Combat Feedback for Update 5.

[AbsynthMinded]

Do you actually think before you babble these conspiracy theory BS? Character assassination? are you serious? Nefing just for the sake of ****ing people off?

I've dealt with gaming companies for the better part of 20+ years. I have yet to meet one that could maintain it's integrity and player respect. Blizzard is the front runner as their ethical errors have in no way effected their market dominance. You however seem to be the babbling brook of vitriol. Careful, you've no idea the depth of experience I've had on a corporate level.


Listen you dont have to agree that the changes will result in better game balance, but you at least have to give the benefit of the doubt to the devs for their intentions, even if the changes werent the best of choices.

The way they tried to sell things to us spoke volumes about their intentions and agenda.


If you truly and honestly believe that this is a nerf just to **** off some players that are obsessed with showing off their "theoretical" dps threshold, then why even spend another minute playing the game? If you are right, then the devs are telling you and the likes of you to get the hec out of here cause they dont want your kind.

They want Benjamin's baby, and they care nothing about the perspective of anyone willing to give them some. Whatever they told us was a fake, and the real motivation was either to save money or generate new interest for new income. I shall not further dissect this, as the changes are in, welcome to the new world order.


Fortunately, I dont believe that's their intention :) If they do revert back all or some of the changes (if any), it will SURELY be for balance's sake again, not because of some small minority of people on the forum screaming "give me back my 378.58dps twf monster"!!

My main complaint, was the change to the core code diverting us away from the D&D'ness the game is supposed to be all about. They told us this was to help the DPS lag, which so far as anyone can tell did not effect things at all. They did however raise the bandwidth ceiling, which according to player testing is working better for some servers than others. So as far as I am concerned, the DEVs lied. During all the firestorm of debate over the DPS issues, they snuck in a host of other changes. Many of which are taking a great deal of heat because of the general suck factor. Some of the new changes are alright, but on the whole the U5 has been a big bag of chaos and pain. Pain they could have avoided had they gone all in and discussed many factors with us players and taken the negative feedback to heart before implementing it. But then, I still assert they never cared about any of our feedback and the whole discussion was smoke screen to distract us.

Believe as you wish. Do not get testy with anyone over their personal evaluations of the situation. Unless you can discuss things from a impartial perspective, you are only diminishing any value of your argument.

[Meetch1972]

Breaking down one paragraph here 'cos it talks about so many little things. :)


My main complaint, was the change to the core code diverting us away from the D&D'ness the game is supposed to be all about.

This even bothers me a little, though not enough to make me think twice about intentions, motivations or playing again. As a long-term player, I can understand your attitudes have probably been shaped more by the evolution of DDO than most if not all of us who joined when it went F2P. Fairy 'nuff.


They told us this was to help the DPS lag, which so far as anyone can tell did not effect things at all.

No they didn't. The OP at the outset says as far as combat was concerned, 1) there's the DPS lag fix (one physics calculation instead of 2 at 0.15 seconds apart when TWFing) and 2) the rebalancing of combat (aka TWF nerf/THF twitch nerf - which also happens to be all THF while moving). It's easy to believe that your assertion is 100% correct with the amount of misinterpretation of the OP I've seen on the thread. Yes, the two should have been separated but I do not feel they hid one in the other.


They did however raise the bandwidth ceiling, which according to player testing is working better for some servers than others.

The bandwidth ceiling was only raised on Lamannia AFAIK, with the intention of applying as a hot fix later. Has it gone in already? The flip-side is that perhaps there is a negative impact from clients with slower ISP connections with throughput below the bandwidth cap. I should be concerned if normal DDO activity requires constant transfer of data that eats through my download quota - which it doesn't, yet, but trending up might call for some sort of protocol evaluation/in-packet-data-compression/optimisation if that's even possible.


So as far as I am concerned, the DEVs lied. During all the firestorm of debate over the DPS issues, they snuck in a host of other changes.

I don't think they snuck them in so much as everyone ignored all the other stuff to focus on the nerf. I'm guilty of that, as there are a couple of guild items I'm not fond of that I hadn't considered previously 'cos I let myself get drawn into this thread.



Many of which are taking a great deal of heat because of the general suck factor. Some of the new changes are alright, but on the whole the U5 has been a big bag of chaos and pain. Pain they could have avoided had they gone all in and discussed many factors with us players and taken the negative feedback to heart before implementing it. But then, I still assert they never cared about any of our feedback and the whole discussion was smoke screen to distract us.

I won't deny that there is much suck factor in U5 - degrees varying depending on your play style/attitude. However, it was my decision to be distracted, and I find it hard to believe Turbine used The Force to make you look elsewhere. I'm pretty sure "we" only have ourselves to blame (myself included) for missing stuff.


Believe as you wish. Do not get testy with anyone over their personal evaluations of the situation. Unless you can discuss things from a impartial perspective, you are only diminishing any value of your argument.

