The Tavern

Well, I have.

The trouble is that AC does not reduce max damage any more than EV does. I can see how a small chance of just not taking a high damage roll could be better than reducing it by 0-5 points.

There is a small effect, because the damage reduction from GDR is capped by your AC/2; if you have heavy enough body armour and are facing hits with enough max damage that your GDR hits the cap, extra AC does reduce the maximum damage. For example, if you have a GDR of 34 (chain mail) and a total AC of 8, a hit from an ettin with a dire flail (45 + 13 = 58 max damage) will do at most 58 - 4 = 54 damage per hit. If you increased your AC to 24 while still in chain mail (by training Armour and/or by wearing aux items), you would be taking at most 58 - 12 = 46 damage per hit.

I should have been more clear, I was talking about the OOF/bolt of fire case. I was unaware that it was AC/2, I though it was just AC though. That does make having more AC a little better than I thought VS melee attacks when you have GDR.

To add to the EV vs rF vs AC discussion, apparently there is a third way, having a crapton of HP and ridiculous attack power with medium AC and EV. This would be using dragonform with a non-red draconian. You'll still likely have very high dodging, though. Then you can kill fire orbs without rF+.

Offence as defence does not work reliably, you still can miss or deal no damage many times in a row

HP does work pretty well as one of the components of your defense, though.

6/6 until now is good enough for my personal use, though. Of course, rF remains better because you stop being completely subject to wild rolls.

Is there a way to count people online killed by oof while in dragon form?