How can they be useful for determining how the game works? They do not have access to the real game code, so are just doing their best to make things kinda work them same (but never quite there).
Using them the way i did is completely reasonable, they somewhat accurately predict what we should expect on live and we can draw some general conclusions from them. A big one I've come to is that, while raid mobs attack power is very high, AC is not massively less useful than if the mobs attack power was a lot lower, in the ranges we are dealing with, the scaling is somewhat linear, as the OP of this post pointed out. As a percentage of their attack power, your AC has to get a lot lower before the damage reduction starts to level off and actually become irrelevant. Another point brought up is the fact that, an amount of AC can stop 20's from occuring, ever. while definitely true, it will never happen in current content, it is not possible to get that much AC over current mobs attack power. It's a percentage over their attack power kind of thing, so if they have 10k attack power, you are going to need like 25k AC to stop 20's. And while yes i am using the "fake" formula to determine this, i am very certain that it is not so wrong that it can't be relied on to make general conclusions like this.
Gotcha. I can appreciate the best fit formula approach and have experience on that side in FFXIV, although as I'd maintain in theorycraft for that game as I did in EQ I believe in refining models to be as accurate as possible usually by trying to break the model at its limits. Most people are happy with them being good enough rather than exact, short of some RE breakthrough (which said calcs may have already been created from).
This discussion does have a way of making the "de-inclusion" of AC in modern trophies galling instead of annoying. HoT through RoS: Trophy of Sleep 30 Trophy of Dreams 30 Essence of Talendor 45 Essence of the Fallen 45 Trophy of the Landing 45 Replica of the Qeynos Claymore 100 Trophy of the Seafarer 75 Spirit of Rallos Zek 75 Trophy of Duality 150 Scavenger's Prize 200 Wayfarer 200 and then: Mortal's Ethereal Wonder 0 Rallos Zek's Axe Replica 0 Temple Torchery 0 Shadow Torchiere 0 Subterranean Lily Bloom 0 Crest of Heroism 0
I'm from the era that proved DI obsolescence in then current raid content was very possible, albeit being encounter specific as raid bosses were not all designed the same. There was a good variety in how bosses dealt melee damage. It was even more pronounced against group content. Back in the hp vs ac debate era, people on TSW didn't believe it was possible and I had data that showed it was which lead to Yoda and Yakk working with me on tank risk of death analysis, instead of the old tank A vs tank B max round death illogic. Bedavir was also providing data that backed it up, so while it was rare to have tanks that would see it, it wasn't a singular outlier. Now if we consider raid boss ATK of the last few expansions, probably not, and it's not like you can seriously pivot into way more AC like you could in say the era of Last Blood+ gear, metal power sources and augs that were higher in pure AC with nothing else. I haven't looked at current content boss distributions to see how close or far off geared mains are. What I am not sure about being confident in is the notion of the relative % of attack when my experience for years was the relative linear difference shifting the histogram to the left or right. We didn't have displayed mitAC and had to work it out the hard way, but the shifts were consistent. That's why I asked the OP if they still had the logs because it's data from the live game. It does make you wonder why as it's not like the mit cap is being hit in recent times.
Mitigation tools are so prolific now (which is a good thing, folks should have good buttons to use that make them better) that it's hard to pull clean tanking data without going pretty far out of your way.
Yeah. Cleaning up logs was time consuming then and that was with a fraction of the tools that exist now. Pretty much why I haven't been as invested in doing so. Still it's one of those things I like to think about. We have come a long way from the days of "AC/ATK past X is useless".
The extremes are generally where fit functions fail, although it doesn't seem like this one is failing at extremes but yeah I'll concede my confidence in it is maybe too high at the extremes.
I assume it was a typo, but if not, DI would be X/20 not X/10 with how you're talking about it. There are 20 DI intervals from (almost all) NPCs.
I don't have any comments about your conclusion, but the fun part about parsing the impact of AC is creating histograms showing how each of the 20 buckets get filled. When I was parsing this a looong time ago I saw some weird bimodal distributions that were surprising. One of the good things about creating histograms for this is that you're guaranteed to not be misled by mitigation changes like the proficiency buff. Where you have a bajillion AC or 0 AC the max and min hits will be the same, which is neat. It doesn't feel super neat when you parse a surprising death you had and saw a string of hits several standard deviations above the mean, but that's part of the fun.
no x/10. i am not talking about the roll, im talking about how much a 1 would be. so 50k DB, 5k * DI roll for a max hit of 150k. min hit of 55k.
Absolutely do the best you can as a tank getting all your stuff maxed out. Drive your AC and HP's up ect. After all the work you put in, it still comes down to things out of your control. Healing. Slowing. DPS (kill mob faster). All account more to raid/tank success than a few hp's or ac you gain. Tanks, go hug your healers today!
