So that high of armor piercing if fine for Ice and all but to me making it that high for Earth and Fire is a bit ridiculous. We are going to be reaching a lower mitigation percentage than we were in T4 armor because the armor percing percentage was lower AND our defense was lower, but now the armor percing is higher AND our defense is higher meaning it will be ignore much more defense than it did in the past effective nerfing fire and earth. This is why increasing armor piercing AND increase the defense is bad and is what I have been trying to get at the whole time. Now with spord not giving out exact numbers it's very hard to tell but if its 46% that means Earth and Fire Tanks will have 2794 effective defense(Earth will be slightly higher because of the dominance addition) but the cap in T4 around the 4200 mark with 25% piercing. That puts them at 3150 effective defense. So the increase in defense and increase in armor piercing just nerfed fire and Earth. I am not ok with that at all. In order for it to be even it would need to be 40% armor piercing but from the direction spord is explaining it seems they went higher than that if it needs to be 46% for the ice tank to hit 75% max.
This really does not make since. First off.... Earth tanks are going to be absorbing a percentage of the damage, a large percent at that. This is when the equation comes into play. Fire tanks try to have as much health as possible, so the armor is increasing that stat drastically as well. Right now with junk SP(90) my fire tank alt has 1k dom. Imagine with the new t5 stats...not only increasing my base health but dom as well. TotalDefensewhiletanking+Totalhealthwhiletanking I am not a tank number cruncher, but from what i remember there is a forumula to determine your effective health. Since firetanks will be blocking the damage(like they were meant to anyway) that gives us a increase to incoming damage(80 percent i think) So after figuring out effective health while tanking, i bet all tanks will have a retardedly high amount with t5 gear. The reason the fire tank from odysee died so much in that raid last night was because he was not blocking correctly. Sorry its very early and I am doing alot of homework, so i honestly do not feel like figuring out the calculations for effective health. Go post in the tank forums and im sure those pro number crunchers will help u
I can crunch the numbers perfectly fine i don't need anyones help, I just don't have the time right now. Simply just looking on the surface our effective defense went down a lot. Yes we will have more health but the adds will be hitting harder as well not just from armor piercing but from increase damage as well.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvDnoFKgS5_QdG51aGI0Vk9MRkI3R0V2TDRWczJkblE#gid=0 There are my effective health calculations for T5 gear and max rings,neck,face,trinket, innates. I did not add in mods to make it fair and even(for ice). As you can see even if T5 adds have 50% penetration Ice still is above the 75% cap just with gear and sp innates. I guess it seems pretty even at 50%. Ice shields should help with the large gap in blocking effective health. I don't have the effective health numbers for T4 max nor do I know what armor piercing is in t4 content so i can't compare. If anyone has that and could post please do so.
Regardless of armor piercing an Earth tank with their damage absorption maxed out will still have the highest effective health of the three tanks when played right, excepting the time where the ice tank uses Reflect. EVERYONE gets nerfed from this so in reality, NOBODY gets nerfed. It has been the exact same way since Update 6. An ice tank's mitigation will still always be higher innately than the other two tanks with ANY amount of armor piercing, as it should be.
No matter how much armor penetration enemies have, Ice has 1.9x as much defense as Fire. If Ice has exactly enough defense to reach the cap, Fire will have 75/1.9 = 39.5% mitigation with the same gear. For comparison, an Ice tank at the defense cap for t4 has 7100 defense, which would be 3737 defense for Fire, which would be 2803 defense after penetration, which is 2803/71 = 39.5% mitigation. Or in other words, more defense + more armor pen isn't necessarily a nerf nor a buff to anyone. The whole purpose of armor pen is that mitigation levels should stay about the same in tier-appropriate gear.
I was kind of leaning this towards maybe thats why the T5 raids are pretty unbeatable because the adds have higher armor piercing AND do more damage not just do more damage because they have higher armor piercing. What I'm saying is maybe their piercing is TOO HIGH and needs toned down. We as a group got nerfed as tanks too much not just ice or fire or earth but all three are tanking more damage than they should be with the gear they are giving us to do it with because simply increase the defense to offset the damage is not enough due to that higher armor piercing.
I guess we'll have to disagree on that. The adds hit very hard, but as was shown on the livestream, the developers did not intend for the raids to be walked into and beaten in full T4 without getting at least a few drops from the alerts. I don't really see a problem with this, as the jump in those stats is quite large. Most tanks including myself aren't getting killed by attrition, we're getting killed by oneshots that we don't know enough to avoid yet or some sort of mechanic. It's not unmanageable for a good group, it's mostly just figuring out mechanics and getting used to it at this point.
Exactly, the devs even answered one of my questions about visual mechanics. In the paradox wave t5 raid, for I think the 40k hit, there is a red chevron that pop warning that. As I have learned space is tight and moving fast. So new skills and awareness of surroundings need to be developed. Now is not the time to say it is too much, etc. It is on the test server for a reason, devs are watching all of this. I pray they don't change the difficulty, in fact a little tougher could be better in some ways. Don't interpret that as meaning I think it is easy, I just think in the past we have done just enough to figure it out, then we geared up gutted through it. After that we over geared and things like FoS1-3 became easy. Now Gates of Tartarus is going to be a 12-20 minute farm run for marks. Let the test server do its job and players work on their mechanics, ie SP and how you distribute them along with overall gameplay. The players that wait to react will be behind. Those that watch last nights stream and paid attention to be proactive in strategy development will be ahead of the learning curve. Happy Villain hunting.
