This AC change is not needed, 18yrs the old way and we were fine with it. I don't like seeing an item have for example have 12 ac on it and it goes up 6 only. I don't care if the developers say the stat components is now with mitigation,evasion and its all the same.
And in the end EQ AC system is so... convoluted no one truly knows what exactly what either number truly does for you to reduce damage on you... Real or Fake number
Modeling accuracy vs avoidance is actually super easy. Just take these numbers and do exactly as dzarn described in another post (he said something like accuracy roll beat avoidance roll) and it comes out damn near perfect to EQ's system
More information is better than less information. For one thing, the changes should let you figure out the ac softcap for your level/class fairly easily, without having to do extensive parsing. This was not possible under the old system.
I love that putting on 15 worn attack gives me 15 Offense rating now instead of ~23 sheet attack. The old system was really weird and I welcome more clearly defined stats.
Guess what, if you put on 12 ac and it only goes up by 6, you're at the AC soft cap. Before this change you had no idea if you were at the soft cap or not. More accurate information is good, before we were in the dark. And don't tell me you liked the old system where you put on a 12 ac item and your sheet ac went up by 16. It made no sense, you had no way to know what that meant at all, now you do.
Then maybe explain why Dodge or Parry mods make a pretty green number on the skills page but yet makes no difference on the Evasion number cause you'd think it would =\
When I strip off all my armor and start adding piece back on, the AC still goes up by significantly less than the AC indicated on the items, and that doesn't make any more sense to me than the old system did. Surely I am not at the AC soft cap when my character is naked, so what's the explanation?
Separate defensive skill checks that don't factor into AC. There's a dev post about this somewhere that I'm not going to go digging for, but it basically goes Riposte -> Parry -> Block -> Dodge -> Shield Block/Staff Block, checking an NPC's attack against those in order. If it passes all those checks, it's going to check your avoidance AC vs its Accuracy skill, and then (when the NPC has finally hit), it will check its offense skill vs your mitigation for final damage taken. Edit: I might have the exact order wrong, but the idea is the same. Defensive checks first, then avoidance, then mitigation.
Easy to say when you dont have :Skill: 1H Slashing Atk Delay: 12 DMG: 98 Dmg Bonus: 26 AC: 170 http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=126110 Don't forget about the 20,000 ish AA They have to continue trying to simplify a system that is fairly complex. I think they are doing a rather good job so far adding clarity and streamlining their systems. This also most likely equates to less data used which has been a big goal as seen by the heroic / mod 2 changes.
This was the single greatest change they have made in the history of EQ. I absolutely love it. The numbers you see now actually mean something
Beleive it or not, the ac soft cap is so low in some circumstances that you can be over it while naked.
I don't think that's true. Softcap increase with level (it's basically linear) People used to believe this, but they also believed silkies had a softcap of 70, which was never true. (Classic had a hardcap of 350, then when softcap were introduced everyone but monks were higher or 350) Maybe with some AAs and naked you could be over, but AAs
AAs increase your softcap, not your AC. Buffs count towards the softcap, so if you're naked and fully buffed, it's possible that your buffs alone are pushing you over the soft cap. Now if you're naked with no buffs, then you would think the new AC mitigation number would reflect a 1 to 1 increase until you reach the soft cap. I haven't tried it though so can't say.
Combat stability raises softcap , Armor of wisdom gives ac .... its entirely possible that other AA's give ac as well.
EQ's melee system isnt really that complex. its simply a series of dice rolls, To Hit: accuracy vs avoidance ac and skill check for block parry riposte dodge. damage: ATK vs Mitigation AC to determine which Damage Interval you get hit at, this number gets added to attackers Damage Bonus. the convoluted stuff comes from EQ calculating the numbers it uses in some very, very, odd ways. you can reference the dev post about AC and see EQ does things like take a number, multiply it by 500 then divide by 832 and add 7. its weird. theres also STILL some wrong information being given to the players, that makes me question the validity of these new display numbers. for example, the tooltip for dexterity states it raises your chance to hit, yet ive gone from 85 dex to 255 and my accuracy portion of ATK never increases. so either the tooltip for dex is wrong (which dex was parsed out years ago to not effect accuracy, so my money is on this) or the numbers in the new display arent displaying the correct numbers still.
