The Spirit Realm

A guildmate of mine had her "Crest if the Scarlet Legion" in her boots. I recommended to put it into her shield instead, but her AC did not go up?
Is aug AC counted yet differently?

Displayed AC doesnt differ based on slot(shield vs boots), Shield ac only adds 1:1 to the soft-cap(where other slots[non-shield] are 1:fraction based on class), AC in shield is the most valuable place to put AC into, which is a "hidden" value(that is not shown in-game) that's boosted.

not much more to add here, basically aim to have yer strongest armor class aug in yer shield in order to take advantage of the strength of the armor class in that specific slot, unless armor class isn't a priority.

So basically the boost is there, yet invisible?

Right. It doesn't effect your displayed total AC, but it does effect your effective AC, which isn't displayed.



See also http://samanna.net/eq.general/effects.shtml#4

From a different point of view... Take it for what its worth. I'm not disputing the information above, but simply offering some suggestions because not much was stated about the gear of the person. I'm sure I'll get some feedback.. but oh well.

If your friend isnt at the ac softcap it won't make much, if any, difference. I dont know what the softcap is for knights now. In fact, it may even be more of a loss if she doesnt have a solid set of ac augs imo. For many people, the crest is easily in there top 3 ac augs. Putting the crest onto the shield will take it from an 'all the time' aug and make it an 'only used when using a shield' aug. So, unless she is over the softcap and has a strong set of ac augs already, putting something like a ground murkglider eye aug might be just as good, if not better for her current situation.

And people can really hate me for what I'm going to say next.

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The other thing that no one really mentions or at least I havent seen or heard a solid explaination for, is that some slots tend to give more ac returns to them. Maybe someone can explain this part a bit more, but I don't know the factors in this at all. My Ring of deterence at 70ac will display an ac value increase much higher then any other item close to 70ac like my Totem of Chimera at 72ac. All my stats such as agility (and all heroic) along with counted mods (avoid/shield capped) will stay the same. I dont know the numbers atm, but I know if I take the ring off, its about 140ac drop, whereas if I remove the totem, its something like 125ac drop (not exact on #s, but you get the idea).

Also, when I compare my legs (104ac) to my shield (105ac), I can toggle them off seperately and get a 12ac difference in the displayed total ac on my character. A 1ac actual difference shouldnt result in a 12ac displayed difference. And someone already said the shield ac doesnt effect the displayed amount, the shield ac softcap thing shouldn't be making the difference. Although, I'm not trying to make a theory, but with those numbers as they are, If I were to increase each item with a 30ac aug, I should be able to see a 15ac difference in the displayed amount. Assuming if I compare every 10ac on my legs to 10ac on my shield, I get displayed ac +1 for every 10 shield ac vs displayed ac +0 for every 10 leg ac.

I know someone is going to say 'your augs play a factor in this.. with the shield being 105ac on the item compared to the 79ac item+25ac leg slot. However, the results are opposite if you compare the ring and range. The ring has a 40ac item+30ac aug value to the totems 52ac item+20ac aug value so the augs vs item ac value thing doenst explain it either. I've also tried to move my eron's item from slot to slot and I believe the ac value is the same so the AC calculating equation is a very very strange thing.

Nightops, you have a problem. You're arguing with feelings against people with numbers. You may well have a point, but you're not going to be able to make that point until you can support it on terms people will listen to.

I'm surprised no one else seemed to catch that either. Still surprises me to this day how many people aren't aware of it either.

I was in that same situation actually, using my epic 2.0 to tank rather than 1h/shield (there was always abundant time to land CH's, or shaman HoT could keep me up easily), and I still have a 20ac aug in my shield from back then - I'm waiting for a new shield, and hopefully the LDoN or Crystallos aug, before I swap them around. It worked well enough for me, since I wasn't using my shield that often. It's easy to swap the augs if you find yourself using 1h/shield a lot, like I have been lately (been 3boxing without a healer, so having another heal proc and taking less damage really helps).

Regarding ac softcap, got these numbers from evilgamer: raw ac softcaps for a level 80 knight at 602 without aas and 915 with aas, the number for displayed ac softcap is 1300 or so.

If your level 75, 80, etc you are at the soft cap unless your basically still wearing the same armor you wore at level 1.

-Fenier

Aye, that's what I was saying, I put the 20ac aug in there back when doing MPG trials was about the hardest stuff we'd tackle as a group, and there wasn't much content a knight should be tanking on raids. It's a different story now, I find myself using the shield a lot more, so much I'm considering swapping Blessed Shard in there to get me by until I can get a new shield and the Crystallos aug.

