Agi for warriors

[|tda| fatal]

Hi guys,

I have a question about end game and stat allocation.

I'm planning on rolling an ogre war for raiding and from what i've heard, all your stats with end game gear + shm buffs get capped except for AGI. So my question is should I just dump all 25 into AGI for ultimate min/max? Also anyone know the exact +AC per AGI? Havn't found any real informative data on this.

[Danth]

Hi guys,

I have a question about end game and stat allocation.

I'm planning on rolling an ogre war for raiding and from what i've heard, all your stats with end game gear + shm buffs get capped except for AGI. So my question is should I just dump all 25 into AGI for ultimate min/max? Also anyone know the exact +AC per AGI? Havn't found any real informative data on this.

No, don't do that. Agility may help a little, but the impact is small enough it isn't worth making a serious investment at creation. The only time you want to put points into agility at creation is a) if you pick a race that needs points to reach 75 (Erudite, Dwarf, some Ogres) or want a twink to be able to maintain 75 agility with a fungus tunic on. If all you care about is best-in-slot endgame, a primal will give you 100 agility from the special effect anyhow.

Danth

[|tda| fatal]

No, don't do that. Agility may help a little, but the impact is small enough it isn't worth making a serious investment at creation. The only time you want to put points into agility at creation is a) if you pick a race that needs points to reach 75 (Erudite, Dwarf, some Ogres) or want a twink to be able to maintain 75 agility with a fungus tunic on. If all you care about is best-in-slot endgame, a primal will give you 100 agility from the special effect anyhow.

Danth

But if every useful stat will be capped end game, why not?

[Zipity]

I mean by that standard why not put 25 points into charisma for a better chance of divine intervention proccing?

[bigjeff100]

I think the idea of capping out agility or stats not used is great. You're classes main stats will surely be capped in end game content. The problem will be the struggle in the early levels.. Not having that strength or stamina from the start will suck!

[Sonderbeast]

6 agil = 1 ac

wow

[Wickedbane]

Doesn’t agi also have a dmg mitigation?

Less dmg coming at you because of other combat skills like parry, dodge and etc...

It may not be ideal but if you are planning on doing raids with the character I’d assume your guilded so most likely your char will be grped mostlly so it shouldn’t matter if you put all points into agi.

Also being the superior race you shouldn’t have any issue with your sta or str.

[Ivah]

Agility has a minor noticeable impact in pvp, haven't noticed anything pve wise.

[Danth]

Doesn’t agi also have a dmg mitigation?

Less dmg coming at you because of other combat skills like parry, dodge and etc....

No, absolutely none of the above, except that it may help defensive skills level more quickly. Agility has zero impact on mitigation whatsoever, and the frequency of dodge/parry/etc is impacted solely by the level of those skills. What agility (as well as defense skill) can do--supposedly--is increase a monster's raw chance to MISS you. Its effect is clearly not large. Some folks believe it has no effect whatsoever on EQ-emulator.

Mitigation is affected by AC derived from equipment, and from buff spells. Both mitigation and raw miss rate also appear to be affected by player level relative to the level of his opponent. Any form of mitigation, including /defensive discipline, only affects the 1-20 damage interval roll portion of a monster's attack and not the separate damage bonus portion.

If a tank is receiving complete heals from a chain, as is the norm at the high-end, that chain will be timed with the assumption of worst-case hits, and the heals will land whether the tank is at 10% or 30% life. Hence trying to gain a few per cent more MISS from agility is largely fruitless in that type of scenario. Tanks doing that type of content are best-served by gearing for as much effective health as possible. You'll gain some agility from equipment anyway, and can gain a lot more from buffs if you're willing to give it a buff slot.

------------------------------------

One of the difficulties of this discussion is most of the available information is based on the classic period from EQ-live, but we as players have nothing (except the occasional P99 dev comment) to prove that P99 uses the same mechanics that Live did....and at times plenty of evidence to show it's often different (remember when AC was broken?). What's flagrantly apparent in-game is that agility has only modest impact at most.

Danth

[Jimjam]

The classic agility tables gave a large boost in avoidance, a smaller spike in the 90s. After that there technically were improvements at higher scores of agility but the improvement was minuscule.

As posted above, As detailed knowledge we have about classic, we have no idea how well the p99 mechanics mimic live. Even if the avoidance/mitigation system is implemented perfectly we still have a problem; we don't know the attack or accuracy values of in era live mobs, which really is half of the equation for creating an accurate emulation of in era tanking.

