Has anyone seriously parsed AC?

[pasi]

Originally Posted by heartbrand [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

for tanking that's what I usually do. but I guess the crux of my post was more, does anyone know if AC has a cap here, what the hp > ac value approximation is etc. usually in other MMO's such as WoW mitigation is far greater than EHP [effective health]. do people find that to be the same case here? On EQ Live a number thrown around was 1 AC = 5 HP.

Hey pal.

The 1 AC = 5 HP figure was thrown around for an era that has some key differences from Project1999.

First off, in this era, Complete Healing is a full heal. This changes later on when CHeal goes down to 7500, and you can start to break 7500 HP. For practical purposes, CHeal is also the only strong heal in raiding this era.

In the long run, AC reduces damage taken and adds a small amount of survivability to NPC bursts via a left skewing DI curve. The issue is that your healing is coming through a CHeal chain. The goal of the CHeal chain is to keep the tank alive through damage spikes. While AC will slightly change the probability of damage spikes, your goal is to be spike-proof, not reduce overall damage intake. Slight reductions in damage taken matter a lot more when healing changes from CHeal chains to Light spamming.

With CHeal chains, the healing thrown at you and cleric mana expenditure are the same regardless of your damage mitigation. In other words, it doesn't matter if Tank A has 200 more AC than Tank B - you're still going to be running the same CHeal interval because you are playing around NPC max damage rounds.

So, you would be comparing AC versus HP for the sole purpose of surviving damage spikes. Furthermore, defensive discipline actually de-values the effectiveness of AC relative to HP as the DI is halved through defensive.

So, if your goal is raid tanking, HP is far, far superior in this era than AC.

With that said, it doesn't really matter. The high HP gear is almost all gonna have shitloads of AC (with hammered golden hoop being an obvious offender). It's not like there are augs or anything where you're distributing stat points. You can argue that Kael (AC) vs Skyshrine (stats) is a choice, but the reality is that you're just going to grab the first one that's available.

If I had to ballpark a conversion value, I would do 1 AC = 2 HP for the purposes of raid tanking.