blade of carnage bad at lvl 60?

[Troxx]

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

I’ve parsed ac returns here quite in depth. For raid dragons, they largely ignore AC once it is above 1200. 1200 was the magic number. I buff out to 1487 ac and see about the same results in parsing ToV dragons as when I was at 1205. That’s why it doesn’t get love from me.

In groups and even with trash in HoT, you actually do see a difference with higher ac. I’ll dig out the files and post the excel graphs eventually.

This is a very common misconception. Bear with me.

My warrior main on live for years was also named Bedavir and I was a raid leader and main tank. For a period of about 18 months I had the serverwide highest ac across all classes. Brael (well known SK on evilgamer) and I spent a stupidly huge amount of time parsing ac. Ac was my baby for a long time and few understood it or tested it more than I did.

With more trivial xp group and raid trash content, ac on live had the ability to so overpower mob attack in the expansions after Gates of Discord expansion content that you’d have to statistically parse thousands of hits to see a single max hit. I had a few parses vs relevant xp mobs that were over an hour long unslowed where there were only 16 hit values - DIs 17-20 just never happened. While you can never truly have a 0% chance of a max hit, you could get it so low you’d practically never see it.

The misconception was that ac is more valuable vs easier mobs, but that isn’t the case. Vs raid targets until SoFaydwer expansion these ac values were still beefy enough relative to mob attack that tanking start to finish I’d routinely (50% of the time) tank a raid boss 100 to dead and never see a DI20 max. After SoF mob attack ramped up and I went back to seeing 20-25% of hits for max DI.

To better understand what I’m about to say, first understand that parsing mob dps does not tell the full picture. Compared to hit distribution, raw dps differences in high and low ac is underwhelming.

Mob average dps does not kill tanks. Let that sink in. Seriously forget about mob dps as it relates to your chance of death. If it does, that’s a problem if insufficient heals. What kills tanks is burst damage, micro-bursts in a short window, and generally when you strike out and get back to back (or triplicate/quadruplicate) bad rounds. That’s where tanks die.

Ac is not less useful on dangerous high attack high hitting mobs - it’s more important. If you have a drop in max hit frequency from 50 to 45% that’s huge. If the mob never misses a 50% DI20 chance means you will get a full max quad 6.25% of the time. At 45% it drops to 4.1% of the time. At 30% it drops to 0.8% of the time.

AC does lower mob dps, but more importantly it exponentially lowers the lethality of the nature of the mobs dmg output. High ac minimizes the dangerous burst potential and makes the incoming damage more level and predictable.

AC isn’t less important on the high impact raid mobs ... it’s more important.

Hope that helps.