Test Update 02/10/16

Necro Club is not what it used to be.

Did you ever read prior to this statement? Apparently not.

I'm going to use on paper percents. Real time is going to be different, much like a warrior's! Warrior's don't get some arbitrary mysthical benefit of having mitigation abilities stack differently than knights.

You have Prof + Mantle (more mitigation than LS/SB by a long shot) - 1 minute (65% vs 55% LS/SB)
Prof + Carapace - 30 seconds, probably closer in the 40 second range. (50% vs 55%)
Now you switch to Guardian + SB - 2 minutes (46% vs 55%)
Switch back to Prof/SB/Bargain - 1.5 minutes (depending on your endurance amount at the time) 45k/1 minute is about 40% endurance which you should have. This may last closer to 2 minutes. (40% base + 70% threshold rune over hits 25k+ (which is just so OP it's not even funny) + 40k sub zero hp + 1% mitigation in the form of mana aka no hp drop vs 40%).

If a warrior want's to exceed your first minute, he'll have to use Bravery/CoA BP back to back. Combine those will last maybe 1 minute 15 seconds. That means once a warrior is done with LS, he'll have nothing but Dichotomic shielding (remember, roughly 40 seconds), Tenacity, which is trivialized by your bargain, and prof. Add all the times out and you get somewhere in the range of 4 minutes for a warrior and close to 5 minutes with an Sk.

So you're talking about your best mitigation abilities over extending past Warrior's LS by a long shot. Couple that with repel being casted continuously and you're mitigating near equal, equal, and more than a warrior while maintaining these for a longer time period. Granted, you'll probably be done after Reaver's, but SKs could quite literally replace warriors without batting an eye.

Let's remember that Reaver's will drop those bad spikes very well - better than anything a warrior has. Even though at periods you drop below our raw mitigation of LS/SB, Repel makes up for that. Here's how:

1 hit round every 2 seconds (unslowed). Mobs usually hit 3 out of every 4 hits. So let's say the mob is quading every round, hitting us 3 times each and we avoid the 4th. With an average hit of 50k, the 5% advantage we'll have with LS/SB over carapace/prof equals out to about 2.5k per hit. There will be about 6-7 hit rounds between repel casts. That's 16-21 hits. 2.5 x 16 = 40k // 2.5 x 21 = 52.5k damage we'll be mitigating over you in that span. And we're talking about major 50k hits each and every time. Repel mitigates roughly 90%/36k (?) per cast. So each repel cast will make up roughly half of the total damage a war is mitigating more than you between casts. 25k damage in a span of 15 seconds isn't much more (about 1.6k dps). I'm also not mentioning repel casts during mantle - an ability that can stack with prof and make you already mitigating more damage than a war. Do you want me to talk about repel while using RB/prof/SB? A time period where warrior's secondary stuff has long expired and we're strictly using prof/SB?

There are ways to maintain a slight edge, but seriously, should it have to come down to this number crunching? Should knights really be within a few percent points of a warrior at all times? Personally, I think not. We are no longer the hands down best. Facts and numbers just prove it. There isn't a single way of talking around it. The difference between a knight and war is arguably more microscopic than it's ever been in the history of the game

The devs better have some very large and tasty carrot at the end of a stick in production for the warriors to chase after.

Are you starting to figure out what I'm getting at here? Maybe just slightly?

They don't whine like their fellow casters

Well simply put, we didn't know that Elidroth was the only dev that wanted to keep class balance up, keeping warrior mitigation over knight (as it should be).
Rest of devs atm must play knights and don't like warriors, as they gave them a big mitigation boost and a big aggro boost.
We need to go on catching their attention by explaining why the tank class parity is so unbalanced atm. Maybe it will work. Right now, knight def proficiency needs to be reduced in half, to a 15 % mitigation.

They didn't receive a big aggro boost. Why is reading so difficult?

Their aggro just got multiplied by 1.5 on their terror lines. Pally crushes just doubled up their aggro. That's their fastest recast source of aggro. It's now more aggro and a faster reuse (terror for sure. I don't know the recast of the crushes off the top of my head) than the warrior's fastest instant aggro ability, by a pretty good margin. How is that not an aggro boost?

They said aggro was being counted twice as a bug.

To fix the bug they were going to double aggro.

They then doubled aggro for pallys and only raised aggro 1.5x for SK's. So based on what we have been told to this point, SK's are getting a 50% aggro nerf. I haven't parsed it so I'm not sure what's true and what's speculation, only what we have been told.

Despite all that, warrior aggro is way more than sufficient to perform your role. They could triple aggro on knight spells and it wouldn't effect a warrior's ability to lock aggro on a mob. Worst case is knights would have to not be morons and ping-pong aggro.

Not only that, all tanks are getting a huge boost with taunt changes. Currently none of the tanks have an aggro issue at all.

Only thing that may happen with aggro here is SK's get reamed back to where we were before the aggro fix where we were using 3 and 4 years worth of expansion aggro spells to try to keep aggro.

He has a point here Beimeith. A year ago you'd have been mentioned by page 2 at the latest lol.

At least you got to some of the right conclusions.

Warriors still are the best tank. Knights are now very close.

The gap is too close for you and others and you don't like that.

With these changes I agree the mitigation gap is the closest it's ever been.

Most of necro club hung it up long ago after the pet nerfs, death bloom nerfs and constant threats of attack considering how much the class has to do to keep pace.