Agreed. Forums are for discussion, education, debate, other stuff specific to channels like the marketplaces, and occasionally - in the right context - venting. Name calling and labelling is not only bad form, but can get you silenced in the forums, which is a real bummer when you feel passionate enough to make a point. :D

[AbsynthMinded]

Ill only respond to a couple things as we seem to be in agreement more or less on the rest..

From what I have read in the forums, the bandwidth ceiling was indeed raised on all servers. The player testing suggests that some servers are doing better than others. But then this has always been the case..

The deception about U5 is that they asked for our input at all over the changes to TWF. As if they were gonna alter their coarse over player feedback. That was a fake.. However the massive attention it got made sure that there would be less scrutiny over the rest of it. Classic misdirection.

[shablala]

I've dealt with gaming companies for the better part of 20+ years. I have yet to meet one that could maintain it's integrity and player respect. Blizzard is the front runner as their ethical errors have in no way effected their market dominance. You however seem to be the babbling brook of vitriol. Careful, you've no idea the depth of experience I've had on a corporate level.

My friend, I don't need to be careful about anything. You have nothing under your belt that would intimidate me, one that started two successful companies, and has over 22 years sales experience selling to C-level executives. You dont need to give me a lecture about greed or economics.


They want Benjamin's baby, and they care nothing about the perspective of anyone willing to give them some. Whatever they told us was a fake, and the real motivation was either to save money or generate new interest for new income. I shall not further dissect this, as the changes are in, welcome to the new world order.

(sarcasm)Are you serious? you want me to believe that a for profit company creates a game and actually want to increase profit? get out of here, that doesnt make sense at all!! :P

On a serious note, was this change to TWF made to have a small percentage of the playerbase who are obsessed about min/max toons go out and buy lesser hearts of wood and increase profit? Absolute B.S. If that was the intention, it was an epic fail, since I seriously doubt that they sold enough of them to even cover the hours they are paying a janitor at the building.
There are however many things to this Update that will bring them some extra money, but none of which have anything to do with the TWF change.


My main complaint, was the change to the core code diverting us away from the D&D'ness the game is supposed to be all about. They told us this was to help the DPS lag, which so far as anyone can tell did not effect things at all. They did however raise the bandwidth ceiling, which according to player testing is working better for some servers than others. So as far as I am concerned, the DEVs lied. During all the firestorm of debate over the DPS issues, they snuck in a host of other changes. Many of which are taking a great deal of heat because of the general suck factor. Some of the new changes are alright, but on the whole the U5 has been a big bag of chaos and pain. Pain they could have avoided had they gone all in and discussed many factors with us players and taken the negative feedback to heart before implementing it. But then, I still assert they never cared about any of our feedback and the whole discussion was smoke screen to distract us.

The game is still based on D&D. If you thought that everything on the PnP can be automatically applied to an MMO without any tweaking for balance's sake, then you're dreaming.
What things did they "sneak" in? The cry of TWF nerf was heard 2-3 weeks before U5 went live.
I can not believe I am repeating this again, since I and countless others have mentioned it before, the change was not JUST to decrease lag(which IS absolutely decreased), in fact the MAIN reason was balancing the two melee playstyle, which was long overdue. More changes will be done, especially for THF, which hopefully will put both of them on a more or less equal footing.


Believe as you wish. Do not get testy with anyone over their personal evaluations of the situation. Unless you can discuss things from a impartial perspective, you are only diminishing any value of your argument.

Are you serious? I am the one getting testy? I am the one screaming about the change affecting my TWF toons? Well my friend, well one my toons is a 20ranger tempest III, and I am perfectly ok with the current changes, BECAUSE I have an "impartial perspective", unlike you.

Anyone who says that the TWF change has ruined their character, or made their character not viable in ANY content (even Epic), is a >bleep< >bleep< >bleep< exaggerating liar OR and incompetent player. I trust that you are neither.

[AbsynthMinded]

Was there anything in that which was related to the actual discussion? Seemed like you continued to attack me and not make any advance in the debate, if it can be called such anymore. You are misreading my position in any case, so I see no merit in dragging it out with you.

This thread is dead and long ago ceased to be about the merits or faults of the TWF changes, and so far as I can tell, has devolved into mostly petty arguments about who has the more smelly opinion. Nothing said here will change anything Turbine is doing with the TWF nerf. Neither will it improve the general suck factor of the many many issues caused as collateral damage by U5. Other threads may make more progress in that regard, but I have low expectations.

[tday123]

Here's what I've noticed and figured would happen...

DPS is down...Lag is still ever-present in the usual trouble spots (subt, shroud, etc.) Meanwhile there seems to be no lag issues on the EU servers and never was from what I hear. So Im not sure anything got accomplished to that stated end.

