Armor Class and Raid Tanking

[Stonewallx39]

I have a level 60 warrior with 6350 hp and ~1275ac (depending on buffs) wearing aggro weapons and fully raid buffed

I’m looking at future upgrades and trying to decide on priorities. I wanted to see if anyone could share testing that shows the impact of additional armor class on the damage dealt by raid targets (in particular NTOV dragons, AOW, Tuna).

I had heard previously that HP was king and raid targets had such high attack additional AC was mostly trivial. However I’ve been hearing more and more conversations on the effect of AC and it seems to be a significant consideration.

[Danth]

Armor does have good effect, but raids focus on HP because the timing of your Complete Heal chain has to be based around worst-case scenarios anyway. Having better mitigation usually just means the CH hits you at 25% life instead of 15%, or something similar. Stacking enoiugh HP to survive an additional max-hit round means you can increase your CH interval. If you're off-tanking or doing other activites where you aren't the focus of a full CH chain or where your complete healers can routinely duck their casts, armor will give a better benefit.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

From my testing in this thread, AC does have a softcap:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=444022

I haven't tested Warriors specifically, but all classes get diminishing returns on AC after they hit Softcap. Shields will raise the softcap by that amount. For example, if your classes softcap is 200 and you are wearing a 25 AC shield, your softcap becomes 225.

From Haynar's post:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...8&postcount=13

It looks like Warriors have a diminishing return of 45% AC after the softcap. The EQEMU values I found show that Warrior softcap is at 300 AC.

So in theory a Warrior with 500 AC wearing no shield has 390 AC after the softcap diminishing returns.