Real AC vs Char window AC

[Kalamurv]

It's worth mentioning that the ac soft/hard caps are on your real (mitigation) ac and not your displayed (avoidance/ mitigation) ac

[Troxx]

AC clearly counts for something but the challenge is knowing where those breaking points are in terms of significantly deflecting hits towards minimums. Thankfully classic eq has a very slow tempo 99% of the time. Tanks don't die quickly vs non-raid content so a wide range of gear options are almost interchangeably viable. Furthermore with no augments it's not like tanks have hard choices to make. At the raid level the good gear has both. At the group level, there aren't a ton of choice dilemmas where you are comparing 2 items roughly equivalent in power where you have to really pick between extremes of hp or AC.

On live starting after PoP tanks had to pick between hp focus, AC focus, and balanced approach. Mob attack stagnated meaning that even raid boss encounters could be overwhelmed by player AC. DoDh, OoW and the few following expansions were the golden days for AC and those who focused on AC were the clear winners. It was during this era that the debates raged on thesteelwarrior and evilgamer. Brael and I (Bedavir) spent ludicrous amounts of time parsing to prove this.

The nature of the gameplay also changed. Complete heal was phased out in favor of faster burst heal - both group and raid. When XP trash now quadded for 1k+ and mitigated slow, the benefits of AC helped make the AC tank not only take less total damage but more importantly exponentially decreased the risk of max or high combo rounds.

I remember raiding Anguish Deathknell and other zones where raid mobs would hit me for minimum 60% of the time and so rarely landed a max DI that you could expect to kill the boss 10x and still never take a DI20 hit. We had a hp focused warrior who might get 30% minimum hits 15% max and a high expression of DI15-19s. He'd go down faster than a Thai hooker after defensive fell even though he had several thousand more hp. I rarely failed to single tank start to death. This was a golden age as the threshold for overpowering even boss mobs was a few hundred AC.

P99 is different though. Max hits aren't nearly as high and damage is less bursty. AC works but raiding hard stuff now ... not possible vs most high mobs to get enough AC. You still have to rely on a 100% cheal at regular intervals and defensive because those max hits will happen.

For group content? AC probably best but it's a wash. If you're geared to an appropriate tier, you'll do fine.

[Lhancelot]

I guess I am too dumb to make any sense out of the technical explanations of soft caps/hard caps, shield adding/not adding double ac bonuses, and all this other dev talk that just makes no sense to me.

Sadly the nerd in me wants to see direct numbers - I wish there was just a simple graphical chart that could show an exact correlation between AC and a percentage of damage mitigated with a simple graph that showed exactly what a shield did for AC or damage mitigation.

You know, like:

800ac mitigates 40% incoming melee damage.
25ac shield grants a worn 30ac, and increases avoiding incoming melee damage by 5%.

simple shit like this. ^

Guess that's impossible. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Naethyn]

Avatar of War still hits a 1700 AC warrior for 1538. HP is king.

[Fifield]

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

Avatar of War still hits a 1700 AC warrior for 1538. HP is king.

I've gone for straight hp on my warrior, good to know i wont be gimped by doing so.

[trite]

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

I guess I am too dumb to make any sense out of the technical explanations of soft caps/hard caps, shield adding/not adding double ac bonuses, and all this other dev talk that just makes no sense to me.

Sadly the nerd in me wants to see direct numbers - I wish there was just a simple graphical chart that could show an exact correlation between AC and a percentage of damage mitigated with a simple graph that showed exactly what a shield did for AC or damage mitigation.

You know, like:

800ac mitigates 40% incoming melee damage.
25ac shield grants a worn 30ac, and increases avoiding incoming melee damage by 5%.

simple shit like this. ^

Guess that's impossible. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think people are saying, how much damage it mitigates depends on the Mobs attack value...that aikons guy was saying on mobs with low attack values , "around 1200ac you start seeing damage trend down to the minimum"...other people are saying that when it comes mobs with high attack values, the highest AC you can possibly have doesn't do a great job at getting hit values to trend away from the maximum

[Lhancelot]

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

I think people are saying, how much damage it mitigates depends on the Mobs attack value...that aikons guy was saying on mobs with low attack values , "around 1200ac you start seeing damage trend down to the minimum"...other people are saying that when it comes mobs with high attack values, the highest AC you can possibly have doesn't do a great job at getting hit values to trend away from the maximum

Thank you. I needed the extreme technical nerd jargon translated. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[aaezil]

from my not scientific at all and purely singular anecdote of levelling my war to 60 - i found that yellows/reds pretty much always maxed hit me levelling up no mater how high i stacked ac on

[Kowalski]

AC is broken, move along...

[Troxx]

It works, you just sometimes need unrealistically high ac to see the benefits.

IE for seb you won't see high enough ac levels until velious gear