[Pyrion]

When i am playing a melee class i think i notice less hits coming in when getting an agi buff, i do think it is noticable. But that maybe bias of course, so i would very much welcome if somebody would indeed try to parse it for a suitable long time.

The fact that everybody believes that agi beyond 75 is doing nothing for avoidance doesn't mean it is that way.

[Pringles]

Agi adds avoidance AC which when you compare someone with 100 agi to someone with 255 the difference in getting hit is pretty noticeable. Like having iksar AC except avoidance. It's pretty strong despite the naysayers on these forums.

[Danth]

When i am playing a melee class i think i notice less hits coming in when getting an agi buff, i do think it is noticable. But that maybe bias of course, so i would very much welcome if somebody would indeed try to parse it for a suitable long time.

The fact that everybody believes that agi beyond 75 is doing nothing for avoidance doesn't mean it is that way.

For what it's worth, I'll take agility buffs when I can get them, and I believe (and the wife even more adamantly believes--as the person usually healing me) that agility does help some, even if only a little.

Let's assume for a moment agility works "as advertised." In this case it takes about 6 to 7 points of agility to provide what the game counts as 1 AC (avoidance AC). For the sake of comparison, 1 point of defense skill provides somewhere on the order of 2.4 AC, and a level's worth of defense gains (5 points) provides about 12 to 13 AC. The difference between 230 to 252 defense on my 60 Shadow Knight is 54 AC. Point being: We all know from leveling our own characters that the difference in MISS between a character with 155 to 160 defense is rather small, yet that difference is the equivalent of perhaps 70 to 80 agility. As such, even if everything's working properly a large amount of agility will have only a small impact. The 20 or 25 points at creation would have nearly no impact at all.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, some players are quite certain that agility beyond 75 has no effect at all on EQ-Emulator, and a few people go farther and insist that defense skill doesn't work either and the combat tables are solely based on level. Since P99's combat code has been customized beyond that of stock EQ-EMU and is not publicly available, such claims cannot be confirmed or refuted except via extensive parsing.

....That's the sticky bit. Because agility will only have a small effect even if it's working perfectly, even a medium amount of log recording won't be enough to differentiate its effect versus the whims of the random number generator. It would take a *massive* amount of log parsing to conclusively prove agility's effect one way or the other. Who wants to do that? I don't. With that in mind, I prefer instead to stick to what I originally said: I don't specifically gear for agility, but some of it ends up on my gear anyway and I'll take agility buffs when I can get them. At worst it can't hurt, and maybe it helps a bit--all potential upside, no potential downside.

Danth

[Legidias]

AGI = no noticeable effect when there, but if you lack it (<75) then you'll feel it dearly.

[Jauna]

omg another god damn old wives tale thread.

Get agi to 75 for all classes and races and dont touch it. thats it. seriously thats it.

if you want you can look at "agi make more avoid" because of the massive ac penalty you get when at 74 or below. if you want a fungi for leveling so bad get some agi gear because you wont be using it forever.

[rajax]

As far as how agility works on p1999 and on most EQ emulator servers the above advice will suffice.

Back in 1999-2001 era in simplistic terms there was a noticeable avoidance chance increase on melee hits versus attackers your level or lower by getting to agility 100 roughly 5-6%. This dimished rapidly with levels above your own, high attack values (raid targets), attack buffs etc. to the point of being unnoticeable in log parsing. Getting to around 150 agility was equivalent to roughly 1% extra avoidance and anything above that was extremely dimished in returns to almost unnoticeable >.5%< till cap of 255. Monks and to far less extent rogues got a marginally better return on avoidance from agility. This changed- usually nerfed as EQ aged and AAs became the avoidance bonus.

This was hard to account for and most people doubted it’s relevance due to the AC stat in original EQ being a sum that included avoidance chance, armor (damage reduction chance) from equipment and shield ac (same as armor but with extra effects that changed as EQ aged) which were all modified by your class.

[Jimjam]

Rogues got a mitigation boost for moderate levels of agi as well as the usual increase to avoidance.

[|tda| fatal]

so no one actually has hard evidence of parsing a raid boss missing more due to max agi?

[Legidias]

What raid boss are you talking about? End game (city leaders, NToV) bosses dont really miss unless disc'd, and are such higher level than 60 that they basically max hit every round. Given the damage they put out, AGI difference in mitigation doesn't even matter squat when you CH every time (shaving off 50-200 dmg off a 4k quad isnt going to be noticeable).

