AC cap and AC Vs HPFollow

i would say Hit points then AC 'If' your AC is around 1200-1250 but i look to upgrade to get both.

At 59 my standard LDoN buffs make me 5500 hit points 1205 AC and i seem to hold up pretty well even on 'Hard'.

65 Paladin here. In my opinion both are of equal importance nowadays.

Durilg the luclin ERA HP was definitly king, but since PoP came out AC has grown in importance substantially. The reason for this is two-fold:

First, in PoP the AC cap is Way above the Old World PrePoP zones. So you get more effective mitigation in PoP with higher AC.

Secondly, in PoP the mobs have a huge difference in their max and minimum hits. This is why AC is much more useful here.

For example: In Luclin zones a mob might have a max hit of 300, and a minimum of 175. Therefore High AC doesnt do that much for you since the minimum is so close to the maximum.

In PoP a mob might have a maximum hit of 800 and a minimum of 150. In this situation, AC makes a huge difference since the mob will hit for much lower more often.


I hope that helps.

What gbaji said.

There is no AC Cap.

The one person who knows whether you have enough AC or not is your healer.

Without buying into the argument about where the benefit curve flattens out and Luclin mob offense/attack vss PoP mob offense/attack;

I can tell you that melees with insuficient AC stand out like sore thumbs to healers (and are a lot more frustrating).

I was recently healer in a revolving PoJ group, the core of the group lasted for several hours, but the MA (and one or two others) changed a few times. A couple of stunning differences emerged. With one particular Pally and one Warrior, I never used anything excepty Celestial Health. (Hardly had to heal anyone else either except for the odd rat add attacking our mage) I filled in my time stunning and nuking and scratching my butt.

With a different Warrior and a Shadowknight I was constantly at half mana and using CH regularly as well as patching the HoT. I've witnessed this many times in LDoN, but there is always the possibility of the variation in group levels and variations in the mob spawn.

But in the PoJ situation, the only explanation is differences in AC.

The most frightening experience a healer can have is to see his tank's health draining faster than he can recast his heal spell. No matter how much HP you have the only thing that can prevent the rapid drain of health is strong AC!


Edit... Well good defensive skills help, but you know what I mean

Edited, Mon Feb 23 00:42:40 2004 by Iluien

Steel warriors are obsessed with this stuff. Head to their site, and you will get about two hundred angles on this question.

I don't disagree with your post, but I think your first point is a misconception. Truth be told, there's almost no parses done against raid level mobs whatsoever. I've seen one parse on xegony (since it's such a long fight, it allows a dataset for it), but past that, virtually no parses whatsoever on 'boss' targets. Almost no one is willing to risk a raid's time to parse low and high ac versus raid targets, so virtually all testing is done by people on their 'free' time against xp mobs. There's logs, but very little in that's really valuable from a statistical point of view. If anything, that's why people keep clamoring about an AC cap, since there's so little testing against the very high ATK raid mobs.

Heh, its ironic.

As a Ranger I was constantly obsessed with AC and HP and defensive skills.

Now as a Cleric I am constantly obsessed with AC and HP and defensive skills.



Maybe some day I should try playing a warrior?

I was under the impression that when on a horse casters get sitting mana regen during casting. Correct me if I am wrong. If what I say is true, your argument has validity indoors/LDoN, but not in most of the main exp zones 50+ (read PoP). I know every caster I play with uses a mount.

So yes, if a player has low HP and high AC using heals over time may be more efficient than using CH, but generally, if the player has any sort of decent amount of HP then CHs are always going to be the more efficient use of mana.

Lol, I can gaurantee you there is a difference in the AC cap from Luclin to PoP.

Once you get into zones like PoV, HoH, and BoT you will definitly notice it. When i first tanked in BoT I was getting hit for close to max on most of the mobs hits. I was at roughly 1250 AC at the time with about 6.5k hp. Now at 65, I have about 1420 AC and 7k hp. The extra HP does help, but the mobs miss alot more often, and I get hit for 200 a heck of a lot more than I get hit for 600-700. The major difference here is the AC. I have the same Defensive AA's I had on first comming into BoT, so those dont have a hand here in lowering the hits.

If i go hunt in Luclin, I am getting hit for the same amount of damage I used to at 1250 AC. Thus, the AC cap.

