Hmm, that is odd. Testing from the previous system showed that they never hit for their maximum damage. Aren't skills, AC, and AAs supposed to mitigate a certain amount of damage all of the time, or are they just a chance to mitigate damage?
If you look at the testing post I made in this post:
http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/showthread.php?t=24487
you will see that they never hit for the max damage that was set. All of my end game encounters have been balanced on that system. None of my NPCs ever hit for max on a level 70 player even with no shielding, or AAs. In the most current release, it doesn't matter how much skill/AA/AC you have, you will still get hit for max sometimes. Only shielding and shielding related discs reduce the max hit.
Here is a section of the testing of the previous system from the post I mentioned above:
Code:
NPC level 70 with 10000 Str 0min 1000max hit:
War level 70 no AA, 1511AC
Max hit around 920 min avg is 874/897
War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is 808
NPC level 70 with 1000 Str 0min 1000max hit:
War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is around 500ish with lots of range
NPC level 70 with 2000 Str 0min 1000max hit:
War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is around 600ish with lots of range
War level 70 no AA, 2097AC
Max hit around 850 and average min is around 700ish with lots of range
NPC level 70 with 2000 Str 0min 3000max hit:
War level 70 no AA, 2097AC
Max hit around 2487 and average min is around 2100ish with lots of range
War level 70 no AA, 2893AC
Max hit around 2487 and average min is around 1100ish with lots of range
I am not exactly sure what was causing the mitigation, but I can only guess it was defensive skill based. Since AC didn't seem to impact max hit, just the average hit of the NPCs. Is it possible that defensive skill is no longer being calculated?
If this is a permanent change I can readjust all of my encounters without too much difficulty, but as things are now my end game is considerably harder than before. This system may make encounters easier to tune, since max will be the real max instead of having to check the actual max the NPCs will land like I had to check before. I just don't want to go through and readjust everything again if something is messed up and will get changed.
Possibly they weren't able to land for max before because they were missing the new stats that they now have. I will have to do more testing.
Either way, I think the combat system is still making leaps and bounds towards being a really nice system for encounter balancing. The most recent additions should make a huge impact on what can be done for more consistent DPS from NPCs. I just wanted to mention that the outcome of the max hit setting has changed in case that wasn't an intended effect.