Berserker Defense & Offense

Discussion in 'Fighters' started by Dortek, Jan 8, 2014.

  1. Dortek New Member

    Hi people, I'm a lvl 95 zerk and I'm going to be main tank in my group so my questions are about my tank set
    I'm not sure about which stats to aim for when selecting my cryptic/potent so here is the question I'd like to ask about defense and offense to all you tank experts :)

    DEFENSE
    So if I understood what I read on fighters topics , as a plate tank I should rather go mitigation than block ? if that's right how much mitigation should I aim for ? what's the cap for it ? and do I need to get my block chance to 100% anyway or should I just ignore that stat as a zerk ?


    OFFENSE
    Is it more effective to max autoattack (dps, ma, haste...) or CA (potency, AB mod..) as a zerk ?
    While I like more autoattack it's like zerk CA are strong enough to be worth going that way, so from people experience I'd like to know which of those gives best result once well geared.

    Overall what stats/value should I aim for to be an effective tank with a correct dps on my tank set ?


    Thanks
  2. Regolas Well-Known Member

    Go mitigation because it's more useful, especially with a zerker, as you heal when you get hit. There's no real cap, as it based on level. The higher the mob compared to you, the more mitigation you need to reduce damage by the same amount. Aim for 1400+ but you might not get it for a while. 2000 is a distant figure to aim for but I think currently unachievable.

    Blocks only really useful if you're using a shield, and you're more interested in uncontested block, which caps at 70%. That's not to be confused with block chance. Block chance increases uncontested block but not at 1:1. Basically uncontested block is calculated based on your shields protection value x block chance percent. So 22% avoidance shield (2200 protection) x 100% block chance is 44% uncontested block. 200% block chance is 66% uncontested block with a 22% avoidance shield.

    This can still be avoided by mobs with strikethrough, hence why mitigation will always be better as it means smaller hits.

    For your offensive gear, go WDB, DPS, MA, ATK.

    You may find on easier zones that your offensive gear works fine with mass pulls and self heals.

    Stats to aim for:

    Mitigation as high as possible
    HP as high as possible
    600 dps mod
    200-300 attack speed
    120-200MA
    60-100 Hate
    Block as high as possible for when you use a shield.
    100% cast speed (white adorns are good here)
    Weapon skills as high as possible (adorns also good here)
    Strikethrough over 50 if you're raiding.
    Vultir likes this.
  3. Dortek New Member

    Thank you very much for the time you took answering me regolas , you summarized here all the informations I was looking for ;)

    I must admit that since my early lvl there is a stat I still don't fully understand though, "Weapon skills" , does that increase the raw damage of my weapons ?

    Like for example, let's say my weapons damage are 2000-6000 , and I add to that 500 weapons skill, will I end up with 2500-6500 raw damage on my weapons ?
  4. Regolas Well-Known Member

    No, your primary stat effects damage (strength in fighters case).

    Weapon skills effects your hit rate. It's an increase to each of your skills you improve leveling up (slashing, crushing, etc).

    Your weapon skill determines how accurate your hits are. The higher the enemy, the higher you need weapon skill to hit 100% of the time. Higher level enemies are harder to hit.

    Personally, what I do on my melee characters as a general rule, is add weapon skill white adorns to their boots and a few other slots once I have enough crit chance that I don't need crit chance adorns there.
  5. Estred Well-Known Member

    Also after you have over-capped Weapons Skills they convert to base damage. Here is the math behind it.

    The ballpark your aiming for with Weapons Skills as a cap is:

    Enemy Level + 500 = Target Skills.

    A level 103 Orange Boss would require ~650 Weapons Skills to ensure you are meeting his requirement for accuracy.

    After cap they convert by raising the minimum hit of your weapon on a conversion of 200 Skills = 2% Damage Increase up to +1000 Skills = +20%

    Say your weapon hits 2000 to 6000 as a damage rating and you have 1600 Weapons Skills. Your overcap by ~1000 so your weapon damage spread will look like this: 3200 to 6000.
  6. Wulwyrlyn Active Member


    Good post and I agree completely about going mitigation.

    However, for offensive gear, I'm going to go against the grain here. I generally will wear one or two pieces of WDB gear, but overall for offense I prefer the set that is: +% hitpoints, crit bonus, potency. I know, I know, what!?! And I'm not saying WDB gear is a bad choice, far from it, it's a good choice, but here is my opinion:

    1. Most of the time you are going offensive you are tanking big groups of easy mobs. Or bosses that also have adds, etc. Not always, but most of the time.