Gbaji is correct about there not really being an AC cap programmed into the game. It comes into play simply when your begin dealing with mobs that have a huge difference in their Max and Min hits. That is what i was saying earlier. Luclin mobs have a very small difference in their min and max hits, but PoP mobs have a large difference meaning AC is much more effective against PoP mobs.

Just to add something. Level plays a huge part in there as well. I'm frankly surprised that a level 58 tank would take less damage over time then a level 63 tank ragardless of relative AC/HP.

Um... But then again, 1150 is a *very* low AC to have at level 63, so that would have something to do with it.

Although there are trends with each release, there's still no real "AC cap" on a per release basis. There are noticable differences per mob within a release as well. If you normally tank tier2/3 mobs, go back and tank tier1 yard trash for awhile just for fun. Now, take of a few pieces of armor so you AC drop a hundred points or so. You'll notice that you don't take signifigantly more damage. Take off that same hundred points of AC against higher level mobs and you will.

The point at which you hit a diminishing return on AC increases will vary with expansion, zone, and creatures within a zone (level based primarily, but not always). Unless you plan on having different sets of armor for different situations, I'd just recommend going for as much of both as possible. That's not to say that I don't whip out a shield and a +AC one hander if I feel I'm getting hit on the high side of the damage range against mobs I'm tanking, but more then that is probably going to be a waste in the long run.


Oh. And just to clarify something Cal. I was talking about *old* "top end raid targets". And perhaps "top end" and "raid" was being a bit too exclusive. The last time I recall anyone seriously trying to pin down expansion based AC caps was Velious (the idea had pretty firmly been abandoned by SoL IIRC). I do recall that a *lot* of damage parses (and certainly ones used to attempt to determin AC caps), were based on what at that time were higher end raid targets. Folks parsed planar mobs in the original game. They parsed VP mobs in Kunark. They parsed NToV and ST mobs in Velious.

IIRC, it was the extensive parsings someone did against mobs in Western Wastes (I don't remember which, but they weren't raid targets by any stretch), that cracked the whole "AC cap by expansion" idea. He found that there was a much lower cap against those mobs (which were easily soloable, which was why he was parsing them). The only explanation was that the AC versus ATK equation was curved so that there would be variable "cap" against any particular mob.

I was referring to what people used to parse against back in the day that determined the old AC caps for those expansions. To my knowledge, no one's taken the expansion based caps seriously since, and thus, no-one bothers to parse for caps on mobs in VT, Ele-planes, or Time. Heh. I remember folks trying really hard to fit their ideas of caps into the game though. They'd talk about how you had to have a 1k AC to tank in the old world, a 1200 AC to tank in Kunark, and a 1300 AC (some said 1400, but again that was probably because they parsed against different mobs) in Velious. Theres no way they came up with those figures parsing against normal exp mobs. I've seen parsings since that time that show 60th level characters hitting a "cap" at around a 900AC against exp type mobs in all three of those earlier expansions.


That's not to say that AC recommendations aren't still valid today. Certainly, you'll notice a damage rate difference between 1100 and 1300 AC when tanking mobs in BoT. Whether it's bigger then having a thousand extra HPs is still questionable though.


Oh. Another thing to think about is AAs and the order you'll likely pick them up as a tank. This is one of the reasons the "Get more HP" camp has some weight. Your best bang for the buck is to get your run3/regen3 first to get to archtype. Then you'll want to get CA3, LR5, then ND3, then maybe go for some "fun" stuff, then come back to CS3. Point here being that you'll get the most out of the early AAs you get that effectively add to your avoidance AC. Having that and high HPs is a good thing, and will probably help you more then having that and a high AC, but low HP. As mentioned before (and Pat's argued very well), once you are above the prime AC point when fighting a particular mob, you don't gain much from getting more AC (or stuff that adds effective AC like those early AAs). However, more HPs always makes you a better tank. As a tank you will likely switch back and forth between tanking raid mobs and exp group mobs. You'll want those AAs for when you're tanking those higher mobs, but you'll be wasting them when fighting exp mobs. Again, unless you plan on having two sets of gear, you'll get more bang for the buck going for HP on your gear and moderate AC (at least try for 1200 pre-buff as a bare minimum though), then going high AC and moderate HP. You'll be able to survive against your raid targets, while being a more efficient tank to heal when exp grouping that way.

As you hit higher raid targets, you'll presumably get better gear that has the AC *and* HP you need (who cares if you've got "too much" AC in a group if you're covered in +200HP gear?), but until then, try to keep the dual role you'll play in mind when chossing gear.