Post from Yoda off Steelwarrior forum
Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2005 2:52 pm
Many thanks to you Celeritum and Brabble for pursuing and/or correcting my first post. I will try to go on further today.
Beforehand I will comment previous post...
Celeritum, your post is easily understandable and fully comprehensive; the different approach (with tables) has the advantage of being much easier to understand than a long story. But I will keep my first form for this new post.
Brabble, thanks for making clear this little paragraph and for checking my spelling, my grammar, and my expression, I haven't see any deviance from my thought.
Smashed, I completely agree with you, avoidance AC is not affected by worn AC but only by lvl, stat, and skills as you mentioned. I planned to speak about avoidance when getting on the worn effects.
Thanks Gobsmash Emgood for prolonging my post, but I may correct a little bit the second part of your post (about melee damage). Indeed warrior's RNG is still 1-20, it's its DI that change by 95%, thus if you want to translate it into the RNG it becomes 0.95-19 (floating values instead of integers) and not 0-19 because the min hit isn't DB (1000 in your example) but DB+95%*DI (1142 with rounding to the lowest for your example). And avoidance isn't 2% per 10 for a cap at 20%, it is commonly valued at the half: 10 avoidance gives 1% more miss for a maximum of 10%. Moreover, Frodlin's parse gives that 10 avoidance is 0.62% (+/- 0.56%) thus it is possible for it to be at 1% but it is highly improbable for it to rate at 2%.
Ok back to my work...
third step: about softcap and class (de)advantage
This part of the game has a very long history, I won't tell anything about that since I am neither a storyteller nor an historian. But what you have to understand is that with all the expansion coming out and their increased-stat gears, developers had to implement a system that will make your gears less effective the better they are to keep the balance between expansions.
Indeed the main purpose of the gears, when tanking, is to reduce the damage you globally take. So in this part we will mainly focus on the global dps you may receive depending on your AC. Such kind of research is quite old but the most recent results are the more interesting. It appears that the dps you take from a given mob depending on your AC is multi-linear (see thread on Monkly business, fig here, and fig here). These figures show what the community call "AC sofcap". They are breakpoints in the linear law of the dps upon your AC. For a long time we though there were only one AC softcap per class but monk's parses highlight that there is more than one along all the spectrum of AC you can reach.
Moreover what is clear is that all the different classes have their own "AC softcaps" and their own "return after the softcap". I mean that the slope of the linear law after (and even possibly before) the AC softcap will differ depending on your class. Currently (see Dev's post on Monk section of EQ board, sorry but I lost the link) warrior have the best "return after the softcap", which is shared with knights, shortly followed by monks, but warrior keep the higher softcap over all classes.
On a side note I would add that softcaps aren't fixed values but that they depend on mobs' characteristics (developers' statements).
step four: and how do I get hit for less?
Obviously you just have to get better AC and you will take less damage, but it's not the only possibility you have.
you can purchase the mitigation line of AA (CS +10%, PE +2%, LI +5%, DI 2.5%) ~20% total dps reduction. They all have the effect of increasing your softcap and thus improving the efficiency of your gears (a naked toon's AC is below the first softcap).
you can use a shield. Indeed a shield-flagged item (thus neither a mug nor a weapon) equipped in your secondary slot (doesn't work on your back) will not be affect by the softcap. In other word, a shield will raise both your AC and your softcap by the same amount so that you will always have full benefit of the shield's AC.
you can use a rune buff to buffer the amount of damage you can take. Samely with a vie-like rune that will partially reduce total melee damage by a fixed amount, and a fixed percentage of each hit (note that knights have now a disciple with that exact same effect except it is limited in time too).
lastly, there are two other effects that change the formula of the hit's damage. Remember that we found the damage being DM=DB+x*DI, actually we will complicate this formula to explain what does the two next effect. Now we will use this formula:
DM = INT( DB*mod1 + x*DI*mod2 )
x->INT(x) being the function that truncates a floating number into an integer.
mod1 and mod2 being two parameters used to model the effect of the last two possibilities to reduce damage : shielding and defence.
shielding is the worn effect of the same name. It has the effect of reducing all incoming hits from a mob by a constant value; and this value is based on mob's characteristics: shielding is represented by mod1 in this formula.
Thus shielding is very valuable on mobs with high minimum damage and even more when the mob has on top of it a low DI. Shielding is very effective for a tank since all the AC he can pile on him will only translate all the hits into more minimum hit, so that a tank with infinite AC should be hit only for minimum, and thus will still receive damage. Thus shielding brings what all the AC can't, which is reducing the min hit. Thus shielding and AC are a good pair that need to be raised together. But keep in mind that shielding caps at 35%.
defence is named after the famous warrior defensive discipline. Defence is obviously the mod2 parameter of the above formula. Currently the warrior class has innately 5% defence and thus moving immediately a 125-600 hitter into a 123-575 hitter. The only other source of defence in this game is currently the disciplines: defensive and stonewall for warrior (45%, stackable with innate, for 3min), Earthwalk (monk) Protective Spirit (beastlord) and Stonestance (rogue) for 90% and less than 18s.
what is very important to highlight is that even is such effect gets less profitable for reducing the dps on an heavy tank (since more AC yields more min hit and that def has lowest effect on min hit), but actually, as monks cry it for years, having a low dps as income isn't enough to make a good tank since monk have the lowest dps among all classes (see this) but still are unwanted as MT. Indeed you have to take into account the chance of dying due to an unlucky series of hit (no miss and multiple max hit in a raw) that won't be healed quickly enough. Thus what makes healer's life easier is the decrease of the number of “spikesâ€
Beforehand I will comment previous post...
