Augmentations

[Spinecrak]

Looking for some input, suggestions, opinions, and thoughts about augs.

I consider myself an AC based warrior. When thinking about the HP/AC balance, I generally value 1 AC as being equal to 10 HP. When trying to determine upgrades, I convert the Aug to a straight HP value to compare them by multiplying the AC by 10, and adding that value to to the augs HP.

For example, if an Aug is 30 AC and 80 HP, I "value" it at 380. (30x10=300, 300+80=380).
In the event of a tie, I side with whichever Aug has a higher AC.

Does This sound extreme? Crazy? Open to any advice or suggestions please, augs always drive me crazy.

Feel free to click on my magelo and see the augs I have equipped. I put unused augs in my clickies (first 2-3 bags in inventory), and am open to (and hoping for) suggestions If there are any augs I should swap out.

The only Aug Not floating around in my inventory is my BiC; 18 AC and 200 HP.

HALP MEEEEE

[Spinecrak]

I think I'm gonna swap out my Drop of Dread (30AC 80HP) for my Silver Threaded Worn Gear (24AC 145HP).

Anyone know the exact AC value for Heroic Agility? Or is it still broken?

[Draghin]

I use the same ac/hp ratio.
however i do wonder that with our hp% aas should we adjust for that? cause for 100 hps we get 110 hps i think.
I think H Agility is still broken but i think you was the last to confirm that so use that for what its worth.

I probally am not the best help here cause i went the AC tank route too. the only thing i can think is the extra hp only helps us when we are full or a heal is casted that over caps our max.
but the ac will migrate damage till we are dead.
/shrug...

[Draghin]

just looked at your mag and on your BP it has this effect:
War All Hate (worn)

WAR All Hate Mod Class: noneMana: 0
Casting time: 0 sec
Skill: Special
Target: Targeted PC/NPC
Duration: 03:15:00

Slot 1: Decrease Agro Multiplier by 22%

lol typo or sony playing a game on us warriors?

as far as augs go i think i hate deciding more then you.

[Spinecrak]

just looked at your mag and on your BP it has this effect:
War All Hate (worn)

WAR All Hate Mod Class: noneMana: 0
Casting time: 0 sec
Skill: Special
Target: Targeted PC/NPC
Duration: 03:15:00

Slot 1: Decrease Agro Multiplier by 22%

lol typo or sony playing a game on us warriors?

as far as augs go i think i hate deciding more then you.

Newp, I dont like to get hit, so I killed a few rangers and imbued my BP with Jolting Kicks.

Back in the Demi days, I valued Hp over AC. I didnt tank nameds, the trash hit me for 500 or so, and I needed the HP to outlive the AoEs and shit.

In the PoR days, I saw AC's value rise in my book to roughly 1ac = 3 hp. Zayix and I had many spirited conversations about this, where he urged me to value it roughly around the ratio of 1ac = 6 hp.

In TSS, AoE's were still a thing, but the mobs hit a bunch harder. Trash hurt. I remember going into Ashengate for the first time, and I could only tank if I was running final stand. I also decided at this time to finish my CA / CS AAs. Yes, I was bad. AC suddenly was worth 6hp to me.

TBS, i calculated out at 6.5. SoF I jumped it to 8.5. SOD I put it at 10, and its stayed there. In my opinion, with mobs that hit for blatantly silly amounts, AC is the only way to go. Named hit for over 20k (in SOD, the 12k-15k hitters made me kinda nod toward this as well). If i traded out my AC augs for HP augs, What would I gain? Even if I had oobur 200hp augs in every slot, it would be arguably a HP gain of around 2200 hp (since my AC augs DO give some HP). How much AC would i lose? Many HP heavy augs are gimped on AC. On the modifiers tab of the Magelo, it says about AC for me ::

Total from items 2387
Total from augments 813
Total 3200

So, My AC heavy augments, that I value at 1ac = 10hp make up 1/4 of my equipped AC.

Looking at HP, which I obviously do not favor...

Total from items 23777
Total from augments 2570
Total 26347

So, I still gain almost 2.6k hp from my AC heavy augs.

