Balancing AC and HP (For Paladins/ShadowKnights)

[Jimjam]

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

I am parsing this right now with 164 worn ac vs 244 worn ac at lvl 51 to see if there is a difference. Will post results.

Any results yet?

Also don't forget the strength of the mob you are fighting might affect the parse; 164 vs 244 worn ac might parse the same if the mob has a really low or really high 'fightiness' (say 100 or 300 wAC eqv).

[Lorraine]

Apologies for the long post, Danth said he wasn't going to go deep into this, but I kinda felt this might shed more light into how things were/are perceived in regards to the subject.

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

"RAW AC" is determined by adding up the AC stat on each of your pieces of armor, not by looking at AC on your inventory screen.

I don't think anyone disputed that, unless you were further trying to clarify it in case there were people who didn't know.

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

For what it's worth, I wouldn't further reference that AC post outside of the Kahvok quote and the information from that famous post on TSW.

I know I'm not providing much information here, and that's largely because I don't know how AC works on this server, but that post addresses LIVE and more importantly, has many unsupported points about LIVE. The big red flag for me is that the post was from Velious-era and it was answering questions that folks on TSW and SK.org didn't know the answer to years later.

Now the catch is the P99 developers could have used all that unsupported information on this server. I have no idea. Personally, I think HP is King until CHeal is no longer a complete heal.

Kahvok's post is deep SoL / Pre-PoP. He speaks of Ssra gear, and does comparisons between classes during that era. The data on the live servers is also from that era, and between Classic/Kunark and Pre-PoP there were a few changes regarding classes and their damage mitigation and damage avoidance abilities.

Can we reference it here? We probably can (some parts at least), again with a grain of salt. Without solid equations (coming directly from the developers/coders mouth) the community was left with speculations and the hard work of people who parsed endless hours and insane amounts of logs against specific mobs, in order to reach some plausible conclusions. And then again, it was still up for debate whether or not this stood.

I remember (see what I did there?) reading about this in the very very early stages of the game (beta/early live). People were trying to explain the AC-Mitigation/Avoidance and the damage received from mobs.
There was this theory that when a mob attacks a player, the outcome of the attack is determined by the roll of two dices (to explain it in an easy way). One die to see if the attack will connect (and the outcome of that die was directly affected by your Damage Avoidance number), and another die to determine how much damage is done to you (which again is affected by your Damage Mitigation number). Some people further refuted that this die was at some point combined into one, to avoid confusion.

I also remember that the general consensus was like this:
Raw AC (or Worn AC) directly affects the amount of damage you will receive IF the die that determines if you get hit or not comes up as a 'HIT'. And what it did affect, was further explained (again I don't remember how this data or the equation came into light) into this equation: Mob Damage = Base Damage + (1-20)*Bonus Damage. So, Raw AC directly affected the d20 roll on this, meaning that the a hit that you perceive as MAX on you, will be substantially lower as a number than a hit that someone with less Raw AC will.
Defense Skill and Agility directly affected the die roll that determines if you get hit or not. Again, the general consensus was that this was further constituted by a series of die rolls. One die to see if the attack misses. If it goes through, it checks to see if it gets parried. If again it goes through, it checks to see if it gets dodged, then riposted, then blocked etc etc (You get the idea).

Now, in his post, Kahvok specifically says that the Defense Skill increases both mitigation and avoidance. So was there an error in the explanations during the early stages of the game? Did we have it all wrong from the beginning? Or did we get it right, but there were changes down the road? And if there were, which era did they take place upon, and how did they directly affect our game?

Again, even if we determine all this, and we actually KNOW what is going on, we have to then try and apply it on P99. Are our devs here using code from early classic? Have they done any changes to it?
If you try to imagine how many manhours were put into this, trying to determine what is and what isn't true during live, do you really think anyone's willing to dig ALL that information up, then spend the time needed on P99 to see what applies and what doesn't?

Imo, this is Mythbusters area, so there's no "Rock solid set on stone evidence" apart from statistics posted from the community (and Everquest had/has some pretty stubborn and knowledgeable people who did a ton of work behind the scenes to get to the bottom of this). Personally, I don't trust statistics at all, it's mankinds biggest invention to lie.

This is how theory games are played.
Go into Allakhazam (or the P99 Wiki if it has the same numbers), pick any mob, then read about his damage. Most often than not, it says that it hits between X and Y.
Now, try to find out how this X and Y was posted up there.
Were those X and Y numbers taken directly from the database? Do they apply for a naked level 50 ( 60 during Kunark) character sitting down and then standing up? Are they parsed on lower level/higher level characters, and if yes, what classes were they? Have they changed down the road to reflect later expansions?
There's literally a fuckton of questions that will arise, and each one isn't exactly easy to answer without a hint of doubt.

