The Spirit Realm

Not sure which way to go, Magelo'ed at 3558 AC with 16885 HP's, and my shielding is still not maxxed, it is at: 27/35. I have an item augged now with a 20 AC aug, and I am considering putting in that slot a Shielding 3 DS 6 item instead of the 20AC aug. Or I can remove a 120 HP aug and put in the shielding aug too.

How does 20AC compare to 3Shield? I sorta understand how they compare in mitigation, and perhaps one would work better in one situation while the other in a different situation, but I am seeking advise here as to what you guys think I should do.

alright, well if you want to compare them, compare them in terms of how many of either it takes to reach "max potential". for shielding thats 35, for ac thats substantially higher. just how high i'll estimate after my magelo loads up. ill read you my current ac before skills are factored in

so im listed as 2061 ac on the ac tab in my magelo, this is before defensive mods and such are applied. this turns into 4199ish real ac or displayed ac.
now in tss the major ac goal for every knight to reach, the first major goal, to be able to tank ag or fc, was at bare minimum 3000 ac.

so a very rough calc using 4199/2061 is 2.03 ac displayed for every 1 worn. slightly inaccurate because there are other things that modify it but it works for this explanation.

youre talking 20 ac worn, so roughly 40 visible ac. lets say ou were trying to get to 4,000 ac from 3558, that's 442 ac visible increase, so 221 worn ac. now what percentage of that is 20 ac? 10 percent.

if you wanted to look at it another way, lets take my listed total visible ac, 2061. so what percentage of 2061 is 20. well, 20 / 2061 is roughly .97 percent, or nearly 1 percent. so in the big picture, 20 ac is rather small, now you mentioned being 27 of 35 and looking at the ag ds six augment. so that would bring you to 33 of 35. 27 of 35 is 77 percent towards max shielding, and 33 of 35 is 94 percent of the way towards max shielding.

clearly augs of shielding contribute more to the stat of shielding than augs of ac contribute to the stat of armor class in terms of reaching soft caps in ac's case versus reaching max shielding. but if you break down your ac into goals of increase needed to reach a new softcap which i believe you would reach around 4k, then a 20 ac aug gets you 20 percent of the way based on your stats. so the real question is which would you weigh as more important, reaching the next nearest softcap or maxing your shielding. both are beneficial, for specific info on how much benefit either provides id point you to the steel warrior for their parsing. figure out which is the most important and go with it.

speaking for myself i usually max my shielding and aviodance before i turn towards maxing my armor class which is more of a lifelong pursuit than an attainable statistic. the softcap will change from expansion to expansion while the mod 2's are always the same. making them easier to max. so altruistically you may never reach the most top end ac softcap but you will always be able to max your shielding and avoidance. so my own decision if i was in your position would be to abandon my ac total to the tier of gear i was wearing as the gear tends to naturally get better in ac, especially if you look for only ac upgrades, going from tss to solteris and beyond, and in the meanwhile keep my mod 2's at their peak at all times.

I think I will use 3 shielding aug as well in your situation.

Quick Reply, but hopefully it helps.

In my opinion, swap out the shielding aug in place of the 120 hp aug, which would allow you to come closer to your shielding cap at 35, and preserve your current AC gains.

With a conservative ratio of 1:6 (AC:HP) the 120 hp aug and the 20 ac aug are a "wash", but as stated that is rather conservative, and with any greater ratio you start seeing that the ac aug becomes even more valuable than the relative hp aug.

Shielding will give you a constant mitigation per hit by a set amount, vs armor class which is going to give you a gained average mitigation improvement, and that is more important.

Hps you need to survive bad rounds, and increase your survivability based off being able to keep the tank from going empty, but once a certain level of hps is achieved for the content being fought, you will see more gains first from avoidance, then shielding, then ac, then hps. Avoid, mitigate, absorb is a good mantra, and used often over on the Steel Warrior forums.

*Edit* Another option would be trying for the hp/shielding aug from sverag, not to hard of a camp, believe it drops from the Restrained Cereton, which on our server is almost always up every time I enter that zone. This way at least your loss in hps isn't as substantial, though i believe this aug is only 2% shielding.

Hope that helps,
Dan