D&D: Five Magic Armors For When You Want to Be the Ultimate Tank
Dungeons & Dragons is a game about fighting monsters, and sometimes, the best offense is an impenetrable defense.
There’s a paradigm that’s at least as old as D&D that goes something like “well the casters are squishy, so they stay in the back, while the fighters have more hit points and heavier armor so they stay up front and take all the hits.” And though this isn’t actually true in 5th Edition anymore, where full spellcasters can, with frightfully little effort, be just as, if not more tanky than the Fighter, at the end of the day, someone in the party needs to be taking the hits.
And when you want to be the guy who can shrug off getting a mountain thrown at them, the good news is, there are a lot of ways to pull that off. Here are five magic suits of armor that are sure to be essential for anyone who wants to be the party tank.
Mizzium Armor
Mizzium Armor is straight out of Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, and by and large, it is a strictly better version of Adamantine Armor. So if your DM won’t let you play with the stuff in GGR (which is a shame, because there’s some fun stuff in that book, including the mutant Simic Hybrids), you can make do with Adamantine Armor, which like Mizzium Armor turns any critical hit into a normal hit, means that you’ll never take double damage.
With the right items, you can get your AC up high enough that your enemies can only hit you if they roll a 20, and even if they manage that, it’s just a normal hit. A great way to shrug off attacks from hordes of enemies.
Antimagic Armor
What about against magic, though? Many spells bypass the need for AC entirely. Well for that, you might don a suit of Antimagic Armor, out of the Book of Many Things. This armor gives you a reaction to give yourself advantage when making a saving throw against a spell, and you can only do it once per day, which is kind of whatever. But the real reason you’d want this is that it also lets you cast Antimagic Field with no spell components (meaning it can’t be countered because you can’t detect it).
And it’s a magical property that can be applied to any armor. Stick this on your grapple-focused fighter, and suddenly even the most powerful lich will be reduced to having basically no magical resources at their disposal.
Serpent Scale Armor
This is one of two explicitly medium armors on the list. But it’s well worth picking up because this armor lets you work on avoidance tanking extremely well. While wearing this suit of scale mail, you can apply your full Dexterity modifier to your Armor Class. This means you can get this up to a minimum of AC 19 before you start using stat-boosting items or layering in a shield. And since it’s Medium Armor, it can be an excellent option for ranged characters, or anyone Dexterity-focused.
You can find the Serpent Scale Armor in Candlekeep Mysteries.
Armor of Safeguarding
Sometimes though, the best way to take a hit is to have more hit points than anyone else. So that even if you do get hit, you still have a ton of extra health just lying around waiting to be chewed through.
With the Armor of Safeguarding, out of Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, you get exactly that. The armor gives you a passive bonus of increasing your hit point maximum by 10 + your level. Which is already pretty great. But on top of that, you can invoke this armor’s shield rune to cast the Beacon of Hope spell without needing to use your Concentration. This spell makes it so that anyone who is healed by a spell gains the maximum amount possible, while also getting advantage on Wisdom and Death saving throws.
Stonebreaker’s Breastplate
Or go the other route, and wear Stonebreaker’s Breastplate, a suit of Breastplate that, when worn, grants you resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage while also making you immune to being knocked prone. And that’s resistance to those damage types, period, not non-magical. So this beats out the so-called Armor of Invulnerability by a mile.
And as this armor was added in Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, you know it’s got a rune. And when you invoke its rune, you can cast Wall of Stone, which is a nice little bonus.
What do you reach for when you want to tank hits in D&D?
