Combat Stability and AC softcaps

Are the AC softcaps on Phinny low enough for combat stability to be useful?

The whole AA is very vague.
"This passive ability increases the armor 'soft cap' of your class by 2%"
'Soft cap % by class increases make sense following these being the defaults.
Warrior: 34.48%
Paladin/Shadowknight: 32.25%
Ranger/Cleric/Bard/Monk: 30.30%
Rogue/Shaman/Beastlord/Berserker: 25%
Druid/Necromancer/Enchanter/Wizard/Magician: 20%

Now the real problem is that no one has any idea what the soft caps are for level 60 characters in Luclin. Not knowing if we will be over or even near the 'soft cap' basically mean the AA reads "Might do something, might not".

I'm not sure there are any other AA's like this. Combat agility, for example, says "This passive ability increases your melee avoidance by 2%". We know that will increase our avoidance. The fact that it is dependent on a hidden attribute makes it very unappealing.

We're way over softcaps already afaik. I am not in a position to research this again right now, but I previously found some pretty convincing testing that showed the softcaps were in the low/mid 100s, with the softcap itself being a little higher for tanks and the softcap returns being what you mentioned above.

My understanding is that softcaps for tanks were around the 300-350 mark during the Velious era, and were increased much later around SoF or SoD. Post changes there were figures quoted on steel warrior for softcaps over 1k, I wasn't around at the time and I don't know the details of how people arrived at those figures.

As players today mitigate significantly better than they did in the early days of EQ, I think it is a possibility that softcaps remain high. If they're still over 1k then combat stability won't do anything for a while, AC wouldn't catch up until POP?

It might be nothing or it might be a potential oversight, as long as it's a question asked I'm happy.

I've seen the below formula for the soft cap posted in many places including here, but i have no clue if its accurate or not. If it is players will need to be in mostly raid gear to reach the softcap

It's so horribly worded. I hate obfuscated mechanics. What the hell is the softcap for each class for each level?

And these are for worn ac, not sheet ac. So you have to add up all of the c on your gear to see where you are in relation to the cap.

nope, you wouldnt be able to tell without parsing it out

He is right, your 'nominal' AC, id est the value reported on your stats, will increase but you don't know the portion of that AC which is over the softcap and therefore how efficient it is. Only parsing will do something here.

Short answer: Yes

This is the equation for mitigation AC (from this thread):



The AC softcap for WAR at level 100 is 510, I see the highest AC on magelo for Phinigel (yay Vash) is 695, well above the softcap.

If, for example, the AC softcap for WAR at 60 was 300, and you had 290 AC... I am not sure CS would still function. I guess that is your question. I would hope that it would still do AC * (CS + PE ) / 100 and work that way, but not totally sure. For most of the game we are operating above the softcap so it is an interesting question. It would be really cool to see a table with all AC softcaps for all classes and levels. Probably never happen though.

As an example, if we do Vash (Iksar Warrior, 60, 300 softcap guess, 695 rAC, 40 shield AC, 131 AGI, only buff is Aegolism = 180 spell AC, pretend CS 3, PE 1)

This results in a mitigation AC value of 937. Exciting. Although this number may not seem that meaningful, we can redo the calculation without CS 3 and PE 1. This gives us mitigation AC of 901. So we increase our mitigation AC by 36 for gaining these AA. If we increase Vash's rAC until he has +36 mitigation AC, we find that 77 AC is about the same as gaining 36 mitigation AC. So we could say (roughly) that CS 3 and PE 1 are equivalent to gaining 77 AC from items, or a 10% AC bonus for Velious era. ***However, I made up the softcap value here (300), so the return from CS depends on the real value.

We can also find Vash's displayed AC from these equations:



Displayed AC = (1000*(270 * 400 / 225 + 8000 * (131 - 40) / 36000 + (4 * 695) / 3 + 35 + 270 / 3 + 0 / 4 + 131 / 20))/(350 + 497)

EQ truncates at division - plug this equation into excel and you get 1838 which matches Vash's magelo.

Ok interesting, I went back to your referenced thread and found the dev post with the softcaps, which was the key question. Thanks for digging that up!

I'm sure the extra detail will be appreciated too

I don't know what it is currently, but I highly doubt it would be 300. Classic EQ has a hard cap of 350 for everyone. (post very late luclin revamp that introduced the more modern system WAR were moved to 430)

Maybe a dev could comment on the current state of EQ's softcaps at lower levels

Sirene's posts make my head explode every time.

That's ROCKET SCIENCE I TELL YOU!

That is all EQ is and has ever been. The formulas and math let you figure out exactly who/what/when/where/why in relation to tanking/healing/dpsing/etc to maximize your performance and then you verify it in game with parse testing. It is especially noticeable on Live where the "elite" of whatever class will out perform those who are "average" by a factor of 2 or 3 all day every day when both are the same level, same AA count, identical gear, etc etc.

haha I'm glad you liked it I really enjoy EQ math

/respect
Us casters can go home now with our dps or dpm calcuations formulas Being a tank is supremely...scientific !

When are you gonna come kill stuff on Phinny, Sirene!?

The math is great. That is a good proven formula for mitigation AC. My only gripe is still wanting to know where the softcap really is.

and

Really don't go together very well. According to the bottom formula the AC softcap for WAR at level 100 with no CS is (375 + 100) * 1.88 * (1+0) = 893

I guess when it comes down to it, it really doesn't matter. All raid geared tanks will be above the softcap and CS will matter. Even the highest HP warrior (at the loss of AC) is still at 400 worn AC. 100 AC above the guess of 300.

I don't think the softcap is a formula at all. I'm also not 100% it's a softcap at all levels either. Classic EQ everyone had a hardcap of 350 mitigation AC. The last patch of Luclin introduced softcaps and shield going over the cap (well, I'm not 100% sure if there were some kind of softcap before this point, there could of been.) This patch changed the numbers for most classes, WAR's moving to 430. This also still had a hardcap for levels 1 through 50. I've talked to some people who have done very extensive parsing at level 65 and they believe their parses showed the softcap at 65 still being 430.

We walk about softcaps in context of what we wear.

Do those softcaps change when the incoming damage increases from motm?

IE a mob hits for 100 and our softcap and max mitigation down lowers it to 65. This was in-era, pre-motm damage output increases from high ATK value raid mobs.

If the same mob now hits for 1000 and our softcap decreased it to 650, would raising AC beyond the old softcap actually show marked improvements on the 350 decrease to say 400 or 450 simply because the damage output enables the recapture of lost AC gains from de minimis returns we could not observe before because damage output was too low to factor in the decimals as relevant?

Iirc, the damage output of a mob is the addition of a base damage and a damage interval ; and only the DI is affected (mitigated or avoided) by the player's AC, is that correct ? "Raid mobs have a very high base damage and that's why they are so dangerous", this is also something I recall from the old days.