Anyways, the point I'm failing to make due to sheer sleepiness is, if a fucker is hittin you for 22k a swing, what matters more? an extra 4k HP? or an extra 500 ac? Like you said, Mitigation and protection helps you from start to finish, on every single hit. The way i reason it, if I parsed, and could do this, I would think if you added up all the damage recieved that the higher AC gave me, would it be higher than the HP a HP spec warrior gains over me? Personally, as the expansion mobs get nastier, I believe the answer is yes.

[Lrrac]

Since I am an "Oh Shit!" speed bump tank, I tried to find a way for me to survive long enough for a warrior to be able to take over. I found that AC is still king. As I increased my AC with augs that had hps it made it all the better and I could actually tank to finish the round of Pallorax for example. It helped the raid / group refocus and not wipe.

Lrrac
Memento Reejeryn

[Draghin]

I have to concur with you on the effects of AC. since i have went from mid 5k ac to my 6k+ now i can take the trash in FoS w/o a merc now and if i use weapons with taps i rarely drop below 90% even with 2 doggies beatin on me.
UF still beats me down pretty easily though. but my CA/CS is only at 29/33 .. i be workin on it though AAs just got to 1400

[Ughbash]

Generally I go for AC.

How much AC depends on your class due to differnce in softcap and return over cap.

For a Warrior I would say 1 ac = 15 HP (I like AC).

For a monk while I usually went for 1 AC = 8 HP I am considering uppign it to 1 AC = 10 HP.

For a Warrior I treat 1 Hdex as 2 AC and 1 Hagi as 1 AC.

For a Monk I reverse those.

[Slein]

Talk of "AC:HP ratios" is fundamentally wrongheaded. Ratios are great for comparing two different stats that do the same thing, but AC and HP do two quite different things. These two stats function in ways that are simply not equivalent, so you can't create a meaningful equivalence ratio between them. AC reduces the rate at which you take damage. HP increases the total amount of damage you can take without being healed.

In a game like Diablo II, or even to a much lesser extent, EQ up through Luclin or so, one could work out an equivalence ratio (though that ratio would be specific to a particular mob) because you aren't receiving a steady stream of heals. In Diablo II (or in classic EQ if you were soloing as a melee class, for instance), you more or less fight a mob(s) until it's dead, then heal to full. In pre-PoP EQ raiding and grouping, Complete Heal really was more or less "complete" and was the primary source of healing; again, you basically fought until you nearly ran out of HP and then healed to full (the difference between raiding and grouping being the rate at which this happened). In these two sorts of situations, decreasing the rate at which you take damage and increasing the total amount of damage you could take genuinely do have equivalent effects on your ability to survive a given encounter. Suppose you have 100 HP, and a mob hits you for 5 damage every second. You'll live for 20 seconds. If you increase the total amount of damage you can take by 20%, you'll have 120 HP, and you'll live for 25 seconds. If you decrease the rate at which you take damage by 20%, the mob will hit you for 4 damage every second, and you'll live for 25 seconds.

Modern EQ is a very different animal, though. Tanking and healing in EQ is not a matter of gradually chipping away at your total HP and then healing to full all at once. Instead, modern EQ is about keeping healing per second above damage per second (HPS > DPS). Healers don't wait for the tank to nearly deplete his HP and then heal him to full all at once; heals aren't big enough for that (and damage spikes might kill the tank, but hold that thought, I'll get to that later). Instead, healers are healing continually as the tank takes damage. If the tank is taking damage faster than the healers are healing it, the tank will die. Increasing the total amount of damage the tank can take will extend the period of attrition before the tank dies, but it will not stave off the inevitable death. Decreasing the rate at which the tank takes damage, however, will enable the healers to heal damage faster than the tank takes it, and the tank will live. Suppose you have 100 HP, a mob hits you for 25 damage every second, and a healer heals you for 20 damage every second. You'll live for 20 seconds. If you increase the total amount of damage you can take by 20%, you'll have 120 hp, and you'll live for 25 seconds. If you decrease the rate at which you take damage by 20%, you'll take 20 damage per second, and you'll live forever unless your healers run out of mana (or go AFK...).

