Ranger ac parsing (I'm serious)

[Salaryman]

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

Anyone have updates to this thread?

For years, I've been saying a narrow band of AC is actually useful for each mob - bcbrown's cleric results suggests this could be as little as a difference of 30 AC or less. To me that is crazy!

The other thing I was interested in, is how AC seems to be almost like a switch - you either mitigate well or mitigate badly. The posts in this thread don't seem to indicate there is much transition between those two states in the narrow band where AC is actually relevant.

RED99

Looks like these nerds got real quiet once I called them out on the fact that they supposedly have access to all these raid shields but have yet to actually test shield ac or even test ac on rangers, which is what the thread is about.

I can tell you from First Hand Experience (FHE) that using a Guardian Robe instead of my Tolunds Darkplate of the Glade has minimal effect and I think the ac cap is around 120 worn ac for rangers, do I take alot of damage from bows and melee in pvp? I dont know, most fights end in my favor because I have faction with the zone or my Legendary status of the Top #1 Number #1 PVPer in all of EverQuest History deters hostility, and rarely have to actualy fight anyone.

Am I going to test anything like the nerds in this thread? No, min maxing is for pve nerds, I am a PVP Legend the Top#1 Number #1 MVP PVPer in all of EverQuest History.

And thats all First Hand Experience (FHE)

RED99

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[bcbrown]

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

Anyone have updates to this thread?

For years, I've been saying a narrow band of AC is actually useful for each mob - bcbrown's cleric results suggests this could be as little as a difference of 30 AC or less. To me that is crazy!

The other thing I was interested in, is how AC seems to be almost like a switch - you either mitigate well or mitigate badly. The posts in this thread don't seem to indicate there is much transition between those two states in the narrow band where AC is actually relevant.

Why do you think the difference could be as little as 30? Looking back over my posts, I found that for the cleric, 163 worn ac + 63 spell ac was almost-fully squelched and 106 worn ac + 63 spell ac had equal spikes at min and max. So that implies 50-60 ac to go from midpoint to squelch, and if it's also 50-60 to go from midpoint to under-squelched (all max hits and no min hits), that implies there's about a 100-120 band within which AC provides a benefit.

I just calculated the average hit for those two parses and got 45.9 and 50.8. So going from midpoint to fully squelched for this mob is about a 5-point-per-hit change, or about 6% or the max 82 hit value. Extrapolating out to something that max-hits for 300, that would be equivalent to a 18 point per hit swing. If we assume a 30 delay and two hits per interval, that's a 12 DPS swing, and if we assume 4 hits per interval, that's a 24 DPS swing. For a mob that has a max hit of 600 and quad hits on every swing that would be 50 dps.

Obviously that extrapolation is unfounded, but I wanted to get a sense of what the DPS impact of AC might be on an easier raid mob. If Shiel gets one hit per swing with a 30 delay that would be going from 15.3 DPS to 16.7 DPS. Would that be significant change in mana used healing in an xp group? Dunno. I was killing Shiel in about 2:30 on the ranger, so 150 seconds, which means a difference of about 240 damage over the whole fight. That's a difference of about 2.5 casts of Healing, or 150 mana. At 18 mana/tick for medding, that would take 49 seconds to recover. So going from midpoint to squelch point in AC in a typical solo fight against a low blue might save you between a half minute to a minute in recovery time. That seems significant.

Originally Posted by Vear99 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Thanks for doing those parses, bcbrown. It definitely seems like the best explanation is that NPCs always get ~65% interval hits and the remaining 35% are either min or max depending on relative AC/ATK. The ad hoc nature of Project 1999 game mechanics never ceases to amaze me, considering how pedantic Nilbog is about quests and such.

After doing those parses I reread Torven's research which Jimjam had previously linked in a different thread: https://www.eqemulator.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=40543. Here's the quote that jumps out to me:

The probability distribution of rolling one of these twenty values follows a shallow bell curve such that DI10 and DI11 will appear more frequently than other values except for DI1 or DI20 when offense == mitigation. DI1 and DI20 appear the most frequently because the ends of the bell curve are compressed into those intervals. When offense == mitigation, DI1 and DI20 will both parse slightly higher than 15%. I call this the "double 15 point".

Lvl61War 224wAC 1061AC 273def 126agi backface Lvl60NPCTestSixty.txt
1] 102: 6694 (15.2%)
2] 119: 1171 (2.6%)
3] 135: 1387 (3.1%)
4] 152: 1483 (3.3%)
5] 168: 1558 (3.5%)
6] 184: 1735 (3.9%)
7] 201: 1772 (4%)
8] 218: 1898 (4.3%)
9] 235: 2068 (4.7%)
10] 251: 2125 (4.8%)
11] 267: 2206 (5%)
12] 284: 2048 (4.6%)
13] 300: 1888 (4.2%)
14] 317: 1808 (4.1%)
15] 333: 1635 (3.7%)
16] 350: 1593 (3.6%)
17] 367: 1456 (3.3%)
18] 383: 1370 (3.1%)
19] 400: 1307 (2.9%)
20] 416: 6778 (15.4%)

There's a few things I want to mention here. First, he did way more parsing than me, 44 thousand total hits. Second, although I earlier concluded that the interval hits were a uniform distribution, I think that might just because I didn't log anywhere near enough hits to distinguish between a uniform distribution and a shallow bell curve - I didn't realize just how shallow the bell curve is. Third, although I agree it looks ad hoc, it does also look like the classical mechanic that p99 is trying to emulate - the original developers were ad hoc, and Nilbog et al are accurately and pedantically replicating it.

