Balancing AC and HP (For Paladins/ShadowKnights)

[Jimjam]

It could be his AC is way too low or way too high for the shield to make a difference.

[koros]

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

It could be his AC is way too low or way too high for the shield to make a difference.

It could be, although if that's the case it should still have a marginal effect. 40 raw AC is a LOT, and the cliff golem is an appropriate leveled mob for a 60 war to be tanking.

[Jimjam]

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

It could be, although if that's the case it should still have a marginal effect. 40 raw AC is a LOT, and the cliff golem is an appropriate leveled mob for a 60 war to be tanking.

Then I guess the AC cap is lower than we thought and as we would expect there is no overcap bonus for shields (unlike live)?

Edit: actually, perhaps p99 has been programmed to correct for the shield AC overcap bonus but the correction slightly overcompensates, hence the shield parse being worse? /shrug

[koros]

Also... you should parse yourself tanking either naked or with the same worn ac as another 60 war with the same agi. That could yield some interesting information about the iksar ac bonus.

[pharmakos]

sakuragi -- what were your raw item AC totals during those tests?

[Splorf22]

I think it is reasonable, even likely, that the shield performed worse due to insufficient sample size. You can see the 95 CI bars are quite large. That's why I was very careful with my conclusions. My suspicion is that the 40AC is good for 1-2% mitigation which the test is simply not measuring. But if I were Kanras I would definitely be rechecking the code for a possible bug.

Sak was at like 170/210 item AC for this test which I think is a pretty reasonable range for most people I think (a full set of indicolite is 155AC according to the wiki). One unknown factor in this whole business is the Iksar AC bonus and how its screwing with things.

Oh, and one last thing. I wrote a little sim code. Even if AC works HP is still by far the way to go IMO. Here are the simulated results for Sakuragi with various amounts of HP against the Spiroc Lord with evasive disc up (I took the numbers from two parses). So at 4500 HP, in order to have a 90% of surviving against the Lord for 100 seconds, he would need a complete heal every 14.5 seconds. AC0 means 15 and 5% chances for max and min hits; AC1 means 14 and 6% chances for max and min hits; AC2 means 13 and 7% chances and so on. I hope all that makes sense.

So according to these sims, even reducing the max hit chance from 15% to 5% (AC 10), which would probably require several hundred item AC at least, is only worth about 600 raw HP. Those results make a lot of sense to me, because even at AC10 you are basically flipping one hit from max to min. If you are getting a CH every 20-25 hits, its quite possible that you could just get unlucky once or twice, whereas HP provide more space for the hits to return to the norm. You can in fact see that each HP is worth more than the previous one. (4500->5000 is worth an additional 2 seconds per CH, but 0->4500 is worth only 11 seconds not 18).

Of course that analysis assumes AC is working . . . [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

caveat lector: i may have had a bug in my code

Increasing HP (4500): 90%: 14.5, 99%: 11.5, 99.9%: 10.5
Increasing HP (4600): 90%: 15.0, 99%: 12.0, 99.9%: 11.5
Increasing HP (4700): 90%: 15.0, 99%: 12.0, 99.9%: 12.0
Increasing HP (4800): 90%: 15.5, 99%: 13.0, 99.9%: 11.5
Increasing HP (4900): 90%: 16.0, 99%: 13.0, 99.9%: 11.5
Increasing HP (5000): 90%: 16.5, 99%: 13.5, 99.9%: 12.0
Increasing HP (5100): 90%: 17.5, 99%: 14.0, 99.9%: 12.0
Increasing HP (5200): 90%: 17.5, 99%: 15.0, 99.9%: 12.5
Increasing HP (5300): 90%: 18.0, 99%: 15.0, 99.9%: 12.5
Increasing HP (5400): 90%: 18.5, 99%: 15.0, 99.9%: 14.0
Increasing HP (5500): 90%: 19.0, 99%: 15.5, 99.9%: 14.5
Increasing HP (5600): 90%: 19.0, 99%: 16.5, 99.9%: 14.5
Increasing HP (5700): 90%: 19.5, 99%: 17.0, 99.9%: 14.5
Increasing HP (5800): 90%: 20.5, 99%: 17.0, 99.9%: 15.0
Increasing HP (5900): 90%: 21.0, 99%: 17.5, 99.9%: 15.0
Increasing HP (6000): 90%: 21.5, 99%: 17.5, 99.9%: 15.0
Increasing AC (0): 90%: 14.5, 99%: 12.0, 99.9%: 11.0
Increasing AC (1): 90%: 14.5, 99%: 12.0, 99.9%: 10.5
Increasing AC (2): 90%: 15.0, 99%: 12.0, 99.9%: 10.0
Increasing AC (3): 90%: 15.0, 99%: 12.0, 99.9%: 10.0
Increasing AC (4): 90%: 15.0, 99%: 12.5, 99.9%: 10.0
Increasing AC (5): 90%: 15.0, 99%: 12.0, 99.9%: 10.0
Increasing AC (6): 90%: 15.5, 99%: 13.0, 99.9%: 12.0
Increasing AC (7): 90%: 15.5, 99%: 13.0, 99.9%: 11.5
Increasing AC (8): 90%: 16.0, 99%: 13.5, 99.9%: 11.5
Increasing AC (9): 90%: 16.5, 99%: 13.5, 99.9%: 12.0
Increasing AC (10): 90%: 17.0, 99%: 14.0, 99.9%: 11.5

