AC Seeming to have little to no impact

[cormag]

On the other hand: the iksar AC curve seems to be a little more even compared to the human data here http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=92

[Schortt]

I'll throw a betabuffed human monk into the mix next time I do some testing to see if it matters (probably a warrior too). Cliff Golems are handy for testing on Blue because you can convince your cleric buddy to hammer over and spam you with heals for awhile, but their relatively low max hit means it's more difficult to show significant differences. Perun's test is great work and shows that AC isn't doing as much as some people would like, but the closeness of the numbers makes it really tough to tell anything other than AC values over 800ish are having less of an effect than the RNG for test runs that are short enough to preserve your sanity.

A lot of the concern about AC seems to stem from this idea that we need to make sure it's working for Velious when numbers get bigger and fights last longer so people are making informed choices about gearing - just another reason to be testing on hard hitting Velious mobs on Beta rather than sissy stuff on Blue.

[wycca]

Thanks so much for testing, the # of swings seems good. It's obvious that AC scaling does work on p99....likely in group content at least (where I've always thought it had noticable returns). Not so sure about raid content sometimes =P.


Softcap AC & returns over softcap testing on p99 does require eliminating alot of variables imo.

- Monk low-weight bonus ac, a mitigation ac bonus on top of a softcap?
- Iksar bonus ac - a mitigation ac bonus on top of a softcap?

Either one would raise the apparent softcap and cover some AC scaling/returns issues. Heck, it could be possible that an iksar monk is tanking better than warriors because of a softcap and returns over cap issue.

- Need to know raw ac from a gearset you're parsing really.
- Ideally would eliminate iksar ac and monk bonus ac, and conduct testing soley through scaling of raw (ie worn) ac to discover a softcap. You could then go back and repeat the test with monk ac and iksar ac if you wanted to know what those are worth on p99 btw.
- Should aim to discover softcap, then returns over cap. Would be interesting to conduct test with warrior to compare.

Boring for sure, I'd be game to help conduct the tests though, would finally give us some insight into the softcap/returns system on p99 and help people evaluate if AC is truly worth anything.

[deadlycupcakez]

Even with the same amount of hits you'll take 6500 more damage. I'm just pointing out from a clerics viewpoint in a longer term group setting, the mitigation of that extra 6,500 damage seems very valuable to my mana pool/appears to be working properly.

[Ciroco]

Do DB and DI work the same way here as they do on Live? If so, parsing against one type of mob isn't enough to prove a lack of effectiveness.

[Nirgon]

I just wanna stroke your beard

[koros]

bump?

[Schortt]

I'm still working on collecting data. Will hopefully have enough to throw up another post after the weekend. I've got comparisons on monk and war tanking ST trash. I still need to do some more straightforward comparisons on lower level stuff as mob level is definitely making a difference w/r/t AC effectiveness.

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

If anyone wants to provide those min/max/interval numbers on existing parses I'd be happy to plug the data in.

I'll try to make this available too.

[koros]

Nice. Do you have the min/max hit of that mob you were tanking? If I can figure out the interval we can probably figure out really quickly how much of an effect AC is having.

[Throndor]

The Siren's den in Siren's Grotto may also prove to be a somewhat effective place to gather parse data, as the mob types are very limited and lvl ranging is minimal while still providing consistently above-lvl-55 mobs.

Sleeper's Tomb's trash mob-level varies considerably, and may prove problematic in obtaining consistency in your independent variables (the mob's lvl, class-type etc).