How do Barbarian Shamans and their toys hold up in Velious?

[Orruar]

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

You again chose to ignore 80% of what I wrote.

Did you miss where I pointed out about 5 times that the example I gave is based on absolutely perfect world conditions? Such as, soloing dungeon trash like you've been bragging about in this thread?

You were coming up with all this inane timing math so I decided to play your game. And what I showed is that under all your conditions (which don't actually occur in this game), the regen is "just as good" as stun immunity. That's me proving you wrong, once again.

It was your example I was using. If you didn't think it was realistic and aren't willing to stick by it, you shouldn't have used it. And those numbers didn't show that regen is just as good as stun immunity. They showed that you gain the same number of hp in both cases, while saving 400 mana if you have innate regen. Do you stop reading paragraphs after the first sentence?

But of course the two bonuses aren't "just as good" as each other. Things don't actually happen like you're trying to say in this thread, and stun immunity gives you a huge amount of flexibility and a "get out of bullshit free" card that +8 standing regen doesn't give you.

Yep, I've already pointed out that if you're not good enough at multitasking to properly handle maintaining torpor without interrupts, you should probably go ogre. It's an easier race to play, and you can get 97-98% of the power of an Iksar with 30-40% less work. Still, if you're not timing your spells around melee cycles and bash cycles, then you're opening yourself up to interrupts, which you say are a huge problem. Even if I played ogre, I'd be aware of these cycles to reduce interrupts as much as possible, so I'm shocked an expert such as you hadn't heard of this until yesterday.

The fact that you're even mentioning mana loss really shows that you have no idea what you're doing as a shaman. Shamans don't measure efficiency in mana, they measure efficiency in time. It doesn't matter if you lose mana because it's just some extra time you have to spend to regain that mana through canni. The question is, does that extra time put you over the mob dps/hp regen threshold. Unless you're soloing something right up to the limit of what's possible, 5 Canni IVs isn't going to do that, so once again you're saying things that are irrelevant to skilled shaman. What you're saying may sound good to people who don't play the class, but to someone with high end shaman experience, everything you say is just a bunch of bullshit from some guy who managed to solo some trash mob that hundreds of people have soloed before him and now feels like he's some sort of guru of shamanic knowledge.

A good shaman considers many things. Mana is a requirement for our spells, and mana efficiency does allow you to cast more dots. Stacking more dots gives you shorter fights, which reduces the chance of something bad happening. These things may be irrelevant to you, but don't pretend they don't matter to skilled shaman.

And no other shaman on this server has solo broken and held an HS south camp, to my knowledge. It may have been done on live, but shit here is much more resistant, and I invite you to try your hand at this feat. Of course, you're just some scrub shaman from live who solo'ed WW dragons like 10 shamans on every single server did. You are such a scrub that you didn't even realize you could time spells around the bash timer, as my sig so eloquently displays. The fact that you worry about things like interrupts when any decent shaman times their torpors between melee rounds shows how little you know.

Lol, this statement is really telling. That gives you 6 Turgur's attempts if you just chain Turgur's casts together. Less since you'll be mixing other spells during the Turgur's cool-down. You're going to get fucking owned in Velious, dude. You need to prepare way before 1 minute on MR mobs, and you don't just stand there like a retard spamming the Turgur's button over and over. You begin throwing it into your torpor/canni rotation much earlier so that you're safe from being insta-gibbed in the case of bad resist luck. When slow wearing off is an instant loss, you don't depend on one slow out of 4 or 5 landing, especially in Velious fights which could take an hour or longer. You will die in those situations, there's no defying resist luck over that amount of time.

If it takes more than 1 minute, I'll learn that lesson and adjust accordingly. Nothing I solo here resists reslow more than that. Adaptation to new situations and new information is one of the great skills human beings possess. It's only too bad you can't adapt to the new information presented to you here. I suspect you actually are learning quite a bit about paying more attention to timing of your spell casts, but at this point you are just trying to save face, either to preserve your ego or your image on these forums.

Regen isn't better than stun immunity. That's been discussed to death in this thread.

Bringing up AC in Velious is a joke. You're going to be well over the priest softcap when even your rings are 30 AC.

Iksar need +180 stamina to cap.
Ogres need +128 stamina to cap.