Now the multi-proc mainhand is an ok addition but is very problematic. My guy is not set-up as a hate tank but as a result of the nerf I am now able to pull aggro off of knights of the chalice and just last night pulled aggro from a monster build when my touch of death proc'd 4 times. While this sounds cool for a dps it upsets the balance that had taken time to establish in my raid group and now makes my toon a liabilty for my team. I know that a different strategy can be employed in most situations but not always; for instance its difficult to vary your strategy on the shadow master in TOD.

Oh well...I may try the overly gimmickie prestiges before I shelve the little guy but Im not very pleased. We were told the obvious; the was a serious lag problem on the US servers. We were told that turbine didnt want to spend money buying up-to-date equipment to make the gaming experience better for its paying customers. We were told that the devs had a plan b that would fix the lag while allowing them to keep from purchasing new capital. This was somewhat acceptable to me since I get that turbine was a recent acquisition of WB and they may not want to drop a lot of financial capital on a new piece of the corporation, but only so long as it fixed the problem. Ultimately only half of their solution has worked...they nerfed dps.
A disappointed customer.

[Thanimal]

Could a dev confirm that Tempest I and Tempest II *do* apply to unarmed? Some in-game measurements have suggested this, but this seems like a conceptual departure from the original Tempest PrE, so I'm thinking it's a bug?

Thanks in advance!

[crazycaren]

Hi
I didn't have any preconceptions about TWF before U5 happened. To me, it depends on how it feels in the game. Since U5 I've played 3 different characters and had 3 different experiences with the changes!

Ranger with rogue & monk splashes, lvl 17 with Tempest 2. Running around in the vale, vale and amrath quests. Hardly any change. OK, so there's some yellow first numbers on her second hand but she is still super fun to play. Lots of DPS, which was one of the points of her build. (Zergasaurus Rex on Khyber)

Monk with rogue splash, lvl 13 with TWF and Improved TWF. Running around in gianthold & desert quests. Using handwraps he's awesome. Lot of successful attacks and hits. However, trying to dual-wield vorpal kamas he couldn't hit anything. Just lots of misses. This is a definite U5 change as this used to be my favorite weapon set when in a party. I quite like the dual-vorpal combo as it makes the monk more welcome in parties since many people think monks are gimped anyways. (Treeh on Khyber)

Bard with rogue and ranger splashes, lvl 11 with TWF. Running lvl 10 & 11 quests. She can't attack a thing anymore when dual wielding. Has always had better attacks when THF but now her TWF is totally useless. (Redmaple on Khyber). Not sure what to do with this build since I had planned for over-sized TWF at end game. I'll have to rethink that plan.

[BossOfEarth]

I have a lv 16 Tempest II Str vorpal Ranger. My play style is to kill the casters while the Tanks take down the muscle. I almost always get 1st place on the kill count.

Pros:
The rhythm of TWF is easier on the ears.

Cons:
Breakables take longer to destroy.

Wants:
I'd like to set the text to display when procs happen without getting the text about damage.

Thanks for a great game and keep up the good work Turbine! :D

[Wraith_Sarevok]

Update 5 was a terrible update.

Not including the new bugs it introduced by breaking certain spell area of effect buffs, it completely sucked all the fun out of melee combat by cutting speed and replacing it with double-strike.

Double-strike in practice isn't as terrible as it sounds and overall boosts DPS for the TWF style to new levels, but it's not impressive to look at either and overall, feels boring.

THF was gimped badly by removing the hidden 10% capstone attack speed bonus for pure Barbarian builds, removing glancing blows while moving, and making absolutely no attempt at all to fix the many broken glancing blow feats/enhancements. The result being that THF has fallen from being the king of DPS in this game to 2nd, or in some cases even 3rd place behind the dark monk and TWF.

And at last we come to the absolute worst part of this update: The Dark Monk. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to glance over the Monk's unarmed damage at level 20, factor in some high-quality handwraps, attack speed bonus gained from stances, and put Void Strike IV and Fists of Darkness enhancements together, to churn out potentially the most damaging and versatile class in the entire game! I mean, what were they thinking? Did they really believe that an 8d4 force damage strike on each hit was just going to go unnoticed? Just awful, terrible decisions.

What I can hope for in the next update is a reduction in the damage gained from the Void Strike enhancement line, bringing dark Monks more in line with TWF and THF builds, and an attempt to fix the broken Warforged glancing blow enhancements and Barbarian capstone feat to give at least some damage back to the THF Barbarian builds.

[Tarnoc]

[QUOTE=Eladrin;2989398]If you acquired a double strike effect from somewhere, then yes, Touch of Death could double strike (and trigger an off hand attack) for a total of three attacks. You may have to wait for the next tier of Warchanter though.


