Optimizing Touch AC Build

[Doidgestar]

So I recently started a thought experiment for an NPC my party have faced.
I was looking for ways to boost up AC and Touch AC as high as possible, and generally make a combatant effective in avoiding damage, and incapacitating a party without killing them.

So Far I came up with this

Monk 1 Feat: Power Attack
Bonus: Flurry of Blows
Wisdom to AC

Monk 2 Bonus Feat: Evasion
Monk 3 Feat: Great Fortitude
Monk 4
Monk 5 +1 Bonus AC
Monk 6 Feat: Stunning Strike
Battledancer 1 Add Charisma to AC
Fist of the Forest 1 Add Con to AC

[Zaq]

Honestly? I'd caution against this.

The party will eventually realize that this guy is basically super obnoxious to hit, right? Right. So then we have a few options. Basically, we'll have to determine if he's actually threatening or not, and we'll have to determine how important it is that he be specifically fought.

If he's really dangerous to the PCs and he absolutely has to be fought for some reason, this is honestly going to feel not terribly fun. Either he's going to be treated as a puzzle monster without a built-in solution, or everyone involved is just going to kind of have a bad time.

If he's really dangerous to the PCs and he doesn't need to be engaged for plot reasons, they're likely to cut and run. Which may be your desired effect, and if so, good show, I guess. If that's not your intention, though, well, this might be a design flaw.

If he's not actually capable of meaningfully threatening anyone and there isn't a specific reason why this particular guy needs to be fought, then a smart party will basically just ignore him and move on with their lives. Why bother attacking someone super tanky but who can't really proactively make your life hard? ("Oh no! A Dwarven Defender! Everyone, walk briskly!")

If he's not threatening but the plot/circumstances demand that he be engaged in combat, then you're going to have a railroady slog on your hands. One of the least entertaining encounters I've ever dredged through was basically this sort of thing—an obnoxiously defensive but not actually threatening dude who still needed to be killed for some vaguely defined reason before we could progress. I'd call it forgettable, but honestly, it wasn't—it was memorably obnoxious and boring. The encounter only ended because the GM took pity on us and went along with my totally unplanned wild idea of creatively using Disable Device and some very bad physics to end up squishing the baddy with a jury-rigged teleportation rune (don't ask, it was dumb and it shouldn't have worked, but I was bored enough to try anything). And I mean, I'm all for players creatively using the environment to their advantage and coming up with unexpected solutions to problems, but "you're stuck in an endless boring encounter where no one on either side is actually in any meaningful danger" is not the way to encourage such things. The net result still isn't actually fun.

I might be accused of being gamist (um, guilty, it's a game, we're playing a game and we want to have fun with the game), but sometimes encounter design needs to be viewed through the lens of "how will the human beings sitting at this table with me perceive and appreciate this scenario?" What do you envision this looking like among your group? What's your desired outcome, both for the players and for the characters? Why is that outcome and the path to it fun/interesting/worth the time? It's fine to make challenges that are, you know, challenging and can't just be breezed through, but is the challenge actually challenging and not just frustrating?

Monk and Battle Dancer can't be on the same character by RAW because of alignment restrictions.

Ignoring alignment restrictions (which are dumb and you're fine to remove them; I encourage ignoring them when possible), you've added a lot of stats to your AC. What stats does this dude actually have? That's a crazy MAD character. If you want to have someone who's got high enough stats to benefit from adding four separate stats to AC (while still maintaining a minimum of 13 in another stat, namely Strength), why not just give them an unusually high DEX and/or WIS instead? You're already likely above the typical array used for NPCs or even the point buy used for PCs, so why is it more fair to turbocharge all those stats instead of just bumping up the usual stats unusually high?

I generally prefer heavy armor on my high-touch-AC characters. Get psionics somehow (take a psionic race, take a dip in PsyWar, or just play a psionic class straight) and take Deflective Armor (Races of Stone) to add your armor bonus to touch AC. PsyWar does it best between bonus feats and basic proficiencies. You can also take Parrying Shield or Shield Ward to add your shield bonus to your touch AC as well. If you keep upgrading your armor and shield through the usual channels (raw bonuses and/or Magic Vestment or equivalent), it's a very long time and takes a very high budget before a Monk-style stat-based character ends up with equal or better touch AC. It is, admittedly, a bit harder to get Evasion or the equivalent while still in heavy armor, but maybe that should be considered a feature rather than a bug—enemies should have SOME weakness, even if that weakness isn't obvious.

[King of Nowhere]

wwell, if he's untouchable, they may just fry it with magic.
but it's far from untouchable. Even a high AC can be hit on a good roll, so it's just going to be a slow combat. nothing wrong with that

[Bronk]

So I recently started a thought experiment for an NPC my party have faced.
I was looking for ways to boost up AC and Touch AC as high as possible, and generally make a combatant effective in avoiding damage, and incapacitating a party without killing them.

So Far I came up with this

Monk 1 Feat: Power Attack
Bonus: Flurry of Blows
Wisdom to AC

Monk 2 Bonus Feat: Evasion
Monk 3 Feat: Great Fortitude
Monk 4
Monk 5 +1 Bonus AC
Monk 6 Feat: Stunning Strike
Battledancer 1 Add Charisma to AC
Fist of the Forest 1 Add Con to AC

Well, for the monk/battledancer thing, you could go with a Chaos Monk instead of a regular monk.

Aside from that, since this is an NPC, the sky's the limit! It would be easier on you to have your NPC be a Nymph with a Monk's Belt, or a Dragon using alternate form that can pop back into it's true form with 'Shimmering Scales' up, that sort of thing...