Tanking Heroics and Raid Boss Strikethrough

Discussion in 'Tanks' started by Gorg00, Jul 15, 2020.

  1. Gorg00 Augur

    After digging into things for awhile, I believe I've determined the following:

    * Around UF era, Raid bosses start to get Heroic Strikethrough, a value that will negate all forms of dodge/parry/riposte until you raise either hagi or hdex past some threshold (some multiple of 25), at which point you will start to gain avoidance again (but all the heroics below that threshold are effectively lost).
    * Each era increases heroic strikethrough numbers (although this can vary between different npcs) requiring an ever increasing amount of hagi or hdex to regain avoidance.
    * At some point group mobs also gain heroic strikethrough.
    * At some point, raid NPCs end up gaining so much heroic strikethrough, that you roughly cannot get avoidances back in era.

    Given all of that, I've surmised that for a raiding tank, picking either hagi or hdex and stacking that is the correct thing to do, until you hit the point where raid NPCs start getting 100% strikethrough, and then at that point you're better off stacking hsta.

    Assuming all of that is roughly correct, the one thing I haven't been able to find any real information on, is at what point raid NPCs start gaining so much heroic strikethrough that it's better to switch from stacking hagi to stacking hsta. Does anyone happen to know what era that is?
    Szilent and FranktheBank like this.
  2. Szilent Augur

    Anecdotally, I've gone for hDex in all eras except for a specific stretch when mobs had a high likelihood of one-shotting me - that was in EoK before I looted EoK armor, and even more specifically still versus Queen Velazul who puts double dots the MT. No amount of defensive stats protects versus dots, just have to have enough hp to soak them along with the melee
  3. Wulfhere Augur

    It's not Heroic Strikethrough. Heroic is just a secondary bonus term.
    It's regular Strikethrough that can 100% negate defensive skills, for NPC and PC alike.

    In that case, a swing is either a hit or a miss. To defend against a hit, use an ability like Fortitude or Deflection; or just mitigate it with AC, HP, runes.

    The only way to improve your miss rate is to increase your avoidance: defense skill, agility, heroic agility; AND/OR reduce the mobs accuracy: Gut Punch, etc..
    kaedmon likes this.
  4. Denyu Lorekeeper

    I want to say it was Luclin in RoF T3 when we first really noticed it, but it may have even been before that.
  5. Auesheet Lorekeeper

    I noticed a big difference in strikethrough from raid bosses (and even group content mobs) once we got into TBM (playing on Phinigel).

    IMO TBM is where you would want to swap from HAgi

    I'm currently going stamina preparing for EoK, although I am mixing some hdex in there as well.
  6. Triconix Augur

    hAgil still affects avoidance AC which increases odds of mobs missing. I still stack hAgil for this reason and have literally found no reason to ever switch. Unless there's a significant chance of getting rounded by AEs, melee, or a combination, the extra 15-20k hp given by hSta is pointless (Hint: there isn't a high chance) and serves as nothing more than an ego boost for tanks with low self esteem. The only chance that there is, no amount of HP attainable is going to save you. Those times are the ridiculously stupid lag-induced anti-kite mechanics resulting in 800k+ DDs straight to the groin, which should be banished from existence until they figure out how to eliminate server lag. As it stands, offtanks randomly get blown to bits and the innocent MT having no issues whatsoever, suddenly becomes worm food out of the blue.
  7. Repthor Augur

    as for raid tanking goes Hstam is the way to go for cutting edge content . haveing 20k more hp when your at the lowest point in gear progession helps, and gearing for hstam on type5s gives you some hagi as secondary highest stat on them augs. the point of the stam stacking is that its useful for all dmg regardless of what happens and due to how healing stacks in the game riseing you max hp by 20ish k permanetly wile getting ravaged by bosses that qauds for 300-400k ish you and very seldom misses pair it with 150k - 220k aes that also hits the main tank beeing able to also have that 20k buffer that constantly refilled due to how healing stacks gives you more bang for your buck wile boss tanking

    now mind you the diffrence isent big at all its not like Hstam is miles and weeks ahead of dex or agi infact if it wasent for Hstrikethru all tanks whould opt for dex/agi as it where cuz the benefit of parrying or dodgeing attacks every once in a wile whould in the long run out weight the extra hp.

    also Hdex effects your crit so that also has a effect on your dps together with the defensive benefit, this is why ppl stack hdex in lower content say group content or killing old raid bosses ect cuz you get the dubble benefit for it dieing slightly faster and also gives you the benefit of the defensive benefit

    you can be sucessful eitherway

    in the long run what will be the most impactful is you rotating your skills and abilitys properly the benefits of the Hstats are very very minimal

    also for the thing adressed above. its not the size that matters, its how you use it
    p2aa and Tucoh like this.
  8. p2aa Augur

    Yeah it was during TBM that you stopped dodging and shield blocking at all on raid boss.
    Vim or Vigor, I had seen still some few dodge, then starting with T2 and Emollious for example, this number went to 0. A few parry, but coming from Flash of Anger / Fortitude. And you still see some riposte in gameparse, but they are strike through back by NPC so you are hit at the end.
    So it was at this time that Strikethrough has been set to 100 %
    Heroic Strikethrough is not at 100 %, because we can still proc Crippling Snare from belt effect on raid NPC, maybe coming from riposte who still trigger but at the end make you hit as explained.