Quick question, what do you think that the stout defense line and field guardian and aura, higher def stat, higher ac on armor, etc that gives you thousands of more AC does for you? does that not have any relevance here? What about the 15% more hp pool base then all the % based cleric aura, does that not have a relevant place?

Even if a knight, and without testing and parsing I cannot tell, does have a small mitigation advantage, they are going to be taking higher DI's with a smaller hp pool, and thus will still have issues compared to a warrior. They will still be able to be rounded faster and more often.

I don't want knights to get 30% discs, we should only get 20%, but that is not up to the community, but the problem is, and I understand them not reaching out to the community more is because people are not being honest, and don't either know how or don't want to incorporate the full story into their justifications.

Why not? It's not though Shadow Knights have any other role in raids.

As for the rest of your calculations, remember that Warrior still has the 5% internal advantage due to the Knight passive being on 168, and whatever else internal advantage they had prior to Defensive Proficiency that allowed them to receive 30% less DPS than Knights according to data from 2014.

Thus, until I see numbers showing that Warriors are now receiving equal/more DPS than Knights, I'm not going to put any credibility to the idea that Warriors are now no longer the best choice. And of course, even in case they aren't, and you're finally off your "best raid tank" role, that still beats what every other class except for Clerics have had to live with in the last 15+ years. Welcome to not being a god.

So says the #1 whining class on the forums.

I did the following quick tests without any buffs - self or otherwise (excluding shadowed clicky buffs and Defensive Proficiency) after purchasing the AA "Knights Sedulity":



These were all done while sitting down, facing the exact same mob ("a grand overseer" in Plane of Health at loc: 1390.37, 1406.51, -26.09). I tested each ability several times to make sure that I had the correct values that the overseer was hitting me for.

A couple things I noticed:

1. I don't appear to be getting the full 30% mitigation from Defensive Proficiency. Perhaps it doesn't stack properly with Knight's Sedulity.
2. I don't appear to be getting the full mitigation for Holy Guardian. Perhaps it doesn't stack properly with Knight's Sedulity.

Just a reminder, the highest mitigation ability overrides the lesser one. You still only get 20% Mitigation when you have Armor of Ardency up with Protective Proclamation's recourse up since the 20% overrides the 15%. I did double check and test exactly that to make sure it was still working correctly.

It looks like I'll need to double check these without having already purchased Knight's Sedulity. Feel free to make a suggestion if you'd like something else tested.

SPA 168 only functions on the NPCs BASE_DAMAGE * DI_roll portion of their damage.

Not after the knight class, which you contribute well into it atm.

The 168 reduction abilities were never a full 30% in max hit. They averaged out around 27%, and that's what you're seeing.

The Guardian line looks to have a bug, unless its 36% was actually 30%, because there's no explanation otherwise for why it isn't reducing the max hit past Defensive Proficiency.

Pretty sure that's false. Knights didn't spend hundreds of hours trying to get Mages nerfed, from what I remember.

15% gap? If a [smart] tank isn't stacking hp with the new augs, the gap at the top end is about 8% hp max. The top AC war and top AC SK on magelos are 8% hp difference. The top SK in AC has more AC than the warrior counter part by a good 200ac. Higher defense skill? Check again. We're both at 415 with tear.

There's literally no way a knight can be rounded with proficiency constantly on. Full raid buffed around 190-200k the chances of being rounded are maybe 1%. I have yet to see a single raid mob quad for 50k instantly. Let's get past all this "getting rounded" bologna. It ain't happening now.

Do knights not have self buffs that increase ac? The benefits of Stout gets cut in half compared to the SK one. I believe there's is somewhere around 600ac? Field is a group buff so if you stick a war in the group with an SK you get that benefit while tanking. However, in group situations, it isn't nearly as powerful as say...healing?

Knights were not honest and they still aren't honest to themselves. Now they're given abilities that make the stacking of their active discs just below/equal/superior to warrior discs. The only advantages we have are stat-based. Is that seriously enough to define an entire class? A 10k hp difference at most and the ability to raise our AC 1k more than knights (if that). Knights cried the sky was falling, the devs came on a flying unicorn pooping out rainbows, and now are on thee verge of sending an entire class into oblivion unless something by the devs is done to boost warriors. A class that was supposed to be game defining in terms of their role (along with clerics) is quickly becoming a red-headed step child. I'll just main change to a zerker....oh wait

For this, I will wait and see what happens.
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Close isn't even a word I would it. The difference is minuscule which is against the last 14+ years of EQs existence. If we're going to rapidly change the entire dynamics of tanking then there should have been more of a warning than 2 weeks. Knights are now fully interchangeable with warriors. Guilds could now effectively raid without a single warrior and have a knight rotation.

There's no way that you could do this when comparing something like a cleric and druid. Clerics are irreplaceable. Warrior's were supposed to be that same niche. That niche is completely lost.

Knights no have more dps than warriors, tank within the 95% percentile of effectiveness of a warrior's capabilities, and have more useful utility in both the raid and group scene (Pallies more so than SKs).

The main issue is not that you got proficiency. You got the original proficiency + half our another warrior ability called Phalanx.

But it's whatever. I'm not mad about it. I'm just in disbelief at how the SKs actually defend it as if it's not completely redefining and game changing. They continue to downplay everything. If I said the sky were blue, they'd argue and say it's purple.

How many times do you have to be told that the 5% to Knights isn't working? And why is that even being brought up? The innate Warrior advantage is a different ability and that hasn't been given to Knights.