Please Reconsider the Meteor Swarm Cooldown Nerf

[Amoneth]

Dear SSG

Fire sorcs have already had 2 nerfs again recently, the belt and the Max Level, please reconsider the cooldown nerf. It's not so much the DPS loss, it's the fact that it's completely messed with the spell rotation. If you want to spam DPS, you could go Meteor Swarm, Delayed Blast Fireball, Fireball, maybe Scorch depending on how fast you can spam keys, then back to Meteor Swarm, etc. Now there's still a good 2 seconds on MS and there are no other viable fire spells to put into the rotation without SLAs which will cost you 9 APs. Pretty please reconsider, it's painful having to twiddle your thumbs in between spell rotations. I accept having to do that on my wizzy's neg spells but this really shouldn't be a thing on a DPS caster :(

[MaeveTuohy]

Pretty please reconsider, it's painful having to twiddle your thumbs in between spell rotations. I accept having to do that on my wizzy's neg spells but this really shouldn't be a thing on a DPS caster :(

Could you explain why you think this shouldn't be a thing? Please don't include any version of "because I want to do more damage" or "because I get bored" in your answer. Cheers.

[Amoneth]

Could you explain why you think this shouldn't be a thing? Please don't include any version of "because I want to do more damage" or "because I get bored" in your answer. Cheers.
Tell me something, if you were on a melee DPS, thrower or bow/crossbow user and your attack animation suddenly had you standing still for 2-3s out of every 6s rotation would you be OK with that? I don't think so, so why should spell DPSers be OK with it?

[Targal]

Long time ago, SSG took away Sorcerer's MCL +1 from lvl-6 core and lvl-12 core. the nurf was done to make Meteor MCL lower.
Now we realised Meteor Swarm's MCL was actually 30. the nurf was intentionally 25 to 23 MCL, but it was actually 35 to 33 MCL.

What was the point of this nurf at this moment? hmm.
I know it was aimed for Iceberg as well, but they nurfed the staff as well... I see the staff nurf is legit, but why the MCL nurf at the moment?

[SirValentine]

Fire sorcs have already had 2 nerfs again recently, the belt and the Max Level


The belts were nothing to do with fire sorcs in particular.



It's not so much the DPS loss, it's the fact that it's completely messed with the spell rotation. If you want to spam DPS, you could go Meteor Swarm, Delayed Blast Fireball, Fireball, maybe Scorch depending on how fast you can spam keys, then back to Meteor Swarm, etc. Now there's still a good 2 seconds on MS and there are no other viable fire spells to put into the rotation without SLAs which will cost you 9 APs. Pretty please reconsider, it's painful having to twiddle your thumbs in between spell rotations.


It sounds likes I could paraphrase that reason as, "I can't figure out a spell to add to my rotation." Are you looking for spell selection advice? Or a link to the spell list on the wiki?


...if you were on a melee DPS, thrower or bow/crossbow user and your attack animation suddenly had you standing still for 2-3s out of every 6s rotation would you be OK with that? I don't think so, so why should spell DPSers be OK with it?

Why are you standing still and twiddling your thumbs? It sounds like by your own choice.

[redoubt]

Could you explain why you think this shouldn't be a thing? Please don't include any version of "because I want to do more damage" or "because I get bored" in your answer. Cheers.

Why is "because I get bored" not a valid answer?

After the 48.4 nuke from orbit, I played fire alchy. It was painfully SLOW. SLOW was the problem. The dps was bad of course as well, but the sluggish play was simply not fun. I respected my character into negative and poison. It was mildly interesting as a different option, but again, with the long cooldowns it was just SLOW and boring. I TR'd into a melee as a result. (And I also lost a friend to play with; she disliked the nerfs enough she quit and went to play other things.)

So I ask again, why is that not a valid answer?

[Steeme]

I assume you're having issues because you don't build your Sorc incorrectly like I do (I take the Scorch + Fireball SLAs along with the Master of Fire feat, and I put 11 in Feydark for GCS).

Aside from physically adapting to the new rotation (which will take a while), I found that DBF needs to be hit twice in between each Meteor Swarm.


Example:

Meteor -> DBF -> Fireball SLA -> Fireball -> DBF -> Meteor -> Scorch SLA -> DBF ...


Of course the rotations change dynamically based on the scenario. For example on non-boss fights I'll start launching stuff to pull everything towards me then throw various CC into the mix (Mass Hold, Color Spray, BoGW, sometimes Prismatic Spray). On boss fights there's usually some jumping around and cocooning which can fill the cooldown wait time.

[Lonnbeimnech]

you should add acid well into the rotation

[TekkenDevil]

Why do you need to spam DPS?
Why not just nuke a bit, then walk up and melee?
Or just stand back and wait a bit.

Hardcore side of DDO sounds so lame, I cringe every time I read about it on these forums.
"Help, I can't send nukes on my caster every single second of every minute!"
Well, how incredibly sad to hear that, my goodness! Poor you!

[mikarddo]

you should add acid well into the rotation

That was my ideas as well but using a 4 pcs LGS set I found it hard to get a meaningful acid spell power. As it happens I had around 3 times as high fire spell power compered to acid. Playing a Tiefling could fix that I guess but the alt I am using as a sorc is doing racial + epic lives so thats not an real solution.

How did you get meaningful acid spell power / spell crit to make Acid Well worth casting without gimping spell crit percent/mult?

[Amoneth]

Every time I post on this forum I am reminded of why I rarely post on this forum, there are always those people who feel the need to respond with unsolicited "advice" (snark) in order to attempt to make themselves look better by putting down others.


The belts were nothing to do with fire sorcs in particular.
If you insist on offering "advice" that was not asked for, may I suggest that you actually properly read the post you are responding to. At no point did I say the belt nerf was specific to fire sorcs, I said they were affected by it. My primary and secondary toons, both clerics, were also affected by it but they were only nerfed once and it was an acceptable loss, as opposed to the triple nerf bat (a.k.a. "Lucille" to me now) swing that fire sorcs got this time around.


It sounds likes I could paraphrase that reason as, "I can't figure out a spell to add to my rotation." Are you looking for spell selection advice? Or a link to the spell list on the wiki?
To me, it sounds more like another comprehension fail on your part, I said "there are no viable fire spells to put into the rotation without SLAs", which implies that I have already checked, not "Please help me learn how to read the wiki, I am lost without you SirValentine".


Why are you standing still and twiddling your thumbs? It sounds like by your own choice.
Since the CC is already done at that point and more is generally not needed, I guess I could file my nails, check my ceilings for cracks, clean my keyboard perhaps?

[Amoneth]

Why not just nuke a bit, then walk up and melee?
Erm, because I would be instantly dead. You may not want to do high reapers to get your RPs, and that's fine, but many of us do.


Hardcore side of DDO sounds so lame, I cringe every time I read about it on these forums.
"Help, I can't send nukes on my caster every single second of every minute!"
Well, how incredibly sad to hear that, my goodness! Poor you!
Some of us have been playing for 15 years so reapers are pretty much it for us. Just because you don't / can't play that way, doesn't mean it's wrong for others.

[MaeveTuohy]

Why is "because I get bored" not a valid answer?

After the 48.4 nuke from orbit, I played fire alchy. It was painfully SLOW. SLOW was the problem. The dps was bad of course as well, but the sluggish play was simply not fun. I respected my character into negative and poison. It was mildly interesting as a different option, but again, with the long cooldowns it was just SLOW and boring. I TR'd into a melee as a result. (And I also lost a friend to play with; she disliked the nerfs enough she quit and went to play other things.)

So I ask again, why is that not a valid answer?

It isn't a valid answer to me, (1)because it doesn't interest me; and (2) it's very personal rather than sorc-specific.

There is always something you can be doing, solo or in a party. If the only thing a player is interested by is a 4-spell rotation, I don't think the devs should cater to that. Go do something else.

[TekkenDevil]

LMAO you think this game has to be balanced for Reapers?
HIGH REAPERS AT THAT???

HAHAHAA

No seriously that's disgusting. I laugh to mask my disgust.

[Amoneth]

It isn't a valid answer to me, (1)because it doesn't interest me; and (2) it's very personal rather than sorc-specific.

There is always something you can be doing, solo or in a party. If the only thing a player is interested by is a 4-spell rotation, I don't think the devs should cater to that. Go do something else.

Luckily for us, you are not responsible for keeping DDO going. We've already lost many people to the lag issues, there's just no need to lose them to this when there are other ways to further nerf DPS, assuming that's even necessary after the other nerfs that came with the cooldown ones.

As I've already said, you wouldn't accept a 2-3s halt in any other DPS attack chain animation, why would you accept it on a DPS caster?

[MaeveTuohy]

Tell me something, if you were on a melee DPS, thrower or bow/crossbow user and your attack animation suddenly had you standing still for 2-3s out of every 6s rotation would you be OK with that? I don't think so, so why should spell DPSers be OK with it?

I have played all those builds. Every build has premium attack aspects that go on cool down or have numeric limitations. You have other spells that do less damage, just as melees have standard attacks that hit for much lower numbers than their various clickie specials. You don't personally have to be okay with it, I'm not here to counsel you. But the game does not need a sorc to be able to cast just 4 spells essentially without interruption.

[Amoneth]

LMAO you think this game has to be balanced for Reapers?
HIGH REAPERS AT THAT???

HAHAHAA

No seriously that's disgusting. I laugh to mask my disgust.

Nobody said anything about balance in high reapers. You brought up the suggestion of meleeing, I responded that it was not an option in the content a lot of people run.

[MaeveTuohy]

Luckily for us, you are not responsible for keeping DDO going.

SSG lengthened the cool down, and they are responsible for keeping DDO going, and have done so successfully for 15 years now. Looks like I am in good company.

[Amoneth]

SSG lengthened the cool down, and they are responsible for keeping DDO going, and have done so successfully for 15 years now. Looks like I am in good company.

SSG are not omniscient, they generally welcome constructive feedback

[MasterDragonan]

I have played all those builds. Every build has premium attack aspects that go on cool down or have numeric limitations. You have other spells that do less damage, just as melees have standard attacks that hit for much lower numbers than their various clickie specials. You don't personally have to be okay with it, I'm not here to counsel you. But the game does not need a sorc to be able to cast just 4 spells essentially without interruption.
That is exactly what Sorc is designed to do cost a few spells without interruptions, their whole kit is about it.

[Artos_Fabril]

Some of us have been playing for 15 years so reapers are pretty much it for us. Just because you don't / can't play that way, doesn't mean it's wrong for others.
Sounds like your Challenge Setting became challenging, and now you're whining about not steamrolling it. WAI

[Marshal_Lannes]

Normally I don't like answering a question with a question, but here we go - why should you have constant DPS? Now you say melee have constant DPS but do they? Only in theory. They may have constant theoretical DPS but that's irrelevant if everything is dead consumed and left in ashes by a constant DPS fire savant. Further, the melee pays a price for their theory constant DPS - they must be in range and are subject to being whacked rather hard. Casters can toss spells from a safe distance as you yourself say you'd be dead immediately if you went in to close combat range. The whole purpose of the nerf was to bring down the power of two types of casters that were overperforming. This nerf was successful and largely supported by most DDO players.

So what should you do? Oh...2 seconds just passed. Oh...there we go again. Blink I guess?

