It's funny because Szilent and I dont particularly "get along" because of some difference of opinions on several matters, but I included him because across most class discords (and previously the eq discord) and many forums he answers questions and when challenged, brings receipts; either from raidloot data or forum history. Maybe you aren't that active in areas where people ask questions, but Szilent is. Your self proclaimed accolades mean nothing to me. It's good you think you're the best paladin, but it's much like a rapper stating "theyre the best rapper in the game" on a track. Just as many raids have been won because a paladin has +20k hp lol The point isnt which saves the raid, neither one does that. The point is, after a certain gearing level, your survivability is controlled by your ability to press buttons, not your gear. Neither is a replacement for using a defensive cd. hsta stacking insignificantly impacts your tanking ability. hdex significantly impacts your dps ability.
1300? sure, 1300. 13.3% delta on melee crit rate Critical hitting does not just double a hit, so gaining 13.3% criticals is considerably more than 13.3% melee dps. I can't speak to what you've experienced as "terrible" dps, but side by side in the same group a good paladin can certainly keep pace with me. Here's a Shei (ahem, not undead.) split from a couple weeks ago when we weren't tanking, so stuck in with a brd, shm, 2*mnk: Shei Vinitras in 419s, 17.82B Damage @42.52M, Paladin = 587.36M@1.41M in 418s {7} | Szilent = 559.38M@1.34M in 417s That same paladin came up 5th in total healing in that event, since besides anything else he was responsible for cures on the melee ball. It's one thing to describe one's own choices - to wit, that you don't engage with your class' ability to contribute to raid dps because you think you'd be one-shot with 20k lower max hp - it's a whole 'nother thing to claim that the ability doesn't exist and then to fabricate nonsense numbers to support that perspective. If your dps is terrible, that's as may be. It's not something I care about. But neither is that terribleness intrinsic to Paladins in 2022.
Do you dispute the >13.3% increase in DPS? Specifically for a paladin who is not tanking and is meleeing a boss (regardless of whether they have ADPS in their group)?
I play an alt pally in my box group that I also raid mostly CoV with and I go hSTA because i lack raid gear still and stuff like trophies and those alt raids are usually short on healers too so I tend to get destroyed by adds. I'm curious though, my thought was that once you have the crit from buffs, additional crit would have less value. Like getting 1% crit if you have 0%, is a 1% DPS increase, but getting 1% crit when you already have 99% crit, is like 0.5% increase in DPS. So I thought for a pally, increasing crit beyond what we have naturally and buff was not worth chasing. I'm guessing that if being grouped with a zerker, the synergy increases crippling blows so it would help scale damage from crits, but beyond that i can't think of anything that would make the 13% crit increase DPS by more than 13%. I usually play priests or casters though so I may have missed something about melee DPS and i'm genuinely curious.
A key factor is that critical hits aren't double damage. The amount of extra damage is dependent on buffs (ex: shaman epic 2.0, SPA 496 10: Increase Critical Hit Damage by 110% of Base Damage (Non Stacking)), and a bunch of other stuff. More info is here: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/combat-fury-aa.257059/#post-3780066 You can check your logs to see your typical normal swing and critical hit swing. When I tested the impact of crippling blow I averaged the below amounts. This was against a target dummy in the guild hall with controlled buffs, but it was also a long time ago so I don't remember if there was any other context to it: My average hit was: 6577 My average crit was: 28573 My average crippling blow was: 36345 This was with Shaman epic 2.0 up and on my level... maybe 110 berserker. I was using Fury's Synergy to proc crippling blows. So, in this case my crits were 4.3x more damage than my normal swings. If we take an example here and say that you execute two rounds of 10x attacks each, one where you crit 9x times and another where you crit 10x times and an average normal hit of 10k damage, you might get something like the below distribution: 9x crit: 1*10000 + 9 * 10000 * 4.3= 10000 (from normal swings) + 387000 (from crits) = 397,000 10x crit: 0*10000 + 10*10000 * 4.3 = 0 (from normal swings) + 430000 = 430,000 So, in this case the 10% increase in crit (to go from 90% to 100%) would result in an 8% increase in damage. Just to visualize this relationship I charted that equation below for 0-100 crit. I might've made some bad assumptions or screwed up my math (which you can see in the equation in the image), so take this with a grain of salt. When in doubt, parse differences. This doesn't cleanly describe DPS in real situations, especially paladin DPS which has non-melee components, I don't know what percent paladin DPS is influenced by critical melee hits.
