AC Seeming to have little to no impact

[heartbrand]

Been doing some HoT / Master of the Guard and I am seeing little to no statistical difference in tanking between 1200ac and drastically lower AC. Do we have any idea on the formula being used at all?

[Smedy]

i think ac scales down above 1000 (or whatever number it's set at) drastically, much like int and wisdom there's no point in getting more than a certain number (around 210?). confirm / deny?

[Throndor]

not true. AC is a stat which currently on live, does, and always has operated on a bell curve. It was revanped in the SOF era after nearly every class was capable of reaching ac values that trivialized group content when raid geared, while simultaneously causing group geared characters to get destroyed by group mobs. This anomaly stemmed from developer attempts toward providing challenging group content to raiders, and in the end they found the only way they could fix the disparity was to revamp the tables.

With that said, when a raid tank was sitting in top end raid gear with maximized ac group content was classicly and still is currently, rarely if ever hitting u at max value. Tbf, there is a point at which u are seeing minimum hit so often where more ac is not really an effective gear decision on LIVE, but as it currently stands mob attack values throughout p99 are substantially higher than they were in classic. Either its outright coded incorrectly, or its an intentional sleight to add "epicness" to the group content on p99.
In maximized ac from raid gear, P99 kunark era tanks are seeing little if any difference from group geared tanks in parsing toward the low end of the DI table and are forced to counter this primarily with larger hp pools which does little to improve the efficacy of the healers responsible for sustaining the damage, aside from buying an extra round of combat or 3 per ch. It's not surprising though. When it takes 5 slows in a row to slow a mob 4 to 6 levels blue to you at a camp like fungi king despite it being tashed and maloed, its pretty telling that things like mobattack and MR are drastically exaggerated on P99.

[dbouya]

Back during live velious there were rumors about ac being broken, but the main tank in the raid still wanted the druid hp buff that resulted in like 5more total ac than the cleric one.

Trouble slowing doesn't sound that odd too the golem and deeper areas of seb used to be pretty hardcore luck required to land spells in 2000 too from what I remember.

[Schortt]

Hmm. Mitigation seems to be scaling pretty well within my means of testing it.

All data is a 60 Iks Monk getting hit by the same level 59 Crystal Destroyer in Velks (max hit 350, min hit 81) for roughly 10 minutes.

All AC values were with identical buffs (aego) and achieved by removing gear down to 877. To get below that I had to load up on plat to get some AC penalty going on.

1171 AC
--- Total damage: 32455 --- Avg hit: 186 --- Swings: 399 --- Defended: 100 (25.1%) --- Hit: 174 (43.6%) --- Missed: 125 (31.3%) --- Accuracy: 58.2% --- Dodged: 18 (5.7%) --- Parried: 0 (0%) --- Blocked: 67 (16.8%) --- Riposted: 15 (4.5%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

1070 AC
--- Total damage: 44798 --- Avg hit: 199 --- Swings: 481 --- Defended: 112 (23.3%) --- Hit: 225 (46.8%) --- Missed: 144 (29.9%) --- Accuracy: 61% --- Dodged: 17 (4.4%) --- Parried: 0 (0%) --- Blocked: 75 (15.6%) --- Riposted: 20 (4.9%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

969 AC
--- Total damage: 40925 --- Avg hit: 210 --- Swings: 447 --- Defended: 115 (25.7%) --- Hit: 194 (43.4%) --- Missed: 138 (30.9%) --- Accuracy: 58.4% --- Dodged: 28 (7.8%) --- Parried: 0 (0%) --- Blocked: 68 (15.2%) --- Riposted: 19 (5%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

877 AC (naked + aego)
--- Total damage: 45533 --- Avg hit: 229 --- Swings: 498 --- Defended: 142 (28.5%) --- Hit: 198 (39.8%) --- Missed: 158 (31.7%) --- Accuracy: 55.6% --- Dodged: 28 (7.3%) --- Parried: 0 (0%) --- Blocked: 92 (18.5%) --- Riposted: 22 (5.4%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

770 AC (naked + aego + enough weight to drop my AC that far)
--- Total damage: 45136 --- Avg hit: 246 --- Swings: 436 --- Defended: 103 (23.6%) --- Hit: 183 (42%) --- Missed: 150 (34.4%) --- Accuracy: 55% --- Dodged: 19 (5.4%) --- Parried: 0 (0%) --- Blocked: 66 (15.1%) --- Riposted: 18 (4.9%) --- Absorbed: 0 (0%)

I will try out MotG or some other much higher level mob when I have the time.

[Raev]

95% of the time, the people complaining about these things are just statistically ignorant. You can't expect to eyeball AC.

[cormag]

On the other hand: the iksar AC curve seems to be a little more even compared to the human data here http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=92

[Schortt]

I'll throw a betabuffed human monk into the mix next time I do some testing to see if it matters (probably a warrior too). Cliff Golems are handy for testing on Blue because you can convince your cleric buddy to hammer over and spam you with heals for awhile, but their relatively low max hit means it's more difficult to show significant differences. Perun's test is great work and shows that AC isn't doing as much as some people would like, but the closeness of the numbers makes it really tough to tell anything other than AC values over 800ish are having less of an effect than the RNG for test runs that are short enough to preserve your sanity.

A lot of the concern about AC seems to stem from this idea that we need to make sure it's working for Velious when numbers get bigger and fights last longer so people are making informed choices about gearing - just another reason to be testing on hard hitting Velious mobs on Beta rather than sissy stuff on Blue.

[wycca]

Thanks so much for testing, the # of swings seems good. It's obvious that AC scaling does work on p99....likely in group content at least (where I've always thought it had noticable returns). Not so sure about raid content sometimes =P.


Softcap AC & returns over softcap testing on p99 does require eliminating alot of variables imo.

- Monk low-weight bonus ac, a mitigation ac bonus on top of a softcap?
- Iksar bonus ac - a mitigation ac bonus on top of a softcap?

Either one would raise the apparent softcap and cover some AC scaling/returns issues. Heck, it could be possible that an iksar monk is tanking better than warriors because of a softcap and returns over cap issue.

- Need to know raw ac from a gearset you're parsing really.
- Ideally would eliminate iksar ac and monk bonus ac, and conduct testing soley through scaling of raw (ie worn) ac to discover a softcap. You could then go back and repeat the test with monk ac and iksar ac if you wanted to know what those are worth on p99 btw.
- Should aim to discover softcap, then returns over cap. Would be interesting to conduct test with warrior to compare.

Boring for sure, I'd be game to help conduct the tests though, would finally give us some insight into the softcap/returns system on p99 and help people evaluate if AC is truly worth anything.

[deadlycupcakez]

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

I did some testing; here's my conclusions after tanking an ancient sentry in ST twice, once with 1166 ac on a warrior, and the other 847.

1166 ac data:
285 hits
253.3894737 avg
316 max
115 min
140 18 14 29
miss riposte dodge parry

fight lasted 20 minutes


847 ac data:

hits miss rip dodge parry
331 180 33 29 34

276.3927492 avg
122 min
316 max

fight lasted 20 minutes




A reason there were more hits is partially due to, on the first attempt, I messed up and died with the mob at ~30%, however the data's extremely comparable.

My conclusion? AC's effectiveness is close to 0.

Except that you took approx 7,600 more damage in the second fight over the same amount of time. Which means over 20 minutes of fighting those mobs you will need at least a few more CH's