[AbyssalMage]

LMAO you think this game has to be balanced for Reapers?
HIGH REAPERS AT THAT???

HAHAHAA

No seriously that's disgusting. I laugh to mask my disgust.
Although I agree with your sentiment... Who do you think 90% of the updates cater to? It's literally to the High Reaper crowd. They are catering to the minority of players.

[AbyssalMage]

Sounds like your Challenge Setting became challenging, and now you're whining about not steamrolling it. WAI
I'm sorry you are having a disconnect from reality. When SSG plays favorites we, as the community, all lose. People are still steamrolling Reaper, just not as many Sorcerers as they have moved on to the next FOTM build. So the game is NOT working as intended but nice deflecting like the developers do. You may have a job in HR where saying one thing but meaning something else is the currency of our time. He would like help playing content as a Sorcerer instead of switching. Because that is how he enjoys playing DDO. If people don't enjoy playing DDO they leave for other games. Something you and the developers don't understand. People quit when they nerf things. And people who quit don't buy things. Without sales they won't be able to nerf things (wait, that would be a good thing). Ok, keep nerfing things SSG! Hope I am around long enough to see the tyranny end. I mean, if we all had fun playing then players may come back. Not going to happen with the philosophy they currently use.

[Artos_Fabril]

He would like help playing content as a Sorcerer instead of switching.
Then he can do the same thing everyone else with a non-meta build or fewer than 50 reaper points has been told since Reaper was introduced: "Turn down the difficulty or reroll and join the meta." Or just find a group that will let you pike until you can start having fun again.


Fire sorcs have already had 2 nerfs again recently, the belt and the Max Level, please reconsider the cooldown nerf.This is pretty clearly neither a request for assistance nor for advice. He doesn't want help playing content on a sorcerer, he wants the Devs to cater to his preferred playstyle of always having a button to push for max damage. See also the previous advice provided in this thread re: spell rotations.

[Tsutti]

Then he can do the same thing everyone else with a non-meta build or fewer than 50 reaper points has been told since Reaper was introduced: "Turn down the difficulty or reroll and join the meta." Or just find a group that will let you pike until you can start having fun again.

Except that nowhere did he complain about difficulty. His comment was a response to someone saying that high reaper shouldn't be the focus of balance, and that person was under the same misconception you are when they responded to the OP when the OP said that someone's suggestion to melee stuff while their spells are on cooldown won't work in high reaper bc they'll get one shotted.

Essentially, they are not complaining about the difficulty but rather saying there truly isn't much for them to do while waiting for their spells to come off cooldown.

[slarden]

Does anybody have an idea how inter-Savant balance looks now at the high-end? I'm guessing it's Fire > Acid > Cold > Air. I don't think they fixed the Earth tag on Meteor, but just overrode it for Fire Sorcs? That means Air still cannot cast either Meteor (Earth) or Acid Well (Earth) at good caster level, and AoE is king. OTOH, they do get leap, so you get one of those annoying performance vs. fun trade-offs...

EDIT: Actually, you can probably get (the equally bad) CL19 to Meteor even as Air/Cold Savant in DI now, but it requires putting some points into the tree, and likely sacrificing either armor or No Mercy. It never ceases to amaze me how terrible the sorc trees are now, +3 MCL in one element at the cost of -3 MCL in all others. If it wasn't for the capstone immunity breaker, you would almost be better off not taking any. You would likely get more DPS out of Falconry No Mercy with the AA tree enchantment bonuses for Mass Hold, or something equally absurd.

I am always confused why everyone thinks no mercy is a must have for alchemists and sorcs unless they are focused on maximizing kill count - it is good for that. I definitely like the sprint boost and 5% hp boost more.

In my experience the smallest problem I face in questing is helpless mobs - not worried if it takes 2 more seconds to take them down. I think feydark illusionist is an intriguing tree for a sorc because you can get 4 charisma out of it and a boost to crit % on top of greater color spray.

I did not mean to imply any element is better than fire - I just think it's easy enough to add in acid well to the mix for aoe - and for bosses swap to electric and throw in a thunderstroke. Necrotic ray also isn't terrible and is solid on bosses with a low fort save that aren't otherwise immune.

I also get why super-optimized characters want this reversed - slotting is tough with 4 LGS pieces + various LGS off-hands.

[Oxarhamar]

Tell me something, if you were on a melee DPS, thrower or bow/crossbow user and your attack animation suddenly had you standing still for 2-3s out of every 6s rotation would you be OK with that? I don't think so, so why should spell DPSers be OK with it?

Endless fuselage
No holds barred

YW

Now that's one a 30 second rotation but it's also limited to number of action boosts instead of SP.

[TedSandyman]

So this thread is simply "Please let me continue to spam high DPS spells as fast as possible"?

I personally play melee and want the vorpal hp limit removed and I want to be able to vorpal everything I hit with cleave, doublestrike, or strikethrough.

I am bored otherwise.

Thank you.

[Kebtid]

The amount of brain mass loss in this read is immeasurable.

Guy asks for a more fluid playstyle and all he gets is attacks from people.

This community is as bad as this game.
Worse even.

This could be solved by adding more epic abilities or spells , dnd book generally for evokers has plentiful spells which were not properly translated and added to ddo, overall the concept of savants was poorly done and the trees have not been updated in a decade, so of course the class would feel clunky at this moment of time,

[Jerevth]

First it's "nerf the max damage of casters so my melee toon can hit something!" and now "It's only fair that you can't cast spells back to back."
You got your wish; top-end spell damage got nerfed downward (Belts) and they even threw in a nerf on how fast those spells could be cast. It was a double nerf.

It doesn't seem different than someone complaining about how unfair it is that melees can swing their weapons all day without needing to conserve a stamina pool and being able to wear high AC/PRR gear without this also impacting the speed of their swings.
I play a melee, when I bother to play, and I do can back-to-back attacks on my main. Cleave feats added to the attack chain (in addition to Epic Sphere martial AOEs), CC procs on weapons and gear all give a healthy advantage. The only difference was you have to get close to your targets first.

Arcane casters took a heavy hit from the Nerfbat. 2HF lost a fair chunk of their damage percentage, yet it was nowhere near the hit arcanes took. "Lol, play like me," is not the solution to enjoying the game for everyone.
Crabs in a bucket.

[MaeveTuohy]

The amount of brain mass loss in this read is immeasurable.

Guy asks for a more fluid playstyle and all he gets is attacks from people.

I think it's a stretch to say he was only asking for a more fluid play style. But, let's say that's what he was really trying to ask for. If so, he seems to be asking for it within the limitation that the fluidity involves only the highest dps, long ranged AoE spells. I consider that to be unreasonable.

[Amoneth]

I think it's a stretch to say he was only asking for a more fluid play style. But, let's say that's what he was really trying to ask for. If so, he seems to be asking for it within the limitation that the fluidity involves only the highest dps, long ranged AoE spells. I consider that to be unreasonable.

That's exactly what she was asking for

[Amoneth]

First it's "nerf the max damage of casters so my melee toon can hit something!" and now "It's only fair that you can't cast spells back to back."
You got your wish; top-end spell damage got nerfed downward (Belts) and they even threw in a nerf on how fast those spells could be cast. It was a double nerf.

It doesn't seem different than someone complaining about how unfair it is that melees can swing their weapons all day without needing to conserve a stamina pool and being able to wear high AC/PRR gear without this also impacting the speed of their swings.
I play a melee, when I bother to play, and I do can back-to-back attacks on my main. Cleave feats added to the attack chain (in addition to Epic Sphere martial AOEs), CC procs on weapons and gear all give a healthy advantage. The only difference was you have to get close to your targets first.

Arcane casters took a heavy hit from the Nerfbat. 2HF lost a fair chunk of their damage percentage, yet it was nowhere near the hit arcanes took. "Lol, play like me," is not the solution to enjoying the game for everyone.
Crabs in a bucket.

Please point me to the post where I wished for nerfs to, well anything/anyone! As I've said, repeatedly, I can handle the other two nerfs but the cooldown one affected the fluidity of the toon, thank you Kebtid btw, I appreciate you sticking up for me and fully understanding what I was asking for :)

[LOOON375]

Even with the nerfs, my fire sorc is still more than viable in reaper.
Instead of spamming two fire spells, I spam 3.
I also adjusted my play style, and now wait for the meteor swarm cooldown to end before attacking the next group of mobs.

It slows things down a bit, and I may have to hit an extra shrine that I was able to bypass before, but it is still my most powerful toon.

The player base has always been able to overcome every nerf I have ever seen through the years, and that's after a multitude of doom threads on the forum.
This is no different.

The idea that a toon or a class is "unplayable" after this nerf is actually laughable.
And mine isn't even close to the max possible CHA and max evo DC.
Fire sorc is just that powerful......

[slarden]

Fire sorc is just that powerful......

/Thread

[Jerevth]

Please point me to the post where I wished for nerfs to, well anything/anyone! As I've said, repeatedly, I can handle the other two nerfs but the cooldown one affected the fluidity of the toon, thank you Kebtid btw, I appreciate you sticking up for me and fully understanding what I was asking for :)

I didn't see anywhere that you posted as such, and I agree the CD nerf was a kick in the kobolds. It was too much, on top of the other two nerfs.
I was trying to illustrate an argument that could be directed against melee in general, with the same merit that a few nerfbois were directing against arcane casters.

Sometimes what I say doesn't entirely convey what I think. Sorry.

My point is, for the melees laughing and supporting the Arcane Nerf:
So What?

Arcane casters were very capable, but their limitations were set by the spell points, monster resists and saves. Melees just need to equip a damage bypass item and land a hit. They may have to swing two or three times but those three swings are in the same span of time as an AOE cooldown was. Now they can swing 6-9 (or more) times more in the CD of an AOE.
You would think it mattered who killed what in a group when it came to killing trash mobs.
Yet everyone gets the same XP payout whether they're melee, caster or healer. They can swing an ax or man the back door piking.
Same XP. Same **** treasure.
Unfortunately, there are a vocal, bitter few who find that a Fire Sorc can max out their spell damage and kill a group of trash mobs more effectively than the precious melee could.
Their everything hangs in the balance of who gets the most kills. As if they'll be able to woo women, gain riches or establish their dominance in reality. All it means is the game got a little harder yet the reward didn't change a bit. Who could possibly resist the allure of cheeto dust, neck beard and Mountain Dew gut?

[MaeveTuohy]

That's exactly what she was asking for

Then that is exactly what she still has, as long as she doesn't expect it to be the same few AoE high DPS spells.

"Fluid," high dps or AoE: you can pick two.

[droid327]

You can weave Fire Bolt in as much as you like. That was created to be the equivalent of an auto attack for martial builds.

THF don't get to chain Boulders Mights and Exalted Cleaves non stop...don't know why sorcs can't weave in a few lower-tier spells too.

Especially since a "top tier" fire sorc often means tief, and they can add a second element for just some RAP. Throw out some acid wells or Tstrokes. Or toss out some no save DOTs

Change requires adaptation, but the solutions are there. Be a bird, not a whiny dinosaur. A whinosaur?