My point being that it depends a lot on where you are spending most of your time, and also on your playstyle, whether an extra 10ac in your shield will matter all that much or not.

Every time this discussion comes up, I do chime in with a similar argument to the one being made here: if all you are concerned about is getting the absolute best performance when you are tanking the toughest things you ever tank, then yes, you should put your biggest AC aug in your shield. But for my purposes, I'm worried about lots of different situations. I solo a lot; in those cases, I use 2h. The most important thing for me is going to be to kill before I get killed, but if doing so caused me to lose my best AC aug, the "before I get killed" part would start to suffer. Similarly, in a raid, especially against undead, my dps is irrelevant. I might as well switch to 1h, because I'll be more resilient and my dps is a drop in the bucket. In a group, while I'm still not the main dps, my dps starts to matter more. If I can tank 2h, I may do so even if it makes things a bit bumpier, because the extra pain is offset by extra dps. In fact I should, up to the point where I'm dying or the group is having to med because I'm becoming a mana sponge.

When I consider all my situations, my current balance has me putting a good AC aug in my shield, but not my best AC aug. This is all further complicated by the fact that I don't think anyone has done the painstaking work it would take to quantify what real benefit you're getting by raising the soft cap by this small incremental amount. I believe it has some benefit, but it isn't going to be like taking my breastplate off or something. It is likely a benefit that would be small enough to be difficult to parse. To put it in perspective, let's say my armor class is 4200. We're talking about whether you get the full benefit of adding another 30 AC, or only getting partial benefit from adding 30 AC.

If anyone *did* want to parse this (I'd like to, but can't imagine when I'd find the time), you'd need to fight the same mob or mobs a LOT in two different situations:
1) Fight with AC X, with a shield, but no AC aug in the shield.
2) Fight with AC x, with a shield, and as big an AC aug as possible in the shield.
Can't do one parse without a shield, or shield block will mess things up, as will whatever gain you get from the shield itself moving the soft cap. You'd want everything controlled, except moving 30AC or whatever from elsewhere to the shield to move the soft cap. You'd then want to demonstrate a decrease in DPS taken. My money would say you'd need a huge sample before you could get any sort of reliable, observable decrease in DPS taken, but that's what science is for; I could totally be wrong.

A Shadow Knight could always use their 35 point attack debuff to parse the difference without getting into shield issues.

The amount of the soft cap is adjusted is the exact same as if you lowered NPC ATK values by the same amount, yet stacks with -atk debuffs.

Depending on if you are tanking SoF content, the shield AC value, and by extension attack debuffs increase in relative power due to the mobs being directly designed to hit between DI values of 4 and 8 on players. The higher the combined total of ShieldAC + Attack Debuffs the larger variance you'll create in the average DI you're hit for, thus decreasing your chances of taking higher end DI values.

Using a Crystallos group shield, the 35 Shield only augment from Crystallos would take the Shield AC value over 100, based on Rashere's posts should be just under a 20% decrease in DI. Thusly, if you were a grouper, and the normal DI on you was DI 8 while using a 2 hander, switching to a shield should decrease your Normal DI to 6.7 while at the same time giving you the advantages of Shield Block.

-Fenier

is the fact that it's type 7 relevant to the mitigation or were you just being thorough in description

Item type 7 (not slot) is how EQ determines if it's a Shield or not. You can tell if it's a shield by looking at the item type field under the raw data in lucy.

-Fenier

Okay. That clears things up. It suggests to me that the augment probably does more than I might have guessed, but still not as much as your initial post led me to believe, due to the following clarifications:

- For the sake of thoroughness, the shield/aug combo you used would have 130 AC, not 120.
- The shield isn't in question as much as the aug, so 95 of that 130 is constant and not in the discussion. The question is how much you gain by putting that 35 in the shield vs. somewhere else.
- Your math would suggest that the augment is responsible for a 5% DI decrease. So that would be the absolute upper end of what you're buying. But the augment does *something* if it is installed elsewhere, so making this particular configuration decision won't actually get you a 5% DI decrease.

