Grouping/solo necro here. With my playstyle (soloing, pulling, trying crazy crap) I do get bonked by mobs quite a bit. For a long time, I focused on HAgi augs in hopes of avoiding some hits. More recently, I've been switching over to HSta to survive the dots and nukes in TBL and ToV. I'm wondering if it's worth keeping a few HAgi augs, or if I should just go for HSta for the hit points. ---------------------------------
Personally, I pay attention to how much "melee shielding" I have, if im close to the a "magic number" of Hsta and can bump shielding up, I go for Hsta, otherwise Hagi.
Eh, melee shielding is not all that valuable since it only works on the DB portion of damage and not the DI portion. It is a nice added benefit but not something really worth going after.
What does DB and DI mean in this context? Can you link a description of what those mod2s actually do? I just assumed that melee-shielding=damage-absorption, and avoidance meant increased chance of avoiding melee-hits.
It's been awhile since I looked at this stuff, but I think this is the gist. DB = Damage Bonus DI = Damage Interval Basically DB is the minimum damage a mob can do and DI is the standard value that determines the spread of total damage values, which there are 20 of. Might make more sense with an example: If we set the values to DB = 10000 DI = 1000 Then the mob can hit for 10000 11000 12000 13000 ... (14000 to 27000) 28000 29000 30000 (Again, it's been awhile since I looked into this stuff so I'm rusty and there may have been changes) So reducing DB or DI have different effects on the overall damage of a mob. It used to be that DB was the main portion of a mob's damage, but with the inflation of damage values, I think DI has taken that position. Shielding (which includes the Melee Shielding Mod2 and most tank discs) only reduces the DB of a mob. I don't think there is much that reduces the DI of mobs, which is where Avoidance comes into play by reducing the number of hits instead.
The Melee Shielding mod2 reduces DB damage Some discs use SPA168, notably including War Defensive (Ultimate) and both knights' Guardian discs, reducing only DI damage. All other SPAs I'm aware of use either a bottom-up(SPA162) or top-down(451) or holistic(197) approach to reducing the overall damage (i.e. the post-calculation DI+DB) There is no SPA for targeted reduction of DB.
Thanks for the clarification, Szilent. That sounds more accurate after reading your corrections. (And better matches up with my memory of using Evasive instead of Defensive on certain mobs a long time ago)
Slight nitpick, but ... This is not quite accurate. DB of 10,000, and DI of 1000, then the mob can hit for 11,000 to 30,000. It cannot hit for a DI of 0. Attack, target AC, these play a part in adjusting the DI 1-20 roll. The formula for a mob’s base damage value is DB + (1-20)xDI. (Technically, its for PC’s too, but there’s a lot more involved with PC damage.). That then gets affected by Shielding or other stuff on the target, as Szilent pointed out.
For any class not just silk you want to understand how Hstats work. You get more from them then what you think. Under Heroic Mods on Stats tab: Accuracy: affected by hDex Combat Effects: affected by hDex Damage Shielding: affected by hStr Damage Shield Mitigation: affected by hStr Stun Resist: affected by hSta Melee Shielding: affected by hSta DoT Shielding: affected by hInt Spell Shielding: affected by hInt Strike Through: affected by hAgi Avoidance: affected by hAgi When you ask about Silk the answer is not so simple. Chanter for example are up in the mobs face to AE mez / Stun bubble. Also may chanter pull or Charm. this all leads to them getting hit more then most other casters. Nerco like to eat themselves. So they need more HP. these are just a few example of why diffrent silk class would use different heroics. As an Enchanter for the longest time I used Hagi. With ToV I have made the switch from Agi to Int. Here is why I not getting hit by melee as much as I used to. Also on raids the DoT and Spell damage is doing more to me then melee hits. So by switching to HInt I have lower the dame I take. 2nd Int = more mana / more DPS so with more mana I can Dot more and Nuke more. Doing more DPS things die faster. You asked about HSta. I like Hint > Hsta unless your a nerco then Hsta might be the better option. Sta add HP and yes HP is good but most the time the amount of HP you get is not going be more then the damage your taking. You only need enough HP to live long enough for the Healers heals to land. More then that is most the time a wasted stat. Now if you are dropping dead a lot then by all means get more HP / Sta but when you find your not dropping dead then you can cut back on the Sta and go for more DPS.
I've been all about the hStam for years. I'd loot items with that attribute the highest and toss in type 5's with the most hStam. Now with the recent increase to mana on necro dots, I still go Hstam on items I loot, but swaping the type 5's with hIntel. We'll see how that works out for me. Trying to keep both intel and stam up is the goal for my play style.
It really depends on what kind of content you're doing which itself comes down to a factor of two things: 1) How often are you being hit? 2) How large are the hits? Hsta only adds something like 35k HP to a caster (might be more, been a while since I checked) which when you have 350k+ HP is around 10% or less. HAgi adds around 40% to Dodge chance (minus Hstrikethrough and Strikethrough which are unknowns aside from Strikethrough being 100% on raid content). It also increases the likelyhood that an incoming attack will be a miss, but I don't know off-hand by how much, (but I'm guessing around 2%) and older parses are not reliable for this. Note here that I'm only talking about the difference in specing one vs the other: E.g. If you spec Hsta you can likely get around 3000 but will still have something like 2000 Hagi so the difference is really only ~1k if you reversed the spec. Let's assume that a group mob has something like 80% Heroic strikethrough and 80% regular strikethrough. (Made up numbers). This would effectively reduce that 40% Hagi dodge chance to .4 *.2 *.2 = .016 or 1.6% dodge rate. The question is then, does avoiding taking damage 3.6% of the time result in a higher survivability rate than having 35k more HP? The answer is: It depends on the two points I made up top. Hit often, Low damage Hagi is probably better because overhealing negates the extra HP. Hit often, High damage Hsta is probably better up to the point where you are likely to get rounded. If you are likely to get rounded even with the 35k extra HP, (e.g. raid content), then the chance to avoid being hit is going to be more likely to save you. Likewise, if your healer is bad (merc) to the point they can't keep you near 100% HP every heal, then Hagi is likely better. A higher cap is only worth it if you can make use of it. (It's the same difference as the Hint vs HSta/HAgi argument: If you have 300k mana but are only able to use 200k in a raid before the event is finished, then specing Hint and having 350k mana is useless. The extra 50k isn't getting used). Hit rarely, Low damage Hagi is probably better for same reason as above. Hit rarely, High damage Hsta is probably better for the same reason as above but with the same caveats as above. As an example: I like doing a lot of older content which means the benefits of high Hagi to completely avoid damage greatly outweigh the extra HP. This is doubly true for pre-Arx Mentis (TDS) where regular strikethrough isn't 100% (kek), and triply true for pre-SoF content where Hstrikethrough doesn't even exist. TL;DR Hagi is almost always going to be better for a caster than Hsta, and they're both better than Hint practically always. Edit: Yes, I'm aware I didn't specifically mention AEs, but DDs we can negate a lot of with runes and shield (though that line has continued to get worse over the years) so it is really only DoTs that are the issue and in a lot of cases it likely doesn't matter if you have Hsta or Hagi since a massive raid dot is *probably* going to kill you in 2-3 ticks regardless of your spec if you aren't healed.
