New players - pick a knight if you aren't a boxer

Again, people are going about this wrong. Repel would replace any other SpA 162 being used since it's the highest percentage (90%). Knowing this, all you need is the total damage it mitigated multiplied by the total times it was used.

Under ideal circumstances, this knight would've used it around 27 times mitigating 35595 damage each use. So we automatically know that this ability would've mitigating 961065 damage, regardless of whether it stacks or not. It's a very simple concept. It doesn't matter what the person had running at the time or whether or not the other things mitigated damage also. The only time where Repel wouldn't mitigate the full damage is if the boss has 3 hits in a row where the damage mitigated totaled less than 35.5k damage. The odds of that are pretty slim considering the 90% mitigation percentage. A mob would only need to hit for an average of 14k for three times for Repel to work 100%.

I can go back and check how many times he did use repel in this time frame to see the real numbers, as long as Repel shows up on parses, but for all intents and purposes, Repel adds an additional 5-9% mitigation for the duration of a fight which is like having a mini Vie/SB on at all times. I'd say that's a pretty powerful ability to have available.

No, it doesn't because people are failing to understand stacking mechanics. Repel will take precedence over all your abilities because it's the highest percentage. You're getting that 7% mitigation no matter what. It's so simple, yet people acn't get the concept through their heads. If you cast Repel X amount of times, it will mitigate X*Y amount of damage because it will overtake every single other Vie available.

If you add that damage Repel mitigated to your real damage, then divide your actual damage taken by the "fake" total (real total + Repel damage mitigated) you will get the exact percent which Repel mitigated. There are no "well, if we're using Mantle during it, it will mitigate less than that because blah blah blah. NO! That's not how it works!

Unless you have a 100% mitigation ability out there I don't know about. This is the reason why NTTB was such garbage in raid situations. It was 100% mitigation, but only mitigated up to 3.4k damage. Any mob hit over 34k and it was a detriment to use compared to SB/Vie.

When did I mention warrior's feelings? I didn't. I laid out numbers and stated that a warrior outside of LS probably won't serve better than a knight will his abilities up. A 4 minute period is when a Warrior should theoretically destroy the knights on a parse, especially if the parse for the knight is 2 minutes longer in length. In that time we'll have Dichotomic, our bravery's, LS, and everything else in our arsenal at our disposal. Unfortunately lots of abilities don't show up for warrior parses so I won't be able to tell what he used. However, he's a MT in a very good guild so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and said that he was stacking everything during this 4 minute phase.

If a warrior is so superior, why was the different a mere 6%? It's a question that I don't have the answer to without more parses to see if it was a fluke or not. One would think that a warrior using all their best abilities (much higher mitigation than our base DP/Vie) would have a substantially better parse than 6% better, especially if for 2 minutes or so the knight was running on nothing but DP/Repel/Vie.

I'm not worried, it's more of a curiosity at this point. I'd love if people could bring up some knight parses of MTing duties and I can compare them to the tanking parses I have for myself and the tanks in my guild. Will I get these? Probably not because parses lead to irrational idiots screaming for nerf bats.

EDIT: For S's and giggles, I decided to look at his spell casting parse for healing. From a base - no modifications, no crit heals, nothing - his spell casts equaled 2k healing per second for the duration of him tanking. That's roughly 12k healing per tick completely unmodded. I would say that's a very, very powerful tool not to be downplayed. Granted he's a pally, not an SK so the SK is probably lower, but still how in the heck are knights downplaying that much base healing for a period of 6.75 minutes while tanking?! How powerful are knight mods for healing? The arms current healing mod is 62-100%? So without AAs that healing power increases to what, 20-24k per tick? The real number is probably around 30k/tick? Why is that being downplayed so much?

I don't have time right now to address much else but I had to comment here - if we accept your 6% as accurate, you are stating that is not enough between the top tank and the secondary tanks (not 3rd, 4th, or 16th, but 2a & 2b). How big do you expect it to be without being bad for the game? The dps gap among the various tiers of dps classes may be larger, but dps is a lot less valuable than mitigation. People get hung up on the number and never stop to think about the value. I'm not saying it is the right value, but 6% mitigation is pretty significant in EQ.

As for healing, in the group game it definitely matters. In the raid game, I have yet to do a current raid target at any year I can recall where I could tank a mob without a healer spamming me thanks to self heals. Perhaps I'm forgetting something so feel free to remind me if I am. Until a knight can tank a mob without a healer dedicated to spamming them, what does it matter? A 12k heal isn't doing much good with how hard mobs hit today and how big the heals are from the cleric spamming you to keep you alive..

Dichotomic has a 1 min recast.

