Write this down, copy/paste it, whatever. Type 18 and 19 Ventral augs DO NOT stack focuses Type 18 and 19 Dorsal augs DO NOT stack focuses Type 18 and 19 Soothing augs DO NOT stack focuses Type 18 Dorsal and Type 19 Ventral DO stack (and visa versa) Type 18 and 19 Defender (soft cap ac) DO stack Type 18 and 19 Attacker (accuracy) DO stack Type 18 and 19 Casting DO stack Type 18 and 19 Assaulting DO stack Type 18 and 19 Defending DO stack Type 18 and 19 Protecting of same resist DO NOT stack Type 18 and 19 Warding of same resist DO NOT stack You're welcome.
18/19 is a red herring Ventral is best-one-works Dorsal is best-one-works Soothing is best-one-works whether the best is 18 or 19 is completely immaterial.
A little bit of a necro thread but I had tanks in our raid ask the question about the defender augs and if they are worthwhile. By re-reading some of the posts here, it seems most say that they aren't worthwhile; also given the fact that there are pretty much only 6 slots now (if you forgo the TBL ones) may sway the thoughts a little bit. For myself I don't currently use them, but I most of the other knights do. Just wondering what other tanks thoughts currently about the 18/19s are and what they use
I will likely, if I decide to spend the time farming them, end up with: 1x Ventral Defense 1x Soothing 2x Casting 2x Attacker Stacking all 4 Defenders is less effective than just equipping your shield, and only useful when tanking. If I could put them in my shield, I would absolutely do that, but they're not worth it to me as they are.
I probably need to do some parsing (unless anyone has done so) to see the difference between equipping the Attacker augs, the high Hdex augs, and the casting magic augs. Also - is the Soothing worth it? I thought there was some discussion (which I may have imagined) saying that the actual effect was relatively small
When I tested the effect of accuracy like, 5 years ago on my berserker when looking at "Eyes of the Hunter" Personal Tribute that increases accuracy I was pretty impressed by its apparent effect. I never parsed the effect of these accuracy augs or did any accuracy parsing recently, but for now I'm on Team Accuracy/Attacker. This is where I'm at too. Though I might look closely at Soothing. In contrast to my warrior, increasing healing on my shadowknight is second to increasing mitigation and the improved stats from a stat aug like Fortification might outweigh the benefits from +3% healing.
The thing is that all of these augs will have a relatively small impact on anything. It's all about which small impact means the most to you.
Exactly, like you would even notice a difference with whatever augs of those you choose. These games get you looking at these little stat increases, and in the grand scheme of things, you almost never notice or need/use them. When was the last time you almost died, but just barely survived by a percent? That would be about the only time these augs would make a difference. Splitting hairs over nothing. I get caught up in that minutia too, but in actual play, it doesn't really matter, especially in the group game. Maybe if you get excited to parse a few dps higher in a raid or something I guess. Not too much pushing my tank down to a few percent, without my group dying lol.
But seriously, if you made a pie chart of all the factors that go into a tank's effective HP pool, you're going to have some massive slices for "standard gear", "Passive AAs", "skill/AA/spell usage", and then a ton of tiny slices for chase gear, heroism AAs, random clickies, augs, trophies etc. More than most games the cumulative contribution of all those tiny slices is substantial. You really can't point to an individual slice and say it's unimportant, because it all is*. * If the next expansion has any difficult content. If it doesn't then yeah, you can pretty just cancel your sub till the next expansion, no need for an upgraded cloak/augs/anniversary gear etc. Pretty much any fresh tank can tank easy content with a new set of gear and basic AAs.
Ive always said I would rather be alive by 1% than dead by 1% in the game. Its all those small increases that help. Just try to improve a lil at a time all the time.
