Are combat agility and combat stability really worth the cost? It will take almost 500 AA to finish each of them after the auto-grant stopped at 106. It will be a gain of 88 more AC, but already have over 7k. It just seems there are many more important AA to take before grinding hours for 88 AC. I asked in chat the other day and was told CA/CS were the most important AA. This seems like PoP era advice to me, but wanted to get more opinions. Also, is hDex still the most important heroic stat? I thought I saw somewhere that a recent patch made it less important.
Your mileage may vary. This comes down to how you are currently faring in the content you are playing in. If you tank perfectly fine, then ALL defensive AA are not "worth it", compared to AA that increase your dps and thus your exp gains per unit time. If you ever die tanking anything, then yes, they are worth it. The baseline would be, can you function perfectly fine using a 2her (you a knight or a warrior?). Some warriors go hSta because it gives them more HP which is valuable on raid bosses where you have essentially unlimited heals and the mobs strikethrough all your heroic gains on agi and dex avoidance. But that isn't the case with you, so go hdex with hagi as secondary. Dex gives slightly more total avoidance than agi, but also gives you more dps. Combat agility is better than stability. Do that first.
On average for whoever is taking hits from the group's opponents, the combat calculations of taking a hit are done twice a second. How well one bends those calculations is one of the basic definitions of tanking in EQ. If you want some other AA? You can probably get by versus most content without. After all, groups make do with monks & rangers & various pets & even mercenaries. But that's what we're talking about, talking about playing a tank without the core tanking AA: getting by without a real tank.
For group content, Hdex > Hsta > Hagi. To try to overcome mob heroic strikethrough, you need to go fully into Hdex or Hagi in group content. If you balance Hdex and Hagi, you will come with middle values, that won't allow you to go closer to Heroic Strikethrough values. This is why Hsta is the secondary logical choice. For raid content, Hsta > Hagi > Hdex. This works also for knights, because all raid mobs now have 100 % strikethrough, it's not only boss mobs. Hagi comes 2nd as miss are still working, even if the impact of Hagi on miss % is lacklustered on raid mobs. I read that it was debatable that Hdex could be best stat for SK, even in raid, with their lifetap thing, but I cannot comment on this.
Out of curiosity, what do you think would be more important than taking CA/CS/Armor of Wisdom/Physical Enhancement? My recently hit 110 SK noticed a huge improvement once those were maxed.
Good question because a tank class must be able to first survive a fight in order to win it. With paladin being the lowest dps of the 3.5 tank classes, paladins actually need to max their defense even more then warrior, SK, (and ranger) in order to be successful. Any soloing paladin learns this fact (painfully) but with the caveat being stun-able mobs.
For CS. CA has nothing to do with AC. You will avoid more hits. For a tank, that seems kinda important.
Another important fact about CA preeminence. It's not canceled by Two-Handed Proficiency I, which every knight should strive for in battle. That further diminishes the value of CS entirely for knights. Odd that.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that I am talking about an SK, level 113 atm. CA/Armor of Wisdom/Physical Enhancement/Shield Block are all capped now. I am just having a really hard time with another 500+ AA to gain < 100 AC. Of course, I realize any additional AC is good, but it seems to me that almost any DPS AA that could potentially get the mob dead one round sooner, and help with your aggro would be better than such a tiny (0.0142%) AC boost.
I think it's one of those things where even if it's 100 AC, if that puts you in the next DI roll bracket, you're talking about a constant reduction on incoming damage per hit. Is that 1k more damage in a nuke worth 1k damage off per incoming hit? (Simplified to make a point)
Yes, that is the conventional wisdom. I have yet to see any real argument for grinding out 500+ AA for 88 more AC. Ultimately, it won't matter as I'll get enough AA to cap it out anyway, but I think the priority of it is way overestimated.
if I was just breaking into ToV content on my SK now as a fresh alt or something I'd more than likely just leave ca/cs at autogrant levels and bang out lifetap related AA (crits, procs etc). I don't know what the other tanks would do but that'd be my plan as an up-and-coming SK in 2020
Its like anything else. It depends on what else you have available. I mean, 88 more rAC isn't nothing. I mean, that is something like 200ish item ac. Look at people arguing about fleet earring versus a new earring and losing way less AC.
How does hdex give slightly more total avoidance than hagi when hagi boosts "Avoidance" directly? I'm sorry to seem dense with this one but I'm trying to get my head around it! My tank is a paladin.
On the Defense only side of the stats, when mobs have no strikethrough hDex gives +1% per 25 points to Riposte and Block/Parry, hAgi gives 1% per 25 points to Dodge, via mod2 dodge also gives to Miss Avoidance but it's a lot less then these Mobs have heroic strikethrough (so you are penalized for going a balance of stats), as well as some amount of regular strikethrough, Raid mobs intentionally have full overall strikethrough (so only misses or w/e work)
hdex increases riposte and parry rates hagi increases dodge rates The sum of the riposte + parry increase > dodge increase.
HAGI also increases misses. So yer Occam's Razor should be The sum of the riposte + parry increase > dodge + miss increase. The difference really being that riposte increases DPS while tanking.