    Sure it increases the odd of mob missing, but the impact between a tank going full Hagi and full Hsta is meaningless.
    Also you are hit nearly all the time, and the impact of AC on hits is underwhelming in today's raiding game.
    A tank going full Hagi won't really miss more than a tank going full Hsta.
    I did some parse back in time in TBM with 33 avoidance and 1000 AC won thanks to + 500 Hagi, my miss % stayed the same, and the average hit been reduced by 2 k max and the highest hit stayed the same.
    Actually in ToV, the difference between a war Hagi favored and a war Hsta favored is 20 k HP versus 500 AC, and + 600 Hagi.
    In the other way, the 20 k HP advantage is a constant one, and can help a bit on harsh AE coupled with melee hits.


    My self esteem is fine, you can express your view without insulting others ?
    For me, Hagi remains the best 2nd choice, and I don't mock other tanks that prefer this way.
    And as Repthor said, at the end the way you are using your mitigation tools will make the biggest impact on your survival than Heroic choice.
  9. Syylke_EMarr Augur

    I've come to the conclusion that hDEX is actually the best tanking stat. And here's why:

    We have tanks using all 3 sets (hAGI, hSTA, hDEX) and all tanking with the same level of success. Now, if we consider that hDEX provides 0 defensive benefit in raids, yet tanks are still successful with it as their primary stat, then the logical conclusion is that the difference between any of them is negligible.

    For example, I have raided with Szilent, who stacks hDEX. He did just fine as a tank, in fact better than fine. And, knowing him a bit, I'm sure that if his healers were complaining that he was harder to heal than other tanks that stacked hAGI or hSTA, he would probably switch.

    So if a tank can forgo the defensive "benefits" of hAGI and hSTA without seeing any major detriment to their tanking capability, then the "benefits" of those stats must be extremely minor when seen in actual play. This means that the best overall stat will be the one that provides some other benefit besides defensive capability: hDEX. Because, as we all know, DPS is king, so more DPS that does not cause a decrease in your actual survivability is the best option.

    Does this mean I'm going to regear to hDEX from my current hSTA? No. I'm lazy :p

    Note: I will add that hAGI/hSTA can maybe help early on in gearing, but probably quickly lose any lead over hDEX.

    Of course, none of this is necessarily pertinent to the original post/question.
  10. Triconix Augur

    hSta is utterly pointless. At no point in ToV have I felt I needed more hp. Nothing in this expansion caused concern to tank with full TBL gear let alone ToV gear. The hardest mobs to tank (AoW and Golem-man in Velks both of which are 100k+ hitters) simply needed minor tweaking to my baseline rotations. Once that was made on the fly, there wasn't an issue C2Cing them.

    There was no point that an extra 20k hp out of my 500k+ baseline buffed pool would cause me to live or die. However, there is that off chance that avoiding a 50k+ hit would serve as beneficial. And for this reason I'll take hAgil over hSta. Also, there's no way it's 20k hp difference. It's currently a 20k difference between me and the highest HP war in game and I need to replace 4 items still while he's completely T2 ToV. It's looking like it's closer to a 15k difference, resulting in hSta to be even more useless.

    There are secondary perks to stacking hAgil augs. We innately get more hDex than hSta augs (something like 250 hDex). That means more dps than hSta stackers. While not as much as hDex stackers, it's still better. However, I'm close enough to max crit rate during raids without stacking hDex that the difference between stacking hDex and hAgil is becoming meaningless. That also means the secondary benefit of having more hDex than an hSta tank is becoming smaller. I won't be too surprised if next expansion puts me over the top to max crit rates. That means only "tank" benefit to hDex is in the group game which is such a joke for any raid tank I don't know why you'd even worry about that.

    In the end, any of the three choices and you'll most likely be fine in just about any scenario. None of the three are going to give you exponential benefits over another. However, that's literally what EQ is about. Incremental benefits that add up in the long run. I prefer the route of hAgil.
  11. Gorg00 Augur

    Thanks all, this data has been super useful.

    Just to provide an additional frame of reference, I currently play on the Selo server, which is currently in RoF, but is churning through expansions one month at a time (although with half lockouts). This has an interesting effect of, I believe, causing us to go through this content less geared than live or phinny did, since aiui, live had several months of farming at each tier before the next releases, and phinny had effectively an entire extra month (but really even more than that, because not half lockouts mean more time to do optional side raids or spend time deep splitting). On top of all of that, the shorter time schedule itself means we generally spend less time farming the final tier zone if there is *any* sort of artificial gating (such as the VoA book mechanic) which might mean we're 50% of the way through an expansion before we even see the end zone.

