TLDR Version: what is the setup of items+spells+songs that would give a warrior the maximum possible damage shield, in this era of the game? Long Version: I play a warrior in my main trio, and essentially consider him my "main" of all my toons. One of my actual goals for him is to have the absolute maximum possible damage shield, meaning I'd need to acquire a specific list of items in order to achieve that. Yesterday Blood Guard killed Tunare, because we hadn't done it yet on TAKP, and we had the fortune of having her belt drop, and I had the fortune of having enough DKP to outbid the many other tanks who wanted it, so I'm now one step closer to that goal! Items I now have on Mahonri that help me achieve this goal: +10 DS from Dain Ring - https://www.takproject.net/allaclone/item.php?id=30385 +8 DS from VT Neck - https://www.takproject.net/allaclone/item.php?id=8364 +4 DS from Cursed range - https://www.takproject.net/allaclone/item.php?id=30565 +4 DS from Tunare belt - https://www.takproject.net/allaclone/item.php?id=2510 and technically, +9 from Zordak arms - https://www.takproject.net/allaclone/item.php?id=4299 Seeing as Zordak arms don't stack with regular damage shield from my druid, I generally cast Shield of Bracken instead of the clicky from Zordak arms, bringing my current non-consumable and non-bard damage shield to 66. Yesterday I asked in Alliance if I was all done on my Damage Shield item acquisition, having never made it to Plane of Time in my original EQ days, and based on the responses from Sanben and others, it appears I'm not there yet, and there are at least 3 items from Time (I think?) that factor in... What other items should I be looking forward to acquiring, and what (if any) are the stacking issues? I don't play a bard on TAKP, at least not yet, but what bard songs are used to max out Damage Shield? I know that the DS pot is another addition (I have a few 10 chargers in my bags), and it doesn't stack with Dain Ring clicky, but does it stack with the ranger buff (Rathe)? What else have I not considered, that would help me maximize Damage Shield on my warrior? Thanks in advance for the feedback
Bard songs are Psalm of Veeshan and Warsong of Zek. I believe my max atm is 44 from Veeshan and 51 from Zek. There are still better mods available. I have a spreadsheet that I found online. I do not know how accurate it is. It says I'm already maxed for Veeshan, and Zek will go up to 56.
You can use lucy.alkabor.com to look up the best damage shields by slot. Slot 1: Maelstrom of Ro (45 - MAG DS; DRU is 40) Slot 2: Kilva's Skin of Flame (33 - potion) or Vengeful Guard (20 - PoTime clicky) Slot 3: Spikecoat (4 - from your Tunare belt!) Slot 4: Shield of Torment (15 - PoTime clicky) Add in 8 DS from your AHR neck and up to 116 from bard songs, and I think your maximum possible DS as a warrior would be 221, not counting reverse DS debuffs or Wrath of the Wild. Without a bard, that goes down to 105; without using the potion, it's a lackluster 92. How sad. (The Shroud of Eternity doesn't stack with AHR's neck, does it? If it does, that's another 5! And if you want to reroll as a shadowknight, you can squeeze another 10 points out of the level 65 self-buff. Worth it!)
So, either the spreadsheet I found from 2004 is wrong (capping Veeshan at 44/Zek 56) or I'm missing a song with DS. How do you get to 116?
