I recently commented on another thread on here and was asked what SK's were tanking that I , as a paladin, could not, with similar gearing. I had left game for nearly 8 years and only returned last june, that said when i left game AC was king, and there was still a stat called shielding, which is gone now apparently. After reflecting on the question i was asked, what are sk's tanking that I cant, It occured to me, that maybe im not geared as close as I thought, so upon looking over tanks on magelo, I see that many went mostly or all Hsta, and many are Hdex, but very few,, exept me it seems went Hagi. Im aware of caps on AC now, I wasnt so much when I returned and it occured to me, that maybe other tanks are just better mitigated than me with me going Hagi, as Im probably not benefiting from all the AC I have , some portion being over cap. Im not 100% Hagi, but 85% for sure. Which stat is better for mitigation? Im a Paladin so im not looking for the magic make me have dps now set up, doesnt exist, so would retooling with Hdex be an option for me , or should I retool as Hsta, for the melee mitigation and added HP? Does Hdex offer mitigation in the form of less hits by increasing Dodge? I have also seen a few other posts on here asking pretty much this question in one form or another, sorry to bring it up again, but I would like some other opinions on this from end game raid tank types, Thanks in advance.
Melee Shielding, the thing that you are talking probably, still exists. Look at this name, it raises by 1 every 400 HSta points. If grouping mostly, HDex > HSta > HAgi If raiding mostly, I stand for now by HSta > HAgi > HDex, but as raids boss don't 100% strikethrough anymore, i'm waiting to study more ToL tank parses from my own ones and also waiting to see tanks posting tanks parses results between HSta / HAgi and HDex set up. 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. I value HAgi next, because it can still have an impact on miss %, and per the formula it can still impact AC a bit as you said it. It's nice because type 5 HSta augs have HAgi as secondary stat. I'm wating to see the number of real riposte / parry / dodge on these tanks parses to see if HDex could get some value back, btw it's HAgi that increases Dodge rate, not HDex, HDex increase parry / riposte. By real riposte / parry / dodge I mean hits that are really avoided, as most of them are strikethrough by the raid mob so you are hit at the end.
Because of the order of melee checks (miss, riposte, parry/block, dodge, etc.) and the impact that hDex has on riposte chance, hDex is favored up to 2500 where you are about 100% chance. Once you successfully riposte nothing else can happen in the sequence, other then misses. Next get hAgi up to 2500 to boost miss rate.
I'm still waiting on your answer ! I am H-sta type 5s currently. Have enough currency for H-Dex and about 1/4 of the way done with H-agi. Once I get them all I will do a few weeks of comparison parses while making sure to maintain the same defensive / spell rotations. I personally have not found anything in this xpac that SKs can tank that pallies can not. Ditto for kiting, tho obviously on swarm commander SKs can snare the mobs themselves so a bit of an advantage on those particular mobs. If you're noticing a large difference in ability I would suspect it's either augs, tribute, trophy, or defensive / spell rotations making the difference.
There is no hard cap on any type of AC. mitigation AC has a soft cap but we are and have been very far past that since...basically always. There is no cap, hard or soft, on avoidance AC, which is what HAgi primarily boosts. If a mob has really really high accuracy than it is hard to get a benefit from HAgi, but, in that scenario, avoidance AC gets better the more you have of it. it stops getting better once you cross 50% miss rate but that's impractical to ever achieve in current content. basically it scales like this. if a mob has 10,000 accuracy and you have 5000 avoidance AC, you will evade 25% of the time. if you bumped it up to 10,000 avoidance AC you would evade 50% of the time. To evade 75% of the time you would need to have 20,000 avoidance AC. In my opinion, HAgi is potentially the best in terms of damage mitigation. But, it only becomes the best if you can really push it super high, like 3500. That will give you roughly 100% dodge chance and enough avoidance AC that your evasion will be decent. HAgi has the benefit of pairing really well with glyph because glyph provides a percentage increase to your avoidance AC, so the more you have the better. We do need some parses before anybody can say anything for sure though.
Would be cool if there was a way to get the crazy hp regen buffs some devs give us during beta (so you don't explode) in the guild hall and the ability to make a dummy attack you with the power of a raid mob to really test things in a controlled environment.
You said: 5k avoidance = 75% 10k avoidance = 50% 20k avoidance = 75% I think you meant you will be hit 75% (evade 25%) of the time with 5k. Should make the 3 statements match format.
How are both of you you coming with this 2500 HDex number equals to 100 % riposte chance or 3500 HAgi equals 100 % dodge chance ? The chance to riposte depends of the Heroic Strikethrough number of mobs versus HDex. The chance to dodge depends of the Heroic Strikethrough number of mobs versus HAgi. So without knowing the HStrikethrough of the mob, how are you obtaining these results ?
