[bcbrown]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Anyone have updates to this thread?

For years, I've been saying a narrow band of AC is actually useful for each mob - bcbrown's cleric results suggests this could be as little as a difference of 30 AC or less. To me that is crazy!

The other thing I was interested in, is how AC seems to be almost like a switch - you either mitigate well or mitigate badly. The posts in this thread don't seem to indicate there is much transition between those two states in the narrow band where AC is actually relevant.

Why do you think the difference could be as little as 30? Looking back over my posts, I found that for the cleric, 163 worn ac + 63 spell ac was almost-fully squelched and 106 worn ac + 63 spell ac had equal spikes at min and max. So that implies 50-60 ac to go from midpoint to squelch, and if it's also 50-60 to go from midpoint to under-squelched (all max hits and no min hits), that implies there's about a 100-120 band within which AC provides a benefit.

I just calculated the average hit for those two parses and got 45.9 and 50.8. So going from midpoint to fully squelched for this mob is about a 5-point-per-hit change, or about 6% or the max 82 hit value. Extrapolating out to something that max-hits for 300, that would be equivalent to a 18 point per hit swing. If we assume a 30 delay and two hits per interval, that's a 12 DPS swing, and if we assume 4 hits per interval, that's a 24 DPS swing. For a mob that has a max hit of 600 and quad hits on every swing that would be 50 dps.

Obviously that extrapolation is unfounded, but I wanted to get a sense of what the DPS impact of AC might be on an easier raid mob. If Shiel gets one hit per swing with a 30 delay that would be going from 15.3 DPS to 16.7 DPS. Would that be significant change in mana used healing in an xp group? Dunno. I was killing Shiel in about 2:30 on the ranger, so 150 seconds, which means a difference of about 240 damage over the whole fight. That's a difference of about 2.5 casts of Healing, or 150 mana. At 18 mana/tick for medding, that would take 49 seconds to recover. So going from midpoint to squelch point in AC in a typical solo fight against a low blue might save you between a half minute to a minute in recovery time. That seems significant.

Originally Posted by Vear99 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Thanks for doing those parses, bcbrown. It definitely seems like the best explanation is that NPCs always get ~65% interval hits and the remaining 35% are either min or max depending on relative AC/ATK. The ad hoc nature of Project 1999 game mechanics never ceases to amaze me, considering how pedantic Nilbog is about quests and such.

After doing those parses I reread Torven's research which Jimjam had previously linked in a different thread: https://www.eqemulator.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=40543. Here's the quote that jumps out to me:

The probability distribution of rolling one of these twenty values follows a shallow bell curve such that DI10 and DI11 will appear more frequently than other values except for DI1 or DI20 when offense == mitigation. DI1 and DI20 appear the most frequently because the ends of the bell curve are compressed into those intervals. When offense == mitigation, DI1 and DI20 will both parse slightly higher than 15%. I call this the "double 15 point".

Lvl61War 224wAC 1061AC 273def 126agi backface Lvl60NPCTestSixty.txt
1] 102: 6694 (15.2%)
2] 119: 1171 (2.6%)
3] 135: 1387 (3.1%)
4] 152: 1483 (3.3%)
5] 168: 1558 (3.5%)
6] 184: 1735 (3.9%)
7] 201: 1772 (4%)
8] 218: 1898 (4.3%)
9] 235: 2068 (4.7%)
10] 251: 2125 (4.8%)
11] 267: 2206 (5%)
12] 284: 2048 (4.6%)
13] 300: 1888 (4.2%)
14] 317: 1808 (4.1%)
15] 333: 1635 (3.7%)
16] 350: 1593 (3.6%)
17] 367: 1456 (3.3%)
18] 383: 1370 (3.1%)
19] 400: 1307 (2.9%)
20] 416: 6778 (15.4%)

There's a few things I want to mention here. First, he did way more parsing than me, 44 thousand total hits. Second, although I earlier concluded that the interval hits were a uniform distribution, I think that might just because I didn't log anywhere near enough hits to distinguish between a uniform distribution and a shallow bell curve - I didn't realize just how shallow the bell curve is. Third, although I agree it looks ad hoc, it does also look like the classical mechanic that p99 is trying to emulate - the original developers were ad hoc, and Nilbog et al are accurately and pedantically replicating it.