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#1
11-05-2010, 02:28 AM
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How AC works
Can anyone clarify how AC works on this server?
I hear a lot of different answers. Found this on the live forums but I doubt this applys http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/po...opic_id=160153 | ||
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#2
11-05-2010, 02:32 AM
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moar is better.
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#4
11-05-2010, 03:42 AM
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Pile it on until Velious
To give an actual explanation, AC increases the chances for a mob to hit you for minimal damage. Say you have zero AC, then a mob's hit distribution might look more like a bell curve. As you add AC, then the fat part of that curve moves left, toward the smaller hit damages. The Steel Warrior had some crazy graphs I might try to find | ||
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Last edited by jck169; 11-05-2010 at 03:47 AM..
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#5
11-05-2010, 09:29 AM
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[Edit - these posts were made after AA's, but the basic premise of AC doesn't change. Just don't go looking for a robe with 75 AC on it to be in game on p99]
From http://samanna.net/gen.info/effects.shtml#4 Melee Damage Brohg writes the following description of melee damage recieved from mobs: "Mob damage is two parts, DB (Damage Base/Bonus or Fixed Damage /Vig), and (1-20)*DI, which is Damage Interval. You can see this by parsing, that there are 20 discrete amounts of damage any mob can deal on a successful hit. It's not quite /random 1 20, because AC makes a big huge difference in how many low hits you have, but you still have the whole range. If a mob has a damage base of 200, and a damage interval of 20, then (once they hit you) they'll deal either 220 damage, or 240, 260... etc ... 580, or 600 damage." "High AC (from gear /Vig) reduces the damage taken from the (1-20)*DI portion a lot, making many more low #*DI than high." So all melee damage has two parts, one wich is random and affected by the AC on your gear, and one part that is never modified by AC. The Shielding effect in particular is extra interesting heresince Shielding affects only the Fixed Damage (and is the only thing that affects it), not the random Damage Interval. Armor Class Armor Class is what decides how much damage you take and how often you take damage. It mitigates damage and it makes the mob miss it's attacks against you. The first part of the AC is "mitigation AC" which is calculated from the worn AC you gain from your gear. Taraddar writes: "Your "mitigation" ac comes from the AC on your gear and is what effects the distribution you get in the 1-20 portion of attacks. Higher ac gets more lower hits etc." This means that the gear you wear decides how much of the random part ie Damage Interval (as described above) of the damage coming your way actually hits you. The other part of AC is the "avoidance AC" which is defined by your Defense Skill and your AGI stat. Taraddar writes: "Normally your defense skill and agility contribute to your "avoidance" ac and increase your chance of being missed. AC from gear doesn't effect this at all." From http://reborninfire.proboards.com/in...play&thread=37 Over the years, Ive found many people in EQ are in the dark about what all of the numbers on their character sheet actually mean. What exactly is Armor Class? What do the Combat Agility and Combat Stability AAs actually do? How do avoidance and shielding fit in? If you ever wondered about any of those things then keep reading. All of that will be explained and more. The first thing you need to know about AC is that for most toons the vast majority of the number you see displayed on your character sheet in your inventory is ineffective AC. Each archetype, (Plate, Chain, Leather,Cloth) has a limit to the amount of AC that actually "works". That limit is called your "soft cap", and it varies between classes. What follows is a list of the AC soft cap approximations for each archetype. In the following chart, worn AC means look at your gear and add up the AC it shows when you inspect the individual item. Soft Caps Cloth..........= ~75 worn AC (yes its really that low) Leather......= ~100 worn AC Monk..........= ~120 worn AC (if they are under 15 stone wieght) Chain.........= ~200 worn AC Plate .........= ~300 worn AC You may be shocked at how low those number are, I certainly was. My robe alone has 75 AC on it, so I hit my soft cap with 1 piece of gear! Everyone reading this can go check their character right now and Im sure you will see that you are all way above the softcap. Hitting the AC soft cap for your character is trivial in EQ today. So what we really want to know about is how effective is worn AC AFTER the softcap. The answer varies by class: AC returns after the soft cap has been reached 45%: Warrior (from Devs) 33%: Knight (from Devs), Monk (reportedly equal to Knight? via Zajeer?) 23%: Cleric, Bard (via L2), BZR (rough estimate based off of parsing) 17%: BST, Ranger (BST is ~1/2 of the monk, ranger hearsay) 6%: Druid, Enc, Mag, Nec, Wiz (~1/3 of BST -- Druid was quoted as "lowest") Rogue, Shaman? Probably they are close to cleric returns. What does that mean? Well lets use a warrior for example, and lets say that when he looks in his inventory he sees his AC displayed as 1000, this is called displayed AC for future reference. Displayed AC adds up your worn AC and mulitiples it by 1.65. 