Warrior ac soft cap?

[Oscar the Boxer]

Is there an AC soft cap for warriors and if so do we know what its at?

[cvinion]

IIRC the steel warriors had a great list for live. If I can remember in classic the softcp was 1100 or so.... kunarl bumped it to 1200-1300 and velious raised it to 1400. My numbers may be off + or - 100 but if your hitting 1500 Ac you should be right in that sweet spot of stacking massive up items instead of more AC. If I also recall correctly the numbers took a huge jump in luclin to where warriors would shoot for the magic 10k up / 2k Ac.... however this was rarely achieved until PoP when not just the top 1% of warriors could hit this.

Again note these are numbers from live so take it with a large grain of salt that things may be totally different here on emu.

[Troxx]

Bedavir here from TSW (Brael from the SK community and I did a ton of work regarding ac back in the day).

Unless ac works dramatically different on this box than it did on live (and it shouldn't because they use the same DB + (DI 1-20), you probably aren't going to be capable of hitting any functional line of absoluetly diminished returns here regardless of your play style (hardcore raider vs casual grouper). There is (or should be) a soft cap that is class dependent, with warriors having the highest soft cap and post soft-cap returns and knights having the next highest softcap and post-softcap returns. It was proven at multiple points in time on live that it's possible with enough ac beyond the soft cap that you could effectively eliminate the upper DIs altogether, and so strongly deflect your incomming hits to minimum that you could trivialize tanking encounters. It is basically impossible to hit such ac ranges for raid targets with classic to velious gear given relative mob attack values, but every point of ac you have will have a real impact on the dynamic DI spread you'll get.

Its a combination of your level, your targets level, your ac, and your targets attack value that factors into the equation.

So is there a soft cap? Absolutely yes, i'm not sure what it is.

Are there benefits of pushing past that soft cap? Again, absolutely yes --- this was definitively proven both on Evilgamer.net and thesteelwarrior.org.

Most of the best tank gear has both hit points and ac on it. Outside of tanking very few select mobs in the game where you need defensive + a cheal chain so tight that a heal lands between every melee round, chasing high ac values on your gear will always make you the stronger tank (defensively speaking).

It is also worth mentioning that unless p99 does not follow classic mechanic rulesets, that shield ac is added at a 1:1 return rate even past the softcap. If, for instance, the softcap were 1000 (you being already at the soft cap) and you put on a 100ac shield vs a 100ac breastplate, that breastplate would only be worth a fraction of it's 100ac, while the shield would effectively put you at 1100 real ac (1:1 returns that ignore the soft cap). In classic eq, this is one of the biggest benefits of being a knight. You can wear a fat shield while still holding aggro.

I don't play a tank in p99, but if I did my gear choices would favor raw ac over raw hit points in general ... but a cautious eye towards always making sure you had enough stamina and hit points that your cleric can use cheal efficiently. For most of the content you'll see on p99 (exception being a few ass-beaters with heavy aoes in velious) ... getting to that level of hp/stamina is very easy. If you find yourself in a situation without a cleric using complete heal exclusively on you ... ac will always win. Less damage taken = less damage needed to be healed via HoTs and lesser direct heals.

Generally speaking ac > hp :)

[Raev]

Classic is a hardcap of 289 AC for melee classes. This is why monks were so good: Iksar monks could get +100 AC from being iksar monks and still hit the 289 AC cap pretty easily with TOV gear, while the warrior wearing 500AC of gear would be capped back to 289. Right before PoP, Verant did some tests and realized their itemization sucked. Since they couldn't very well go back and delete/change hundreds of monk items, they just implemented softcaps where warriors got more AC over the cap than monks.

However, we don't have a classic implementation here. Haynar and Rogean had already implemented a softcap and didn't want to retune things.

From a practical standpoint, both my Warrior and Monk are at about 1200-1250 displayed AC and I notice a huge difference from Kunark. I don't know how long that trend will continue.

[Colgate]

in terms of raid mob tanking, it really doesn't matter if you have 1100 AC or 1600 AC on this server when fighting the highest end mobs like AoW; you are almost always going to die in 2 melee rounds if a CH is missed

doesn't seem to make sense, but that's how it is here

a warrior in planar gear tanks AoW about as well as a best in slot velious warrior, for practicality purposes

for anything that isn't vulak, tunare, vyemm, and AoW AC seems to help a lot

[Colgate]

From a practical standpoint, both my Warrior and Monk are at about 1200-1250 displayed AC and I notice a huge difference from Kunark. I don't know how long that trend will continue.

yup, monks are pretty crazy here; i hit around 1500 displayed AC when going full tank mode in regards to buffs and equipping a shield, and i barely take damage from mobs like yelinak, tormax, dain, vindi, etc.

i forgot gorenaire was up the other day and died while autorunning, but my combat log had minimum hits about 9 out of 10 of the times she hit me