    All of that has caused me to start re-evaluating my current gearing strategy of stacking hagi to try and bring dodges back. We're now about half way through the expansion and I believe only one or two of our tanks have gotten their hagi high enough to start dodging on bosses other than Xaric, I don't believe any of our tanks have gotten to the point of dodging on Xaric yet. hSta has the property of always "working" where hagi/hdex's returns are largely mitigated until you hit the new treshold to bring back avoidance. In addition to that, I notice clerics are pumping out ~16k HPS each, but only ~3-4k of that is actually landing as effective healing, so shifting to a strategy that adds more HP would theoretically let less of that healing go to waste.

    We actually rely really heavily on Glyph of Dragon Scales, there are a number of bosses since UF where the incoming damage was just near impossible to tank otherwise. We regularly burn through, as a raid, 3-5 Dragon Scales a night on non progression raids, and about that much per tank per night on progression raids (assuming the prog raids aren't super easy or something).

    Anyways, all of your information has been super useful to me, thanks for providing your input! and sorry for rambling a bit ;)
  12. p2aa Augur

    No, it's not.

    Have you read the part I wrote about Avoidance AC and HAgi ? The difference of HAgi between a HAgi tank and HSta tank is not enough to make the HAgi tank miss more nor is going to make him hit for less.
    Spell dmg is more harsh than a few years ago, and it happens that you can die due to a bad melee round coupled with a heavy spell.
    Calling 15-20 k HP useless is like calling druid / shaman growth spell useless. So you aren't getting Growth cast on you because these 30 k HP stand for only 6 % of your total HP pool of 500 k HP ?
    Every bit of HP helps to soak up this Spell dmg.
    If there was a clear advantage on miss % from HAgi boosting, then yeah it would be better to avoid a 40 k hit, but I haven't seen it in my parses.
    It seems indeed that the situation got worse as in the group game, mobs tend to land hits much more often than before as I saw group gear tank on these boards during TBL considering to swap from HDex/ Hagi to HSta, because they were hit nearly all the time.
  13. Tucoh Augur

    Is there? I stack hDex because I primarily play in group content, but everytime this topic comes up I mostly see that strikethrough is so high that agi / dex have zero benefit.

    I'd love to see some parses on it, but it's probably more trouble to get good parses on raid bosses than it's worth.
  14. Allayna Augur

    I work on highest Hdex with a balance of Hagi and Hsta. I push Hdex well over 2400, Hsta and Hagi are over 1900.
    With tribute and trophy tribute, both personal and guild, I break 2500 nearly 2600 Hdex with a sword and board. 2100 Hsta and Hagi as well and that puts me at 40/45 melee shielding.

    Hdex wins the fight imo because you can balance stack the other two without loss of the primary Hdex benefit of added dps.
  15. The real Sandaormo Augur

    With everyone at max gear now its pretty much a big pile of tankiness. 2 tanks, one with Hstam and one with Hagi will be very hard to tell apart (as long as you are using your disc's like you should).
  16. Spankage Elder

    You guys aren't pushing max dps at all times?

    Archetype purity is silly, we can all do both now.

    HDex makes the most sense in both raids and group.
  17. josh Augur


    hdex has zero defensive benefit on raids. hagi still has benefits because it improves avoidance AC. Accurate parses aren't really necessary as the math for avoidance is extremely simple, ballpark is good enough. for example, if you have 4000 avoidance ac and a mob is hitting you 15% of the time, then when you increase your avoidance ac to 4400, a 10% increase, your chance to avoid melee will be increased by 10% as well, so 16.5%

    I'm avoiding raid mobs in ToV anywhere from 10-20% of the time depending on buffs and debuffs, so HAgi would be a 1-2% improvement.

    I'm Hdex cuz ToV is really easy and I might as well do better DPS.
  18. The real Sandaormo Augur

    90% of dps for a Warrior is effort, few augs not gonna cut it.
    (Augs + effort ooooh now you may be on to something)

    Gonna stick with the tankier option though for now and put some effort into dps.
  19. Spankage Elder

    You're on to something with the effort, it solves nearly all tanking and dps issues.

    The heroic debate has been going on for an eternity and its active in at least 4 threads here, the jist is that there's no clear and hard-cut advantage whichever way you go outside the fact that dex is just more dps.

    Chalk it up to preference at this point. I'm going to stay dex unless they rework heroics, I value my dps above my ability to tank the same stale raid mobs as every other war in EQ.

    I might add, too, that most players spend more time in group content vs short raid nights... having additional riposte isn't a bad thing when you only swarmtank.
  20. minimind The Village Idiot

    I'm bringing up a baby warrior right now. It's at level 102 and I just finished kitting out in TBM group gear and hSTA Type 5s.

    Question for those saying hDEX should be used instead: is that because you already have a ton of hAGI and hSTA and the diminishing returns of the stat relative to the content in which you play make hDEX a better use of Type 5 augs? Or is it that my warrior shouldn't bother with stacking hSTA even now?

    Also, how much of your opinion is based on having particularly competent healers? What would you choose if you only had a merc healer?