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

Arcane casters were very capable, but their limitations were set by the spell points, monster resists and saves. Melees just need to equip a damage bypass item and land a hit. They may have to swing two or three times but those three swings are in the same span of time as an AOE cooldown was. Now they can swing 6-9 (or more) times more in the CD of an AOE.
You would think it mattered who killed what in a group when it came to killing trash mobs.
Yet everyone gets the same XP payout whether they're melee, caster or healer. They can swing an ax or man the back door piking.
Same XP. Same **** treasure.

You boil down the game - its quets - down to something in which only xp matters.

But there are other kinds of players, too.

I'll still go the psychological route and say : To some people, it [also] matters whether they cantribute or not.

For a one-shotter, the emotional impace of "having power", of "feeling powerful" is much bigger than for someone who can't cantribute, for example, because he is a melee within a group of fire sorcs, to use an extreme example.

If I have the feeling that "I am useful", so to say, then I'm more willing to play within a group than when I would feel like the provervial fifth wheel on a car / cart.

So, in my opinion, giving others the constant emotional impact / impression of "you are not useful - you are sooo weak !" drives imho people rather into solo play, where they can have their very own experience of usefulness all by themselves.

The German language has the word of "Selbstwirksamkeit".
dict.leo.org translates this as "self-efficacy".

If I don't have the experience of self-efficacy, then I'm going to quit.

[SirValentine]

Guy asks for a more fluid playstyle and all he gets is attacks from people.


OP claims it's not about DPS nerf, but about spell rotation, and makes silly claims about standing around twiddling thumbs for 2 seconds, and refuses to consider simply adding another spell to their rotation, with the even more nonsensical statement that casting a non-Fire spell somehow nerfs themselves. If there's a loss of brain mass, I don't think it's the "community".

(Though I don't think the OP is actually that dumb, either. I suspect they actually simply wanted their higher DPS back, didn't want to admit that, and used the spell rotation nonsense as an excuse. And now don't want to admit that their original excuse is bogus and come clean about their actual motivation.)

[Jerevth]

You boil down the game - its quets - down to something in which only xp matters.

But there are other kinds of players, too.

I'll still go the psychological route and say : To some people, it [also] matters whether they cantribute or not.

For a one-shotter, the emotional impace of "having power", of "feeling powerful" is much bigger than for someone who can't cantribute, for example, because he is a melee within a group of fire sorcs, to use an extreme example.

If I have the feeling that "I am useful", so to say, then I'm more willing to play within a group than when I would feel like the provervial fifth wheel on a car / cart.

So, in my opinion, giving others the constant emotional impact / impression of "you are not useful - you are sooo weak !" drives imho people rather into solo play, where they can have their very own experience of usefulness all by themselves.

The German language has the word of "Selbstwirksamkeit".
dict.leo.org translates this as "self-efficacy".

If I don't have the experience of self-efficacy, then I'm going to quit.

Not only do I understand this, I've felt it; if I can't contribute I feel like dead weight, to be dragged along. It's why I played mostly solo for so long. (I started running with LFMs in the last few months.)
However, if I see a high bar being set, I would choose to either figure out how to improve my current build or figure out where my game-skills are lacking.
I will not demand that others be pulled downward because my sense of contribution is flagging.
I agree the top-end damage for casters can be... intimidating?
I've had to take a breath and laugh at myself when I was getting frustrated because I couldn't close the distance to a mob before it was dead.
But at no point do I think a gear-set spell power source and a spell point cost increase and a cooldown extension are all justified at the same time.
Good developers make small adjustments, get new metrics and then adjust again. Tweaks.

Not directed at you, but in general...
If you wanted melees to be more capable- an argument I've actually been in support of- then you don't laugh when your competition is dragged down; now everyone is less effective. Melees should have been given a couple options that would give them an advantage- a burst of speed to close the distance, or a feat like Sentinel with an autoattack if the mob turns toward another character. But if your current build is not the top dog, the failure is in the coding of the class design (Developer side), a failure of the build (your side), or a failure of the player (not enough coffee, rough day at work, etc).

Rise to the challenge and improve what you have. Don't take satisfaction in SSG hamstringing another class because you can't keep up.

-Demand they fix the gaps in melee combat mechanics- closure rate, opponent lockdown, and the in-quest metrics that track other forms of contribution besides "kills".
-Aggro is still a mess. An intimidation skilled toon should be able to match or beat a high DPS squishy's ability to develop aggro.
-Where are the automatic attacks if a mob turns its attention away from the melee character crowding it/them?

Improve your position, don't laud the nerf of another's combat system and then feel satisfaction that "All things are equal, now."

[Oxarhamar]

Not only do I understand this, I've felt it; if I can't contribute I feel like dead weight, to be dragged along. It's why I played mostly solo for so long. (I started running with LFMs in the last few months.)
However, if I see a high bar being set, I would choose to either figure out how to improve my current build or figure out where my game-skills are lacking.
I will not demand that others be pulled downward because my sense of contribution is flagging.
I agree the top-end damage for casters can be... intimidating?
I've had to take a breath and laugh at myself when I was getting frustrated because I couldn't close the distance to a mob before it was dead.
But at no point do I think a gear-set spell power source and a spell point increase and a cooldown extension are all justified at the same time.
Good developers make small adjustments, get new metrics and then adjust again. Tweaks.

Not directed at you, but in general...
If you wanted melees to be more capable- an argument I've actually been in support of- then you don't laugh when your competition is dragged down; now everyone is less effective. Melees should have been given a couple options that would give them an advantage- a burst of speed to close the distance, or a feat like Sentinel with an autoattack if the mob turns toward another character. But if your current build is not the top dog, the failure is in the coding of the class design (Developer side), a failure of the build (your side), or a failure of the player (not enough coffee, rough day at work, etc).

Rise to the challenge and improve what you have. Don't take satisfaction in SSG hamstringing another class because you can't keep up.

-Demand they fix the gaps in melee combat mechanics- closure rate, opponent lockdown, and the in-quest metrics that track other forms of contribution besides "kills".
-Aggro is still a mess. An intimidation skilled toon should be able to match or beat a high DPS squishy's ability to develop aggro.
-Where are the automatic attacks if a mob turns its attention away from the melee character crowding it/them?

Improve your position, don't laud the nerf of another's combat system and then feel satisfaction that "All things are equal, now."


remember that the way aggro works now has been partly due to nerfing others combat.

One example was that ranged use to be able to pick off at range without alerting near by monsters so now ranged aggro works like a huge AOE hate around corners and into different rooms.


I agree intimidating characters should be able to hold agro.

[Marshal_Lannes]

Their everything hangs in the balance of who gets the most kills.

Funny, that seems to be the most prevalent complaint coming from Alchemist/Fire Sorcs. Our absurdly unbalanced kill count margins have been reduced, what do we do now!

Overall this was an excellent balancing pass. Even the topic of this thread indirectly supports the nerfs. The OP is asking what they can do now. Imagine all the possibilities that have opened up. Could scroll heal someone, could use a L2 spell you've forgotten you know, could use a sonic spell to hit some breakables. A whole new tactical world of non-DPS opportunities has been revealed.

[Jerevth]

Funny, that seems to be the most prevalent complaint coming from Alchemist/Fire Sorcs. Our absurdly unbalanced kill count margins have been reduced, what do we do now!

Overall this was an excellent balancing pass. Even the topic of this thread indirectly supports the nerfs. The OP is asking what they can do now. Imagine all the possibilities that have opened up. Could scroll heal someone, could use a L2 spell you've forgotten you know, could use a sonic spell to hit some breakables. A whole new tactical world of non-DPS opportunities has been revealed.

Having played alchemist pre-nerf and finding it "meh" and not having even played Sorceror yet, if this is an accusation it falls flat.
I play melee, primarily and I prefer it to ranged. For Wizard, I played EK/PM with fighter thrown in, focusing on buffs and melee first, and I did enjoy the aoe spells but I didn't rely on them. Not because it would be effective, but because it would be fun.

But I try to be impartial and apply a degree of level thinking when looking at the "balancing changes" and I think, from a rational perspective, they went too far.
From a rational perspective, the forumites, who are crowing about the casters being unhappy about the nerfs, are coming across as petty and vindictive. You didn't "Win" DDO. It's another nail in the coffin; People are leaving because what they enjoyed is no longer fun. As more people leave, the game grows more stagnant and will shut down.

Instead of tearing others down, you should focus on building up your own position/character.
But I can't make you see that until you're willing to look.

[Anuulified]

Dear SSG

Fire sorcs have already had 2 nerfs again recently, the belt and the Max Level, please reconsider the cooldown nerf. It's not so much the DPS loss, it's the fact that it's completely messed with the spell rotation. If you want to spam DPS, you could go Meteor Swarm, Delayed Blast Fireball, Fireball, maybe Scorch depending on how fast you can spam keys, then back to Meteor Swarm, etc. Now there's still a good 2 seconds on MS and there are no other viable fire spells to put into the rotation without SLAs which will cost you 9 APs. Pretty please reconsider, it's painful having to twiddle your thumbs in between spell rotations. I accept having to do that on my wizzy's neg spells but this really shouldn't be a thing on a DPS caster :(

Why should they? 1 shotting everything for 14k has the same effect as 1 shotting for 18k. If you are worried about reaper boss end fights that hasn't changed much either with any of these nerfs. Its not like sorcs are all of a sudden running out of mana or dps.

[Tilomere]

It's not so much the DPS loss, it's the fact that it's completely messed with the spell rotation.

I understand what you are saying. It changed game play, not just dps. Believe it or not, when I asked for feedback on sorcs and alcs, not a single person brought up keeping their rotation the same as a concern.

It isn't that it isn't important, it just shows the communities' opinions aren't congruent enough to put forth if let alone how something should be nerfed, or how the resulting game play should be. The all valid points of view coming from so many different reasonings and backgrounds simply don't line up. Stack on top of that the large amount of fallacious arguments, and it is a mess.

I wanted to get to this stage, of talking about gameplay after nerfs, but I realize that was naïve of me.

[Marshal_Lannes]

It's another nail in the coffin; People are leaving because what they enjoyed is no longer fun. As more people leave, the game grows more stagnant and will shut down.


Source?

As for nails in the coffin, people have been bemoaning that for a decade, and yet look, DDO is still here. I was away nearly 3 years and here it remains, in most ways back and better than ever. The game will be just fine.

[Lafshmaf]

Source?

As for nails in the coffin, people have been bemoaning that for a decade, and yet look, DDO is still here. I was away nearly 3 years and here it remains, in most ways back and better than ever. The game will be just fine.

ah, those were better times, here and on Orien, though at least there people can and do avoid you.

[slarden]

Funny, that seems to be the most prevalent complaint coming from Alchemist/Fire Sorcs. Our absurdly unbalanced kill count margins have been reduced, what do we do now!

Overall this was an excellent balancing pass. Even the topic of this thread indirectly supports the nerfs. The OP is asking what they can do now. Imagine all the possibilities that have opened up. Could scroll heal someone, could use a L2 spell you've forgotten you know, could use a sonic spell to hit some breakables. A whole new tactical world of non-DPS opportunities has been revealed.

Unfortunately too many people comment on balance issues they perceive in R1 heroics and those groups tend to be terribly unbalanced with a mix of people that should be running R5 or higher and others that aren't properly built or geared for elite. When you get several people in a quest that are over-powered for the difficulty - kill count is going to be based mostly on who wants it the most - fastest person to the enemies.