Celeritum, your post is easily understandable and fully comprehensive; the different approach (with tables) has the advantage of being much easier to understand than a long story. But I will keep my first form for this new post.
Brabble, thanks for making clear this little paragraph and for checking my spelling, my grammar, and my expression, I haven't see any deviance from my thought.
Smashed, I completely agree with you, avoidance AC is not affected by worn AC but only by lvl, stat, and skills as you mentioned. I planned to speak about avoidance when getting on the worn effects.
Thanks Gobsmash Emgood for prolonging my post, but I may correct a little bit the second part of your post (about melee damage). Indeed warrior's RNG is still 1-20, it's its DI that change by 95%, thus if you want to translate it into the RNG it becomes 0.95-19 (floating values instead of integers) and not 0-19 because the min hit isn't DB (1000 in your example) but DB+95%*DI (1142 with rounding to the lowest for your example). And avoidance isn't 2% per 10 for a cap at 20%, it is commonly valued at the half: 10 avoidance gives 1% more miss for a maximum of 10%. Moreover, Frodlin's parse gives that 10 avoidance is 0.62% (+/- 0.56%) thus it is possible for it to be at 1% but it is highly improbable for it to rate at 2%.
Ok back to my work...
third step: about softcap and class (de)advantage
This part of the game has a very long history, I won't tell anything about that since I am neither a storyteller nor an historian. But what you have to understand is that with all the expansion coming out and their increased-stat gears, developers had to implement a system that will make your gears less effective the better they are to keep the balance between expansions.
Indeed the main purpose of the gears, when tanking, is to reduce the damage you globally take. So in this part we will mainly focus on the global dps you may receive depending on your AC. Such kind of research is quite old but the most recent results are the more interesting. It appears that the dps you take from a given mob depending on your AC is multi-linear (see thread on Monkly business, fig here, and fig here). These figures show what the community call "AC sofcap". They are breakpoints in the linear law of the dps upon your AC. For a long time we though there were only one AC softcap per class but monk's parses highlight that there is more than one along all the spectrum of AC you can reach.
Moreover what is clear is that all the different classes have their own "AC softcaps" and their own "return after the softcap". I mean that the slope of the linear law after (and even possibly before) the AC softcap will differ depending on your class. Currently (see Dev's post on Monk section of EQ board, sorry but I lost the link) warrior have the best "return after the softcap", which is shared with knights, shortly followed by monks, but warrior keep the higher softcap over all classes.
On a side note I would add that softcaps aren't fixed values but that they depend on mobs' characteristics (developers' statements).
step four: and how do I get hit for less?
Obviously you just have to get better AC and you will take less damage, but it's not the only possibility you have.
you can purchase the mitigation line of AA (CS +10%, PE +2%, LI +5%, DI 2.5%) ~20% total dps reduction. They all have the effect of increasing your softcap and thus improving the efficiency of your gears (a naked toon's AC is below the first softcap).
you can use a shield. Indeed a shield-flagged item (thus neither a mug nor a weapon) equipped in your secondary slot (doesn't work on your back) will not be affect by the softcap. In other word, a shield will raise both your AC and your softcap by the same amount so that you will always have full benefit of the shield's AC.
you can use a rune buff to buffer the amount of damage you can take. Samely with a vie-like rune that will partially reduce total melee damage by a fixed amount, and a fixed percentage of each hit (note that knights have now a disciple with that exact same effect except it is limited in time too).
lastly, there are two other effects that change the formula of the hit's damage. Remember that we found the damage being DM=DB+x*DI, actually we will complicate this formula to explain what does the two next effect. Now we will use this formula:
DM = INT( DB*mod1 + x*DI*mod2 )
x->INT(x) being the function that truncates a floating number into an integer.
mod1 and mod2 being two parameters used to model the effect of the last two possibilities to reduce damage : shielding and defence.
shielding is the worn effect of the same name. It has the effect of reducing all incoming hits from a mob by a constant value; and this value is based on mob's characteristics: shielding is represented by mod1 in this formula.
Thus shielding is very valuable on mobs with high minimum damage and even more when the mob has on top of it a low DI. Shielding is very effective for a tank since all the AC he can pile on him will only translate all the hits into more minimum hit, so that a tank with infinite AC should be hit only for minimum, and thus will still receive damage. Thus shielding brings what all the AC can't, which is reducing the min hit. Thus shielding and AC are a good pair that need to be raised together. But keep in mind that shielding caps at 35%.
defence is named after the famous warrior defensive discipline. Defence is obviously the mod2 parameter of the above formula. Currently the warrior class has innately 5% defence and thus moving immediately a 125-600 hitter into a 123-575 hitter. The only other source of defence in this game is currently the disciplines: defensive and stonewall for warrior (45%, stackable with innate, for 3min), Earthwalk (monk) Protective Spirit (beastlord) and Stonestance (rogue) for 90% and less than 18s.
what is very important to highlight is that even is such effect gets less profitable for reducing the dps on an heavy tank (since more AC yields more min hit and that def has lowest effect on min hit), but actually, as monks cry it for years, having a low dps as income isn't enough to make a good tank since monk have the lowest dps among all classes (see this) but still are unwanted as MT. Indeed you have to take into account the chance of dying due to an unlucky series of hit (no miss and multiple max hit in a raw) that won't be healed quickly enough. Thus what makes healer's life easier is the decrease of the number of “spikesâ€
Much better compilation than ive read in the past. The other posts ive read on other boards about ac softcaps and damage intake mostly just had equations and nothing to explain them.