There's no such thing as an "AC character" or an "EV character". Every character wants as much of both as possible. Having AC does not make it harder to attack at range or minimize the number of enemies in LOS. If you are running around with no AC all game on conjurers/stabbers/whatever then you are not taking advantage of enchanting aux armour, Ozocubu's Armour, etc., and that's fine and fun and all, but don't pretend that any build is forcing you to do it.
I will also suggest that heavy armour is not overpowered. Heavy armour greatly penalizes spell success, and spells are really good. Unless you're a minotaur or something, you would be crazy to put on even D:2 plate armour as any of the backgrounds under the "Mage" heading. A bit later you get enough XP to cast spells in plate, but that XP could have also been used to get the summoning/necromancy/translocation spell of the day instead, which is just as good (usually much better imo).
braveplatypus wrote:The only status that punishes pure ac would probably be corr, but even multiple corr levels wont totally strip ac from a character building for it, and it has many many more counterplay options then say, confusion or paralysis.
There doesn't need to be a status for that. There's already a parameter that controls how well AC compares to EV or SH: damage. The more damage something does, the better it is to dodge/block it, whereas AC subtracts the same amount from 100 damage as it does from 10 damage.
Of course this also means there doesn't need to be a status that specifically hurts EV or SH; I think paralysis would work better if it didn't affect your defenses, for the same reasons as sanka.