As long as Riposte and Rampage favor 2H, that's sufficient in my books, at least from a Warrior perspective. Base advantages in damage per hit with increased swing chance should handle this nicely. It was a well-tuned balance for many years before SS/proficiencies rocked the boat.

As bad as many of us look on DP, I submit 2H prof is equally overtuned. I'm sure we've all appreciated the DPS boost but we should avoid increasing separation between stances from a DPS and mitigation perspective.

Specific to 2H prof, tank DPS is so bad that it makes no sense to tune it downward, but increasing it would be an equally poor and ultimately more damaging decision from the stance narrowing perspective. I would propose all tanks get on board to narrow mitigation and DPS gaps between our weapon configs. Eliminating the 2H prof penalties is the first baby step.

It pains me to say this but we all may even need more 1H damage to get there. Though if we walk down that road I would rather see SS/ISS eliminated with the bonus rolled into DP in a V2 fashion. This would help avoid the anomalies we've seen with it being an all skills mod - ADPS quirkiness, modification of for skill attacks, etc.

A side effect of that change might be that we see Warrior 1H itemization ramping up to catch Knight ratios which could solve our DW DPS issues by itself.

We have the ingenuity AA's. Might be room for improvement there.

Regarding "caster" ADPS, there may be an argument for adding these procs to combat procs. That's another situation that would very nicely favor Dual Wield - particularly against high AC mobs.

Warriors have a lot of "Increase Hit Damage" mods with relatively short reuse timers... these mods are a minor boost to 2H but a larger boost to DW. This is the only reason why the sustained DPS of DW is anything worthwhile. Most other mods either benefit them both equally or benefit 2H more, hence, it's more burn DPS, and I speculate more DPS with any aDPS setup.

Considering ripos and crippling blows (which are a bigger boost to 2H), I assume 2H is more DPS when tanking.

Putting a 2H mod on DW stance in its current form wouldn't be an issue given that stances autocast on weapon swaps (granted, I don't know if there's an exploit with buff blocks etc to get around this.)

12k healing without mods, no less. Nobody is arguing that self healing will allow for healers to ignore you. Damage is always too great, but at that rate, it's like having a whole other healer on you that you control more directly because it's yourself. That's invaluable, imo, especially if there's only a 6% mitigation gap between warriors and knights.

6% is not a lot at all. That's equal to the difference between us before any mitigation abilities existed in the game. You know, the time where knights made warriors look like a sick joke?

If the average hit of a mob is 20k on a war (most my parses are 20-23k), the average hit on a knight is 21.2k. A mob averages around a 70% hit chance from my parses that I see. If a mob is flurrying every round (4 attempts, they are hitting 2.8 times each round) 2.8 x 1.2 is a difference of 3.36k total damage per round.

Based on my parses, a mob hits me around 60 times per minute. 60 x 1.2 is 72k damage more a knight is taking than a warrior if it's a 20k hit. If the average hit for a war is 25k, then the knight is taking around 90k more damage per minute. That's very very low in terms of mitigation totals. A single heal from a cleric is equal to that. Are you saying your self healing is inferior to taking 100k more damage every minute? At a base of 2k per heal unmodded, you're talking 120k healing per minute, which already surpassed the damage a warrior mitigated over you. You throw in mods and you're looking at nearly a 100k hp difference between warrior mitigated damage and knight healed damage, in favor of the knight.

Now, these are just extrapolated numbers and generalizations. My average hits are from my parses, but they give a fairly decent idea of the true balance. Sure, we do have that HP advantage, but I've never been rounded a single time when using a shield on raids in TBM. As long as I have hp left so the healers can put hp back on after the round, that's enough HP in my book. Adding onto that number is only going to protective me from back to back bad rounds, which happens maybe once every 6-8 months for me.

Am I jumping the gun and saying that healing is OP and knights are superior? No, but I'll say that knights may be understating their self healing a bit and the balance between all tanks is much closer than anybody thinks. If all dps were within even 90% of the best bursting classes (wiz/zerk), they'd be jumping for joy. And I don't even think that all dps classes are within 90% of each other. I could be wrong, but most of times it doesn't seem so when picking out the #1 person for each class in my guild.

I fully understand that Repel takes precedence, but unless repel is extending these abilities, if they are on you then you have to take their value out of the value of repel to get the real mitigation of repel over time. Now that doesn't apply if mantle or carapace is being shortened because it hits the damage limit, but as I said that is usually not the case, at least for me. For a non disc'd knight that does not have SB/protective on then yes it is 7% for anyone that has one of those on it is going to be less, not a ton less, but less.

Our opinions disagree on this point. As a knight, there should be a good reason to use a 2her. If the dps gap is small, then why bother? The mitigation, shield block mod, shield block itself, shield AC, and stats far out weigh a small gain in dps. IMO it would be the same thing for warriors - if there's no real difference in setup, why not use the best one all the time?