For max DS there are three components you need to look at. Reverse Damage Shield Worn Damage Shield Buff Damage Shield 1. Reverse damage shields are Debuffs cast on individual mobs that stack with all other damage shields. These are sort of unique in that they will register a separate line in your chat box and they count as attributed damage rather than unattributed damage. In our era only a cleric has access to these. The absolute best is is Mark of Retaliation, which is a clicky from the Karn’s Armplates of Retaliation which drop in VT from VXAHR. These do 35 DS. However you can just use the level 65 spell Mark of the Righteous which is 34 DS. Max 35. Realistically 34. 2. Worn DS comes from spells that have a work effect with DS. In our era there are only two items with worn DS. The AHR Neck, Talisman of Vah Kerrath, which is 8 DS and the Quarm back, Shroud of Eternity which is 5 DS. This gives you a maximum of 13, for most people 8 is your effective max. Max 13. Realistically 8. 3. Buff DS will all stack provided they occupy different slots. It’s easiest to go slot by slot and add them up Slot 1 - This is Mage/Druid DS. Best of Flameshield of Ro at 45. Druid Bracken is 40. Slot 2 - This is Dain Ring slot for most people. Also occupying this slot are CT Time cloak, Fire Ele illusion and DS potion. Also ranger call of rathe is in this slot. Best is DS potion at 33. Best unlimited charges is the Cloak of Retribution at 20. Fire elemental is 17. Dain ring and Call of Rathe are 10. Slot 3 - This is Druid self buff line. Best is Brackencoat for Druids at 13. Best for non Druids is Spikecoat from Tunare belt at 4. Slot 4 - This is the secondary DS clicky slot. Things like VT Cloak/bone shield, cloak of thorns etc. Best is from Girdle of Intense Durability at 15. Puresteel Mantle is a warrior only option from PoAir at 10. Most people just have Icicle Aura from some VT cloak/shield at 6. Slot 5 - Almost nothing has this Slot 6 - This is SK Self buff line. Best is Cloak of Luclin self buff at 10. Slot 7 - This is Wrath of the Wild AA. It’s only 1 hit but can be preserved if you stack runes in slots 2-10 that you refresh before they’re completely consumed. Slot 1 runes don’t work. Best is max rank at 650. Slot 8 - This is Druid SoTW AA. It’s short lived but stacks with everything. Best is max rank at 55. Then on top of all of this bards have two songs that don’t care about slot and stack. Psalm of Veeshan (Singing) has base value of 15 and with max mod of 3.9 gets up to 58. Warsong of Zek (Brass) has base value of 15 and with max mod of 3.9 gets up to 58. Warrior Effective Max (Requires Cleric, Bard, Mage support) 35 - Reverse DS 13 - Worn 45 - Slot 1 33 - Slot 2 4 - Slot 3 15 - Slot 4 116 - Bard Songs This is 226 base DS plus 35 reverse on whatever you click the DS arms on. If you get Spirit of the Wood it jumps to 281. If you add Wrath of the Wild it’s 931 for 1 hit (or more if you have runes blocking it like Uproar) Best any class can do is Shadowknight because Cloak of Luclin adds 10. Druids and other plate classes come in second because the Druid self DS is 13 instead of only 4 on Tunare belt and plate classes can use the Saryrn time belt at 15 instead of icicle aura at 6. Everyone else is below the tier calculated above by 9.
It is worth noting that hitting 3.9 Singing and 3.9 Brass is nearly impossible outside of Puretone. To accomplish this outside Puretone a bard needs to have: Singing and Instrument Mastery 3 (0.6) and Ayonae Tutelage 3 (max mod up to 3.9 from 3.6) Shadowsong Cloak clicky (0.9 Singing mod) Songblade of the Eternal (1.5 Singing Mod) Blaring Horn of Flame (2.4 mod) Outside of a bard who has those things (I’m guessing there are less than 5 bards on server with both fire horn and Shadowsong cloak), your DS drops off a little bit. Especially the brass mod since the singing mod can be covered by twisting amplification. WTB Blaring Horn loot rights offering lots of platinum :/.
The damage shield value for Psalm of Veeshan is not correct on lucy.alkabor.com. Psalm of Veeshan is base 12 at level 65, not 15. The values for the mana regen songs and some other things also use the same formula so they're also incorrect. Max from PoV is 46, 50 with Jam Fest (bard only)
Looked into it and apparently nothing on our server does. Eventually they did use this slot for a few classes short duration DS abilities but none exist on our server so far as I can tell. Also to maximize DS in this way you need to dedicate 6 spell slots to it, 7 for SKs! Nearly half your buff bar for DS only.