As far as hstm, all my research seems to show that melee shielding only mitigates the damage bonus side of each hit you take (this could be wrong and I'd love someone to confirm or deny it with proof if possible). On a young zelniak that I tanked all of on a zelthiniak run recently, I was able to determine the db to be somewhere roughly between 25-30% of its max hit. Which means an extra 3 or 4 melee shielding from going full hstm would only mitigate somewhere between 1 and 2% of the total damage you take from each hit on average. Every DB is tailored to the invididual mob but I imagine eq standardizes all hits now to be about the same (this could be totally wrong...just a hunch). Although I don't know exact numbers, it's been thrown around that full hstm build is somewhere between 20 and 30k more hp over someone who uses something else, which is like...a 5% increase on max health or less? Even less if you consider your unconscious hp? Adding all this up with quick garbage math it seems going full hstm results in roughly a 5% increase in hp and mitigation combined over someone who uses another stat. But someone who goes full hdex I've noticed can see strike throughs in the 90-100% range depending on the mob and hdex of said tank. Leads me to believe they are "probably" roughly equal on raids except hdex gives more dps making it the best choice outside of mobs that appear to still have 100% strike through (I've noticed a few mobs I tank do me 100% despite no changes in my hdex that I can notice, including tribe usage). On hagi, I really have no idea. Does avoidance ac work against strike through the same way hdex does? Does anyone know if the numbers are comparable?
You are reasoning wrong if you are just reasoning with %. So tanks don't get growth cast on them too because the 20-30 k HP bonus is useless then as it's only 5 % of tank total HP ? So with HSta and Growth , i run now with 50 k more HP to soak dmg from each round and sustain AE dmg. Will it save me for sure ? I don't know, maybe not, but there is a chance it will. I prefer this than winning 45 sec on a total of 9 events duration 4 hours + total raiding time.
Your insight appears correct in the abstract, but going full hSta doesn't ever provide a 4% Melee Shielding mod advantage. It provides 2, 3% barely with the extremest of choices. Foob, highest hSta for warriors, has 1205 higher hSta than Szilent who has highest hDex. With all the extras added in on trophies/etc, Szilent raids with exactly the hSta needed for 41% Melee Shielding. 1205 more provides Foob with 44% presuming they have all the same extras available. Given that Szilent could trivially come up by dozens or hundreds of hSta, and that the same flexibility is not available to Foob who is already pushing that stat to the max, it's almost coincidence that a 3% gap is achievable this year. That's just the most wiggle that we have in pushing a hStat. Foob has 26k hp more than Szilent at the time of this writing. In a typical tank group I'm taking raid hits with over 725k hp steady, jumping up a ton "when it matters" via dru Bear, war Composite, cle Composite, war Tenacity, glyph Dragon. So "or less" on % increase to max hp. hSta is not an insupportable choice. Indeed it's the only choice, when one chooses "maximum survivability as a raid's main tank" as one's exclusive ethic, because the alternatives do approximately nothing to advance that ethic. This should not be understood to overstate the efficacy of hSta. Extreme choices to garner small edges do have a statistically understandable way of reducing the incidence of outlier events (deaths, that is, as a raid's main tank), but as those outliers are not per se eliminated a perspective of risk management comes into play. If both the hSta & hDex tanks were both taking hits, and our most powerful mitigation abilities had expired, and some dot damage comes in, and our emergency tools had already been used, and the healers with their rescue tools are distracted/disabled/whatever, then there's a higher chance the hSta tank will make it through to one of those conditions being alleviated. But also? If all that goes wrong and the hDex tank doesn't just make it through anyhow? Then for that to actually lead to a raid loss there also has to not be a backup, whether that's another tank or a Deft/weapon brd/rng, with their own shmear of abilities. In the end hSta is not my choice because that maximum of survivability is not my exclusive ethic. As much tanking as I do, I'm not getting beat in the face 100% of the time. Even for that portion of my play in which I'm getting beat in the face, those edges in tankability rarely come into play. I've chosen instead to have a full time, substantial boost to damage.
Oh you are doing 50 % more DPS than warriors going HSta in similar ADPS set up ? is that what you are trying to claim ?
I think you're being deliberately obtuse, so this is the last time I'll respond to you here. 26k hp at a high cost to dps is radically different than 36k hp at nearly no cost to dps
Others are covering your question directly, so I'll cover it indirectly. If I were to look at your tanking performance relative to random SKs who have similar gear levels as you, I'd first look at what abilities you're using and talk with good paladins to verify you're hitting the right ones and secondly look at how different the tanking abilities of an SK are relative to a paladin. The truth is that your heroic stat choices mean very little in terms of mitigation, it just gets talked about a lot because it's nearly the only build-choice we have and because it's difficult to answer one way or the other.
