Q u o t e:
Once your armor values start sinking into DR, it's much more valuable to stack avoidance and health to allow you to survive burst/spike damage and require less overall healing. Even that isn't entirely true, since there are fights with excessive stuns or huge damage attacks where armor is valuable. The point is often made moot by the fact that the top end items happen to offer the most of all of these values. I suggest hanging on to items with exceptionally high stats for any given tanking area for use in individual fights. Learn how the mechanics work and play smart.
I dont quite see how this makes sense. How can AC make burst/spike damage worse off then avoidance? If anything avoidance makes damage even more spiky.
Let us say that a mob has a 2s attack for 5K regular and 10K crit.
In a 200s you get hit 100 times. At 5% crit rate and ignoring base dodge/miss(lump then in with total avoidance), lets compare 50% DR from AC to 50% DR from avoidance. You cant get 0% AC or 0% avoidance but this will illustrate the point.
50 % reduction from AC will save you the same amount of healing over this time as 50% avoidance.
50% AC
95 attacks for 2.5K damage
5 attacks for 5K damage
50% avoidance
50 attacks that done land
25 attacks for 5K damage
5 attacks for 10K damage.
If you were to make a graph plotting incoming hits on a time vs damage axis you would clearly see that dodge, parry, defense, hit avoidance rating and resiliense make the damage more spiky (the sum of the mean square distance you capture this nicely for those mathematically inclined individuals in the audience) while AC is the stat that smooths things out.
The new AC curve is a bit nuts to climb ou now, but that is a different arguement.
