Soft AC caps for the Classes

[redghosthunter]

ACCORDING TO VIZIER, on REBORN IN FIRE

"Over the years, Ive found many people in EQ are in the dark about what all of the numbers on their character sheet actually mean.

What exactly is Armor Class? What do the Combat Agility and Combat Stability AAs actually do? How do avoidance and shielding fit in? If you ever wondered about any of those things then keep reading. All of that will be explained and more.

The first thing you need to know about AC is that for most toons the vast majority of the number you see displayed on your character sheet in your inventory is ineffective AC.

Each archetype, (Plate, Chain, Leather,Cloth) has a limit to the amount of AC that actually "works". That limit is called your "soft cap", and it varies between classes.

What follows is a list of the AC soft cap approximations for each archetype. In the following chart, worn AC means look at your gear and add up the AC it shows when you inspect the individual item.



Soft Caps
Cloth..........= ~75 worn AC (yes its really that low)
Leather......= ~100 worn AC
Monk..........= ~120 worn AC (if they are under 15 stone wieght)
Chain.........= ~200 worn AC
Plate .........= ~300 worn AC


You may be shocked at how low those number are, I certainly was. My robe alone has 75 AC on it, so I hit my soft cap with 1 piece of gear! Everyone reading this can go check their character right now and Im sure you will see that you are all way above the softcap. Hitting the AC soft cap for your character is trivial in EQ today. So what we really want to know about is how effective is worn AC AFTER the softcap. The answer varies by class:



AC returns after the soft cap has been reached
45%: Warrior (from Devs)
33%: Knight (from Devs), Monk (reportedly equal to Knight? via Zajeer?)
23%: Cleric, Bard (via L2), BZR (rough estimate based off of parsing)
17%: BST, Ranger (BST is ~1/2 of the monk, ranger hearsay)
6%: Druid, Enc, Mag, Nec, Wiz (~1/3 of BST -- Druid was quoted as "lowest")
Rogue, Shaman? Probably they are close to cleric returns.



What does that mean? Well lets use a warrior for example, and lets say that when he looks in his inventory he sees his AC displayed as 1000, this is called displayed AC for future reference. Displayed AC adds up your worn AC and mulitiples it by 1.65.

1000ac / 1.65 = 600 worn AC.

So if this particular warrior added up all the AC listed on his gear it would be about 600, I rounded these values to make it a bit easier to work with. Now remember Warrior are a plate class with a soft cap of about 300.

600 worn AC = 300 under the cap AC + 300 over the cap AC.
300 over the cap AC = 300 * 45% = 135 effective AC.
300 under the cap AC + 135 effective over the cap AC = 435 REAL AC

So in review a warrior that looks in his inventory and sees 1000ac displayed up at the top, really only has 435 REAL AC!Using the same formula for a Ranger that has 1000 displayed AC you get this:

1000 displayed AC= 600 worn AC = 200 under the cap + 68 effective AC = 268 REAL AC!

So two completely different classes that have the same number displayed in the AC catagory of their inventory have VASTLY different real AC!

Ok now I hope you can understand everything up until this point because there one more piece of the AC puzzle I need to explain now and that is Shields.



The truth about Shields

If you have a shield in your secondary slot, ALL of the AC on that shield counts as "under the cap AC". That means if you have a shield with 100AC you get ALL 100 AC from it, regardless of what class you are, or what return over the cap your class gets!!!

Weapons with AC on them in the secondary slot dont count, neither do orbs, lanterns, totems etc. It must be an actual shield to get the raw AC bonus.

Take me for example, im a cloth wearer with an AC softcap of 75 BUT I use a shield+aug that gives me 110ac. That means I get more AC from my shield alone than all of my other gear combined!!!

Even if you dont understand any of that it simplifies down to this: If you use a shield, ignore every stat on that shield except AC. A shield with 100ac and no HPs is far better than a shield with 500hps and no AC, yes its that dramatic.


Here is some raw parsed data that illustrates the effectiveness of shield AC.