R1 heroic quests suffer from character power balance issues that are so significant it really distorts any attempt to evaluate class balance based on heroic data.

[janave]

Unfortunately too many people comment on balance issues they perceive in R1 heroics and those groups tend to be terribly unbalanced with a mix of people that should be running R5 or higher and others that aren't properly built or geared for elite. When you get several people in a quest that are over-powered for the difficulty - kill count is going to be based mostly on who wants it the most - fastest person to the enemies.

R1 heroic quests suffer from character power balance issues that are so significant it really distorts any attempt to evaluate class balance based on heroic data.

True;



Additionally worth noting that under geared/developed nukers fall off first as reaper difficulty increases, the cost to land a kill can go up really fast, because the multiple layers reducing the effect of spells. Mob saves are all over the place and are much harder to feel out than, eg: monster DR, that is also shared inside many quests, once you learn the DR traits of a creature, can usually reuse that knowledge, learning/remembering the saves in a specific quest on a specific reaper diff takes more out of a player.

The investment and progression needed for an effective epic nuker built is excessively more than most other ranged/shooter/thrower builds for example.

Maybe EG7 can hire some designers for them, with skills like: compare two integers.

[Jerevth]

Source?

Thanks for the laugh.

[Marshal_Lannes]

ah, those were better times, here and on Orien, though at least there people can and do avoid you.

As said in The Princess Bride, I don't think that word (or character as it may be) means (or is) what (who) you think it means. I have played almost exclusively one character the last 3 months and you have no clue who that is so this is merely a sad attempt to discredit me through a disingenuous statement.


Unfortunately too many people comment on balance issues they perceive in R1 heroics and those groups tend to be terribly unbalanced with a mix of people that should be running R5 or higher and others that aren't properly built or geared for elite. When you get several people in a quest that are over-powered for the difficulty - kill count is going to be based mostly on who wants it the most - fastest person to the enemies.

R1 heroic quests suffer from character power balance issues that are so significant it really distorts any attempt to evaluate class balance based on heroic data.

Quite a bit to unpack here in game theory anyway. First, I don't know if people "should" be running anything. There is an effort/reward mechanic in play that determines difficulty level. This is usually based primarily on equipment. In heroics for me, R1 is basically normal and R4 is elite because I have been running them a lot and have an optimized gear set. In epics, R1 is hard and R4 is elite + difficult because I don't have an optimized gear set. But even this has a wide range of variance. Going through the ES chain on R4 wasn't all that difficult but doing something like Finding Dorris on R4 was brutal. I can't speak for everyone, but why do I go from R1 to R4? You aren't picking up that much more in the way of rewards. Well, for me it seems R4 right now is where the quest pushes back enough that it requires more party interaction and cooperation and this leads to more fun.

Many people have said, and games are based on this utility, that people find enjoyment when they are contributing. And once you get up to R4 (and beyond I would imagine) you are correct, the kill counts tend to level off. You'll tend to see four characters grouped around each other than two on the low end. In R1 you'll have two characters who dominate kill count. You're also correct that speed plays a role and people move as fast as they feel safe. So for example, I have no qualms about rushing into a R1 mob and blowing them all up with Holy Retribution but I am much more cautious in higher R4 because I know some will make the save.

After R4 the game changes rather dramatically in playstyle for all types. Absolutely you see it with casters but also melee. You're no longer able to cavort around the battlefield and multiple champions are lethal. So what does this all mean? Well, you talk about game balance. Where in this wide range of play do we target balance? And of course, I'm only talking reaper here and have completely omitted all N/H/E. I believe most players would accept that R1 is now the 'default" difficulty for most questing. Even in the Legendary raids, I've run people want to do R1 because they get access to their reaper trees. So if R1 is the default, the game balance should be targeted toward that. Are you suggesting the game should be balanced for play at R7+?


Thanks for the laugh.

So, no source. Gotcha.

[Amoneth]

OP claims it's not about DPS nerf, but about spell rotation, and makes silly claims about standing around twiddling thumbs for 2 seconds, and refuses to consider simply adding another spell to their rotation, with the even more nonsensical statement that casting a non-Fire spell somehow nerfs themselves. If there's a loss of brain mass, I don't think it's the "community".

(Though I don't think the OP is actually that dumb, either. I suspect they actually simply wanted their higher DPS back, didn't want to admit that, and used the spell rotation nonsense as an excuse. And now don't want to admit that their original excuse is bogus and come clean about their actual motivation.)

I don't know how else to explain things to you, I genuinely don't know if you're mentally challenged or just trolling me now. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, assume it's the latter and make you the first person I've ever squelched on a forum in my entire life, so congrats for that I guess.

[slarden]

I believe most players would accept that R1 is now the 'default" difficulty for most questing. Even in the Legendary raids, I've run people want to do R1 because they get access to their reaper trees. So if R1 is the default, the game balance should be targeted toward that. Are you suggesting the game should be balanced for play at R7+?
.

There is leveling and there is end game. The reason people run R1 is speed to get to 30 - they don't want to optimize gear at each level and they don't need to on R1.

So R1 may be the default for leveling, but once you get to level 30 you will see many R6+ groups for rxp and lower difficulties are typically for fast gear farming.

My argument is that balancing around R1 heroics doesn't make much sense since people are mostly just trying to rush through it ASAP and groups are absolutely crushing that content because most people are over-powered for R1.

On the other hand at level 30 people are trying to push skulls and optimize as much as they can so it's much easier to identify real gaps in class balance and more impactful to address those gaps. Nerfing sorc and alchemist didn't really change R1 heroic zerg runs but did have an impact at level 30 (although it seems blown out of proportion to me). I doubt any groups running R10 with an alchemist and sorc have to drop down difficulty. They might notice a small impact. I was a bit shocked how well my alchemist is doing after the nerf with a slight respec. I still don't care much for the alchemist playstyle but it is growing on me now that i am doing more than just pressing a few buttons.

[Amoneth]

I understand what you are saying. It changed game play, not just dps. Believe it or not, when I asked for feedback on sorcs and alcs, not a single person brought up keeping their rotation the same as a concern.

Where did you ask for this feedback? This is not a sarcastic response, I would genuinely like to know so I can give this kind of feedback in the future.

[slarden]

I don't know how else to explain things to you, I genuinely don't know if you're mentally challenged or just trolling me now. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, assume it's the latter and make you the first person I've ever squelched on a forum in my entire life, so congrats for that I guess.

Unfortunately tone can be difficult to read - I don't think he is trying to be disrespectful at all. I have the same question. Why do you believe adding another spell to the rotation isn't an effective solution vs. not casting? I assume you are running 4 piece LGS and 1 piece LGS debuffer so slotting another spellpower is difficult, but even with potency some damage is better than no damage.

I am not trying to be disrespectful at all - I genuinely want to understand your viewpoint more.


Believe it or not, when I asked for feedback on sorcs and alcs, not a single person brought up keeping their rotation the same as a concern.

Why would they? You are a not a dev and your example seemed unbalanced and not a fair representation.

I would like to see the devs put things on a watch list for a month before they put it out on Lamannia when it's pretty close to final at that point.

For example if the devs put an official topic "Watch List - Meteor Swarm" and listed potential changes the community could respond and meaningful discussion could begin. I don't think responding to a post by a player such as yourself is the right way to provide feedback to the devs and there should be no assumptions that comments in that thread are representative community opinions.

A good example for a few years there was much discussion on guild renown and decay and if you read those threads you would get the idea there was this equally divided opinion on it. When Maj Mal actually posted it in the official topic forum and asked for feedback it became clear there wasn't a divided opinion after all and that many players had opinions and they mostly flowed in one singular direction.

Devs - More dev posts asking for direct feedback please and less reliance on posts by players asking for nerfs please.

[Amoneth]

You can weave Fire Bolt in as much as you like. That was created to be the equivalent of an auto attack for martial builds.

The problem with slotting a single target spell into an AoE rotation is that it's pointless, I would kill say 1/5 mobs quicker but would still be casting the AoE spells to kill the other 4 so it's a total waste of SPs to cast that fire bolt in between, unless we're talking boss damage which would go on for a while, but this is more about packs of mobs for me.

As I think I've said before, I would rather they further nerfed the damage of the spell (though I really don't think that's necessary on top of the other two nerfs that affected fire sorcs) than the cooldown.

[Jerevth]

So, no source. Gotcha.

I suspect you think simply demanding a citation or a source is the perfect argument.

Source: Me, seeing people leave the guild because of the continuous, poorly managed changes to the game over the past 4 years.

The Forum- people stating they are leaving or dropping SUBs/ purchases in game because of dissatisfaction.

This isn't Wikipedia, nor a scientific journal. But you can do your own peer review.

Might I suggest the following...

https://www.google.com/
https://www.playeraudit.com/
https://www.ddo.com/en/forums/forum.php

[Amoneth]

Unfortunately tone can be difficult to read - I don't think he is trying to be disrespectful at all. I have the same question. Why do you believe adding another spell to the rotation isn't an effective solution vs. not casting? I assume you are running 4 piece LGS and 1 piece LGS debuffer so slotting another spellpower is difficult, but even with potency some damage is better than no damage.

I am not trying to be disrespectful at all - I genuinely want to understand your viewpoint more.

Slotting another spellpower is indeed difficult. In order to not get reflex saves all over the place when I do Sharn, I've had to push my evocation DCs to ridiculous levels so a lot of my gear is tailored to that. It's absolutely not necessary for low reaper but I'm pushing my reaper points so I do R8+ and don't want to be a burden when I do it. I thought I had responded with something similar in the thread, apologies if I didn't.

Of course, slotting any spell is better than nothing at all but I still have hope that a dev will read this post and consider that they are forcing people to do that or take expensive SLAs instead of the enhancements they actually want to take.

I've never tried any other kind of sorc if I'm honest, I just love burning mobs, especially because my mains are clerics and fire DPS is a breath of fresh, albiet hot, air. How do people find the spell rotations for lightning / cold / acid? I honestly don't think I would get the same satisfaction out of any other element but I guess I will have to adjust if my pleas remain unheard.

[LightBear]

Unfortunately tone can be difficult to read - I don't think he is trying to be disrespectful at all. I have the same question. Why do you believe adding another spell to the rotation isn't an effective solution vs. not casting? I assume you are running 4 piece LGS and 1 piece LGS debuffer so slotting another spellpower is difficult, but even with potency some damage is better than no damage.

I am not trying to be disrespectful at all - I genuinely want to understand your viewpoint more.

To be honest, I have the same "problem" as the OP.

Where I used to be able to land 3 meteor swarms from a distance and swoop up the rest with the rest of my fire based spells.
I now can cast one meteor swarm, have to wait for things to be in range, delayed blast fireball, fireball, scorch and perhaps do the last 3 a couple of times as mobs run all over the place.
If things go bad I have to jump into a pack and do an energy burst, as a failsave jump out again and do a dragon breath.

My biggest pet peeve is the waiting for things to get in range but still be far enough for them to not hit me.
Energy burst is a really dangerous move to pull of without being cut in half as a sorc.

Also my spell list is limited in what I can carry around and utilize successfully, though I have been playing around with it as some of them I hardly use at all.

[Marshal_Lannes]

My argument is that balancing around R1 heroics doesn't make much sense since people are mostly just trying to rush through it ASAP and groups are absolutely crushing that content because most people are over-powered for R1.
.

