The community at large are idiots. Most people suck at EQ.

As a non raider I've always been an AC guy, both here and live.

But you rarely have to choose all or nothing, outside of the Golden Earring example. Most good gear has solid AC as well as str/sta/hp.

the easier the content, the better AC is

harder content, HP

pretty easy to understand

Well, yes that’s true :)

I was just hoping you had more to share since you mentioned parses and it being game breaking/making.

I’ll mess around a bit when time permits. Just lvl 60 pally but I can adjust about 100 worn AC including a sevelak shield. Should be able to calculate incoming (tanking) dps on a cliff golem with some healer help. A few fights averaged in each setup.



Exactly this. With a limited supply of items the best are stacked with all sorts of stats. Only a few head-scratchers outside the HGL

I play a warrior and parsed HGLs vs Black Sapphire Electrum Earrings while leveling in The Hole for hours at a time and hundreds of kills (ie, not an amazing sample size, but not terrible), and experienced about a 4% increase in damage taken when tanking Slab and Docks mobs with the HGLs vs the Black Sapphire earrings and only a 1% damage increase when tanking GT mobs, which average a few levels higher.

Now that I'm 60 I've tried stacking AC while ramp tanking vindi compared to when I'm in full HP mode MT'ing Vindi, and am able to pull off a modest 150ish displayed AC difference. I've found that in RT/AC mode the average hit I take is about 20 less than in MT/AC mode. That said, my sample size here is very small (I've only thought to track this over the course of a few vindis).

Take this for whatever it's worth...which is probably not much :p

AC is broken on p99, the numbers are way off and hard AC has barely the impact that it did on Live

tanks overwhelmingly used Kael armor back on live because of the higher raw (worn) AC, and they were parsing their mitigation back then to confirm it (something that wasn't as common in Vanilla/Kunark)

as a Live Shaman, AC was so good that there was a huge noticeable difference between shamans wearing leather/chain and shamans wearing "plate" with high AC. A set of Totemic or Jaundiced meant you took significantly less damage while slowing.

on p99 it's wildly different. You can't really "feel" the difference with higher worn AC like you could on live. There is some parsing which shows it still has an impact, but it's not definitive like it once was.

Yeah on the forums it is easy to assume BiS BiS BiS but the reality is you’re grouping in chardok between HoT, wexit, dragon raids … you’ve still got like a karana’s tear or sarnak earring of the station and a golden earring drops … of course you roll for it.

Vindi is a terrible mob to parse AC on. It don't mean shit for him.

AC hasn't been broken here for 5 years.

And shamans get some of the highest returns for worn AC of any class. Aside from monks and warrior they seem to get by far the best results. Ditto shamans, druids, clerics, rogues... Then some classes AC does absolutely nothing (cough ranger, absolutely zero effect at any level).

I'd say what is broken is mob ATK values here. Kunark dragons, vindi, velious dragons, some velious named etc all just ignore AC as they are so incredibly over tuned. But random other content like velious trash/flurries, dagarn, zland..ac is incredible. It's the ATK values that are completely jacked to shit here, seeminly at random.

The fact that resists are also completely broken on p99 and it's effectively impossible to resist any dragon ae in the game does sway towards stacking HP for a lot of classes though. Even 255's across the board doesn't see much effect on a huge amount of content. Look at old live ntov, sontalak, vp videos from 20+ years ago and dudes in very basic late kunark gear and early velious mismatched junk barely took an AE from Sont.

It is still broken - just not so severely and in a different direction - I don't want to downplay how the implementation has improved, because it really has.


The issue, as you identify, are there are many mobs which are massively overtuned. The classic velious experience is AC hard cap (at a relatively achievable number) and very late velious minimal gains after the cap for the tankiest classes. On this server, most classes make decent gains after the cap as a fudge to make amends for the overtuned mobs.

This was fudged as it was apparently easier to produce classic differences in tankiness between classes that way rather than rebalance and retest everything from the top down. I can respect that logic.


Due to the work involved in rebalancing every single mob in the game (not just for attack, but accuracy, avoidance and mitigation too) I don't see the issue ever being resolved to full classic. That is a bit of a shame, but since the current implementation has SoV being defeated day 1 in Kunark gear, and the massive over proliferation of high end gear p99 servers accumulate it does seem to be a compromise which works reasonably well.