Brohg - Obscure Combat Skills

[Gloriana]

Originally posted by Brohg

The Attack and Armor Class numbers you see displayed in EQ are both combinations of two numbers. Attack is Accuracy+Power, Armor Class is Avoidance+Mitigation. The split-up numbers were available to players sometime early in beta, but were combined for simplicity sometime before Live release. That simplification has, naturally, caused mass confusion only rivaled by various religious texts.

Displayed "Attack" is Accuracy+Power. Accuracy is how likely one is to hit one's target, and in combat is compared to the Avoidance part of AC (more on that later). Accuracy comes from two sources, Weapon Skills and +Accuracy mods on items. It's quite difficult to see your raw Accuracy number, since most characters have some amount of skill in Hand To Hand even when they have no weapons equipped. Theoretically, if you had some weapon skill at 0 at the time you get around to caring about Accuracy, then you could see what it is by switching from your 0 skill to the weapon you have skill in. Low Accuracy due to crappy weapon skills is what makes caster/priest melee so silly, and a big part of how knight damage is balanced against pure melee.

The Power part of Attack is how hard you hit, when you hit. No amount of power will raise your max hit, but those who are familiar with the (1-20)*DI nature of Everquest damage will understand that shifting your average hits higher on the 1-20 scale will lead to much more overall damage. This is what Power does. Power is modified by Offense skill, Strength score, and +ATK mods on items. In combat, Power is opposed by the target's Mitigation.

Avoidance in Everquest is often used to refer to the aggregate of abilities that cause a mob to miss you, but it has a specific meaning where AC (and the mod on items) is concerned. Avoidance is the part of displayed AC that makes an incoming attack miss. Defense skill is the 800-lb gorilla where Avoidance is concerned, but your Agility stat has a small effect as well. Your AC from avoidance is easily seen anytime you're naked at your bind after a death. +Avoidance from items adds directly to this value. Due to the scale it operates on, the mod is generally a very very good one.

As an example on Avoidance, a 70 shaman with max Defense skill (215) has avoidance ac between 580-630ish, depending on his Agility score. (don't be fooled by that big range. 50 variance for +280 in a stat is crap. Agility is crap. Moving on~ ) +100 on top of that 600 normal Avoidance is a +16% boost in how many attacks will miss you from well matched attackers. Mobs with outlandishly high accuracy like AoW will still pound you repeatedly, but every little bit helps.

Mitigation AC comes from items and buffs, and is very famously soft-capped based on class. That soft cap is raised by the Combat Stability - Innate Defense - Defensive Instincts line of AA, and exceeded by buffs and shields. That's a bit complicated, so I'll break it down a little more.

Armor class from items works just like it should... up to a cap. That cap varies by class, but in all cases is rediculously low by modern standards of gear. Past that cap, you get less "bang for your buck" on AC, so once you've gotten to the soft cap, an extra 15ac going from Kanleku's Bracer of Spirits to Red Crystal Bracer doesn't do as much as your first 15ac Banded Mail did for you. It's still good to have, just not as good as moving up from naked.

The melee mitigation AAs Combat Stability, Innate Defense, and Defensive Instincts all make the soft cap on your item ac higher, so that more of your gear works how it "should" (if only you weren't so uber) Shields aren't affected by the soft cap. Any ac you ever get from a shield will always work as if it were under the cap. This makes shield ac better than other ac on your gear. This only applies to items flagged "shield", btw, not just anything held in your offhand. If you're not sure if an item is a shield, ask a knowledgable cleric if they could use their Bash skill with it equipped. Various tomes and wands and sticks aren't "bash-able"; they aren't shields. Without any exception I know of, anything that actually looks like a shield is. The same way as shields, buffs are over caps. AC added by buffs is not reduced by the "soft cap" calculation.

The effects of mitigation work against an attacker's power, to shift the multiplier on DI. With higher AC, you get more low #s in the #*DI portion of incoming damage. No amount of AC will change the min or max hit of an attack. It is a fact that some mobs have power so high that mitigation AC is nearly worthless. AoW was like this during Velious era, and through most of Luclin era. Tanks just couldn't get enough AC from their gear to compete with his power. This led to some non-intuitive tradeoffs like 12ac pants being best-in-game for warriors, since higher ac wouldn't help them anyhow; only hp mattered. Conversely, there were boss mobs in Ssraeshza Temple whose mitigation ac was so high that player attack power was laughable by comparison. Swinging on them was an endless string of hits for 1. By the end of Luclin, AC was balanced out a lot by changes to mobs and to gear, and EverQuest hasn't looked back since. These days, it's well understood that for tanks, AC is better than raw hp at reducing the healing neccessary at a ratio of 1:3 or better. A 30ac augment, for instance, is better for war/shd/pal than a 90hp augment.

[gurgul]

So combat stability makes the AC I have that is over the cap work as though it were not over the cap.

I don't know if I am over the cap.

Is combat stability worthwhile if you are not over the cap?

[Jalelin]

Combat Stability (and all the other mitigation AAs) is 100% useless if you are not over the softcap. I don't think our softcap has ever been parsed, but I think that it's somewhere in the 1200-1300 range at 65 (a bit higher at 70, obviously) before any of the AAs are applied. This does not include shield.

Brohg disagrees with me, regarding our softcap. See my last post in thread for my logic. Rangers may have parsed their softcap, since they are generally more melee oriented than Shamans, and all the chain softcaps are supposed to be very close.

[gurgul]

[Brohg]

[Beafly]

[Brohg]

[gurgul]

[siludorf]

[Lickity]

edit: removed post.

[Lickity]

[Retron]

[Grakt]

[Lickity]

[Brohg]

[Lickity]

[Brohg]

[Lickity]