Epic Defensive Fighting - needs some help

[Nickodeamous]

Hello all! I'd like to bring up a cool free feat that a lot of Melees use and suggest a tweak that would help with survivability:

Epic Defensive Fighting
Definition: Your hero has learned to enter a reactive state, protecting themselves in the chaos of battle by rolling with the punches, but this hampers their ability to engage ranged threats. Adds a 5% Competence Bonus to maximum Hit Points, with an additional 5% for every combat fighting style feat you have, to a maximum of 25%. The applicable feats are:

This adds a large chunk of HPs to a character at a cost of reducing ranged power to 0. Essentially, only melees will take this.

Here are my thoughts on this. If you are not ranged, and 0 Ranged Power, you need to essentially go right up to the mob to attack. adding 25% HP is essentially saying, "hey, you can hit me one more time before I croak" while ranged are blasting away safely from down the street.

if melees are In fact giving up ranged power (useless to them in most cases), only to get extra HPs (which really doesn't help that much in the grand scheme of things, why not add something else, like 15 AC, or 15 PRR. something to actually help reduce damage.

I have no beef with ranged or casters. They make my life way easier as a monk. I just think "Epic Defensive Fighting" should include more "Epicness" to help defend from attacks then just a HP dump.

thoughts?
Nico

[hp1055cm]

What rock have you been hiding under?
Your take on this is that melees are giving up ranged power? Really?
You need to keep reading the full description until you get to the part about heal abilities being reduced to touch distance.

Seriously this feat came out of left field and was thoroughly discussed last year.
It's auto-granted to everyone, meaning your don't have to spend a feat on it, and you want to improve it... :confused:

[Nickodeamous]

What rock have you been hiding under?
Your take on this is that melees are giving up ranged power? Really?
You need to keep reading the full description until you get to the part about heal abilities being reduced to touch distance.

Seriously this feat came out of left field and was thoroughly discussed last year.
It's auto-granted to everyone, meaning your don't have to spend a feat on it, and you want to improve it... :confused:

sorry, I am under the rock of life. In reality, I don't fully understand the healing aspect that you speak about, but i do understand that as a melee (not ranged), the automatic feat that we all have the ability to toggle on or off removes all Ranged power and gives up to 25% bonus to HPs. I do think that this was a way to help balance melee and provide those that actually have to run up and punch/kick/swing swords/etc an extra boost of "hey this will help you not die in epic content as much".

Heres the thing, personally, I mostly die when A. I am one shotted, or B. when I am not paying attention and forget where mobs spawn/how hard the hit! haha. I think that the trade off of being ranged vs. melee is worth more than a " here's 25% HPs". If I wanted to cruise through this game, I'd be an IQ or warlock or fire sorc now. In fact, I should, but for some reason, I like pressing 15 different buttons to play this game. Look, I'm just looking for constructive ideas to help out, so I post things to throw out ideas. some good, some not so good.

[droid327]

The purpose of EDF was to give melee the option of not taking arti and/or fighter levels for the HP bonuses in their enhancement trees, but not give ranged and caster those same bonuses. Arti and fighter tanks had become de facto required in any tank build, and it was limiting.

It serves its intended purpose, changing it from a %HP bonus would just make it required to take it in artI/fig again. If melee still needs help it'll have to be something else besides EDF.

[janave]

IMO, Epic Defensive Fighting is a relatively large proxy nerf to melee Fighter and Paladin, it doesnt stack with their stances, stalwart stances costs action points vs the freebie feat (which also happen to be boosted by dps feats..weird logic..). It didnt help at all to make main tanking builds better, it made tanking on Wizards and Arties better tho.


If it was up to me i would make a new EDF.


Epic Defensive Fighting (Toggle) * Requires Epic level 1 * Requires one of Melee Combat style feats and either Combat Expertise or Heavy Armor Champion or Resilience (2 Forced Feats instead of 4)

Effect: Gain 3 times your Effective Hit Dice in percentage to your Maximum hitpoints (stacking with all sources of MHP%). In case of Multiple Classes, add up each hit dice, divide by 20, apply floor rounding.

Examples:

20 Paladin => 30%
20 Fighter => 30%
12 Fighter + 8 Artificer => Floor ( (12 * 10 + 8 * 6) / 20 ) => 8*3 => 24%
20 Wizard => 12%
20 Barbarian => 36%
15 Sorcerer + 5 Barbarian => 18%


IMO, a huge win-win for game balance. Okay maybe change Warlock's typing to not stack with EDF specifically, but it definitely should stack with the main tank's defender stance types...

[Komradkillingmachine]

The purpose of EDF was to give melee the option of not taking arti and/or fighter levels for the HP bonuses in their enhancement trees, but not give ranged and caster those same bonuses. Arti and fighter tanks had become de facto required in any tank build, and it was limiting.

It serves its intended purpose, changing it from a %HP bonus would just make it required to take it in artI/fig again. If melee still needs help it'll have to be something else besides EDF.

I'm mostly mad about cocoon and scroll range, just f*cking why?

[capsela]

I'm mostly mad about cocoon and scroll range, just f*cking why?

Reaper is designed to encourage you to heal each other, but here is a mandatory feat that makes it incredibly hard to do that.

EDF is a bandage over a bad design wound.

