Keepers of the Glade

Quote:

www.thesteelwarrior.org/f...hp?t=16954

There are two kinds of "soft cap", depending on what you mean.

First, there is a level of AC whereby anything above this amount inherently means less than AC below this amount. This soft cap is class specific, and is very low (not known precisely but well below what even casual players may already have). This soft cap exists, but is of relatively little significance as almost everyone is already above it. The main interesting thing about this softcap is that it is increased by the amount of AC in any shield you are wielding (including any AC augments in that shield). For this reason, any AC in a shield is more valuable than AC anywhere else, so AC should definitely be the stat you look for in shields and shield augs.

Secondly, by virtue of the way AC works, there will be a second "soft cap" which depends on the mob you are fighting - and more specifically, that mob's level and ATK rating. To understand this you need to understand how AC works.

Every mob can hit you for 20 possible different amounts. Two parameters determine those amounts - the mob's Damage Bonus and Damage Interval (DB & DI). Every time a mob hits you, it will hit for DB + (X * DI) where X is a random number between 1 and 20. Although X is random, it is not uniformly distributed; if your AC is low and the mob's ATK is high, it'll be skewed heavily to the upper end of possible hits. If your AC is high and the mob's ATK is low, it'll be skewed very much to the lower end. Once your AC is far enough above the mob's ATK, there's no point getting much more, as the mob will be hitting you for minimum every time.

If you were fighting, say, most mobs from PoP or before, having any AC much more than about 2,800 would give very little extra benefit. There were exceptions but that was generally the case. Nowadays however, if you are fighting cutting edge content (eg FC or AG raid targets, or Solteris) mob ATK ratings are much higher and you can pretty much disregard the concept of the second AC cap. You'll get benefit at least up to 4,000 AC and possibly much further.

This second cap, then, depends strongly on the content you are facing. The best thing to do would be to tank a few mobs that you typically fight and take logs. Look through the logs and see what range any given mob hits you for. If you are getting hit predominantly for a lowish amount, with occasional hits that are much higher, you are probably mitigating about as well as you can already, and might like to concentrate on HP rather than AC. On the other hand, if the hits are more evenly distributed, you could probably use more AC.

The interesting case is if you find you are already getting hit for maximum most of the time. This indicates that your AC is so low you are hardly mitigating at all. In such a situation, adding a little extra AC probably won't make much difference - you'll need a HUGE increase in AC to have much effect - in such cases you may be better off targetting HP anyway.

Note that most tanks at or near the endgame currently are very very keen on AC indeed. Unless you are reasonably well geared and fighting several-expansion-old content, assume you are some way away from any form of seriously deminishing returns from AC.

Sinn