I'm trying to understand your argument but you still haven't said what you believe the game should be balanced around.



I suspect you think simply demanding a citation or a source is the perfect argument.

Source: Me, seeing people leave the guild because of the continuous, poorly managed changes to the game over the past 4 years.

The Forum- people stating they are leaving or dropping SUBs/ purchases in game because of dissatisfaction.


Anecdotal observations are not evidence nor a reliable source beyond your opinion. Nor is reading someone's rage post on the forum who claims they aren't playing anymore (but most likely simply switches builds or gets over it in a week). So, any actual data to back up what you claim? The game has been here for a decade and a half and is more profitable than ever.

[Valerianus]

I'm trying to understand your argument but you still haven't said what you believe the game should be balanced around.




Anecdotal observations are not evidence nor a reliable source beyond your opinion. Nor is reading someone's rage post on the forum who claims they aren't playing anymore (but most likely simply switches builds or gets over it in a week). So, any actual data to back up what you claim? The game has been here for a decade and a half and is more profitable than ever.


source?

any actual data to back up what you claim?

you know, anecdotal observations are not evidence nor a reliable source beyond your opinion

[Jerevth]

Anecdotal observations are not evidence nor a reliable source beyond your opinion. Nor is reading someone's rage post on the forum who claims they aren't playing anymore (but most likely simply switches builds or gets over it in a week). So, any actual data to back up what you claim? The game has been here for a decade and a half and is more profitable than ever.

The folks who left- friends in my guild- were sufficient for me, based on discussions with them, to form my opinions.
Since I don't know you, you really don't enter into my opinion.
You aren't providing any wins trying to be the thought police, though.
I'm glad you still enjoy the game and feel your opinion is sufficient to prop it up.

It may coast another few years.
I doubt it.

[Lafshmaf]

The folks who left- friends in my guild- were sufficient for me, based on discussions with them, to form my opinions.
Since I don't know you, you really don't enter into my opinion.
You aren't providing any wins trying to be the thought police, though.
I'm glad you still enjoy the game and feel your opinion is sufficient to prop it up.

It may coast another few years.
I doubt it.

it is really just about bullying, and taking the most comfortable position for just that. You side with the powers that be to trample on the little guy. I mean, the environment is harmless enough, just a video game, but the mentality is just that of any snitch or willing helper in any totalitarian regime. Personally, I am in favor of the recent nerfs (even while having an active sorcerer character), that does not make me jump into all related threads and belittle/berate people. Just a willing little unwholeseome mind who enjoys basking in whatever little power shining on him. Bullying 101.

[slarden]

I'm trying to understand your argument but you still haven't said what you believe the game should be balanced around.


I said it but you omitted that part from your quote. I think it's fine to try and balance things around all level ranges, but the place it matters most is level 30 where people are pushing the difficulty, raiding, etc. so those balance issues are much more significant.

[ggmarquez]

I said it but you omitted that part from your quote. I think it's fine to try and balance things around all level ranges, but the place it matters most is level 30 where people are pushing the difficulty, raiding, etc. so those balance issues are much more significant.

https://www.playeraudit.com/servers

don't click that. don't scroll down to character level and content level distributions. just don't do it.

over 85% of the content being played is sub 30. over 75% of the characters logged in are sub 30. this isn't a gut feeling. these are hard numbers.
you want the game to be balanced for the highest level of play at the hardest difficulty setting? where it will matter to 2 out of every 10 players logged in at any given time? i see, i see... tell me more about this "balance for the top first" plan. if you want to achieve class to class parity, do you start by looking at level 30? interesting. very interesting. when you are trying to balance gear, number and power of effects, accessibility, usefulness across class platforms, do you start at level 30? uh huh, uh huh... i think i'm starting to understand.

real game balance begins at level 30. nothing matters before that. real game balance precipitates fotm builds, forcing players to pick the winners the dev's have provided for us. no bad builds need apply. real game balance is demonstrated when a handful of top players running a handful of fotm builds dominate the hardest difficulty setting. bingo, it's DDO.

[Tilomere]

Where did you ask for this feedback? This is not a sarcastic response, I would genuinely like to know so I can give this kind of feedback in the future.

Here. (https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/520958-Should-Sorcs-and-Alcs-AoE-1-shot-groups-of-mobs-while-leveling?) It was just a general thread.

You will notice the community is all over the place, all with reasonable reasons. Mixed with various fallacious arguments.

If you swap to air, you can rotate between ball, chain, and regular lightning bolt non-stop until your fingers fall off.



you want the game to be balanced for the highest level of play at the hardest difficulty setting? where it will matter to 2 out of every 10 players logged in at any given time?

No, don't be absurd, they don't want it balanced for 2 out of 10 players. Only 10% of those 2 out of 10 players are in high reaper. They want the game balanced for those 1 in 10 high reaper players of those 2 out of 10, or 2% of the population. ;)

[Tuxedoman96]

How do people find the spell rotations for lightning / cold / acid? I honestly don't think I would get the same satisfaction out of any other element but I guess I will have to adjust if my pleas remain unheard.

Haven't really investigated the rotation for cold and acid sorcs too much, but I find the sonic spells to be a pretty good addition to the air savant's arsenal, especially after the sonic buffs. As far as filling in other spells for your rotation on your fire savant, there's always spells of an off-element. Even if you do less damage with such spells, I would think that would be better than doing no damage during that time.

[Tuxedoman96]

Anecdotal observations are not evidence nor a reliable source beyond your opinion. Nor is reading someone's rage post on the forum who claims they aren't playing anymore (but most likely simply switches builds or gets over it in a week). So, any actual data to back up what you claim? The game has been here for a decade and a half and is more profitable than ever.

You know, I read people ask for "evidence" and "data" all the time, but I don't think it really matters if we don't really know what data will actually be considered. Then the next question, after providing requested and well-received data is the validity of that information (i.e. the accuracy and its relevance).

[Marshal_Lannes]

It may coast another few years.
I doubt it.

Said someone back in 2009.

[Tuxedoman96]

https://www.playeraudit.com/servers

don't click that. don't scroll down to character level and content level distributions. just don't do it.

over 85% of the content being played is sub 30. over 75% of the characters logged in are sub 30. this isn't a gut feeling. these are hard numbers.
you want the game to be balanced for the highest level of play at the hardest difficulty setting? where it will matter to 2 out of every 10 players logged in at any given time? i see, i see... tell me more about this "balance for the top first" plan. if you want to achieve class to class parity, do you start by looking at level 30? interesting. very interesting. when you are trying to balance gear, number and power of effects, accessibility, usefulness across class platforms, do you start at level 30? uh huh, uh huh... i think i'm starting to understand.

real game balance begins at level 30. nothing matters before that. real game balance precipitates fotm builds, forcing players to pick the winners the dev's have provided for us. no bad builds need apply. real game balance is demonstrated when a handful of top players running a handful of fotm builds dominate the hardest difficulty setting. bingo, it's DDO.

We get into a problem of definitions. First, how do we determine that one class is balanced against another? For example, Sorcs and alchemists still DPS better than divine casters. Now, many say that this is fair because sorcs cannot heal themselves and alchemists are restricted to robes without multiclassing or spending feats (and they have to put more effort into reducing ASF). However, how much more damage are those drawbacks worth? How can we say that the amount of damage is justified? And this isn't restricted to casters. What about THF vs SWF or TWF? How much damage is the ability to hit multiple enemies at a time worth? Does the ability score tax make up for this disparity? Without really hammering down an ideal for this all we're really doing is gut checks in conjunction with vague terminology and fuzzy metrics. I fail to see how we achieve "balance" effectively this way.

Second, what are we even talking about when we reference balance? Is balance merely having the same damage numbers? Or maybe doing the same DPS (which is not exactly the same thing)? Or maybe having the same hitpoints or mitigation? What about the skill floor and ceiling? What is it that we're even trying to achieve with this quest for so-called "balance"?

Third, where should this balance start? Should my level 1 Sorc be able to handle content as well as my level 1 cleric? What about at level 10? Level 20? Level 30? What difficulty should we be balancing around? Certainly elite and low reapers seem to be the standard (I'm not saying it is; this is simply my observation), but is that because that's the most that those characters can handle or because running at those difficulties merely serves as a means to an end? Perhaps it is both in equal measure, but I find more often than not that there is a leaning to one side or the other.

Balance changes do not usually have a linear effect across all levels and difficulties and between all combat styles. For example, reducing the effectiveness of Meteor Swarm and Multi-vial doesn't hurt as much in elite or low reapers as it does at high reaper for several reasons. One, the character's damage isn't reduced as much in a lower difficulty. Being able to one-shot or two-shot things at a higher difficulty would carry over to the lower difficulty, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Two, with the reduction in damage comes the increase in resource expenditure. If I'm one or two-shotting things at the lower difficulty settings, this is a non-issue because my resource expenditure hasn't really increased. However, if I have to go through an extra rotation to kill the same pack of monsters, then I've effectively doubled the amount of spell points I'm burning through each fight. Additionally, the longer I have to fight a pack of monsters the more likely I'll take damage and the more likely I'll have to use up resources to regain lost hp (which also takes away from the DPS).

So depending on the changes, certain classes are likely to be influenced at different difficulties than players may argue for. Players complaining about Sorcs dominating on Elite and low reapers are probably still going to complain, and people that complain that Sorcs are having a hard time running high reapers are going to continue complaining on that front, and both groups will be correct for different reasons. And the lack of context when looking at the achievements or deficiencies is in my opinion the largest hurdle in providing constructive feedback on issues in the game. What I normally see, on the forums at least, are threads that call for nerfs or buffs based on what another character is able to do.

What I don't know when first investigating such a thread is: whether both characters have a large number of past lives; whether they are both geared appropriately; if optimal feats have been chosen; if, for CC or damage purposes, monsters are being appropriately targetted wrt to saving throws (for example a trip is probably gonna land on a divine caster better than a stun will); whether rotations and (for spells) AoE shapes are being effectively utilized; and your UI, hardware, and keybind/hotkeys setup. I usually don't see posters explain that the hotbar and keybind settings play a huge part in the effectiveness of playing a character. Saying that a player that you're running with runs into a room before you (not directed at any person) get there and demolishes everything in sight before you get the chance to do anything in and of itself doesn't really paint the whole picture on what's going on behind the scenes. Some aspects of gameplay can't really be fixed by buffing or nerfing because they hang on the factors of skill, experience, and experimentation.

[Knightrose]

Casters/Nukers are what trivialize content in my opinion. No one breathes a sigh of relief when they see a melee DPS fighter join a group in endgame. However, if it's a Sorc with 3k+ HP and 4k+ SP (with better defenses and a shield, lol) then right away the experience feels like a win. They're out of whack. A sorcerer is not a Warlock in my opinion. They're just fast-casting wizards. The gunslingers of magic. They need to use their other options not rely on one type of 'ammo' and then complain when they're reload takes too long.

I'm in favor of caster balancing. It is LONG overdue. Test it yourself. A full group of players playing any other class combination minus Alchemist and/or Sorcerer feels far more balanced. They move closer together. They close flanks. They participate more like a team. As soon as the Alchemist or Sorcerer is added it just makes everyone else look like puppies chasing a bag of Alpo.

