raw dex question

[Festus]

Does anyone know at which point raw stats do no good?  For instance my Dexer/Mage stats are at: 

Naked:

Str 150        HP 125
Dex 150       Stam. 150
Int.  132      Mana 132

With her gear and Axe

Str 152         HP  275
Dex 256        Stam 249
Int 140          Mana 140

Im sure its way out of wack but its worked thus far.  However Im sure I can fix it somehow so that I can either mele or at least manage to survive firebreath from higher end mobs. 
Suggestions?

[Foray]

One thing that stands out to me is that somehow you have less max Stamina than you have Dex, do you have an item with a penalty to Stamina on it or something? Because your Stamina listing should be at least equal to your Dex value.

There is a few main ways to increase your chances against higher end breath weapon users. Some I know from experience work, others I can't personally confirm but many others have been quite adamant that it work well..etc.

*) The most common and basic way is to evade/ parry it to do this you'd need Bushido of Evasion and to use a one or two handed weapon (two handed = higher chances) and if you do opt for a one handed weapon don't use a shield. If the system here still works as it should then you get substantial penalties for even using shield with Bushido. Anyways, Evasion allows for you to defend against breath weapon attacks sometimes they'll get through but usually it's good enough if you can keep up with a damage/ DPS "race" with the breath weapon user. The damage a breath weapon does is based on the users current HP and maximum base HP, a mob with a high base HP will have a painful and dangerous breath weapon a user with laughable health will have a pathetic breath weapon. Current HP of user also impacts the damage their breath weapon does the nearer to dead they are the weaker their breath weapon becomes, eventually it'll be weak enough to where you wont need to be cautious about it and can just go all in. However if the mob was to flee, heal up and come back it's breath weapon will also have become dangerous again.

**) Now for something that for me is unconfirmed but that many players over the years, including some very successful ones have sworn by. Dex stacking, according to these players it is possible to take dex to close to 300 and be virtually untouchable when it is used in conjunction with Bushido + Parry (dex is a component part of this system), this would carry over to evasion meaning If you kept evasion up you don't have to care too much. I'm not sure what to make of this, other than while I don't doubt that they experience better parry chances than my flagship character ever did I doubt it was anything near "Physically Intangible" territory. Dex does increase stamina, stamina helps determine swing speed. It is possible with enough stamina (and if need be Swing Speed Increase) to swing even the most clumsy and slow weapon as if it was a dagger which means more weapon procs, more damage..etc.

***) While it is not the be all and end all answer to breath weapons from those types of mobs, HP stacking is viable. For going on 10 years my flagship as gone the HP route even when everyone was going the Dex route. The trick is to combine it with a variety of things (some covered here, some not) the idea is that you are playing knowing you'll take some big hits occasional or some undefended damage and doing what is needed to mitigate and decrease the long term impacts of them. The downside to going the HP route is you'll have just enough dex to cover bandage speeds (so about 200 Dex) and that typically means your stamina will be at least equal to your dex, this limits what weapons you can get away with using and obviously this skewers your options more towards the weaker faster weapons and if you can get good ones then some medium speed weapons. With careful equipment decisions it is fully possible to safe use the majority of weapon though but the effort you'd have to put into that suite would be significant due to runic RNG and drop rates.

****) These days I would honestly wager it's fully plausable to push a higher balanced approach where you have high(ish) dex and great HP, you might not have as much HP as I do/ could or as much dex as some of the full dex users but you'll have way better survivability than most dex users do and way wider selection of weapons than I and any other HP user does. The downside to this is you'd need very specific equipment to pull it off and that is the limiting factor but I would probably say this is the optimal route for general play.

To give you some rough guideline figures:
Dex focused:
HP: 200(ish) at most
Dex: 290 to 300+
Int: 150 (ish)

HP focused:
HP: 350 to 420
Dex: 190 to 220
Int: 150 (ish)

Balanced:
HP: 330 to 350
Dex: 240 to 275
Int: 150(ish)

Hopefully someone can speak more on the Dex focused method and the Balanced focused method so you can get a clearer picture of what life is like for those builds. But regardless I am willing to try to help further if needed, I will say this though once you decide on an avenue you want to go down you'll likely have to look at your equipment and see what you can straight up replace and work on replacing them. These now unneeded socketed items you can just divert into uplifting your alts or something like that so they don't actually go to waste.

[Cypress]

You can't use evasion in Fel, so fire breath in Fel can be dangerous if you don't have the HP to tank it. In any case when facing a fire breath monster in Fel, as Foray pointed out remember the damage is proportional to its HP, so deal as much damage as quickly as you can so that when it puts out its first breath of fire it don't kill you. If the first breath don't kill you then you have a decent chance of surviving to victor if you keep pouring on the damage.

There are also other damage types that cannot be parried and which also might not be proportional to the monster's health in which cases your own HP comes in very handy as well as making use of weapon abilities especially paralyzing blow. Since the monster's damage stays high despite their health, paralyzing them so that they don't hit you is a good idea An example of this be found in the Hydra dungeon.

Certain creature cast curse which can be the death of a dexer or an HP tank using minimal dex. A balance of HP and dex might best for those, but in case it still knocks you below the dex you need for your healing macro (some curses are MEAN), make sure that you have chivalry's "remove curse" spell handy... and fast!

Sometimes you just can't take on the world, so seriously, if you're tanking 20 mobs and it's getting to be too much, use chivalry's "dispel evil" spell and make some of them flee so that you can take out the rest and get back to the others later lol. Make their retreat the better part of your valor hehe

There is of course more that can be said, but I think I'll leave it at this for now. Hope it helps!

[Garrick]

Dex stacking, as it is lovingly termed, works for evading as much physical damage as possible so you only have to worry about the heavy damage of certain breath and magic attacks.  As a dex monkey myself I will rarely take physical damage and so long as I can keep evasion going I'm generally fine.  Now for when evasion fails I WILL take heavy damage, but having high HP helps keep me alive between those attacks and healings.

[Knossos]

Dexterity has caps, but they are based on what you're trying to maximize:

Chance to block (DEX needed is based on weapon type - one handed, two handed, shield)
How fast you attack (DEX value needed is based on the attack speed of the weapon)
Bandage application (This has a programmed SH hard-cap that is something like 185[?])

As has already been pointed out, Firebreath can only be "helped" by Resisting Spells, Raw HP, or Evasion where it is able to be cast.  You must prevent the 'one shot', and there is no magic for that. Pun in ten did.

Also note that the block chances as granted by Dexterity are not linear but a step function.  You won't notice the next "level" of performance until you are at or surpass it.