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

KC groups. 4+ levels higher than a <55 char counts for something especially on low kc mobs. Higher haste than a typical 55 monk is going to have. I am talking buffed. So I am sitting at 100% haste and they are at maybe 80-90ish on a monk. An under 55 rogue isn't going to have double backstab.

I am not talking apples to apples. I am talking ~max dps 59 pally vs pick up group <55 monk/rogue.

At 59 with sky belt and FA, I outdamaged a 60 epic rogue who outgeared me a lot, on a mob directly outside the VP entrance. I think he still carries that monkey on his shoulder since that day.

Can it happen? Yea. It's the exception that justifies the rule. 55 rogue has better Weapon Skill against a 59 paladin (225 vs 222/223 don't remember actual max number at 59 here) and a higher Offense Skill (225 vs 222/223 or w/e it actually is). His attacks are also not getting dodged/blocked/parried or avoided in a similar fashion like yours are (assuming you're tanking, it's KC you mentioned). My money's probably like Samwise, if it's happening regularly it's due to rogues not pulling their weight by positioning themselves (or you positioning the mob) and only hitting autoattack and /afk.

[pharmakos]

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

I don't think anyone disputed that, unless you were further trying to clarify it in case there were people who didn't know.

was just clarification, since the quote i posted was talking about raw AC but didn't define it.

[Splorf22]

I did a test with Sakuragi vs the Cliff Golem in OT with and without the Shield of Elders (40 item AC). Both tests were about 5 minutes and had about 150 hits with various damage values. I then bootstrapped the data (my new favorite technique) to get:

1120: mean: 113.5 +- 3.4 [95% CI: 106.6 120.4]
1050: mean: 111.3 +- 3.9 [95% CI: 103.6 119.1]
1120 > 1050: 66.7%

What this means is that with 1120AC, I expect the average hit to be around 113.5 and almost certainly in the range 106-120. With 1050AC, I expect the average hit to be 111.3 (yes, this is LESS. I double checked to make sure I didn't mix up the parses) and almost certainly in the range 104-119. The probability that you will take more damage with 1120 AC is 67%.

The variance in this data is quite high. From what I understand, hits are either min, max, or a purely random hit in between. So I modified the data appropriately, which removes some of the randomness:

Replacing any number not 48 or 172 by 109.5
1120: mean: 111.8 +- 2.6 [95% CI: 106.6 117.1]
1050: mean: 111.5 +- 3.0 [95% CI: 105.6 117.5]
1120 > 1050: 52.0%

Thus we can see that the 1050 parse was a bit luckier on the damage interval hits, but the variance is still quite large. The variance goes down as the square root of the number of samples, so we'd need about 50 times as much data (3 hours with each configuration) to get a confidence interval with a size of +- 1. Needless to say, I don't think I can rent Coeur for 6 hours.

My conclusions:
1. Someone not named Sakuragi should tank the cliff golem for a few hours [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
2. Pasi is correct; for raids HP >> AC. Not only is the average value of AC quite small, but you care about about the worst case more. Based on this test if you are a main tank I would not give up even one HP for additional AC. This is actually good news for Iksar warriors!
3. Even if AC is working correctly (which is only a 50% chance according to this data, heh) the benefit of a ridiculous +40AC shield is very unlikely to be more than a few percent for high-level mobs.

Of course, all of this may be different for xp mobs with lower attack values. For reference, without the shield Sakuragi has about 170 raw item AC.

[Stinkum]

That's a damned nice post.

[pharmakos]

Originally Posted by Splorf22 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Needless to say, I don't think I can rent Coeur for 6 hours.

the tricky part would be having Coeur not go LD for 6 straight hours [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[koros]

Can you try to test at some various AC values keeping agi constant? Very large chance ac over a certain amount does absolutely nothing.

[Splorf22]

I guess I have a hard time believing that the hard cap for AC is 170. I'm pretty sure Kanras implemented the Kahvok post and made 289 the hard cap for melee classes, although whether or not this is classic is of course up for debate.

Does anyone have links to some steel warrior tests of AC? The best I can find is http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum...hread.php?t=13 which certainly seems to match this.

[koros]

Well either you got statistically anomalous results, there is a hardcap, or there's some other mix of factors we haven't considered.

[koros]

Can you check your logs and determine the cliff golem's min hit, damage interval, and modal hit?

Maybe charting the hit distribution would shed some light on what seems to be a pure cap.