Experience, time playing, doesn't really mean anything. A person who plays for 20 years and never learns anything new is less experienced than a person playing 5 years with growth. We've all met that old timer who has a job they don't really know how to do very well but talks poorly about the next generation. Anytime your primary supporting argument for your position is your time in the job, it's time to reflect.
Good players understand stat balancing and knowing when you’ve reached a point of diminishing returns in one area, and can progress another area to achieve more. For example standard gearing in EQ provides enough survivability that leads into focusing HDex to raise dps. I’ve seen multiple raids wipe at 0%. Every little bit of DPS helps, not just for a full kill but getting through phases.
It boils down to a few key points: hDEX is the best option for anyone that can critical with their melee attacks. This is a simple fact because DPS is king in EverQuest and hDEX is the best heroic stat that can impact your DPS. If you are just starting your aug/gearing, building for hDEX is a simple decision If you are already geared, you need to weigh the cost/benefit of swapping. This will be a personal decision, as neither option will have a true impact on your raid or group performance (i.e. you can perform your role in either setting with no externally noticeable fluctuation either way) There are tools (linked in this thread) to get a rough estimate of the impact of this swap The EQ devs have, in their assigned mission of artificially inflating expansion engagement, made acquiring a set of augs extremely tedious For myself, I have built hSTA. Why? Because, when I started that route, it was the recommended stat allocation due to the fairly recent change in raid mob strikethrough. Why haven't I changed? Because of #3 above. The benefit does not outweigh the cost (in time) of swapping for me, and when the last expansion came out (the best time to swap) there were a lot of questions still occurring around this discussion. Additionally, I mostly group with melee classes outside of raids, so my tendency is to give them priority on any hDEX augs that drop while we are grouping, which further delays any swap opportunities for myself and tends to make me prefer a different stat to avoid fighting over the augs. Maybe, now that this discussion is more settled and I have a more established group/mission crew, I might swap to hDEX when the new expansion comes out (or if I happen to get 8500 ToL mission currency somehow). That's my 2cp
HSta advantage is that the added HP allows you to soak more dmg per round, and sustain more AE raid dmg which are heavy now, as you are nearly hit everytime.
There’s a threshold of diminishing returns with HPs and HSTA. There’s so much splash and AE healing available now that you just need to satisfy that requirement. Same premise as any RPG like Souls, Elden Ring or Monster Hunter. Hit the survivability mark and then add other stats.
And if your AE healing is not firing at the good moment ? Also, the AE healing numbers (around 10 k heal), while enough to keep DPS up around, can be too low to cover a bad round that can kill the tank. Of course not, there is no diminishing return with HP and HSta. Also, the hype about HDex is fun, the DPS differences bewteen a HDex and a HSta tank is minor in term of time won. Putting numbers into a crit rate calculator doesn't translate to similar DPS measure.
The reason I can't take anything you say seriously is because you cherry pick data to suit your argument and have been doing it for years. You have zero credibility in my eyes. Linking a 7 minute parse which is exactly the duration of Pureforge and Holyforge of a paladin in a dps group is 100% distorting the argument and you know it. Is it a perfect ideal dps group? No, but its not a tank group with a bunch of other tanks and a couple of clerics. You're such a fraud man. You don't even have enough sincerity to post a parse where there are adds. Why not link the entire raid night parse where a paladin was in an actual tank group and had to use sword and board? It doesn't suit this narrative you're trying to push though. I swapped my type 5 augs to provide 1300 more dex and parsed myself. You are right, it was just about on the nose at 13% more frequent crits and just about the same in dps. I will concede that my 1% more dps was hyperbole. 13% more dps to a paladin is pretty irrelevant in the scope of a paladins job expectations. Thats going to be about 40 to 50k more dps on the course of an entire nights parse. Everyone knows more hdex equals more dps and that would matter for a melee dps, not much for a tank. That's as obvious as the absurdly stacked parse you posted.
What kind of parse did you do? Just self buffed? raid buffed? any adps? 13% is probably the worst case scenario.
Just auto-attack on a combat dummy with full raid buffs. Seemed like a baseline. Also pretty indicative of the adps you get in a tank group for most paladins.
