You have trained to master the use of light armor, gaining the following benefits.
Increase your Strength or Dexterity score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
You gain proficiency with light armor.
Lightly Armored: Minimum Security
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
There are three classes in the game that don’t get access to light armor: monks, sorcerers, and wizards. For a feat, if you’re one of these three classes, you can have a glorious +1 Dex and access to the light armors, basically giving you an AC of 12 + your Dex modifier. Without any armor at all, your AC is 10 + your Dex modifier. Put plainly, a feat is not worth taking your AC of 10 + Dex mod to 12 + Dex mod.
What’s wild to me is they thought this was reasonable to release like this. The vast majority of characters in the game have no reason to take it to begin with, and those that can gain SOMETHING from it always have cheaper, better options. Monks have unarmored defense giving them an AC of 10 + Wis mod + Dex mod, normally putting them right at the best light armor option. If you want to take Wis for some reason, which you care about for your Ki saves down the road, I guess you could take it, but if you do you can’t get any benefits from your martial arts feature that requires you be unarmored. Wizards and sorcerers both have access to Mage Armor, a spell that just sets their AC to 13 + Dex mod (again, literally better than any light option) for 8 hours. Plus, they have access to the spell Shield, giving a +5 AC whenever you’d want it for a 1st level slot.
Let's say you don’t want to need to spend one of your most plentiful slots on Mage Armor for some reason. In that case, Magic Initiate can give it to you once per long rest AND give you other cantrips to play around with. Even if Lightly Armored is flipping your Dex from odd to even for that sweet extra +1, Mage Armor matches it with a lower Dex score and offers you more. You’re not just getting bonus AC.
To be honest, I don’t see there ever being a compelling enough reason to take Mage Armor with Magic Initiate when you could just accept you’re playing a lower AC character. Instead, taking spells like Shield, taking spells that move you quickly, get you out of danger, or circumnavigate it entirely seems way more practical than trying to invest a ton of resources in your armor class. There are no shortages of ways to empower your AC. You don’t want to spend your feat on this basically ever. An ability score improvement is likely just better than this, offering you a guaranteed +1 Dex modifier, and you potentially can bump another ability score up at the same time or prep it to get bumped up with a different feat down the road.
I’m convinced there is no character out there who wants Lightly Armored. Ever.
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