......THIS

[die]

ok its kahza's third life and yes i love ranger so much doing it again, so i was 20 on my second life when the mod 5 N"WORD" hit..:)

I did not notice 2 big of a change i still rocked:)...now on third life just hit tempest 1 and not filling so freash any more :).. so lets see if im understanding page 1'sj graph correctly..

Tempest 1 10%DS - 100%MAINHAND - 90%OFFHAND

Tempest 2 10%DS - 100%MAINHAND - 100%OFFHAND

Tempest 3 5% DS - 105% MAINHAND - 100%OFFHAND....

So assuming im correct on this 1st question..? why on temest 3 am i loosing 5%DS. When the whole point of tempest 3 was for the extra ac and att.. hmm.. and why 105%main hand att is that even possible?,, isnt that like 110 % heavy fort, lol so any why be nice! i didnt fill like reading 140 pages.. just want too make sure im reading the graph correctly on page 1 ty and have anice day -Rich

[dkyle]

So assuming im correct on this 1st question..? why on temest 3 am i loosing 5%DS.

Double Strike and Off Hand Proc are two different things. You appear to be conflating them. Tempest 1 and Tempest 2 both provide an additional +10% to offhand proc, above and beyond GTWF. This determines the chance of an offhand attack happening.

Double Strike gives a percentage chance to have two main hand attacks instead of one. That's what the 105% means. On average, you have 105% the number of main hand attacks compared to someone with no double strike.

As to why Tempest 3 gives only 5% instead of 10%? Double strike is worth more DPS than adding offhand proc, since your offhand weapon only gets half your STR mod. 10% doublestrike would be a greater increase in DPS than the 10% offhand proc of previous tiers. Tempest 3 is somewhat less an increase in DPS than Tempest 1 and 2, but not by an unreasonable amount.

Also, what's with all the blank lines?

[die]

Double Strike and Off Hand Proc are two different things. You appear to be conflating them. Tempest 1 and Tempest 2 both provide an additional +10% to offhand proc, above and beyond GTWF. This determines the chance of an offhand attack happening.

Double Strike gives a percentage chance to have two main hand attacks instead of one. That's what the 105% means. On average, you have 105% the number of main hand attacks compared to someone with no double strike.

As to why Tempest 3 gives only 5% instead of 10%? Double strike is worth more DPS than adding offhand proc, since your offhand weapon only gets half your STR mod. 10% doublestrike would be a greater increase in DPS than the 10% offhand proc of previous tiers. Tempest 3 is somewhat less an increase in DPS than Tempest 1 and 2, but not by an unreasonable amount.

Also, what's with all the blank lines?

Ty very much for the reply.. and i fixed that gap lol it looks like i had a 5 way down at the bottom of the page for some reason .."scratches head" once again ty very much for the speedy reply

[DustTheWind]

I am curious. If this is the case why not just skip off hand attacks all together and just ramp up the attacks with the main hand till they balance?

[dkyle]

I am curious. If this is the case why not just skip off hand attacks all together and just ramp up the attacks with the main hand till they balance?

Huh? Are you replying to a specific post? There appears to be some context missing here.

Also, it's best to avoid necroing threads like this.

[Alektronic]

Don't mean to continue the thread necro, but this mechanic gives a twf feel to the tempest (and monk) lines. If it only gave a double strike (see kensei lines) then the PrE would also support THF and SB toons. As a twf, the increase to offhand proc makes it equally important what you have in ur left hand (again, compare with a twf kensei who does 80% offhand proc...).

[DustTheWind]

I don't believe it was necroing what ever that is... not sure exactly. Its the main topic of this thread the change to 2 handed fighting. If they were going to save bandwidth to have more strikes on the main hand I am saying why not go all the way and save more bandwidth. The 2 handed fighting feel would be the same. You would still get about the same number of strikes. Just with out sending 2 hit tags you would only send 1 hit tag. Thats the point they are making which reduces lag. less data.

Oh by necroing threads you mean an old thread maybe? I had no idea there was a rule against that.

[Calebro]

I don't believe it was necroing what ever that is... not sure exactly. Its the main topic of this thread the change to 2 handed fighting. If they were going to save bandwidth to have more strikes on the main hand I am saying why not go all the way and save more bandwidth. The 2 handed fighting feel would be the same. You would still get about the same number of strikes. Just with out sending 2 hit tags you would only send 1 hit tag. Thats the point they are making which reduces lag. less data.

Oh by necroing threads you mean an old thread maybe? I had no idea there was a rule against that.

Necroing a thread is bringing a thread back to life.
This thread raged on for over 180 pages, and had FINALLY died about 6 months ago.

Two Handed Fighting is different from Two Weapon Fighting. This thread deals with TWF, not THF.
Just "ramping up the attacks", as you put it, would do nothing to help with all the physics checks that they claimed were the cause of much of the lag, which is why the off-hand strike mechanics were changed.