I've never played pen and paper RPGs before, so I don't know pretty much anything and the amount of detail is a bit overwhelming. Our DM is inexperienced as well, so I can't really be sure if they know the mechanics that well either.
Anyway, in the starter campaign a lot of simple enemies have AC of 16-18, with a boss being at AC 21. Most people on our team do not have a combat bonus, so even for a garden variety goblin they have to roll pretty high to even hit it, and for the boss only 2 out of 4 people can even try to hit him, for others even a natural 20 is too low.
Intuitively this feels a bit off to me, but having never played such games I have no idea if this is normal, or if we screwed up character creation and didn't take some important skills or such (we used PCGen to create characters)
So is this normal balancing or is something actually wrong?
Best Answer
AC varies widely by the type of enemy you're attacking, but low level (CR 1) creatures tend to have around 12-17. 21 does seem high, even for a boss type, unless they are useless offensively (and therefore designed to be a long fight).
AC calculation says that you even basic armor puts you a few above 10, the base. Add in their Dexterity bonus and you're looking at about 5, depending on the creature. D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder definitely have a scale that favored defense early and not as much later; it becomes progressively easier to hit things as you level because the rate of skill with weapons far outweighs the rate of increase in Armor.
As an aside, it sounds like you may be forgetting to add your STR (general melee) or DEX (ranged and Weapon Finesse melee) modifier to your attacks. Even at a low level, this should give you +3 to +5 with your Base Attack Bonus if you're a weapon-oriented class. There are also tactics such as Flanking (+2 for being on opposite sides of a creature) and attempting to Trip your opponent (attacking a Prone creature with melee is +4) that would make them easier to hit.