Iksar need to be concerned about an extra 52 points of stamina to cap. Ogre can give you better gear flexibility, possibly allowing for more AC than the small Iksar bonus in the first place. Especially if you can invest in a high AC shield, which overcaps.

I knew you'd bring up AC softcap. What's the first half of that word? Soft. What does that mean? It means you still gain benefits above it. On the other hand, stamina has a hard cap. Getting above 255 means nothing. It doesn't matter if an ogre can reach AC softcap, the Iksar will still be higher and will still take less damage. Gear flexibility due to ogre STA is one other point to consider, but we've spent most of this time showing how ogre stun resist offers only very moderate gains. Anyway, I'd imagine once you're raid geared to the point where the ogre is hitting the ac softcap, the iksar has hit the STA hardcap. With buff and potion, I'm already pretty close to STA cap in kunark gear. Sure I wear a lot of +STA stuff, but with just a few raid pieces in Velious, I could be capped without any special focus given to STA at all.

Eh, if you consider getting "owned" having someone twist everything you say and quote it out of context since they can't come up with actual evidence that they are correct, then maybe. I'd rather be right regardless, so that other players don't get misinformed by players like Orruar.

If that's all it takes to "win arguments" on this forum then...

Except that I actually quoted precisely what you said and what you were arguing. You stated your position clearly that you couldn't time your spells around the bash timer. Once that argument didn't pan out, you conveniently changed it to say that playing ogre just frees you up as you don't have to worry about timing around bash. My quotes of you couldn't be more in context than they are.

[pasi]

I brought this up on an earlier post, but you're going to reach the priest softcap for AC very quick in Velious. The Mischief armor has crazy AC, as does pretty much all raid loot, and kael armor.

The +12 AC or whatever it is not only means little with the softcap, but you're also not getting the 18 AC you could get from Bramblecoat from buying a JBBP (no you're not getting a Tunare belt anytime soon either since that bitch isn't gonna be itemized until way later).

[Orruar]

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

I brought this up on an earlier post, but you're going to reach the priest softcap for AC very quick in Velious. The Mischief armor has crazy AC, as does pretty much all raid loot, and kael armor.

The +12 AC or whatever it is not only means little with the softcap, but you're also not getting the 18 AC you could get from Bramblecoat from buying a JBBP (no you're not getting a Tunare belt anytime soon either since that bitch isn't gonna be itemized until way later).

Yeah, but any amount of ac over the softcap is better than any amount of STA over the hardcap. I just checked and I'm at 247 STA in kunark gear with only 2 pieces (12 STA) really chosen solely because of the STA. Give me like 2 pieces of Velious gear and I'd be capped on STA and could replace my STA devoted gear.

[pasi]

It should also be noted that AC on live was hard-capped until a patch slightly before PoP. Or at least that's what the developers said back then. Who knows if they knew their own code properly, but I imagine P99 will go off what Kavhok said on the matter.

Kavhok
EQ Designer
Posts: 14

Your AC cap was lowered. That was absolutely and unequivocally a nerf. I didn't mean in any way to imply otherwise.

Let me give a more full explanation of what happened, though. Here's how the AC formula used to work before the patch immediately preceding PoP:

The AC from your items was added up, but the value used for it was hard capped based on your level. This was the same for all classes. Once you had 289 raw AC from items (or 385 as a cloth class, since they get less effect from item AC), that was it. More AC from items wouldn't do anything.

After this, it added your class bonuses (including the monk bonus, which is equivalent to your level + 5 in raw item AC), defense skill bonus, agility bonus, and the AC from spell buffs.

Total AC at this point was capped again, this time based on class. In the Kunark-era code, this was a hard cap, but sometime during Velious it was changed to a soft cap for melee classes only. The return was fairly small, though.


The pre-PoP patch did a few things:

- The cap on item AC was no longer used except at lower levels (twinking was a concern since that was before recommended level items were in heavy use).
- Shield AC was added to the class-based cap to give shields more viability
- Class AC caps were changed. Monks were lowered the most, but beastlords were lowered to the same level as druids (yes, they were nerfed too). Cleric and shaman caps were raised above druids. The caps generally followed the armor archetypes of plate/chain/leather/cloth.
- All classes were given returns on AC over the cap, not just melee classes. All casters and priests received the least, followed by the melee classes. Rogues got the same return as monks, as did berserkers when the class was added. Beastlords and rangers got slightly more, followed by bards, then knights, then warriors.