[Tuxedoman96]

Casters/Nukers are what trivialize content in my opinion. No one breathes a sigh of relief when they see a melee DPS fighter join a group in endgame. However, if it's a Sorc with 3k+ HP and 4k+ SP (with better defenses and a shield, lol) then right away the experience feels like a win. They're out of whack. A sorcerer is not a Warlock in my opinion. They're just fast-casting wizards. The gunslingers of magic. They need to use their other options not rely on one type of 'ammo' and then complain when they're reload takes too long.

I'm in favor of caster balancing. It is LONG overdue. Test it yourself. A full group of players playing any other class combination minus Alchemist and/or Sorcerer feels far more balanced. They move closer together. They close flanks. They participate more like a team. As soon as the Alchemist or Sorcerer is added it just makes everyone else look like puppies chasing a bag of Alpo.

But you're not getting my point. You say that Sorcs are fast-casting wizards and need to use other options. So my question is what in your opinion is making alchemist and sorc overperform, is it justified (for example because of less versatility or weaker defenses, etc.), and, if it isn't, what solution could be given that is unlikely to have serious bleed-over to the other casters? The biggest gripe I've seen about many changes throughout the years is the seemingly lack of attention to collateral damage, so just throwing around the "balance" buzz word is likely to result in a corrupt-a-wish blanket nerf.

[ggmarquez]

snip. Some aspects of gameplay can't really be fixed by buffing or nerfing because they hang on the factors of skill, experience, and experimentation.

this is very true. and i won't disagree with the gist of your post. but to simplify the question and prune it down to a more basic level : if the game isn't being balanced with the initial premise of equality of build, parity of class, and access to content, starting from level 1... then what is it being balanced around? can you even use the word 'balance' if you don't start from that position, without first acknowledging the irony, when balance starts to mean the opposite of its definition?

we 'balance' the game around level cap, for the highest challenge setting, with the aim of fostering a select subset of builds to function well beyond the scope and range of every other build, causing the other classes, at every other level of play, to function below those few we have chosen to be the standard with which we 'balance' around. ironic.

balance is all about play-testing, at every level range, across the entire spectrum, with every build. sounds like a lot of work. but anything else is just a distortion of the term balance, the kind of noise which causes interference.

[Tuxedoman96]

this is very true. and i won't disagree with the gist of your post. but to simplify the question and prune it down to a more basic level : if the game isn't being balanced with the initial premise of equality of build, parity of class, and access to content, starting from level 1... then what is it being balanced around? can you even use the word 'balance' if you don't start from that position, without first acknowledging the irony, when balance starts to mean the opposite of its definition?

we 'balance' the game around level cap, for the highest challenge setting, with the aim of fostering a select subset of builds to function well beyond the scope and range of every other build, causing the other classes, at every other level of play, to function below those few we have chosen to be the standard with which we 'balance' around. ironic.

balance is all about play-testing, at every level range, across the entire spectrum, with every build. sounds like a lot of work. but anything else is just a distortion of the term balance, the kind of noise which causes interference.

That still doesn't really answer my question though. How would one be able to say that the classes are all balanced at each level? What metric are we using to decide this? Kills? Completion times? Perceived difficulty of handling? And how do we go about deciding how those values are adjusted? For example, playing a monk has a steep learning curve. How much should that learning curve justify its survivability or the effectiveness of its damage or CC? Does it make sense to have a 1:1 conversion (for example, this class does 5% more damage than another class, so it should be 5% less survivable)? And even then, how do you quantify some of these character aspects? How do we equate how useful the ability to cast is or how useful the ability to heal is? What about the ability to use heavy armor innately or gaining extra feats. I mean, I suppose the easiest solution would be to just make everything exactly the same, but I for one am definitely against such an approach.

[jetster11]

Tell me something, if you were on a melee DPS, thrower or bow/crossbow user and your attack animation suddenly had you standing still for 2-3s out of every 6s rotation would you be OK with that? I don't think so, so why should spell DPSers be OK with it?

Although I don't disagree with your sentiment here, melees/ dpsrs accept this all the time when they have to swap out weapons or ranged when they hit their big attacks they almost always have a windup involved. some melees swap out massively for salting, ash, vulnerability, DR breaking, oozes, rust monsters, etc.... the those lots of DPS times in those situations.

As for my ranged build every time I swap weapons, i have to jump in the air and back or I freeze and the mobs swat me hard in high reapers, so the swapping thing / loss of DPS is comparable for most melees / ranged. Some builds , not as much so.

[ggmarquez]

snip. I suppose the easiest solution would be to just make everything exactly the same, but I for one am definitely against such an approach.

i would also be against the total vanilification of DDO by such an approach. character building is such an integral aspect of the DDO experience, it would be almost unthinkable to dumb it down to an arbitrary x=y=z philosophy.

still, it's probably a lot simpler, though certainly more time consuming, to understand balance, than you are allowing for. run the grotto on a first life alchemist. then a first life bard. then a first life cleric. a-b-c's and eventually you will have played through the first "quest" in the game, on every class and race combo. now move to the first korthos dungeon and repeat the process. eventually you will have played through the entire game, on a first, second, third life+ on every race and class combo, with reaper points and racial ap ranging from 0 to max achievable. now, have someone who has spent the past 15 years playing DDO, run the same test. now, have someone who has no gaming background at all do it.

of course, this method is absurd and unrealistic. but then, calling a game balanced, without the application of such rigorous play-testing, is also absurd and unrealistic.

[Tuxedoman96]

i would also be against the total vanilification of DDO by such an approach. character building is such an integral aspect of the DDO experience, it would be almost unthinkable to dumb it down to an arbitrary x=y=z philosophy.

still, it's probably a lot simpler, though certainly more time consuming, to understand balance, than you are allowing for. run the grotto on a first life alchemist. then a first life bard. then a first life cleric. a-b-c's and eventually you will have played through the first "quest" in the game, on every class and race combo. now move to the first korthos dungeon and repeat the process. eventually you will have played through the entire game, on a first, second, third life+ on every race and class combo, with reaper points and racial ap ranging from 0 to max achievable. now, have someone who has spent the past 15 years playing DDO, run the same test. now, have someone who has no gaming background at all do it.

of course, this method is absurd and unrealistic. but then, calling a game balanced, without the application of such rigorous play-testing, is also absurd and unrealistic.

The absurdity of the experiment aside, what I'm asking about is what exactly are we trying to equate/make similar or compare? Even committing to and completing such an exhaustive test, we can't deny that each class handles each quest in a different manner. For example, a cleric that is sufficiently effective at turning is going to have an easier time doing an undead quest than another class. Additionally, we're not taking into account how multiclassing factors into this. You suggest, as a thought experiment, having a veteran player do this and then having a new player do this. However, that's not to say that the experience and skill of the more knowledgeable player is going to translate to all classes equally, nor are we accounting for the fact that certain players have gameplay preferences which would likely influence their gameplay experience during this experiment. Having two 15-year vets conduct this experience would probably yield different results between the two just as having a 15-year vet and a new player, although probably not to such a large extent. My point still stands though, that part of the data you seem to be interested in is qualitative rather than purely quantitative, and 2 players simply wouldn't serve as a good sample size for such an experiment, as extensive as it might be.

But I'll ask again for clarification. What are we specifically looking for in conducting this experiment? Are we comparing completion times? How often we die? How often we need to shrine? What in particular?

I'll go further and add that even with the data that such an experiment would provide, it still doesn't really mean anything without some sort of standard to abide by. Just because my bard doesn't complete a quest as quickly as my sorc, for example, doesn't necessarily mean that it should.

[ggmarquez]

The absurdity of the experiment aside, what I'm asking about is what exactly are we trying to equate/make similar or compare?

well, i can't speak for anyone else, but i would be comparing... everything. i don't think i would feel satisfied if i left anything out. if i were seriously considering 'balance' and making a sincere attempt, i wouldn't exclude any single aspect from my testing, no matter how mundane it might seem, or if it fell under the blanket of "this should always work in the same way for everyone." like opening the store ui during combat. opening the inventory while standing in a public zone. swapping weapon sets underwater. movement speed in every possible set of circumstances. for example, i have 2 halfling warlocks, both pure, both male, both abyss pact... that have 129% movement speed inside of quests. which is 5% more than any of my other warlocks. no clue where it's coming from. but never look a gift horse in the mouth, right?


Even committing to and completing such an exhaustive test, we can't deny that each class handles each quest in a different manner. For example, a cleric that is sufficiently effective at turning is going to have an easier time doing an undead quest than another class.

of course. turn undead is a unique class feature. it would be a shame if they removed it, or gave it to every class in the name of 'balance'. but turn undead is only of situational use, and the main thing to look at would be it's overall effectiveness. "does it work?" would be the question i would attempt to answer first, if i were testing it. then perhaps "how much of an advantage does a cleric gain from this feature?" if indeed i found it to be working. if i noticed it was always destroying undead, and not only undead, but constructs and evil outsiders as well... and if i went back through the combat log and picked out the fact that all undead, constructs and evil outsiders were being instantly killed, no matter what i rolled on my turn attempt... i would conclude that it was bugged, over preforming, and that it would need a patch to fix it. likewise, if i discovered that it did exactly as it was advertised as doing, and it did it exactly as i expected it should, but i found that it really did not enhance the experience of actually running content, even undead heavy content, as a cleric, i would also consider this to be a bug. if turn undead really didn't give any benefit to the class, i would conclude something was wrong. why have a unique class ability if it doesn't actually do anything meaningful for game-play when using that class and feature?


Additionally, we're not taking into account how multiclassing factors into this. You suggest, as a thought experiment, having a veteran player do this and then having a new player do this. However, that's not to say that the experience and skill of the more knowledgeable player is going to translate to all classes equally, nor are we accounting for the fact that certain players have gameplay preferences which would likely influence their gameplay experience during this experiment. Having two 15-year vets conduct this experience would probably yield different results between the two just as having a 15-year vet and a new player, although probably not to such a large extent.

quite right. the idea isn't to address the disparity between any 2 players... but to provide evidence which supports or refutes the position "is this balanced?". sure, no 2 players, even 2 who have equal experience with DDO, will have the exact same conclusion when faced with such a question. quite the opposite, rather. one may find a melee build easy and enjoyable, the other might wish to avoid such a build altogether, finding it much too difficult and slow. but we aren't trying to determine which player is a "good" melee player, or which is a fair representation of the build they are running. we are simply looking, from as many angels as possible, at the broader base of 'balance'.

i was "leading" with the example of a new player vs. a 15 year vet, because i'm relatively sure that the dev's use some form of server wide analysis when they make balance changes. i might be naive, in that regard. perhaps they don't have any data on hand when making sweeping changes to game systems or class trees. but i would find that hard to believe, as almost invariably they target over-performing builds for nerfs, and bolster the stragglers. also, when they release a new class or universal tree, it is almost always better than anything else in the current meta, which supports the conclusion that they do have the data, and know exactly what they are doing.


My point still stands though, that part of the data you seem to be interested in is qualitative rather than purely quantitative, and 2 players simply wouldn't serve as a good sample size for such an experiment, as extensive as it might be.

2 may be better than 0. though all i can say for sure is... 1 is the loneliest number.


But I'll ask again for clarification. What are we specifically looking for in conducting this experiment? Are we comparing completion times? How often we die? How often we need to shrine? What in particular?

yes. all of the above. and then some. why stop there?