As for Warriors regarding which does more dps, DW vs 2her, I couldn't care less which one you guys want to be more - as you know, I only care that SK 2her melee is closest enough to Warrior's top config melee that the 'adding a pet overtakes it' relationship is maintained. I agree, those penalties on DW & 2her prof are ; missing out on S+B benefits is already penalty enough. While base still needs some attention, more activated abilities would be beneficial for all imo. Autoattack dps among many classes is not as spread out as some people think. The real differences come from activated abilities and mods. A simple parser doesn't show that so folks miss it.

Pulling up my logs from our Fear raids, one of the best geared SKs in the game took 78 hits @ a 25610 avg on Fright and 426 hits @ a 27633 avg. But we both know average isn't what matters here - that's a distraction - its those bad rounds that matter.

Versus Fright, his worst round was 131,800 and versus Terror, his worst round was 151,160. Using your 6% metric, those rounds would have been 124340 & 142604, a difference of 7,460 & 8,556 respectively. Before you bemoan the difference, consider that immediately after taking that max round, he took a round of ~109,000 vs Terror and a round of over 100,000 vs Fright, that's another 11,830 less a Warrior would have taken, per your metric.

So in just two back to back rounds, that's 27,846 less a Warrior would have taken with only a 6% advantage from a real, live parse. 6% is certainly significant.

151000+100000 = 265000 total damage.
262000 * .94 = 235940
262000 - 245434 = 15060 less damage for terror

Is 15k damage really that much more to tank in roughly 6ish hits? That's around 2.5k per hit on the worst of rounds. Big deal.

Again, they have enough HP that the round didn't kill them. They got a heal before the round and they lived. Therefore they have enough mitigation to survive the worst of rounds without worrying about being rounded. If they didn't get a heal they were dead. If a warrior didn't get a heal, they were dead unless they were running one of their HP buffs. I run around 175k unbuffed and normally with growth I sit around 220k. Even with my mitigation advantage, I would've died without sufficient healing. The thing is, a knight can help replenish that HP lost, while a warrior cannot. So you may have taken more damage, but a single heal between rounds will put back more than the 15k you lost compared to the warrior.

I did the math taking in account for both mantle and carapace lasting their durations.

Repel over a 7 minute period would give around a 5.15% mitigation increase if it originally gave 7%. That falls right where I expected it. I said 5-7%.

How'd I come up with that?
repel = .90
mantle = .35
carapace = .20

.9 - .35 = .55
.9 - .2 = .7

7 * .55 = 3.85% added mitigation while mantle is running
7 * .7 = 4.9% added mitigation while carapace is running
7 * .8 = 5.6% added mitigation while Shining/vie is running

((5.6 * 4) + (4.9 * 2) + 3.85) / 7 = 5.15%


P.S. You knights needs to learn math

I came up with ~5% as well after, thus the reason I said less, not a ton less.

PS, you need to learn reading comprehension

Reading is for nerds...which I am one.

I'm actually an English major, ironically.

I am so sorry, my wife is too.

My bad - I combined the two cross references (what I get for posting while working). Even still, they survived the round, yes, but it is not hard to see that 15k could be the difference in said survival. A knight cannot heal between each round either - it doesn't work like that - there's cast time, recast time, etc. Yes, as an SK, when I see my HP drop on a raid target, I start casting, but rarely does that cast save me from needing a res (if I even get it off).

And I'm sure there are Wizards who would be jumping for joy if they were doing 90% of the damage of top wizards, lol.

"Best" is the key word. You differentiate them just enough to be viable in most scenarios while still being able to find non-niche situations where each is ideal.

That's so far from the truth today because proficiencies multiply the gains and penalties. You'd be stupid to tank with a 2H or DPS with a 1hander. There's no wiggle room for preference or optimization, just win/lose. It's the wrong direction, imo.

makes me wonder why when i test what your saying my paladin does 80x more dps then my warrior. So odd, cuz according to what your spewing here, that shouldn't happen.

I thought "mitigation" was only applied to the DB or DI of the hit not both. Was I wrong? When you say hit for 151.6k on the worst round, you are talk both db+di for the total hit? If mitigation is only affecting part of what makes up the hit (db+di), then the mitigation difference means less relative to the advantage self healing provides.

Then there is spell damage. Please consider that vs. spells/ae/damage auras, self healing works and not having self healing does not.

This post https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/how-defensive-abilities-work.230743/
is where I got the idea that some abilities only affect the DI portion of the hit

Simple answer is because you don't know what you are doing, or you are lying, I am going to lean towards the first.