Quote:
Originally Posted by Raev
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
This is almost exactly what I did, except rather than measuring the proportion of tank deaths I measured the maximum damage over 100 parses of 30 attacks.
The 0.75 interval hits (25% max hits) vs 0.60 interval hits (40% max hits) come from parses of Sakuragi (in resist gear), Bobbarker, and Argh against the Spiroc Lord.
|
Velious was originally launched with a hardcap in place on live. Meaning, AC was literally worthless for people for players with more than 289 raw AC from gear. Later on in Velious, they put in a softcap with a small return for melee only. It wasn't until the Luclin mitigation/avoidance patch where softcaps gave reasonable returns (along with a host of other changes that I won't get into).
Obviously, that doesn't necessarily apply over here (for good reasons, EQ has enough useless stats). So, I'm going to write the rest of this under the assumption that the server will have an AC softcap with decent returns.
It's a pretty simple idea, you need to be able to reliably survive in the short-run before you should be concerned with reducing damage intake in the long run. I typed up a long post explaining this in detail, but figured I could illustrate this concept in a much easier matter.
Let's take Derakor the Vindicator for example since you brought him up.
Vindicator has a DI of 25 and a DB of 200. Mathematically speaking, evasive discipline will be superior at reducing average damage compared to defensive discipline. However, any intelligent tank is going to be using defensive instead of evasive on Vindicator.
Why is this?
Because with defensive, you can guarantee that a tank can live 3 rounds while defensive. While it is unlikely that an evasive tank will die in 2 rounds, it is a possibility. Obviously, it is a larger possibility with 3 rounds (what I can guarantee a defensive tank living through).
The argument against AC is similar to the argument against evasive. With AC, you're looking at an effect that is seen over the duration of the entire fight. But, in reality, we're really only concerned about tiny sections of the fight (damage spikes) since CHeal is going to 'reset' combat every 1-3 rounds (pending on our rotation). As you decrease the number of rounds, the effects of AC on a smaller number of hits makes for far more variable rounds. With a mob like AoW, you're looking at 1-2 rounds of combat.
Yes, you'll have more of these tiny sections (damage spikes) of the fight with HP stacking, but less of these will matter (be lethal rounds). With AC, you'll have less of these tiny sections, but more of them will matter.
I was one of the biggest proponents of AC stacking on TSW, it's just a very, very dumb thing to do in the Velious era if raid tanking is your goal. With that said, I mentioned item availability in my prior post - it's not like you have much of a choice in stats until augs come along.