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heartbrand
09-05-2012, 02:51 PM
What are peoples thoughts for warriors on the effectiveness of AC vs HP? I sit at around 1100~ ac buffed. Should I be wearing sarnak earrings of stations over bs ears? I wear a gem encrusted and a 5ac 55hp, but I have djarn ring. Should I swamp in the djarn for the gem encrusted? Trying to figure out what to prioritize, when do the diminishing returns of ac kick in, etc., thanks!

Nirgon
09-05-2012, 05:11 PM
I think level >>>>>> all here. HP being a maybe somewhat distant second in comparison, more ac is good and everything but I wouldn't trade it for raw hps. Djarn ring > fire emerald plat.

Danth
09-05-2012, 11:14 PM
What are peoples thoughts for warriors on the effectiveness of AC vs HP? I sit at around 1100~ ac buffed. Should I be wearing sarnak earrings of stations over bs ears? I wear a gem encrusted and a 5ac 55hp, but I have djarn ring. Should I swamp in the djarn for the gem encrusted? Trying to figure out what to prioritize, when do the diminishing returns of ac kick in, etc., thanks!

Who's healing you? If you usually have a Cleric or raid a lot, HP is better. If you're usually with a Druid or Shaman, the HP are basically useless and you're better off gearing for AC.

I recall a rule of thumb on live that some players used was to rate 1 AC as equal to about 4 or 5 HP.

Danth

Grahm
09-06-2012, 08:43 PM
i want to say it was 1:2 ratio. I actually thought it was 1:5ish too but im pretty sure anyone would take 100hp over 20ac, and even to extremes, 100ac to 500hp

runlvlzero
09-23-2012, 10:52 PM
AC is king, even on Ch's it makes a big diffrence in how early you can start them and how often you need to cast them. This is noticeable in xp groups.

Probably HP on big raid hitters though. Buying 100 more hp for a hit might make a difference on a sloppy CH chain and raid mobs hit like mack trucks regardless due to levels. AC is still not irrelevant though and in velious the best tanks were all AC capped anyway.

Oh yeah, and it makes more of a diff on a war who gets much more mitigation for AC then the other classes and have lots of HP anyway. This assumes EMU calcs AC correctly which I think rogeans servers do properly now. For a time AC augs were far far greater then +hp augs for a raid tank.

Super legit guide, this is one of the few I'll get behind. http://wiki.project1999.org/Guide_for_Frustrated_Warriors

Mathematically, the formula could be expressed this way: An items combat value (CV) is equal to its AC, plus one for every 1pt of Str, 15 HP, 6 Dex, 6 Agi, and 5 Sta. I also add one to its CV for every 1% haste increase.

CV = AC + Str + (total of hp, dex, agi, sta, and save bonuses) + % haste.

Of course for raid maintanking wars I would place no CV on STR, dex, agi. That really only effects grouping and dps potential. Raid mechanics being slightly different as far as healing (from a clerics perspective).

But having your wars/tanks bring some gear that ups their dps a lil when their not sitting infront of mobs makes sense too.

Not the original source but the stuff listed in this post for softcaps and how mitigation works is relavent.

http://eqtitan.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1271&start=0

Ahh and the original thread: (of course linked to in the above) but you may want to read through the discussion if your curious about the nitty gritties and theorycrafting. http://www.thesteelwarrior.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7643&page=1

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.

Note too that all sheild ac falls under the soft cap for any class so having a maintank hold a sheild to swap out when they have agro but need a bit more mitigation for making that "heal" is a pro strat. * <<< edit <<< We had a dwarf doing this on 10k hitters when there was only one 20khp tank on the server and the dwarf only had like 18.5khp sheild made made a diff IMO. Could keep him up with 5 clerics. I would say they may have had a lil more buffed, but thats basically what I remember because there was a huge bit of drama about it in /general chat and the forums lol (being the war who hit 20k was not congratulated enough)

P.S. I see people not caring about or using sheilding buffs on red, and this makes me sad as a pro pve cleric who's seen many battles. The 1-2 mins downtime to buff that is worth it over the course of 60 minutes of chainpulling.

Wen't ahead and bolded the important stuff that directly anwsers OP question about when AC looses effectiveness and what the soft caps are. It goes into how to determine it, which is different for each class, rangers AC 1k != warrior AC 1k.

Scratch&Sniff
09-24-2012, 04:10 AM
yes, cup

runlvlzero
09-24-2012, 04:40 AM
yes, cup

?

Scratch&Sniff
09-24-2012, 04:47 AM
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runlvlzero
09-24-2012, 04:53 AM
I still didn't get it but fuck i googled frylock and you just sold another box of fries for the man. F U

lol j/k

P.S. i'm sure it would have been much more funny if i did not live in an alternate parrelel dimension were there are no such thing as TV's

Xaeophi
10-03-2012, 05:07 AM
Great post

Treats
10-03-2012, 04:26 PM
There shouldn't be an AC soft cap here.

Shield AC should only factor into Total AC since there is no soft cap.

I made a thread on this awhile ago but the majority of it was guesswork:

http://www.project1999.org/forums/showthread.php?t=48312

runlvlzero
10-03-2012, 06:51 PM
Wow, good post treats cant believe i missed that in all my searching on the topic.

After reading that, it looks like AC may be less important then I made it out to be (much easier to reach the cap, less returns for a warrior) unless their going with unclassic mitigation. The only thing I have to go on is my gut feeling that its unclassic still and the bug has not been resolved. Warriors do seem to mitigate allot more then other classes atm.