[pallius]

Shield bonuses came later in the game. Not classic.

[Sazzabi]

Here is the numbers for my parses on low dark blue mobs, I am a level 51 Troll Sk

Mobs - Nro freeport guards (Guard Brendyl, Guard Stoutman, Guard Fintran), all level 40, max hit - 100, min hit - 17

The 963ac and 837ac parses were around 1 hour total tanking time each. The 916ac and 681ac were about 30 minutes each.


244 raw ac (963ac), with shield, 100agi
avg hit 41,16, hit% 47.20

164 raw ac (837ac), with shield, 100agi
avg hit 45.07, hit% 48.26



216 raw ac (916ac) no shield, 100agi
avg hit 42.13, hit% 48.89

63 raw ac (681ac), no shield, 100agi
avg hit 57.13, hit% 45.91

Based on this I am leaning towards the hardcap on this server not being exactly what it is in Kavhok's post.

[Splorf22]

Nice work Saz. Gonna copy my post from the bug forums:

http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...33&postcount=1

OK, I am guessing that Kanras directly implemented the formulas Treats found. Lets assume this is so. In that case

Originally Posted by above link

Melee Mitigation = (Buffs/4) + (Defense/3) + (Equipment * 4/3)

So we can assume that since Warriors and Monks have almost the same defense skill, their mitigation should depend almost entirely on equipped AC. The really good part about this post is the part we can take as more or less gospel by Kahvok, an EQ designer. They ran some tests around Luclin before the monk AC nerf:

Originally Posted by Kahvok

Class War Pal Mnk
Level 51 51 51
Raw Item AC 184 181 107 (effective: 163)
Avg Hit 72.6 72.9 74.6
% Hits for Max 10.2% 10.5% 11.5%

Class War Pal Mnk (prenerf)
Level 60 60 60
Raw Item AC 296 281 163 (effective: 228)
Avg Hit 107.3 109.9 113.6

Class War Pal Mnk (postnerf)
Effective: 295 281 195
Avg Hit 106 108.9 121.3

Since warriors and monks both have the same defense skill, if the information in Treats' post is correct, then we can compare them directly. Going from 195 to 228 was good for a huge 6.5% reduction in damage. Going from 228 to 289 was good for an additional 5.5% reduction in damage. If there is some sort of diminishing returns (logical) then going from 155 to 195 as I did in my test should be MORE than 6.5% (40 vs 33, and in a higher part of the curve). That's well out of the range of error of the test. Again, these are the kind of numbers that make sense. AC was supposed to be good; no one would have figured out how to stack AC if +40AC was a 2-3% decrease in damage.

If you run the numbers, you'll find that 1AC is good for about a 0.11% increase in damage. 5000HP * 0.1% = 5.5HP, which is exactly the kind of ratio people used to quote. It's probably a bit less for ubermobs with huge attack values, and a bit more for XP mobs with lower values. A bit more if your AC is lower and a bit less if its higher. You get the idea.

Actually this thread is too depressing, lets just let it die. On Live Iksar warriors didn't have to go 3 years without armor upgrades. RAGE

[kaev]

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

Shield bonuses came later in the game. Not classic.

iirc, according to that old (PoP-era?) dev post, the shield "bonus" (i.e. shield AC ignores the AC softcap) came in with the mid-velious melee combat revamp that brought Monks back down from demi-godhood. [edit]was monk nerf really not until Luclin?[/edit]