I'll go further and add that even with the data that such an experiment would provide, it still doesn't really mean anything without some sort of standard to abide by. Just because my bard doesn't complete a quest as quickly as my sorc, for example, doesn't necessarily mean that it should.

but why shouldn't your bard get completions at the same rate as your sorc? what makes sorc so special, to you, that you feel the poor bard aught to accept the longer completion times? if i were your bard, i would be indignant! ;-)

[slarden]

https://www.playeraudit.com/servers

don't click that. don't scroll down to character level and content level distributions. just don't do it.

over 85% of the content being played is sub 30. over 75% of the characters logged in are sub 30. this isn't a gut feeling. these are hard numbers.
you want the game to be balanced for the highest level of play at the hardest difficulty setting? where it will matter to 2 out of every 10 players logged in at any given time? i see, i see... tell me more about this "balance for the top first" plan. if you want to achieve class to class parity, do you start by looking at level 30? interesting. very interesting. when you are trying to balance gear, number and power of effects, accessibility, usefulness across class platforms, do you start at level 30? uh huh, uh huh... i think i'm starting to understand.

real game balance begins at level 30. nothing matters before that. real game balance precipitates fotm builds, forcing players to pick the winners the dev's have provided for us. no bad builds need apply. real game balance is demonstrated when a handful of top players running a handful of fotm builds dominate the hardest difficulty setting. bingo, it's DDO.

So any accomplished player is crushing content in heroics so it simply can't be balanced unless they nerf player power significantly across the board since all classes overperform at heroic levels. I don't think they would ever due that due to nerdrage potential.

The report is interesting - it doesn't give us any information about time played by level range or which characters are bank characters. I know in my case I log into several heroic level characters at various ranges that have all been converted to mules. But even so - assuming all those are played characters which they aren't - it doesn't matter since heroics are a lost cause already for anyone that knows how to play the game OR has significant experience playing the game.

As I said balance will always be looked at across level ranges, but the priority should be level 30 due to raiding and people actually pushing difficulty at that level. If a certain playstyle is sub-optimal it matters to a group pushing difficulty in legendary raids. It doesn't really matter all the way to 30 since anyone can crush content with any class. That is the point and it impacts not only the game, but the social raiding experience which is why the devs should care alot about the experience at level 30.

[ggmarquez]

all classes overperform at heroic levels.

if all classes over-preform equally, that's a good indicator of class balance. the only thing left to do is incentivize running higher skulls (which i believe would be a step in the right direction). but i seriously doubt the integrity of the player who states that all classes are over-preforming equally throughout the heroic leveling process.


The report is interesting - it doesn't give us any information about time played by level range or which characters are bank characters. I know in my case I log into several heroic level characters at various ranges that have all been converted to mules.

if you look at the 'content run' by level range, you'll see it. mules don't run content. they mule. sure, you can split hairs by arguing that bank 'toons need coin lord and house k favor. but they only need it once. the content by level graph shows that 85% of all content being played is from levels 1-29. if level 30 had anywhere close to 50% i would back down. but it's not even a contest here... end game players represent the smallest denomination of DDO's current population. i had a hard time believing it at first... but it's true.


As I said balance will always be looked at across level ranges, but the priority should be level 30 due to raiding and people actually pushing difficulty at that level. If a certain playstyle is sub-optimal it matters to a group pushing difficulty in legendary raids. It doesn't really matter all the way to 30 since anyone can crush content with any class. That is the point and it impacts not only the game, but the social raiding experience which is why the devs should care alot about the experience at level 30.

it's very easy to fall into this trap. it's player mentality, and once you've established it, it can be hard to break the habit of thinking this way. but let's examine it carefully. are you sure that what you have said here is absolutely true?

i have a rogue assassin on my main account. not many past lives. not a whole lot of reaper points. gear set includes at least 5 pieces of raid gear, several more as swap items, augments in nearly all slots, max sentient gem in Pain... the works. when i try to solo highskulls i get smushed. when i group in highskulls i do very well. i don't particularly mind that the game isn't balanced in a way that allows my assassin to solo highskulls. because in a raid group, i can be very confident in my ability to contribute. in a group, i can play to the strengths of the build. at cap, class balance doesn't mean as much to me. but at level 1, and at every level after 1, my assassin needs to be able to solo. if it can't, i won't be able to climb back to 30 after a TR. and since it's a raid alt, that assassin isn't very useful unless he's at cap.

so let's look at what needs to happen, in my admittedly self-serving illustration. raid alts need to be able to level at a moderate pace, even solo, from 1-29. which means class balance is actually imperative to the leveling process. if a tank can't level, or a healer or support 'toon can't advance on their own... it's a problem. but put them into the context of cap play, it's not nearly as important whether or not a tank or support character can complete quests on their own, because they don't need to. it's cap... the whole point was to get there so they can be effective party members and contribute. who cares about balance in a raid group? i mean, it's still important. but not nearly as important as being able to actually progress to the point where you finally get to run the raids.

the priority should be game balance from levels 1 to 29. due to people actually being required to run that content, and supported by the player audit data which clearly shows that the majority of players are running that very content. if a playstyle is suboptimal, it matters to a solo player because they will have a harder time getting back to level 30, where they can finally count on having a group for highskull and raid level play. which is why the dev's should care a lot about balancing the TR wheel, and not so much about what happens for that small window which is level 30. where you can count on having 11 other people to lag out with you, and where you can contribute, even on a build that isn't allowed to solo highskulls.

[slarden]

if all classes over-preform equally, that's a good indicator of class balance. the only thing left to do is incentivize running higher skulls (which i believe would be a step in the right direction). but i seriously doubt the integrity of the player who states that all classes are over-preforming equally throughout the heroic leveling process.



if you look at the 'content run' by level range, you'll see it. mules don't run content. they mule. sure, you can split hairs by arguing that bank 'toons need coin lord and house k favor. but they only need it once. the content by level graph shows that 85% of all content being played is from levels 1-29. if level 30 had anywhere close to 50% i would back down. but it's not even a contest here... end game players represent the smallest denomination of DDO's current population. i had a hard time believing it at first... but it's true.



it's very easy to fall into this trap. it's player mentality, and once you've established it, it can be hard to break the habit of thinking this way. but let's examine it carefully. are you sure that what you have said here is absolutely true?

i have a rogue assassin on my main account. not many past lives. not a whole lot of reaper points. gear set includes at least 5 pieces of raid gear, several more as swap items, augments in nearly all slots, max sentient gem in Pain... the works. when i try to solo highskulls i get smushed. when i group in highskulls i do very well. i don't particularly mind that the game isn't balanced in a way that allows my assassin to solo highskulls. because in a raid group, i can be very confident in my ability to contribute. in a group, i can play to the strengths of the build. at cap, class balance doesn't mean as much to me. but at level 1, and at every level after 1, my assassin needs to be able to solo. if it can't, i won't be able to climb back to 30 after a TR. and since it's a raid alt, that assassin isn't very useful unless he's at cap.

so let's look at what needs to happen, in my admittedly self-serving illustration. raid alts need to be able to level at a moderate pace, even solo, from 1-29. which means class balance is actually imperative to the leveling process. if a tank can't level, or a healer or support 'toon can't advance on their own... it's a problem. but put them into the context of cap play, it's not nearly as important whether or not a tank or support character can complete quests on their own, because they don't need to. it's cap... the whole point was to get there so they can be effective party members and contribute. who cares about balance in a raid group? i mean, it's still important. but not nearly as important as being able to actually progress to the point where you finally get to run the raids.

the priority should be game balance from levels 1 to 29. due to people actually being required to run that content, and supported by the player audit data which clearly shows that the majority of players are running that very content. if a playstyle is suboptimal, it matters to a solo player because they will have a harder time getting back to level 30, where they can finally count on having a group for highskull and raid level play. which is why the dev's should care a lot about balancing the TR wheel, and not so much about what happens for that small window which is level 30. where you can count on having 11 other people to lag out with you, and where you can contribute, even on a build that isn't allowed to solo highskulls.

LOL It's not a trap it's my opinion and your opinion and they don't line up. That's fine it's up to the devs ultimately. I think supporting level 30 and raiding better will be beneficial for player retention and satisfaction with the game

If you find levels 1 to 29 challenging I certainly understand and respect your opinion even though I don't agree with it.

[timmy9999]

Why do you need to spam DPS?
Why not just nuke a bit, then walk up and melee?
Or just stand back and wait a !
Walk up and melee LOL, you people really play a different game.
What weapon you thinking, sceptre or you have some other hidden secret weapon of destruction...:)

[Clemeit]

The report is interesting - it doesn't give us any information about time played by level range or which characters are bank characters. I know in my case I log into several heroic level characters at various ranges that have all been converted to mules. But even so - assuming all those are played characters which they aren't - it doesn't matter since heroics are a lost cause already for anyone that knows how to play the game OR has significant experience playing the game.

Bank toons are filtered out by default. You can use the "Filter" buttons above the chart to change that.

[slarden]

Bank toons are filtered out by default. You can use the "Filter" buttons above the chart to change that.

I got that, but I don't think it really changes the discussion much. You can't balance classes properly at heroic levels when it can get crushed by any class due other player power. That would only be possible with absolutely massive nerfs.

[Tuxedoman96]

well, i can't speak for anyone else, but i would be comparing... everything. i don't think i would feel satisfied if i left anything out. if i were seriously considering 'balance' and making a sincere attempt, i wouldn't exclude any single aspect from my testing, no matter how mundane it might seem, or if it fell under the blanket of "this should always work in the same way for everyone." like opening the store ui during combat. opening the inventory while standing in a public zone. swapping weapon sets underwater. movement speed in every possible set of circumstances. for example, i have 2 halfling warlocks, both pure, both male, both abyss pact... that have 129% movement speed inside of quests. which is 5% more than any of my other warlocks. no clue where it's coming from. but never look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

While that goal is indeed commendable, how would you use this data to factor in what exactly needs to change? Take the monk for example. If we decide that that particular class is overperforming, what do we reduce (or for the underperforming classes, increase)? The survivability? The damage? The DCs? What about the ability to hit more than one target?


of course. turn undead is a unique class feature. it would be a shame if they removed it, or gave it to every class in the name of 'balance'. but turn undead is only of situational use, and the main thing to look at would be it's overall effectiveness. "does it work?" would be the question i would attempt to answer first, if i were testing it. then perhaps "how much of an advantage does a cleric gain from this feature?" if indeed i found it to be working. if i noticed it was always destroying undead, and not only undead, but constructs and evil outsiders as well... and if i went back through the combat log and picked out the fact that all undead, constructs and evil outsiders were being instantly killed, no matter what i rolled on my turn attempt... i would conclude that it was bugged, over preforming, and that it would need a patch to fix it. likewise, if i discovered that it did exactly as it was advertised as doing, and it did it exactly as i expected it should, but i found that it really did not enhance the experience of actually running content, even undead heavy content, as a cleric, i would also consider this to be a bug. if turn undead really didn't give any benefit to the class, i would conclude something was wrong. why have a unique class ability if it doesn't actually do anything meaningful for game-play when using that class and feature?