2504ac no shield
308.6 dps
average hit 618.1

2513ac 100ac shield
287.9 dps
average hit 567.90

2512ac 175ac shield
270.5 dps
average hit 537.4

3659ac 175ac shield
262.8 dps
average hit 519.9

The test subject was an INT caster, tank returns on AC are much better of course. Still that parse clearly shows just how effective a shield can be.


CA/CS

Another VERY important piece of the puzzle is Combat Stability and Combat Agility. Formerly both of these AAs were thought to increase your AC softcap, but in a recent post a Dev revealed that CA increases your avoidance, and CS increases your softcap.

Here is the table that was released by the devs shortly after the Secrets of Faydwer expansion was released:

Combat Agility Values -

AFFECTNAME BASE_EFFECT_1
Evasion 2
Evasion 5
Evasion 10
Evasion 13
Evasion 16
Evasion 19
Evasion 22
Evasion 25
Evasion 26
Evasion 27
Evasion 28
Evasion 30
Evasion 32
Evasion 33
Evasion 34
Evasion 35
Evasion 37
Evasion 39
Evasion 40
Evasion 41
Evasion 42
Evasion 43
Evasion 44

Combat Stability Values -

AFFECTNAME BASE_EFFECT_1
ACLimitMod 2
ACLimitMod 5
ACLimitMod 10
ACLimitMod 13
ACLimitMod 16
ACLimitMod 19
ACLimitMod 22
ACLimitMod 25
ACLimitMod 27
ACLimitMod 29
ACLimitMod 31
ACLimitMod 33
ACLimitMod 35
ACLimitMod 37
ACLimitMod 39
ACLimitMod 41
ACLimitMod 43
ACLimitMod 45
ACLimitMod 46
ACLimitMod 47
ACLimitMod 48
ACLimitMod 49
ACLimitMod 50

So if you max

Defensive combat skills

The rest of your defensive skills are failrly easy to assess by looking at the following chart. Basically if you are evaluating gear and you want to know how valuable +10 avoidance is for example, this chart gives you approximately how many HPs those skills are worth in terms of defensive survivability.


Defensive value of combat skill displayed in equivalent HPs
Improved Dodge V.......660 HPe
Improved Dodge IV......530 HPe
Improved Dodge III......400 HPe
+5 Avoidance.............300 HPe
Improved Dodge II......260 HPe
10 shield AC...............250 HPe
Improved Dodge I .......130 HPe
8% dodge skill ...........100 HPe
1% shielding.................80 HPe
10 STA ......................16 HPe
10 normal AC*..............13 HPe
10 AGI..........................8 HPe
10 HP..........................10 HPe
*Varies by class, 13 hps is the value for cloth wearers.



Take a look at how important Shield AC is. If you have 100 shield AC that is the defensive equivalent of ~2500 hps! You may also notice that both Shielding and Avoidance have excellent defensive effectiveness, and should be highly valued when evaluating gear.

It should be noted that Avoidance is hard capped at 100 and Shielding is hard capped at 35%. You wont get any defensive value out of those stats at all if you go over the hard caps.

Well that about covers it. I realize that this all may seem very complicated, but its still very important to understand exactly how EQ works so that you can acurately calculate your characters defensive abilities."

[Brohg]

[Khauruk]

Bad, outdated, or shady information.

[frocus]

Last time i saw posted numbers was when they revamped returns on certain classes back at 70 or 75 level cap. Numbers were given for plate ac soft cap at 600 at that time by a dev in talking about the value of CS aa.


Pretty sure it was post TSS launch pre TBS so level 75 tho.

[redghosthunter]

So, if there is bad info here can anyone of "true," knowledge explain? I know there are readers like me and others want to be able to explain how the game works and there is no black and white explanation anywhere.

[Normy]

The only people who can lay it in stone would be devs, and they aren't talking. The info contained here is fairly accurate (as far as tendencies go). But there are no direct formulas that convert one benefit to another. There is no way to say X ac = Y hp all the time. If it really were that simple, then it would have become obvious by now.