[Arkanjil]

I mean...I haven’t run the numbers for Velious, but I should. In Kunark, we ran pretty hard numbers on AC and AGI. We saw a pretty minor increase in avoidance, aka mob missing you.

While minor, it could matter on fights like AOW, where the mob landing a full dmg flurry or 2 could wreck a tank. Is it something to worry about generally? Probably not. As a warrior, focus on stam and dex and take whatever AGI you get from getting that gear.

[Jimjam]

This is a side line point to the main discussion, but if you are going to be tanking in places where there are a lot of shaman NPCs, especially while grouping, you may want to consider having an agility of circa 130.

Doing so will allow you to mitigate the worse effects of debuffs such as incapacitate, which can be rather brutal to your avoidance.

In these situations you'll also want to keep your strength a decent amount higher than your weight; when encumbered incapacitate will essentially double drop your agility; greatly hindering your movement and avoidance.

[romomike]

You'd have to show me tons of parses from Velious raids at both max AGI and base AGI to convince me that AGI has 0 effect on avoidance.

The server code for TAKP and EQEmu says avoidance AC is:

(DefenseSkill * 400 / 225) + (8000 * (Agility - 40) / 36000)


It further applies to Mitigation AC:

(DefenseSkill / 3) + (WornAC * 4 / 3) + (if Agility > 75 then Agility / 20 else 0)

The only factor up for question on this is the To-Hit chance of a boss, which obviously will change from boss to boss in this game.

[aaezil]

I would allocate to dex so you can proc easier for all those times your char isnt fully raid buffed and for levelling

[Troxx]

For players (not npcs to include pets) it is very safe to assume that any benefit to higher agility is so tiny that beyond 75 it’s not worth focusing on. Stamina/dex/resists/hp/ac - that’s where the focus should be. We have enough important crap to work on raising that agility is frankly ignorable. Regarding the buff? With limited buff space it’s generally not worth it unless there are no aoes, dispels, etc and you have tons of buff space to spare.

Now for npcs (to include pets). That’s a completely different story. Being npcs, pets do not have ac hard or softcaps. If a pet is going to tank, agility, direct ac buffs and the like have a direct linear impact on their performance.

[Pringles]

Come on Troxx break out the parses.

Classically any pet engaged against a NPC uses PC vs NPC rules so I doubt the veracity of greater gain by pets.

[Troxx]

Pets have always followed npc rules. They get 1:1 returns on ac buffs or gear ac they are given. It’s was always this way on live and it’s a big reason why pets eventually ended up so brokenly overpowered in expansions just before and for a few after house of Thule expansion. With mage summoned gear and relevant pet defensive aa’s pets had an insane defensive DI spread — much better than any player character could hope to achieve even with the best raid gear.

The reason why? They behave like npcs - no diminishing returns.

[Pringles]

That could have been the result of something silly as simply not parsing buffs with and without using discs. Among other things like well the fact that when Luclin shipped almost the entire original team had by then poofed. Doesn't surprise me that when handed an already overly complicated and finicky pile of code that had just been revamped in huge ways(AA's for one) that the lack of institutional 'vision' would cause once bugs now to become features. Features to bugs.

That doesn't really get into stuff like shit look at this
https://i.imgur.com/I7gap6A.jpg
OK we have base AC but who is to say there is not an ExtraAC, ExtraDefense. Gonna go with my gut and trust a druid on this. Yuck.
http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=40543


Anyways agility going from 75 to 255 seems to be without running a stupidly long parse 2.5-4% more misses. Is that worth it? Considering what some will do for item upgrades of similar marginal value then yeah why the heck not?

[Bardp1999]

Getting 255 Str/Stam/Dex requires lots of buffs and lots of very high end dragon loot, I doubt its worth gimping your entire leveling career just so you can have more of a worthless stat when you are at the mountain top.

You are also not going to have raid buffs 100% of the time

[Pringles]

Well if we are truly gonna backpedal to the OP then it's an ogre. All of that shit is gonna be maxed trivially on a warr ya nut. I am not advocating you go out of your way to do something silly like prioritize agility over AC. It is pretty nice with that there avoidance and it getting upped as much as any RPG allows is real chill.

[Bardp1999]

Yea I didn't really take being an Ogre into consideration I guess. My DE SK has extremely good raid gear and is not capped out w/o buffs, but there is nearly 160 point discrepancy between Ogre and DE in Str/Stam from jump street. No regerts though.