Fighting WW dragons -- worth sacrificing stat gear for resist gear?
 

Sanity check here. For a torpor Shammy (or any class I suppose), when fighting WW dragons such as Bratavar, Ayillish, etc, is it at all productive to swap out HP gear for CR gear?

Or is it advised to just keep the HP's/AC/Mana as high as possible? It seems to me that the added HP's would more than compensate for the damage (500 max?) of their cold AE.

Yes, I have insta-clickies to keep my two top slots refreshed against the debuff portion of the AE.

Thanks...

Cold doesn't have partial resists so its not as important, cause youre likely not gonna get the resists you want. I would stick with hp

Full resist set works wonders on the lower level dragons, up to ayllish.

Once they're 55+ish, you'll get rolled wth p99's very classic, authentic, and not at all overtuned resist system, and are better off stacking as much AC as humanly possible. No other stat matters.

Full Kael armor, Vindi bp and boots, falinkan, Lodi shield, those things. You’ll be Gucci

Why do you say AC? I was under impression AC is broke on p99
And Pure HP is the way to go.

I believe the trick with Ayyalish and other AEing dragons is to pull them to a certain spot in WW where half their body is in the water And they can no longer area effect you. You would be standing on land on this rock as I remember.

Why do rumors of broken AC persist 8 and 5 years after major AC fixes. It’s easily the most OP stat in the game. Especially when your peak HP is largely irrelevant on a class like a shaman.

Also cheesing AE’s with LOS blocks? I (hope and) warn people will witness and petition that shit. Go play on a solo GM server if you need to cheat at a 20 year old game where all the fights and methods are already worked out.

AC is not broken, it's just useless when the mob attack and your defense difference is too big... Good luck to mitigate much on an aow regardless of your ac... On your average exp mob the difference is huge. For ayilish and such since you're not getting ch, stacking resist/ac makes sense I think, but I am not shaman... What I know is that you should get a melee to help... Duoing with a sk makes ayilish a trivial 13min fight vs a hard 40+minute fight...

Hmm. With the CR gear I have, I'd lose 56AC and 210HP, and gain 110 CR (for a fully buffed CR of around 210). Gonna have to experiment to see what's better.

I could easily be wrong since I haven't played in a while, but I recall (peak)HP>AC>Mana for shammys...or at least peak HP is/was considered extremely relevant?

If you're soloing it, the max HP is mostly irrelevant. The entire goal is to keep average damage taken below the average amount Torpor heals. Max HP is only the main tanking stat here because of complete heals scaling off of max HP and the need to lower variance in the number of combat rounds until death. Almost all of the healing in this fight is going to come from Torpor, and reduced variance in # rounds until death doesn't help you because you have a fixed amount of healing and are going to drag the fight out long.

Its also relevant for some mobs where AC doesn't do anything really because their min damage is too high of Atk values are too large (Guardian of Takish is the worst offender, even Avatar of War has some decent mitigation from high AC, Takish min hits for like 900 and max hits for 1000, so an infinite AC would mitigate 10% of the damage) but that's definitely not the case here.

56 AC vs. 110 CR is less clear as its really hard to put a definite amount on specific numerical contributions to these, but I would probably go with the cold resist.