[count_spicoli]

Melee is dead in this game and has been for a couple years now. The devs have made that perfectly clear by constant updated to range and casters while simultaneously nerfing melee. My suggestion to you is don't play melee or anything to do with them and forget any feats or classes that have anything to do with it. Or move on from the game.

[droid327]

Reaper is designed to encourage you to heal each other, but here is a mandatory feat that makes it incredibly hard to do that.

EDF is a bandage over a bad design wound.

Reaper is designed to encourage roles. The idea is you need an actual healer, not just a full party of dps off-heals with cocoon.

[count_spicoli]

Reaper is designed to encourage roles. The idea is you need an actual healer, not just a full party of dps off-heals with cocoon.

Except you still do. Just casters and inqui's just no melee

[cave_diver]

Reaper is designed to encourage roles. The idea is you need an actual healer, not just a full party of dps off-heals with cocoon.


Casters are not even really needed anymore, couple of inquisies in shiradi for CC, 3 more in other destinies and maybe a healer or another inquisy. The other day i was invited to do r10's on my melee with 5 inquisies, they told me they would heal me....yea as if that was going to happen, i declined.

[Chai]

Melee was the first classes to be revamped, and were OP in that era, but people didnt want to wait for the total design to be fleshed out before demanding nerfs in the now, while comparing new revamped melee to other old school AP trees. Many of those revamped melee did get nerfed, and we still wonder today, which of those changes if reverted would be OP in the current era?

I highly doubt any would, but am open to specific counterpoints...

[lyrecono]

Reaper is designed to encourage roles. The idea is you need an actual healer, not just a full party of dps off-heals with cocoon.

Yah, but part of the player base told the devs this wouldn't work beforehand.

Prior to reaper, i rarely had a healer in the party (in quests), so all my melees had to have self healing at all times..
Post reaper, my dps melees couldn't join parties, because i couldn't heal myself or stay alive between fights with trash to slowely heal myself.
Getting a healer meant less dps, so the melee rol was replaced, usually by ranged or cc/instakill casters.

My tank only saw action in rare quest where they couldn't expoit the boss.
So many desire in the dark (and a small handfull of simmular quest with hard to exploit bosses) later, i get questions like, why does your toon have only 68 reaper points?
And at times like ths i have a hard time keeping my 2 cents to myself; it's because small minded people allow tanks into a reaper part when it suits them.

To be honnest, i used to love the thrill of playing a beefy 2hf melee, when there was a clear risk & reward system for doing so.
Sure, EE was ballanced poorly but atleast we could participate and make a meaningfull impact.
Beats the hell out of sitting on my hand 20 paces behind the party or taking a backpack ride.
The breaking point for me came when all the old tricks were brought in to exploit the game, from 1 rune zerging r10 LE tempest spine and bugging out the boss to skipping part of the shroud (and an even longer list of tricks).
It just made me wonder. If the goal of a harder difficulty is just to skip it and the goal of melee is to stay out of a mobs melee range, then what am i still doing here?

Edit;
I still rember one of the people claiming that healers would make a comeback due to the harder difficulty.
I hope he stIll read the forum, i wonder how it must feel to be this wrong.

[janave]

Yah, but part of the player base told the devs this wouldn't work beforehand.

Prior to reaper, i rarely had a healer in the party (in quests), so all my melees had to have self healing at all times..
Post reaper, my dps melees couldn't join parties, because i couldn't heal myself or stay alive between fights with trash to slowely heal myself.
Getting a healer meant less dps, so the melee rol was replaced, usually by ranged or cc/instakill casters.

My tank only saw action in rare quest where they couldn't expoit the boss.
So many desire in the dark (and a small handfull of simmular quest with hard to exploit bosses) later, i get questions like, why does your toon have only 68 reaper points?
And at times like ths i have a hard time keeping my 2 cents to myself; it's because small minded people allow tanks into a reaper part when it suits them.

To be honnest, i used to love the thrill of playing a beefy 2hf melee, when there was a clear risk & reward system for doing so.
Sure, EE was ballanced poorly but atleast we could participate and make a meaningfull impact.
Beats the hell out of sitting on my hand 20 paces behind the party or taking a backpack ride.
The breaking point for me came when all the old tricks were brought in to exploit the game, from 1 rune zerging r10 LE tempest spine and bugging out the boss to skipping part of the shroud (and an even longer list of tricks).
It just made me wonder. If the goal of a harder difficulty is just to skip it and the goal of melee is to stay out of a mobs melee range, then what am i still doing here?

When you mentioned tank they probably heard d4/d6 ranged / DC caster IK builds... possible source of the confusion. Because DDO logic tank != Properly specced Fighter, Paladin, Barbarian... .

[SpartanKiller13]

The purpose of EDF was to give melee the option of not taking arti and/or fighter levels for the HP bonuses in their enhancement trees, but not give ranged and caster those same bonuses. Arti and fighter tanks had become de facto required in any tank build, and it was limiting.

It serves its intended purpose, changing it from a %HP bonus would just make it required to take it in artI/fig again. If melee still needs help it'll have to be something else besides EDF.

*not taking Paladin/Fighter levels, as they reworked Paladin to also be a Competence Bonus (as is Druid w/new trees). But then they made Artificer give a Racial HP bonus, so for HP tanking you're now stuck as Artificers.

If Artificer was also Competence, it'd be a lot more even; but RMM T5 gives +20% Racial Bonus to HP, which stacks with everything.