All true, but it also presents a tricky design challenge. It means that you can't easily do a "gear reset" the way WoW expansions have historically done by inflating the relevant stats on each expansion's gear. The LDON shield augment is still relevant. "Special" DON/OOW AAs are still relevant. Many classes' Epics are still relevant. Heroic AAs from ALL previous expansions are still relevant. And so on and so forth. A new player (or even a new alt) has a tremendous amount of catching up to do. Some of it can be mitigated by making older content available through other means: the AA auto-grant, Heroic characters (who come with most DON/OOW AAs), making some important AAs automatically available in later expansions (like that resist AA from RoS), expansion currency (old augments on CoTF vendors), etc. Still, it's a big mountain to climb, especially for tanks.
I agree, it's tricky but I think the organic way they've done it works well for EQ. I say this even as someone who main-changed from a 22 year old warrior to a freshly rolled shadowknight last year and has very limited playtime (I think I'm at 10ish days /played on him after one expansion). That I beat challenger/collector/hunter etc on my shadowknight on the new expansion and still have a mountain of stuff to collect is kinda refreshing comparing to something like GW2 where it's mostly cosmetics or account-bound gains or WoW where there are regular gear resets. Not every MMO player is interested in going back to do CotF achievements, doing slayer, leveling tradeskills etc to go from 90% to 100% on a new character, but it's appealing enough for the playerbase. I also like that they can regularly update old items with anniversary content, like they did with the Phoenix Feather. The LDON aug is a good choice, both because farming the raid ~7x times is painful and repetitive and because it's increasingly debatable whether the 35 shield AC is better than the non-lore NoS augs. I've got no plans to farm it for my SK.
I agree, but that "90% to 100%" is the tricky part. You have to make new content fun and challenging for: 24-year-old characters fresh 120s everything in between Thus the gap between a fresh 120 and a grizzled veteran cannot be too big, otherwise new expansion content will be either too hard or too easy. However, if the gap between them is too small, it will trivialize all those intermediate achievements, from Slayer to Heroic AAs. Those who spent years getting them may not be too happy. Perhaps it's the underlying expectation of old achievements remaining relevant years later that is making it a tricky situation. Back when the first WoW expansion was released, I remember players complaining about their hard-won raid gear becoming obsolete almost overnight. However, once expectations were adjusted, it became "the new normal". EQ1 took a different route and, as you pointed out, has been reasonably successful balancing things. However, given the relative popularity of WOW and EQ1, I wonder if it may be one of the contributing factors. Oh well, it is what it is.
imho the problem arises when group and raid content is made entirely too easy that 1-3 in your list can do it all (and easily..) NoS beta participants either failed to give meaningful or accurate data to the devs and it shows. Tunare is home to what is colloquially referred to as the redheaded stepchild of raidforces. They raid on the weekends and haven't beaten an expack in a very, very long time. They've also already beaten NoS and it's April. All of these raids can be zerged, there are no dps checks or other things that really add any degree of difficulty except the usual run away mechanics we're all used to. Relying on folks in beta to tune your game is problem #1 and I sincerely hope they move away this practice. Many of us play this game for a challenge instead many of us are bored even when we might only be 1/3-1/4 nos-ore geared up to this point. This formula is very much like WoW and while it certainly can appease new players (which I agree is important to the game's health) has gone too far and needs a serious correction.
You are acting like there has been a single challenging raid in the past 5 years. There haven't been. The devs make a raid, its tuned nicely in beta, then 1 week before beta ends they nerf it after the same few guilds whine about it being too hard.
and that is exactly my point. It would be super nice if they would stop listening to a few whiners who just can't cope with not getting a trophy on day 1...Also, Mearatas was and still is tough. I think we need to start with bosses and adds hitting for alot more. We've had several nights with zero deaths for anyone after an entire raid night in nos raids. That's another sign something is off.
For my ear and cloak I go with: Type 18 selenelion enhancement, fortification and stealth Type 19 selenelion fortification and stealth type 19 rz devotee's fortification I'd assume most other tanks have the same setup.
As paladin, my dps usually doesn't matter on raids, so attacker is out. I'd love to use it, but just don't have the room. For ventral defense, I don't think the 1.1% front dmg reduction is going to help all that much. I usually only die to spike damage, where that 1.1% isn't going to help much