Moreover, in situations (like a grind group) where the healer is already able to keep you alive continually, decreasing the rate at which you take damage will decrease the rate at which the healer must heal damage. Decreasing the rate at which the healer must heal damage will decrease the rate at which the healer must spend his mana. Decreasing the rate at which the healer must spend his mana will allow you to grind longer without needing to stop for a med break, or it will allow the healer to spend mana on other things (like helping you kill the mobs faster). Increasing the total damage you can take, however, has no impact whatsoever on these situations, because you're never using all of your capacity for taking damage anyway.

We can clearly see that AC and HP do two very different things, and, in modern EQ, the thing that AC does is simply much more useful.

-----

The above is a bit of an oversimplification; there is one thing I've been ignoring in all this. In my examples, I assumed that the tank is taking damage at a constant rate (i.e. that the mob deals the same amount of damage every time). Obviously in real situations, this isn't the case. If our imagined tank is taking 25 damage per second, that's an average, and he isn't likely to be taking 25 damage every second; in reality he's probably taking 20 damage one second, 30 the next, then 50 damage, then the mob misses a round entirely (0 damage), and so on. Spike damage is one of the reasons people often cite for taking HP over AC. And there was a time in EQ's distant past where there was some sense to this (to a point). You wanted to have more HP than the mob could deal in one max damage combat round. If a mob's max hit is 50 and he can attack four times per combat round, you'd want to have at least 200 hit points. At that time, mobs were not as dangerous as they are today, and keeping HPS > DPS was not so difficult, so tanks wanted to be prepared for the 'worst case scenario' even if it were less efficient in the long run. As such, tanks would gear for HP until they reached a point where a max damage round couldn't kill them, and beyond that point they would gear for AC (well, not exactly, because gearing for AC would inevitably yield 'enough' HP, but I'm being charitable to the pro-HP crowd in this example).

Again, though, modern EQ is a very different beast. For one, it's absolutely impossible for a tank to have enough HP to survive a max damage round. There's content that can literally deal over 200k damage in a single round. There are even group content named mobs that can deal about 100k damage in a round. So it simply is not possible to have enough HP to survive a max damage round; a tank can't be geared for the worst possible scenario. Moreover, though, AC doesn't just reduce average damage taken over a period of time. It also greatly reduces the likelihood of taking a large damage spike.

Here we need to take an aside to explain how NPC damage is calculated in EQ (this is different, and considerably simpler, from how player melee damage is calculated). A mob's damage is composed of two parts: Damage Bonus (DB) and Damage Interval (DI).*1 Every mob in EQ has two distinct constants for these two values. The damage actually inflicted by a given hit is determined by the following formula:

Code: Select all

DMG = DB + DI(n)

where "n" is an integer between 1 and 20 (inclusive).*2 In other words, when a mob lands a hit,*3 a roll is made, and the mob deals damage equaling its Damage Bonus plus the number rolled times its Damage Interval. Suppose a mob has DB=100 and DI=50. The mob's minimum hit will be DB+DI(1)=100+50(1)=150. The mob's maximum hit will be DB+DI(20)=100+50(20)=1100.

Now that we have the terminology and the formulae established, we can fit this into the puzzle of how AC works and why it's valuable. We've already established that, in essence, what AC does is to reduce the rate at which you take damage, but we've thus far said nothing about how it does that. The DI roll in the formula above isn't simply a random roll from 1 to 20. It is a weighted roll. Basically the mob's Attack value adds weights to the high end of the range and the player's AC value adds weights to the low end of the value. The higher the mob's attack, the more likely the mob is to score rolls close to 20. The higher the player's AC, the more likely the mob is to score rolls close to 1. Notice that this means debuffing mob Attack functions similarly to buffing player AC.*4 Now here's the kicker: with high enough AC relative to the mob's Attack, a player can essentially skew the weights so far to the low end that the higher values for the DI roll simply never happen. We call this "DI obsoletion". Many tanks will reach a point where a mob will never score a roll over 17. I even managed to obsolete DI16 for the content I used for grinding experience during SoD. The way the formula works, if you parse a hit distribution for a given tank against a given mob, you'll have a massive cluster of values around the median. For AC-heavy tanks in current content, this cluster will usually centre around DI3 to DI6 depending on the difficulty of the particular mob. And, with sufficient AC, there will be a dearth of near-max hits. For AC-heavy tanks in current content, there will often be virtually no hits above DI17 or DI18 depending on the difficulty of the particular mob.

