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

[Malrubius]

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...

[Kealenfists]

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

[Solist]

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.

[Hrothgar]

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

[ScottBerta]

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.

[Solist]

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.

[Solist]

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.

[elwing]

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...

[Malrubius]

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.

peak HP is largely irrelevant on a class like a shaman.
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?

[7thGate]

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.

[Hrothgar]

3k hp, 1kac - you're golden. Rest is in skill/RNG malo/tash/slow/epic resists.

I think it's 1kac... been on live too long to remember the golden ratio, but I mained a sham for 8 yrs on blue. Second i got to 3k/1k, facetanking things got a lot easier.

[Malrubius]

3k hp, 1kac - you're golden. Rest is in skill/RNG malo/tash/slow/epic resists.

I think it's 1kac... been on live too long to remember the golden ratio, but I mained a sham for 8 yrs on blue. Second i got to 3k/1k, facetanking things got a lot easier.
Good to have a ballpark to look for, thanks. It's funny I was always wanting to get to 3k mana until I got torpor. Now that I actually have 3k mana I wonder why I bothered.

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.
Yeah, once I looked at what I lost by adding 110 cold resist, I realized it wasn't all that much in the giant scheme of things (maybe 6-7% less AC, and 8% less HP, and some mana)

[Danth]

Good to have a ballpark to look for, thanks. It's funny I was always wanting to get to 3k mana until I got torpor. Now that I actually have 3k mana I wonder why I bothered.

It's handy to have the mana if you fight something where you have to do a bunch of casting without time to torpor/canni. May or may not happen often depending on what you prefer to do.

For comparison the wife's shaman can solo those WW dragons without issue at ~2500 HP/900 AC self-buffed and whatever resists she happens to have, maybe 120ish with Resist Cold/Fire on. The hardest part of those West Wastes dragons is staying awake through the long boring battle; they're IMO a lot more fun to duo or trio than solo. Really this is another case of, "don't overthink it." I think it's kind of hard to mess up a Shaman that already has torpor/epic/etc.

Danth