    2. Unlike most single target abilities, most berserker AOEs hit quite hard. And you have a lot of them. With right hand side prestige most will cast instantly a good chunk of the time.

    3. Reckless stance gives a huge potency boost. With enough HP you can use it for all instances except (I know, I'm sure some raid guild person will come along and say "I tank Vulak's in reckless" or something but whatever) Vulak's Dominion. In the potency gear you can get your potency to 1000+, even into the 1200 range with temps, good gear, whatever, in combat. This makes AOEs hit ridiculously hard. Pew pew pew!
  7. konofo Active Member

    I like the idea of allocating stats towards our AE arts, but where does Ability Mod fit in? I've been out for quite a while, so I'm still wrapping my head around the current systems, but how do you weigh Potency against Ability Mod when you have that choice?

    I gather that AM is more of a straight addition to the numbers on an art, so the relative benefit would vary by art. Is it that layer of ambiguity that makes it unattractive, or is it actually just bad?

    I struggle with adornment and reforging choices for the same reason - there seem to be so many options that overlap when your basic goal is "do more damage" or "take less damage." I know the relative values between two equivalent choices are theoretically balanced (e.g. 6% MA vs. 2.5% CB vs. 9.2% DPS adornments), but that has to depend on class and playstyle. I figure some of those stats have to be under- or overvalued in the context of an AE-spamming berserker, or in the context of one focused on survival and aggro management.

    kono
  8. petier Active Member

    ya know i have heard this over and over and i never seen anything to prove it. I look at all my act logs and all I ever see when I put a ton of weapon skill on is a min weapon damage boost not a hit rate. The only way I have ever got my hit rate up over 90 was to get my accuracy up to at least 20% (self buffed) and then as close to 100 strikethrough as I could.
  9. Buffrat Well-Known Member


    Um. No. You need weapons kills higher than the mob's defense to cap your hit rate. Not the mob's level + 500.

    You should try and have over 1000 weapon skills buffed if you can.
  10. Estred Well-Known Member

    [IMG]

    Your right in that it's not Mob's Level +500 which was honestly... well I don't know why I thought that. The "base" of a boss would be 103 * 5 according to Xelgad's post on the Formula Discussion Thread. That's a value of 515 which still at 1515 your gaining the +20% Variance Reduction Percentage. I was illustrating how the over-cap skills worked, my example was slightly off.

    I do not believe Mobs actually have anything above their "base" Defense Stat for hit-rates unless they get a buff.
  11. Regolas Well-Known Member

    There may be a number of reasons for this. Off the top of my head I can suggest the mobs innate avoidance to frontal attacks.

    Best way to check is hitting from behind. But maybe you're onto something regarding tanks. If you're always hitting from the front, maybe WS doesn't matter. I don't claim to be the fountain of knowledge in everything.

    I know for a fact it works for scouts hitting from behind.
  12. Regolas Well-Known Member

    AB mod isn't a straight addition to your combat arts. You can basically add an extra 50% damage to your base combat art after potency is applied through AB mod. Finding your cap is as follows:

    Take your highest base damage CA (from the master scroll info on EQ2U is best, as the ingame tooltip includes some mods). Say as an example it's 2000.

    Lets say your potency is 300.

    Your base CA will hit for 2000 *(1+3) = 8000. The 3 is your potency modifier. 250 potency would be 2.5.

    So your biggest CA hits for 8000. AB mod can only add 50% more, so would be capped at 4000, giving you a 1200 CA.

    As potency increases, so does your AB mod cap.

    For adorns, especially with this xpac, you'll need to be clever to utilise them all to meet soft caps.

    The ideal plate tank would be wearing the mitigation armor with 650cc, 600dps mod, 200-300 attack speed, 120-200MA, 100 hate gain, 100 cast speed & reuse, 200+ block chance when using a shield, with CB as high as possible. Potency & AB mod as high as possible is more DPS from abilities too.

    You simply won't get all that, so it's about comprising to find the best you can get.