Huh, interesting. I thought lucy.alkabor was pretty much spot-on for everything other than some Time AEs. Does the 12 base at 65 come straight from the client?
copypasta of the max DS numbers I ran for SK a while back: worn: 8 AHR neck + 5 Quarm cloak = 13 slot 1: 45 mage DS slot 2: 33 DS potion slot 3: 4 Tunare belt clicky (druids get 13 in this slot from Brackencoat) slot 4: 15 Saryrn belt clicky slot 6: 10 SK self-buff (no one else gets DS in this slot) slot 8: 55 SotW (5 tick duration) bard: 58 46 PoV + 58 Zek = 104 cleric: 35 from VXAHR arms total: 314
I corrected it in January in the TAKP code. It's fixed now in regular eqemu too but this formula (110) was wrong for a long time and probably everyone copied it from somewhere else? I'm not trying to crap on lucy, it's the best place to check TAKP stuff, it's just some things are different here, or more accurate spell info was found since that was made. This is a pretty minor issue but since you guys are counting every point it seemed relevant.
So PoV used to be base 15 but was changed to base 12 at 65 in January? Is the spell info from lucy not the best source of what it should be here?
I recently became aware that the Bard AAs that affect only songs they play on themselves increase the DS for the Bard, but not for group members. I think this was a matter of like 6 points.
PoV from lucy.allakhazam: 2002-12-12 11:18 Changed Slot 1 from "Increase Damage Shield by 13 (L63) to 14 (L65)" to "Increase Damage Shield by 14 (L63) to 15 (L65)" 2002-10-21 11:05 Changed Bard level from 62 to 63 2002-10-21 11:05 Changed Slot 2 from "Increase All Resists by 72 (L62) to 75 (L65)" to "Increase All Resists by 73 (L63) to 75 (L65)" 2002-10-21 11:05 Changed Slot 1 from "Increase Damage Shield by 13 (L62) to 14 (L65)" to "Increase Damage Shield by 13 (L63) to 14 (L65)" 2002-10-16 11:15 Changed Bard level from 63 to 62 2002-10-16 11:15 Changed Slot 2 from "Increase All Resists by 73 (L63) to 75 (L65)" to "Increase All Resists by 72 (L62) to 75 (L65)" 2002-10-16 11:15 Changed Slot 1 from "Increase Damage Shield by 13 (L63) to 14 (L65)" to "Increase Damage Shield by 13 (L62) to 14 (L65)" 2002-09-26 11:10 Initial Entry Even allaclone parses the files at 15. Is it possible some adjustments were made server side only for certain things? Are we supposed to have the initial released version from 2002-09-26 where perhaps the song started at 12 ds? Did the resist values also go down in Jan?
A lot of this stuff is not supposed to be known to players in the first place. People who made the data sites and eqemu (myself included) figured out these things through experiments and studying the files in the game client. If someone posts a list of formulas the easiest thing is to copy it to your project and assume it's right until you notice problems with it. These wrong guesses or mistakes tend to spread through the community and if it's wrong in eqemu people might even think that's the right way (see the other thread about flee stuns). I make plenty of mistakes too but I don't just make up numbers especially if there is already something implemented. I checked and they fixed this formula on regular eqemu too so I'm not the only person who noticed it was off. When it comes to spells, this game was designed to have both the server and client built from the same source code and behave identically. Give it a state changing action and the same state is computed on both sides without having to reconcile it. There are various issues with this, some bugs and desyncs even in Sony's server/client pairing, but what that means is that we generally can not just make up values and change spells even if we want to. Our server must behave the same way as Sony's server and the client do. The nice thing about this is that the client contains the code for computing the values of spell effects because it must be able to compute your hitpoints, WIS, the amount of damage shield you have, etc. I got the correct formula by studying the client and comparing it to our calculations in the server.
