Classic is a hardcap of 289 AC for melee classes. This is why monks were so good: Iksar monks could get +100 AC from being iksar monks and still hit the 289 AC cap pretty easily with TOV gear, while the warrior wearing 500AC of gear would be capped back to 289. Right before PoP, Verant did some tests and realized their itemization sucked. Since they couldn't very well go back and delete/change hundreds of monk items, they just implemented softcaps where warriors got more AC over the cap than monks.
However, we don't have a classic implementation here. Haynar and Rogean had already implemented a softcap and didn't want to retune things.
From a practical standpoint, both my Warrior and Monk are at about 1200-1250 displayed AC and I notice a huge difference from Kunark. I don't know how long that trend will continue.
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