The overall goal was to make the average dps (including mitigation, avoidance, block/dodge/etc.) taken for melee classes to be approximately:
Warrior > Knight > Monk > Bard > Ranger = Beastlord = Rogue

Aggregate data from live servers at the time was taken to determine median-AC stats for each class. Parses were run against NPCs 3-4 levels lower, facing front. The characters had cleric AC and shaman agility buffs and faced the NPC. The results of the parse were consistent with statistical analysis of the formulas in code:

Class War Pal Mnk
Level 51 51 51
Raw Item AC 184 181 107
Agility 157 144 169
Dodge 3.4% 3.1% 4.4%
Block 0 % 0% 10.2%
Riposte 4.4% 3.9% 4.1%
Parry 5.2% 4.6% 0%
Skill Evasion 12.9% 11.5% 18.7%
Hit Rate 61.2% 61.3% 58.2%
Avg Hit 72.6 72.9 74.6
% Hits for Max 10.2% 10.5% 11.5%
Avg Dmg / Round 59.7 61.1 54.5
DPS 28.2 28.8 25.7


Class War Pal Mnk
Level 60 60 60
Raw Item AC 296 281 163
Agility 177 152 187
Dodge 4.3% 3.9% 4.9%
Block 0 % 0% 11.4%
Riposte 4.8% 4.3% 4.5%
Parry 5.8% 5.2% 0%
Skill Evasion 14.9% 13.4% 20.8%
Hit Rate 59.4% 59.7% 59.3%
Avg Hit 107.3 109.9 113.6
% Hits for Max 10.4% 11.7% 13.6%
Avg Dmg / Round 87.4 91.7 86.1
DPS 50.8 53.3 50


The problem was that the average plate-equipped warriors and knights had barely any lead on monks in mitigation, due to the monk bonus, but the monk still had the lead in evasion. Contrary to popular belief, this is what prompted the nerf to monk mitigation, NOT high-end monks being rampage tanks.

The changes had little effect on average level 51 warriors and knights, but since the average level 51 monk was over the new nerfed AC cap, it increased their average damage taken per hit and increased the percent chance of max hits (in the above example) to 13%. Monks who had better than this median AC were hit harder by the nerf since it lowered their effective AC even more. Level 60 monks with exceptionally high item AC (Ssra+) weren't hit quite as hard because the uncapping of item AC gave them more returns on AC over the class cap. The median level 60 changes looked like this (evasion, of course, remained the same):

Class War Pal Mnk
Avg Hit 106 108.9 121.3
% Hits for Max 9.8% 11.2% 18.4%
Avg Dmg 86.4 90.9 91.9
DPS 50.2 52.8 53.4


Several months into PoP, the nerf was partially repealed and the monk AC cap was raised to the same level as druids and beastlords. Their return on AC over the cap was left at the same level. The reasoning at the time was based on a number of factors: the percentage of hits for max made taking damage even more unpredictable and raised the likelihood of one-round deaths more than we wanted, median AC increased for nearly all levels 51+ due to the new armor in PoP and trickle-down of old armor into the economy, and other issues were brought up.

[Nordenwatch]

ITT: barb shamans yell at reikerz

[douglas1999]

Barb shams are statistically probably the worst off, but it's a pretty negligible difference and the most important thing is that they are by far the best LOOKING when you start rocking totemic\jaundiced. And it's all about looking smooth as shit.

[Hagglebaron]

The server's elite shamans seem to be mostly barbarians, so that has to say something right?

Also, agree that not looking like a fat retard (ogre) is a great reason to go for the other races!

[fadetree]

This thread is +1 for entertainment. And boobies > all imo.

[Droog007]

Troll is the only viable race to roll as a shaman - based purely on aesthetics.
Furthermore, Trolls are easily the best proportioned and best animated race in the game.

Popeye arms + wicked pierce animation + forward-leaning waddle-run = pure gaming awesome [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

edit:
In summary,
Trolls are fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet.

[Autotune]

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

The server's elite shamans seem to be mostly barbarians, so that has to say something right?

Also, agree that not looking like a fat retard (ogre) is a great reason to go for the other races!

That's because true badasses don't need a racial to be pro.