whatever gp isn't spent on arms and armor will be spent on these 19k gp items.

I don't need to be able to hit every time, just often enough to not be completely useless.

Thanks regardless Playground.

[unseenmage]

Really am quite stuck on this.

It occurs to me, should i use that old 'no single item of more than 1/4 your WBL' bit as a guide for how much gp to spend on to hit and AC?

[ngilop]

It depends on if you are a optimizer or not.. if you are a front line melee, skirmisher, or primary caster and other such..

for example I am the opposite of an optimizer and my level 16 fighter has a 38 AC and a attack bonus of 20/15/10/5 im sure an optimizer can get this into the upper 50s for AC and I saw one guy have a attack bonus of 43 at level 10 once..

id say for a front line you should be in the attack bonus of +18 to +22 region BEFORE buffs are taken into account to be great at your job at ECL 16.

[Cloud]

...Depends strongly on the rest of the party. Ideally at ECL 16 you have a +1 weapon and +1 armour with all the nice special abilities you want, and then a friendly wizard and cleric cast greater magic weapon and magic vestment.

On the armour, sure you can boost it, but just remember that it's often cheaper to buy several smaller items, like Rings of Protection, Amulets of Natural Armour, etc. (which thanks to MIC don't even need to count as an effect if you combine them with other items).

Edit: Anyway, the very poor (and often broken) guideline in the MM suggests a monster has an average AC of 13 + CR. Which would give a target AC of 29. So a +27 to hit after buffs wouldn't be amiss if you're a full BAB class and you want your extra attacks to have a chance to hit, or if you want to power attack liberally. ...Which honestly is a very low bar (16 already from BAB, which would leave 11 from other sources...say 6 from an attribute and 5 from whatever).

[LordBlades]

http://community.wizards.com/forum/previous-editions-character-optimization/threads/1118841

This is a good place to start. It lists (among other things) the max and average AC and BAB for each CR. You can use it as a baseline, and plan your desired AC and attack bonus accordingly.

[MirddinEmris]

Depending on what DM will sned against your party, really. The top AC from MMI monsters is about 40, so if you have +35 or higher attack bonus, you'll do just fine, fighting against them.