Quote Originally Posted by sirgog View Post
Honestly I think grazing hits are needed. DDO allows lots of forms of stacking of stats in degenerate ways. Grazing Hits keep builds that stack AC to the max in check somewhat.

You don't notice them at all unless you have an insanely high AC, and you can mitigate them somewhat with DR. But really, they are there to compensate for monsters being too stupid to hit us with Destruction and Improved Destruction weapons, to Sunder us, and to hit us with Exhaustion, Strength Sapping, Acid Fog and maybe even Sundering Ooze - exactly the things we do as players to Malicia.

Other effects could keep degenerate builds under control too - absolute time limits on fights that force players to have a minimum level of DPS (keeps all-out defensive builds, like Shield Mastery WF sorcs with max Con and dumped Cha from soloing things like eChrono), and so on.

Basically, I feel 80% physical damage mitigation isn't gamebreaking, but 95% is. Without grazing hits, raid bosses that focus on melee would need to hit for 300+ to pose a challenge at all to AC builds.
There is no 95% even without grazing hits in end boss fights, I can't think of an end boss that does not throw other effects. My biggest bugbear with grazing hits is that it is no defense vs it. If they had it as a stacking debuf that melee mobs could impart I could easily live with that (though other debuffs would be good as well)

Eg melee based mob (including bosses) has an x percentage chance to throw a sunder, the hit lands with sunder effect imparting a grazing hit debuff, mobs can now graze for the duration of 1 minute timed debuff, in that time a second lands (can land on grazing) and the timer is reset and a level 2 graze debuff lands if on a setting harder than normal or on normal just resets timer. This can continue for up to 6 debuffs on elite for the 13 or above. This makes individual trash mobs easy to deal with but pull a heap of mobs and your ac drops massively in usefulness.

Give orange named a 2 min timer, red named 3 min and purple 5 min. This will mean that at the start of the fight an ac based toon will need less healing but will certainly scale as the fight progresses giving the option to swap tanks to give him time out and other relevant tactics.

I may actually repost this under a separate suggestion.