    My tanks at the moment (not great gear yet) use the mitigation and block purple adorns for BP and shoulders, with a couple of DPS adorns and a couple of CB adorns on the rest, wearing mitigation gear except for one slot (boots currently). They sit close to the soft caps, but I'm still shy a little DPS mod. And my block chance and hate gain could be much higher.
  13. konofo Active Member

    I got all that, but in your example, you got 4000 damage from 4000 Ability Mod, so it sure feels like a straight addition (up to the cap, of course). If I had +x Ability Mod, every eligible art would be up to x damage/threat better, minus some factor for blue AEs, detailed elsewhere. Is that not correct?

    What I was driving at was this: While Potency has a simple multiplicative benefit to everything (and no cap), Ability Mod is harder to evaluate because any given quantity of it doesn't necessarily affect each art equally. If you're trying to maximize AE art damage, and making choices accordingly, it's difficult to accurately weigh your options.


    In the end, yes, you want to flirt with every cap you can, but realistically, I'll probably just assemble two sets of gear and switch them as I would switch stances or AAs.

    kono
  14. petier Active Member

    I dunno tbh, I joined a guild that required me to put in WS adorns, and my hit rate went down, I eventually was able to swap back to what worked for me. I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and say it may just be play style...but again I have no clue, it just works for me that way.
  15. Regolas Well-Known Member


    Correct
  16. Regolas Well-Known Member

    Accuracy and strikethrough also effects it.

    Strikethrough is only needed on frontals.

    Accuracy is slightly different. A little accuracy seems to do the same as a lot of weapon skill.

    My experience for example, was on a named epic mob in Chamber raid zone, with WS of 1150 and 20 accuracy I was hitting 95% of the time on my dirge (from behind). I added another 10 accuracy and I hit 100% of the time. But, top end raiders say 1500+ WS will negate the need for accuracy.

    So that extra 350 WS does the same as 10% accuracy, or maybe even 30%
  17. Buffrat Well-Known Member

    Go play a scout in ToV with 515 weaponskills then come back and tell me how you think avoidance works, Estred.

    I guarantee you, you will be lucky if your hit rate is above 60 from the back of the mob.
  18. Estred Well-Known Member

    With ToV Jewelry/Adorns is it even possible to have less than 700 Skills without actually trying to lower yourself as a Scout? I don't doubt you but I raid a Mage and Raid-Alt a Tank, both of which rely more on Disruption/Focus and Strikethrough an awful lot. Though I will admit my Guardian does have ~700 Base Skills due to Jewelry having Defense-Stats or my still using CoE-Rings for DPS, the ToV-Tank Rings have Defense/Parry anyway.
  19. Malchore Active Member


    I thought AB Mod only added a max of 50% to combat arts BEFORE potency was applied? In you're example above you include the potency calculation. Using your examples, if you have a CA that does 2000 damage, then the most AB Mod could do to improve that wold be 1000. (50% of 2000 = 1000.)

    Also, you didn't explain where AB Mod fits into the final calculation. (CA + AB Mod) * (1+POT) = Final Result before crit bonus? Where AB Mod is capped at 50% of the CA used. In your example above, if AB Mod is 4000, then your calulcation would be

    CA: 2000 + 4000 = 6000
    6000 * (1+3) = 24000 (before crit bonus)

    OR, is it ( CA * (1 + POT) ) + AB Mod. Which seems to be the way you're calculating it.

    Some mages have a potency of over 1000, and they (Wiz's in particular) have spells that damage for well over 1 million after potency is applied. (And that's before Crit Bonus is added.) Thereby making AB Mod virtually cap-less. I don't think it works that way.

    Unless you can show a dev quote somewhere that states Potency is taken into account before AB Mod cap.

    MY question in regards to AB Mod is...I understand how to calculate max AB Mod with combat arts (i think...), but what about things like Proc from gear or AAs? Are they also affected by AB Mod? Because the effect is to increase Abilities (not Combat Art/Spell.) I'm curious if the wording they (SOE) is using suggests it relates to Procs as well. Example: our favorite Aspect of the Dragon - does 200K AE damage to anyone and everything around it when it procs. Is that also affected by Abil Mod? I don't think it is but I really don't know.
  20. Regolas Well-Known Member

    The way I've said it is the way I've been told. I had heard before potency also but then I got told this way.

    CB is nothing to do with it, and it's calculated after probably in a similar fashion to potency.

    If you have the time, test it. Put on AB mod gear to your cap on low potency gear, then add more pot and AB mod structurally and see it raise. It makes sense the way I say for progression, otherwise AB mod would never scale.