Can I generalize from your explanation that all AC *under the soft cap* subtracts exactly like an ATK debuff would? I'd guess so given that the explanations in the past have always been, "shield AC increases your soft cap". If so, the question becomes how much the value of your AC deteriorates above the soft cap. Do we think it removes more than 50% of the value? At 50%, then suppose you have a 100 hp aug and a 35 ac aug, and you're pondering which to put in your shield and which to put in your boots. The "bonus" to putting the ac aug in your shield would be ballpark 2.5% DI. So if things were tuned for a DI of 8, you'd instead be getting a DI of 7.8. To me that feels like my original premise is pretty sound; it will make a difference, but not so much that you're crazy not to do it, if you have reasons to care about your AC when you are using a 2h weapon.

If your over softcap (which is very low in terms of displayed AC) then putting a 30 AC aug elsewhere will have less effect by likely several percent (varied by how far over softcap you actually are) then if you put it in the Shield, which allows that entire AC value to by-pass the softcap reductions and doesn't subject it to diminishing returns at any level.

The augment I used in my example however, was shield only, so it doesn't matter.

That said, if your tanking, you should be using the shield, and if your not tanking, then you shouldn't really be getting hit so the effect of having a 30AC aug instead of a 15 AC aug should be a non-issue due to the fact you shouldn't be getting hit anywhere near often enough for it to really matter.

Finally your correct my math was bad.

-Fenier

On the play style notes: the dps you gain by using 2h over shield isn't "free" just because you stay alive. The dps you gain going from 1h to 2h has to be weighed against the additional contribution your healer could make to the group with the mana saved healing you.

There are, I will freely though unhappily admit, many healers who do nothing but heal their groups. Those healers are not good healers. They don't suck, "suck" healers are those that don't heal their groups, resulting in unnecessary casualties, but just healing doesn't mean they're good. Good healers handle the baseline contribution of keeping their group alive and also get something else done. For me as a shaman, that something else is a group Maw buff, my own & pet melee, and Bite/Sting whenever it refreshes. For a cleric, the something else is probably Mark of the Devoted, Indomitable Hammer of Zeal, some spamhammer melee (Yaulp is for more than mana!), maybe even stuns.

Your choice to run 2h over sword & board cuts heavily into that "something else" territory.

The ac return over softcap for knights used to be 1/3, not sure if they changed that with sof. That means putting a 30 ac aug somwhere else than shield would yield a return of 10 ac.

I don't think we're that far off in opinion; I just don't think things are that black and white. It isn't, "You're tanking and need 1h" or "the content is trivial so you can use 2h". There is a big range in between. There are plenty of times that I'll switch one direction or the other in a group or even on a raid based on how things are going. Brohg's point is a fair point; I went kinda black and white by saying, "If the healer is keeping me alive 2h, then no harm done." If the healer isn't doing anything other than heal no matter what, that's unfortunate, but factors in. If the healer is being stifled but not telling me, that is unfortunate too. For a while I had no AC aug in my shield. Eventually I decided that was too far in the other direction. These days I have a 20 AC aug in my shield, when I could potentially have a 30 AC aug. For my play style, that feels about right to me. A few other specifics:

- I have no Improved Dodge... as of a few days ago. Used to be in my neck, but I wasn't going to pass up that fabled neck to keep a Hatchet neck. It is a priority to fix that. I'll probably just get off my butt and get back on finishing up Eron's Jewelry.
- If I'm soloing anything, live or dead, I'm using a 2h weapon. I was an idiot, and even as a paladin back in the day I soloed most of my way from 1 to 60. I've soloed plenty since. The bottom line always ends up being, "Kill them before they kill you." If I ever switch to 1h figuring that I'll save mana, it never works out that way, due to the increased duration of the fight. Even moreso now that I have a Fabled Blade of War that doesn't yet show in my Magelo . Very strange having more hp when I go 2h now heh

It is black or white for me. Either the content is hitting me two hard with a two hander out that it's draining too much mana too fast or I am spiking hard. Yes: Then use shield. No: Then use 2hander.

Case in point, maxed attack, maxed offensive AA, etc... I put out 440ish dps with the Fabled Axe from Krzik. I put out about 630dps on average with Nightbane. In group content, that dps is more or less, irrelevant. The loss of 6% blocking + the overcap AC makes very few zones over tier 2 worthwhile to use a two hander for me.

As for solo'ing... I don't think I ever bothered to try to solo actually challenging mobs, I usually picked the weakest, highest con possible and beat them down.

way i see it, once you get the basic aug set, the upgrades are all real small, if you try to keep up with the new expansions, armor class wise you see small incriments of upgrade, hps they may skyrocket but if you are concerned about your making the softcap, then that's all you need.