Ranger ac parsing (I'm serious)

[bcbrown]

Ignore the tedious guy begging anyone to care about his silly shields and let's keep talking AC parsing. Here's two short parses on my 60 druid, one with 146 worn and 61 spell ac, and one with 99 worn and 61 spell ac. On the 54 cleric, 132 + 64 was noticeably below the squelch point, and 163 + 64 was either at or above the squelch point.

If the druid isn't being softcapped, 60 druid at 146 + 61 should be in between those two graphs, and that is indeed what it looks like. The second parse at 99 + 61 was meant to be the same as the 106 + 64, but I messed up and took off one too many pieces of armor. It looks like this is slightly below the midpoint where there's an equal number of max and min hits, which again tracks with the cleric results. Both druid parses are only around 250 hits, so they're pretty noisy.

So now that is parses on three classes, with plate, chain, and leather armor types. None of them show any signs of a softcap. They show that for at least this single mob ac up to around 200-250 gives an improvement in damage taken, in the form of what would otherwise be max hits turning into min hits. All three have identical defense skills of 200.

Next steps: one, upgrade my ranger to see if he can either hit the squelch point or show signs of being softcapped. Second, do some more parsing on a tougher mob. Froglok hunter/forager are level 45 instead of 40, so I think that's who I'll try next.

[Salaryman]

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

Ignore the tedious guy begging anyone to care about his silly shields and let's keep talking AC parsing. Here's two short parses on my 60 druid, one with 146 worn and 61 spell ac, and one with 99 worn and 61 spell ac. On the 54 cleric, 132 + 64 was noticeably below the squelch point, and 163 + 64 was either at or above the squelch point.

If the druid isn't being softcapped, 60 druid at 146 + 61 should be in between those two graphs, and that is indeed what it looks like. The second parse at 99 + 61 was meant to be the same as the 106 + 64, but I messed up and took off one too many pieces of armor. It looks like this is slightly below the midpoint where there's an equal number of max and min hits, which again tracks with the cleric results. Both druid parses are only around 250 hits, so they're pretty noisy.

So now that is parses on three classes, with plate, chain, and leather armor types. None of them show any signs of a softcap. They show that for at least this single mob ac up to around 200-250 gives an improvement in damage taken, in the form of what would otherwise be max hits turning into min hits. All three have identical defense skills of 200.

Next steps: one, upgrade my ranger to see if he can either hit the squelch point or show signs of being softcapped. Second, do some more parsing on a tougher mob. Froglok hunter/forager are level 45 instead of 40, so I think that's who I'll try next.

RED99

I am not just gloating about the fact that my items are better then yours, This is a thread Dedicated to Ranger AC parsing, Rangers can use shields, if you had even just 1 shield (you dont) you would know that.

So do some tests with a shield (you have none) if you actualy want to contribute to the Thread and what it is Dedicated towards.

Because I am busy being the Top #1 Number 1 PVPer in all of EverQuest History to bother with "parsing" or "raiding" or anything else a nerd would do.

RED99

[Snaggles]

Do your own science, you have all the “best” shields!

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=437049

My ranger carries 10 weapons and no shields. If I cared about shield AC and low dps, I would have logged in my 60 sk or 60 paladin in the last 6 months.

[Duik]

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

Do your own science, you have all the “best” shields!

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=437049

My ranger carries 10 weapons and no shields. If I cared about shield AC and low dps, I would have logged in my 60 sk or 60 paladin in the last 6 months.

Just Lolocaust.

*DED99*

[Tethler]

Bro in here PvPing on the forum because no one plays on

RED99

[Jimjam]

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.

[Salaryman]

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.

RED99

Looks like these nerds got real quiet once I called them out on the fact that they supposedly have access to all these raid shields but have yet to actually test shield ac or even test ac on rangers, which is what the thread is about.

I can tell you from First Hand Experience (FHE) that using a Guardian Robe instead of my Tolunds Darkplate of the Glade has minimal effect and I think the ac cap is around 120 worn ac for rangers, do I take alot of damage from bows and melee in pvp? I dont know, most fights end in my favor because I have faction with the zone or my Legendary status of the Top #1 Number #1 PVPer in all of EverQuest History deters hostility, and rarely have to actualy fight anyone.

Am I going to test anything like the nerds in this thread? No, min maxing is for pve nerds, I am a PVP Legend the Top#1 Number #1 MVP PVPer in all of EverQuest History.

And thats all First Hand Experience (FHE)

RED99

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[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.

[Jimjam]

I must have misunderstood your post for the part about 163, 132 ac for squelch?

[shovelquest]