I'm super interested in how the 'low' ac parse has a peak at min and max hits, but the 'high' ac parse has only the peak at min hit.

I wonder if intermediatery AC value parses were done we could see the second peak from the low AC parse move to the left as AC increases, eventually merging with the min hits peak as perhaps it has done in the high AC parse?

The 132-AC has a max-hit peak that's about 2/3rds the height of the min-hit parse, so I think this is in that intermediate range. I'll do a smaller 160ish parse and then I'm hoping a 100ish parse will either have same-height peaks or a higher peak on the max hit. Then I want to see whether there's a difference with spell-ac vs worn-ac and whether there's any difference with or without shield ac.

The other thing that jumped out to me was that the avg hit excluding min/max was almost unchanged in the two experiments at 51 and 50.6.

Another thing I'd like to test eventually is the "1ac = 5/10/15hp" thing. When researching melee gear I've seen that one come up a lot and it seems like it is way too much of a situational thing to come up with any sort of general rule without context. Never seen the reasoning behind it either.

Do you think maybe the 132 is below the threshold for seeing mitigation improvements, and the 195 exceeds the threshold of maximum mitigation?

That was a thing for tanks in live, but later expacs. The idea was 10ac is equivalent to 50hp on gear when choosing upgrades. But that’s when stuff had like 150-200 on it. And I only ever remember applying that to shield. (When warriors got good discs and AAs sword and board was preferred setup on raids) Ie: 60ac 150HP shield is better than 48ac 200HP shield.

Weighing an item per its stats is a great way to compare two items of the same slot. As for if those stats are particularly relevant (outside placebo), that’s a different matter.

Coming up with a personal upgrade path and comparing items leads to less spontaneous spending and excessive point use. I’d rather burn those points on alts than bank replaced NTOV gear. Perhaps more important, it gives someone agency to own those decisions.

I've seen it floated in many threads on p99 forums.

You could probably find that value but I feel like it would most likely only be applicable to mobs in that range, for that AC value and probably with a similar time to kill. And once you are past flattening the DI, HP>AC.


Oh for sure, especially for hybrids where ideally you'd max a couple stats, which is impossible on EC gear so you have to find your balance. Ranger if you go all out tank you'll have like 145str, almost no dex and no mana. Cool if you mt but if you're called on for DPS and you don't have like 190str you'll be failing your DPS role to an extent. If you want to bow stuff you'll need the str/dex and if you fear kite you'll probably want str/mana. Those choices come at a cost and if you don't want to carry full bags of gear you'll have to find your sweet spot somewhere. For some slots it is a no brainer but for others it is a lot more nuanced.

I think 195 ac exceeds the threshold, and adding more ac wouldn't do much damage mitigation for this specific mob. I bet when I test against a level 45 mob there will be room for further mitigation with more worn ac.

132 worn AC is squarely in the realm where adding more AC adds more damage mitigation. I ran a small test with 163 AC and although it's noisy (only 218 hits), it suggests that 163 is right around where maximum mitigation is reached for this mob. There's a small spike at the max hit, but barely more than the other hit values.

I ran a longer test (506 hits) at 106 AC, and that's right around the value where max and min hits occur equally frequently. Note that all of these also occur with ~63 spell AC as well.

I've run a small parse so far on my level 49 ranger with 137 worn ac and 35 spell ac, or 173 total. Only 139 hits; I'm actually killing Shiel on the ranger and there's a 30 minute respawn time, so harder to get a lot of hits in. I think I'll be able to add about 30 worn ac in upgrades and will run another parse when that happens. Compared to the cleric with 106 worn and 63 spell, or 169 total, ranger looks like it mitigates better. Looks most similar to the cleric parse with 132 worn acc, or 194 total. Cleric is using a shield, ranger is not. This makes me wonder if spell ac matters less than worn ac, but there's still far too little data to be confident in that.

Very interesting. So bucket 2-19 are basically always flat and the more AC you get, the hits from the max hit bucket get transfered to the min hit bucket. I would have expected a smoother increase in the second half of the buckets.

So that means if your parse flattened the max hits you're at or above the squelch number for that mob.

So 63 spell AC did nothing even though you're far below squelch point? That's odd.

I guess it is probable that for most group content, the softcap is mostly inconsequential (unless you're a heavy twink) since you'll reach the squelch point way before you reach the soft cap and charting the squelch points at various mob levels would be more useful. High end raid mobs probably cannot be squelshed even with the soft cap reached.

That's what it looks like to me too.


No, I don't think that's the right way to look at it. I had the spell AC on for every graph I've posted here. So it's better to think that, for example, the graph showing equal numbers of max-hit and min-hit is best thought of as being at (106 worn AC plus 63 spell AC). Maybe that's equivalent to 169 worn AC and 0 spell AC, I'm not sure.

That's my conclusion too.