So, again, we clearly can see that what AC does is simply much more useful than what HP does. In the modern world, gearing for AC actually protects you from spike damage far better than gearing for HP.

-----

Note that all of this applies to anyone who takes melee damage, not just tanks. Whilst it's true that non-tanks receive lesser returns on AC than do tanks, that doesn't change the fact that AC and HP do fundamentally different things, and the thing that AC does is simply more valuable. Obviously non-tanks should be gearing foremost for their respective roles (i.e. hStr for melee DPS, mana for caster DPS, etc.), but that being equal, even non-tanks would be wise to focus on AC rather than HP. Melees are wise to, for instance, use Metal powersources rather than elemental. And the new AC/mana/hInt/hWis augs are the best thing since sliced bread for casters and priests.

If people are interested, I can get into further details about how AC works, but this post is already pretty technical, and further elaboration doesn't really serve the purpose of this thread, so for the sake of limiting my verbosity, I'll leave it at that for now.

Footnotes:
1. These terms are the conventions within the player community for discussing NPC damage, but the developers actually use very different (and, in my opinion, more logical) terms. What players refer to as "Damage Bonus" is instead called "Base Damage". What players refer to as "Damage Interval" is referred to as "Bonus Damage". And the D20 value that players don't name is referred to as "Damage Interval". The developers are by and large aware of the different terminology the playerbase uses, but it's something to keep in the back of your mind when reading developer comments on the subject. The different terminological conventions are a product of the playerbase having figured out the damage formulae on our own in isolation from the folks who created said formulae.
2. Yes, EQ is, at it's heart, a D20 game. D&D fans everywhere rejoice.
3. Misses are an entirely separate calculation. You can't mitigate a hit to zero and turn it into a miss. First the mob must pass a roll to land a hit, and only then does this come into play.
4. The formulae for Attack is not simply the opposite of the formula for AC, however; the economy of scale for attack is smaller than for AC. The result is that debuffing X Attack has a bigger impact than buffing X AC.

[Spinecrak]

I agree with you in theory, but not in strict practice. Borzaloth introduced me to the business end of 2 rapid 40k+ hits. No heal is gonna save a pure AC tank from that, so I see HP as like insurance against rapid painful atrocious hits.
My HP saved me that round...however I was sitting at a Tad above 9k AC too, if I were too much lower, no amount of HP would have been sufficient most likely.

Screw the debate IMO, just give me tens of thousands more of BOTH.

[Slein]

Gearing for HP will not give you enough HP to save you from a max damage round from a mob like that. Gearing for AC, however, will greatly reduce the chances of you ever seeing such a round. The above post is basically the same knee-jerk reaction to an isolated piece of anecdotal evidence that I've seen hundreds of times over the years, but it ultimately represents a lack of big-picture perspective. When a mob that can theoretically put out like 300k damage in a single combat round smacks you for 80k and you have 82k hp (or whatever), it isn't a case of "my HP saved me". It's still a case of your AC saving you. If you genuinely had enough HP to survive a max damage round, and then a mob smacked you for said max damage round, then yeah, you could give your HP the credit (albeit a bit dubiously even still), but for just about anything short of that, no, not really.

[Slein]

I missed this earlier...

Anyone know the exact AC value for Heroic Agility? Or is it still broken?

The displayed AC from Heroic Agility does nothing. It's not that it's broken, it's just another example of the displayed AC value you see in-game being meaningless. You gain avoidance AC from agility (not heroic agility, just regular old agility, the cap for which is raised by hAgi). But this AC is hard capped at 305 agility. Agility after 305 does nothing for your AC at all. Heroic Agility, however, is quite powerful. Heroic Agility will increase your chance to dodge by 1% (additive) for every 25 points of hAgi.

I hesitate to mention this, because it often leads people astray, but this gain from hAgi is a stepwise function, not a continuous one. This means that you gain the full 1% dodge chance when you cross a multiple of 25 hAgi, you don't gain 0.04% for each individual point of hAgi. Don't get caught up in that fact, though; unless you're in Triality, Crimson Tempest, or Realm of Insanity, it really shouldn't impact your valuation of the stat significantly. Top players in those sorts of guilds will complete an expansion fast enough that they can fine-tune their gear and have months to play with a min/max'ed gear set before the next expansion hits and they quickly do the same thing all over again; they can figure out what the highest attainable multiple of 25 is for them, and then ignore the 1-24 further points of hAgi that won't be able to reach a breakpoint. For the vast majority of us, though, gearing up is a continuous process across expansions, and we never really hit that perfectly fine-tuned gear set. This means that every point of hAgi you gain will be destined to be applied to the next interval of 25; there is no 'last interval of 25' for us mere mortals.