[Jimjam]

I must have misunderstood your post for the part about 163, 132 ac for squelch?

[shovelquest]

[Duik]

Looks like these nerds got real quiet once I called them out on the fact that they supposedly have access to all these raid.. blsh blah

Nobody cares about red.
If they do they just play it.

Clever people figure out that banging on about DED99 to PVEers is as pointless as a condom vending machine in the Vatican.

Read the room fool.

[Goregasmic]

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

After doing those parses I reread Torven's research which Jimjam had previously linked in a different thread: https://www.eqemulator.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=40543. Here's the quote that jumps out to me:

Wow, I glossed over that section because it was under pvp (shut up salaryman) but it was there all along. At least we confirmed it worked like this here.

Seeing a mob's distribution we could probably calculate its DB and DI and with enough parsing we could figure out the squelch point for that attack value but I guess mob level is a decent enough proxy for your average mob even if imperfect. It would give us AC gearing targets depending on the content you're going for.

[bcbrown]

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

I must have misunderstood your post for the part about 163, 132 ac for squelch?

I think so. The 163 graph shows a full squelch. The 132 graph shows a roughly 2:1 ratio for min:max hits. The 106 graph shows equal spikes for min and max hits. So it's about 50-60 worn ac to go from the midpoint to full squelch for this mob. Which is still not that big a range - a 44 cleric would have about 40 ac in buffs available, so could take someone about two thirds of the way from the midpoint to the squelch point.

In terms of updates, I've spent my grinding time this past month getting some more AC gear. I got my Kael factions up so I could do the turnin for Barbed Dragonscale Boots, which while perhaps not optimal generally on a ranger are certainly useful for running AC parses. I've also gotten a handful of AC upgrades on my druid, which has led to my guild playfully teasing me as a "druid tank" when I do things like loot a Poison Etched Wristband or Gladiator's Chain Armor. This is why, guys!

I do have a couple of graphs of distributions for Grobb bashers and coldain/velium miners. The bashers were a mix of green and blue while the miners are all xp green. All just about completely squelched, but you can see a couple of the bashers (probably the blue ones) still get in a couple more max hits than the others.

What kind of updates would you like to see? What unanswered questions would you like to see me investigate (with the toons and gear I have available)? My vague plan is to try some parses against level 45-50 mobs to see how the midpoint and squelch points change and what the meaningful range of worn AC values is.

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

Wow, I glossed over that section because it was under pvp (shut up salaryman) but it was there all along. At least we confirmed it worked like this here.

Seeing a mob's distribution we could probably calculate its DB and DI and with enough parsing we could figure out the squelch point for that attack value but I guess mob level is a decent enough proxy for your average mob even if imperfect. It would give us AC gearing targets depending on the content you're going for.

It's amazing how much detail and knowledge there is in that post. I think there's going to be a long process where I go through a long investigation just to find out I've relearned something Torven already explained. In terms of your point about parsing DB and DI, that's really easy to do. You don't need a long parse to find the 20 unique hit values. I think the really valuable long-term project is to find the squelch points for a broad variety of mobs of differing levels and try to come up with a formula that tells you the usable AC range by level of mob. If, for example, we find that 100 worn AC is the squelch point for lvl 20 mobs, 150 for lvl 30 mobs, and 200 for lvl 40 mobs, that lets you gear to hit the squelch point while finding either +str or +hp gear in other slots, then slowly replace that gear with AC gear as you level.

One more note: in my previous post I sketched out some estimates on how much damage is mitigated by hitting the squelch point from the hitpoint. I found that ~50-60 ac mitigates about ~240 damage in a 2:30 fight. So if you're concerned with survivability in a solo fight and have AC in the unsquelched range, the conversion ratio for hp or ac gear is about 4-5 hp to one AC. That's approximately the conventional wisdom, isn't it?

I also re-read the latter half of this thread today, and one thing jumped out to me:

Originally Posted by Vear99 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Catzi: 1262 AC
136 max hits (31.5%)

Ruba: 1389 AC
123 max hits (32.6%)

Sakuragi: 1433 AC
69 max hits (27.4%)

All my parsing has been on non-raid xp targets. This is some data on a raid target. It looks to me like this means that Catzi and Ruba are below the AC value where AC converts max hits into min hits, so every "clipped tail" hit is a max hit, while Sakuragi is within that realm (my prediction is a ~5-8% min hit value). I would love to see the worn AC values and min hit frequency for these three toons.