Are there any good non-vis items for tanks this expansion? I'm finding some of my pieces hard to replace due to the AC loss. Or is the HP/Heroics worth the loss?
If you used the type 9 augs for AC while forgoing the other stats you are going to find it tough to reach those AC levels in EoK gear. Giving up a little bit of AC though you will probably see gains in especially hp of probably near the 1k per item, and much more balanced heroics. The EoK gear is going to come out on top as a much better route to take even with a slight loss in AC.
You will make up for if not exceed the AC total by time you get the Visibles themselves, if you did go full type 9 AC mode your hp will be pretty weak, so it is probably a good idea to lose the like 40 ac per non vis (which you will more then make it up by up to like 300 ac gains on visibles) to gain the 30k hp needed to not spike/die as hard. I have a Paladin box I've been using for EoK (full TBM type 9 AC augs, not max type7/8 augs since slack due to box and don't try hard him that much since don't full time use year round), what I can see on him is that in tank mode he takes DPS basically equivalent to a Raid Geared 2her'd Tank, but the Raid geared tank has 2x the HP. With EoK trash mobs doing dots, DD's (some are like 40-50k), it can get kinda Spiky since his HP is only 105k unbuffed. Named as well. I don't think for EoK at least, it is a bad choice to give up like 800 AC potential (even tho your AC will still be the same or gain from the visibles) for like 30k HP potential in the current EoK scenario for a Tank in Group Gear when your HP is that low.
I was leaning more towards hp anyway since the main problems I've been running into are named with 100k DD spells. I'm at 115k hp/13.6 ac but I'm able to do most named in T1 and did 2 T2. The bridge keeper took several tries though.
The value of AC vs HP is a pretty tough question. Not only is the effect of AC on the bell curve that is the Damage Interval (DI) part of damage difficult to determine without a lot of consistent parsing effort, but it changes based on the mob and the benefit of an HP pool vs more mitigation changes based on the encounter and your healers. When examining augs I've generally gone with valuing 20HP as much as 1AC, which means that if I replace my Severed Hooplet ( 2920hp,236AC,1HSTA) with a Barbed Earstud (3840,170,19HSTA) I'd lose some 66AC, but would gain enough HP that I'd break even. I'd also gain in dex/agi quite a bit, as well as less important stats like attack. The benefit of dex/agi depends on if you're stacking it and have enough to get passed a mob's strikethrough. That's the worst earring in EoK in the least AC slot (ear, where the slot9 aug in TBM gear didn't care what slot it was in), so based on that I'd say we should feel pretty good about replacing any TBM group gear with any EoK group gear.
I went to EQR and used the tool there to figure out just how much i would gain/lose for AC and HP by going from tbm to eok gear, so i thought i would share these numbers. 105 SK with all 216 AC type 9 augs in TBM gear: Fully upgrading to EOK TS group gear (same non-type 9 augs as i currently have) gains me 464 AC and 22999 HP. AC Loss on non-vis slots is 351 AC (which implies the total AC gain from the visibles is 815 AC. HP gain on non-vis slots 13285 (implying 9714 HP gain on visibles). One thing...i already have EOK T2 arms, so that is not incuded in these figures.
...and that is not even factoring in all the kickass augs EoK has. All in all there is no reason not to upgrade to full EoK group gear if you aren't raiding. Another thing to consider is the massive difference in heroics also. EoK gear is far far superior in a lot of ways.