1000ac / 1.65 = 600 worn AC. So if this particular warrior added up all the AC listed on his gear it would be about 600, I rounded these values to make it a bit easier to work with. Now remember Warrior are a plate class with a soft cap of about 300. 600 worn AC = 300 under the cap AC + 300 over the cap AC. 300 over the cap AC = 300 * 45% = 135 effective AC. 300 under the cap AC + 135 effective over the cap AC = 435 REAL AC So in review a warrior that looks in his inventory and sees 1000ac displayed up at the top, really only has 435 REAL AC!Using the same formula for a Ranger that has 1000 displayed AC you get this: 1000 displayed AC= 600 worn AC = 200 under the cap + 68 effective AC = 268 REAL AC! So two completely different classes that have the same number displayed in the AC catagory of their inventory have VASTLY different real AC! Ok now I hope you can understand everything up until this point because there one more piece of the AC puzzle I need to explain now and that is Shields. The truth about Shields If you have a shield in your secondary slot, ALL of the AC on that shield counts as "under the cap AC". That means if you have a shield with 100AC you get ALL 100 AC from it, regardless of what class you are, or what return over the cap your class gets!!! Weapons with AC on them in the secondary slot dont count, neither do orbs, lanterns, totems etc. It must be an actual shield to get the raw AC bonus. Take me for example, im a cloth wearer with an AC softcap of 75 BUT I use a shield+aug that gives me 110ac. That means I get more AC from my shield alone than all of my other gear combined!!! Even if you dont understand any of that it simplifies down to this: If you use a shield, ignore every stat on that shield except AC. A shield with 100ac and no HPs is far better than a shield with 500hps and no AC, yes its that dramatic. Here is some raw parsed data that illustrates the effectiveness of shield AC. 2504ac no shield 308.6 dps average hit 618.1 2513ac 100ac shield 287.9 dps average hit 567.90 2512ac 175ac shield 270.5 dps average hit 537.4 3659ac 175ac shield 262.8 dps average hit 519.9 The test subject was an INT caster, tank returns on AC are much better of course. Still that parse clearly shows just how effective a shield can be. CA/CS Another VERY important piece of the puzzle is Combat Stability and Combat Agility. Formerly both of these AAs were thought to increase your AC softcap, but in a recent post a Dev revealed that CA increases your avoidance, and CS increases your softcap. Here is the table that was released by the devs shortly after the Secrets of Faydwer expansion was released: Combat Agility Values - AFFECTNAME BASE_EFFECT_1 Evasion 2 Evasion 5 Evasion 10 Evasion 13 Evasion 16 Evasion 19 Evasion 22 Evasion 25 Evasion 26 Evasion 27 Evasion 28 Evasion 30 Evasion 32 Evasion 33 Evasion 34 Evasion 35 Evasion 37 Evasion 39 Evasion 40 Evasion 41 Evasion 42 Evasion 43 Evasion 44 Combat Stability Values - AFFECTNAME BASE_EFFECT_1 ACLimitMod 2 ACLimitMod 5 ACLimitMod 10 ACLimitMod 13 ACLimitMod 16 ACLimitMod 19 ACLimitMod 22 ACLimitMod 25 ACLimitMod 27 ACLimitMod 29 ACLimitMod 31 ACLimitMod 33 ACLimitMod 35 ACLimitMod 37 ACLimitMod 39 ACLimitMod 41 ACLimitMod 43 ACLimitMod 45 ACLimitMod 46 ACLimitMod 47 ACLimitMod 48 ACLimitMod 49 ACLimitMod 50 So if you max Defensive combat skills The rest of your defensive skills are failrly easy to assess by looking at the following chart. Basically if you are evaluating gear and you want to know how valuable +10 avoidance is for example, this chart gives you approximately how many HPs those skills are worth in terms of defensive survivability. Defensive value of combat skill displayed in equivalent HPs Improved Dodge V.......660 HPe Improved Dodge IV......530 HPe Improved Dodge III......400 HPe +5 Avoidance.............300 HPe Improved Dodge II......260 HPe 10 shield AC...............250 HPe Improved Dodge I .......130 HPe 8% dodge skill ...........100 HPe 1% shielding.................80 HPe 10 STA ......................16 HPe 10 normal AC*..............13 HPe 10 AGI..........................8 HPe 10 HP..........................10 HPe *Varies by class, 13 hps is the value for cloth wearers. Take a look at how important Shield AC is. If you have 100 shield AC that is the defensive equivalent of ~2500 hps! You may also notice that both Shielding and Avoidance have excellent defensive effectiveness, and should be highly valued when evaluating gear. It should be noted that Avoidance is hard capped at 100 and Shielding is hard capped at 35%. You wont get any defensive value out of those stats at all if you go over the hard caps. Well that about covers it. I realize that this all may seem very complicated, but its still very important to understand exactly how EQ works so that you can acurately calculate your characters defensive abilities. | ||
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Last edited by ElanoraBryght; 11-05-2010 at 09:34 AM..
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#6
11-05-2010, 10:19 AM
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About the shield AC being overcap, I'm not sure it should be classic (if it's even on p99). There's a thread discussing it from awhile back here: http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum...ead.php?t=7643
The original thread is gone, but there is a dev response that fills in a lot: Quote:
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Omar | 50 wizard
The Steel Warrior | |||
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Last edited by logiktrip; 11-05-2010 at 10:22 AM..
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Linear Mode