When it comes to your actual armour, you should really always gear as if gains from hAgi really were linear. You're involved in a continuous process of upgrading your gear, and so you're always working toward that next multiple of 25. With augs, though, you can chop and change much more easily. If you really want to, you can re-arrange your augs after every gear upgrade to min/max your hAgi breakpoint. If the best you can do with your best hAgi augs is 199 hAgi, then you could drop 24 points of hAgi for augs with higher AC or other heroics. This'll cost you quite a bit of plat and require you to do a fairly comprehensive re-evaluation of your gear after every upgrade, though, and most people aren't going to want to fuss with all that (honestly I don't except in extreme examples). If you're not going to get involved in the chopping and changing of your augs after every upgrade, then you should aug as though hAgi worked linearly as well. A 1% chance do dodge might not sound like much, but EQ is a game of accumulating incremental gains; that's really an excellent return on your gear by EQ standards. You're gaining a lot more from the hAgi on augs like Bleakburn Goo, Golden Ore, Polished Rockomancy Diamond, etc. than you would be from augs with a couple more AC.

You didn't ask about hDex, but it's hard to discuss one without bringing up the other. Heroic Dexterity works equivalently to Heroic Agility with regard to evasion. The difference is that hDex gives gains to your chance to riposte and to parry instead of to dodge. For one, this means you're getting a 1% increase to two types of evasion, not one; the evasion gains from hDex are roughly twice as powerful as those of hAgi. Furthermore, riposte isn't just an evasion skill; it's also a source of DPS. And with the high levels of hDex players are achieving these days, riposte is becoming a significant source of DPS for tanks, too. So we can already value hDex twice as highly as hAgi.

But hDex has other benefits too. For one, hDex adds bonus melee damage in a way that is similar to the bonus damage from hStr. It's actually better than the bonus damage from hStr, though, because the damage from hStr is applied as the last step of the melee damage formula, after critical hits are calculated (so bonus damage from hStr cannot itself crit). The bonus damage from hDex is factored in earlier in the melee damage formula, though, before critical hits are applied (so bonus damage from hDex can crit). This bonus damage is probably technically a bug; hDex is supposed to increase ranged attack damage (throwing/archery), and what we're probably seeing is that bonus ranged damage being incorrectly applied to melee damage also. But I wouldn't expect to see it ever changed, so rest easy. It should be noted that, like hStr, this will apply to units of 10 hDex (rather than the units of 25 for it's evasion benefits), just as hStr takes effect in units of 10. But wait, that's not all! Call in the next five minutes and we'll also throw in a free bonus to your chance to critical hit, all you pay is separate shipping and processing! This one isn't actually a product of the hDex itself, but rather it's a result of the overcap regular Dexterity that comes with the hDex. To my knowledge, no one has ever done the parsing that would be required to pin down exactly how much additional chance to critical hit you're getting for each point of dexterity, but I can tell you that, because of the way the code is written, it cannot be less than 0.01% per point of dexterity (which adds up fairly quickly when you consider we're pushing a thousand dexterity these days).

What this all adds up to is that hDex is overwhelmingly the most powerful stat in the game for any melee, especially for a tank. hAgi is second; in purely defensive terms, hAgi is roughly half as powerful as hDex, but hDex also has potent secondary benefits as well. Personally, as a tank, I consider 1 hDex = 2 hAgi, and I decide all ties in favour of hDex on account of its secondary benefits. For a non-tanking melee, your valuation of hDex would be somewhat higher still.

[dustauthor]

I love you.

[Spinecrak]

Eh?

[Ughbash]

I tend to be more in the AC camp.

My rule of thumbfor augs is this:

1Hdx = 2Hagi = 4AC = 80HP.

So basicly if it is just AC and HP I use a 20 to 1 ratio.