What you can take away from this with certainty is that a large majority of your AC is over the softcap, by a lot for nearly all players. That really is easy in today's game. After that cap there is a diminished return. AC on a shield is more important than any other stat on a shield. Basically alot of the stuff that is mostly known, this just gives some numbers.

Is this shady info/bad info? Probably to some, there are some convinced they know the infinite secret to this game, I have a few of those types in my guild. To this day I've never seen a theory I can't poke some holes in though, regardless to how many "experts" I've debated with. I take any post like this with a grain of salt, I don't have to believe that its 100% absolute fact to learn something from it.

I just look at the tendencies and see where people agree and base my decisions around that. For tanking the hardest things, a good shield is important. Shielding is important. Avoidance is important. Get and keep defensive focus effects, like improved dodge, improved parry, a direct skill modifier helps. Its only as complicated as I want to make it.

Thank you for the post.

[Khauruk]

[Ughbash]

[Khauruk]

[Unmei]

Is Viz still playing and posting this stuff or did someone just find it lying around and decide to share it? He posted it over on the Runes a year ago and it was pretty thoroughly torn apart, to the point where he stopped even trying to defend it.

Essentially every number in the above post is either outdated, conjecture, or both, because it doesn't take into account the various AC changes that occured with SoF, over a year ago now.

The theory is all sound, but the numbers are pretty much all hooey.

I wouldn't really recommend sharing this around as a real, useful source of information.

[Brohg]

[Normy]

[Khauruk]

[Bigcat Daddy-o]

No information though on whether monks followed the knights, or are they still at the .33?

Curious because I have brought my monk out of retirement to pull in dungeons.

[Normy]

There is a question along the same lines to that near the end of that long thread. Basically, its not sure. It seems rangers got a big boost, and it seems unlikely that monks followed the knights. But, again, its not specifically stated or proven yet.

[Ughbash]

[ZsaZsa Vavoom]

Depending on how reliable the various numbers included here are, it adds context around another recurring discussion here.

For quite some time, I was using a 20AC aug in my shield, with 30AC augs elsewhere. Posters here would comment on what a lunatic I was for doing so My rationale was that I quite often play and even tank with my 2h weapon, and I therefore didn't necessarily want to have my best AC augs sitting in a bag much of the time. I was okay with that decision since it seemed likely to me that the incremental improvement from having the extra 10AC below the softcap instead of above it was probably negligible.

Given the basic premise of the data here, I'd say that the difference is probably more substantial than I was speculating in the absence of any data. It seemed unlikely to me that the difference could be huge, or else we'd see almost no benefit to increasing our AC in the modern game. The gotcha there is that the soft cap is seemingly *really* low, so pretty much all combat/AC math we typically do deals in above the soft cap math, and not just some tiny increment at the top. The surprisingly low values for the soft cap convince me why my reasoning was probably flawed.

That being said, with the numbers we're talking about here, it is/was still the difference between basically adding a 10AC aug (if I don't put the big one in the shield) or a 22-30 AC aug (if I did put the big one in the shield). That still isn't enough to make me a complete lunatic for doing so, but is a greater difference than I would have thought, and for my play style I probably would switch the high AC aug to my shield. Except I am not going to, because for other reasons I already *did* switch it about a week ago heh

Math is good.

[Brohg]

the 35ac shield-only crystallos augment solves those problems.

[Khauruk]

[Ughbash]

[Brohg]

I saw that post, too. It makes me happy to think we're wearing down the staff as more old timers move on, and might, in the next year maybe, see a real AC number in EQ. PM your favorite dev, tell them (again) that the move is just like showing the mana number. Tell them that you really and truly want to see, that you won't blow up and throw a fit like a child, that you want 3kac displayed to = 3kac displayed to = 3kac displayed, regardless of class or AA or phase of the moon.

[redghosthunter]

AMEN. Finally some good info