Not sure what you mean exactly by "enhancing the experience". Also, you mention bugs, but I would think that in the discussion of balance we'd also be looking at factors that are working as intended. Let's say that in this example of yours, the clerics turns did work on all of those monsters as you proposed, but they instead were given a save, and whatever means you acquired this power specified that it could work in that way. How would you determine that the ability needs to be tuned down?


quite right. the idea isn't to address the disparity between any 2 players... but to provide evidence which supports or refutes the position "is this balanced?". sure, no 2 players, even 2 who have equal experience with DDO, will have the exact same conclusion when faced with such a question. quite the opposite, rather. one may find a melee build easy and enjoyable, the other might wish to avoid such a build altogether, finding it much too difficult and slow. but we aren't trying to determine which player is a "good" melee player, or which is a fair representation of the build they are running. we are simply looking, from as many angels as possible, at the broader base of 'balance'.

I don't understand. How can you say that we are looking at balance without representing each of the builds fairly? If I state that monks are in a terrible position but never really took the time to play the class effectively, then how does that serve as adequate data for the actual state of the class wrt balance? Furthermore, you say that we are simply looking at the broader base of balance, and I'd appreciate some clarification on this, because as far as I know, there is or should be a metric for balance. You'd never really have a working system for balance by making the classes with little to no regard for said metric and then define the metric based on the relative position of each of the classes to each other. There's a reason there's such a thing as a reference point.


i was "leading" with the example of a new player vs. a 15 year vet, because i'm relatively sure that the dev's use some form of server wide analysis when they make balance changes. i might be naive, in that regard. perhaps they don't have any data on hand when making sweeping changes to game systems or class trees. but i would find that hard to believe, as almost invariably they target over-performing builds for nerfs, and bolster the stragglers. also, when they release a new class or universal tree, it is almost always better than anything else in the current meta, which supports the conclusion that they do have the data, and know exactly what they are doing.

Fair enough. However, we are discussing the notion of balance both without those data points and the goal they represent. I'll also add that how the devs wish to "balance" the game does not necessarily align with how the players would balance it. I'm not saying this as a bad thing of course, I'm merely suggesting that when discussing balances we are taking half measures when we don't clarify what we really expect the standard to be and why and how to achieve it.


2 may be better than 0. though all i can say for sure is... 1 is the loneliest number.

2 is better than 0 when it is relevant. If the data doesn't convey anything with regards to what I'm looking for then it's inconsequential, isn't it? That's why it's just as important to know what we want and what information would help with our awareness/understanding as it is to actually get said information.


yes. all of the above. and then some. why stop there?

Wasn't stopping there, just wanted to understand what exactly you were looking for.


but why shouldn't your bard get completions at the same rate as your sorc? what makes sorc so special, to you, that you feel the poor bard aught to accept the longer completion times? if i were your bard, i would be indignant! ;-)

Quite simply because the two classes are different in what they can do and to what extent. A caster that specializes in dealing damage is probably going to finish encounters faster (and therefore the quest). That's not to say that each class shouldn't finish classes at roughly the same time, but rather that I don't see why they should. I mean, some classes are easier to solo with than others. Some classes have more versatility. Obviously being more versatile should take away from the benefits that result from having a specialty. Or, let's take warlock. Warlock has the eldritch blasts, which do not cost spell points. I think we could both agree that those blasts probably shouldn't do as much damage as full-blown 9th level spells that cost 40-50 a piece. Why and how, then, should a warlock be able to clear a dungeon as quickly as casters that actually utilize spell points for the majority of their damage?

[mikarddo]

Or, let's take warlock. Warlock has the eldritch blasts, which do not cost spell points. I think we could both agree that those blasts probably shouldn't do as much damage as full-blown 9th level spells that cost 40-50 a piece. Why and how, then, should a warlock be able to clear a dungeon as quickly as casters that actually utilize spell points for the majority of their damage?

If the sorc has enough spell points to finish the quest without ever slowing down then the spell point cost is irrelevant though. Failure to include that into to the equation is unwise.

[Tuxedoman96]

if all classes over-preform equally, that's a good indicator of class balance. the only thing left to do is incentivize running higher skulls (which i believe would be a step in the right direction). but i seriously doubt the integrity of the player who states that all classes are over-preforming equally throughout the heroic leveling process.

It sounds like there's two different definitions of overperforming here.


so let's look at what needs to happen, in my admittedly self-serving illustration. raid alts need to be able to level at a moderate pace, even solo, from 1-29. which means class balance is actually imperative to the leveling process. if a tank can't level, or a healer or support 'toon can't advance on their own... it's a problem. but put them into the context of cap play, it's not nearly as important whether or not a tank or support character can complete quests on their own, because they don't need to. it's cap... the whole point was to get there so they can be effective party members and contribute. who cares about balance in a raid group? i mean, it's still important. but not nearly as important as being able to actually progress to the point where you finally get to run the raids.

And what would you consider a moderate pace of leveling?


the priority should be game balance from levels 1 to 29. due to people actually being required to run that content, and supported by the player audit data which clearly shows that the majority of players are running that very content.

The problem arises when the difficulty you are running is such that you'd easily be able to complete it no matter what class you are playing. At that point, how would you know that there is anything that needs changing? I think this is what Slarden was getting at.


if a playstyle is suboptimal, it matters to a solo player because they will have a harder time getting back to level 30, where they can finally count on having a group for highskull and raid level play.

"Suboptimal" implies that there is an optimal playstyle or class. If you look at the definition of optimal, you'll find that it is defined as "most desirable or satisfactory". Even in the absence of differences in completion times and contribution, the idea of an optimal class is subjective. Some players will, for the sake of effectiveness, decide on what class is "optimal" based on their gameplay preferences, skill level, and comfort/willingness to learn the class. Even a sufficiently large population of players claiming a class to be optimal is not an immediate indication of a balance problem, since those gameplay preferences again factor into these sentiments. Take warlock for example. Warlock is simple enough that most players should be able to bring out a large portion of its potential. So if many players decide that warlock is optimal to level through the game, is it because the warlock is truly superior to the other classes (this is an example so I'm not saying it is)? Or maybe it's because many players have a playstyle that synergizes well with warlock? I understand that these conclusions are not mutually exclusive, but I'm trying to demonstrate that the situation isn't all that cut and dry.

And even if changes are made to the other classes as a result of this data should they be balance changes? I mean, I wouldn't classify making changes to the monk's inability to retain finishers when interacting to be a balance change, since balance changes implies that I'm measuring the class/ability up to something else in terms of some quantitative analysis of some variable. Not losing a finisher upon picking something up doesn't really influence how much damage I'm doing relative to the next guy, nor how much I heal with my healing ki, nor how good my DCs are or how much mitigation I have. It's simply a QoL change.

[Tuxedoman96]

If the sorc has enough spell points to finish the quest without ever slowing down then the spell point cost is irrelevant though. Failure to include that into to the equation is unwise.

It would only truly be irrelevant if this is true of all casters, since we are not only measuring the warlock's spellpoint-free eldritch blasts against sorcs but also all other characters that would be using spells as their primary means of damage. In this case, perhaps it is sorc that would be the outlier if we look at it in absence of its drawbacks.

[janave]

If the sorc has enough spell points to finish the quest without ever slowing down then the spell point cost is irrelevant though. Failure to include that into to the equation is unwise.

Just for notation:

My Sorcerer cannot use new gear, where I play only one competent Sorcerer i trust for advice breaks 8k ( uses DOM2 with some sacrifices I dont want to make), most of the good ones have around 6.5 to 7.5k, Meteor is stupidly sp efficient, try an Air / Water caster at level cap, they burn thru spell points FAST. I find that it is much better to throw IKs when possible than keep nuking with Air and Water. A capstone using Sorcerer loses -10%. I mostly see Fire casters exaggerate the spell points bonuses, and easy to see why if one has experience with multiple builds.

[LurkingVeteran]

Just for notation:

My Sorcerer cannot use new gear, where I play only one competent Sorcerer i trust for advice breaks 8k ( uses DOM2 with some sacrifices I dont want to make), most of the good ones have around 6.5 to 7.5k, Meteor is stupidly sp efficient, try an Air / Water caster at level cap, they burn thru spell points FAST. I find that it is much better to throw IKs when possible than keep nuking with Air and Water. A capstone using Sorcerer loses -10%. I mostly see Fire casters exaggerate the spell points bonuses, and easy to see why if one has experience with multiple builds.

Fire spells aren't that efficient in terms of damage to mana, but they have one big thing going for them which is big AoE in an AoE centric game, in addition to having a few big nukes you can pile metas on at minimum cost. Casting Chain + Ball Lightning gives you about the same damage as one meteor, but target capped, and you have to pay twice for the metas. Lightningbolt is actually stupidly efficient if you don't use metas, although you will suffer -6 DC. I believe metas previously scaled both the cost and damage by a multiplier, which made a lot more sense.

[janave]

Fire spells aren't that efficient on their own, I think it's mainly because you can clear big packs with one nuke, so you can pile on the metas. Casting Chain + Ball Lightning gives you about the same damage as one meteor, but if you have to pay twice for the metas. Lightningbolt is actually stupidly efficient if you don't use metas, but good luck with -6 DC. I believe metas previously scaled both the cost and damage by a multiplier, which made a lot more sense.

Chain has max target limit of 6, hitbox seems smaller too, Ball caps at 15, but the big reason is Meteor gives damage on first cast vs immune targets and applies most debuffs. I agree that Bolt is efficient without metas, but also RNG heavy, it is not something i want when the goal is melting down important targets hp asap, but efficient to attack static, cc-d targets for sure.

Ball avg ~ 127.5 @ 20sp
Chain avg ~ 190 @ 25sp
Meteor avg ~ 440 @ 40sp

0.72 * 0.89 => ~.642

CL/MCL increases favor Meteor, Spell power, Lore, favors fire, race synergies favor Fire, loot favors Fire, no save component is nice to have for some content a fair trade off. Single spell power favors electric.

If Master of Air affected Eladars, that could maybe earn Air a spot for boss beatdowns.

[LurkingVeteran]

Chain has max target limit of 6, hitbox seems smaller too, Ball caps at 15, but the big reason is Meteor gives damage on first cast vs immune targets and applies most debuffs. I agree that Bolt is efficient without metas, but also RNG heavy, it is not something i want when the goal is melting down important targets hp asap, but efficient to attack static, cc-d targets for sure.

Ball avg ~ 127.5 @ 20sp
Chain avg ~ 190 @ 25sp
Meteor avg ~ 440 @ 40sp

0.72 * 0.89 => ~.642

CL/MCL increases favor Meteor, Spell power, Lore, favors fire, race synergies favor Fire, loot favors Fire, no save component is nice to have for some content a fair trade off. Single spell power favors electric.

If Master of Air affected Eladars, that could maybe earn Air a spot for boss beatdowns.

+MCL favors Ball, since it has an MCL of 15. Redo the same calc with +6MCL and it will be slightly closer. 40% of Meteor damage is also force, which (although not as bad after the belt nerf) will be lower just because it's split. Completely agree on immunity dropping and target cap. Besides those, I think metas and DC are big ones though. When Chain hits for half of Meteor and costs 80% as much with metas, efficiency goes down the drain.

EDIT: I also think Air Savant could get some + MCL on Ball specifically in its cores. Same for Cone of Cold on Water. Chain could also benefit from having its target cap raised. It's basically the same AoE as Ball anyway. There was no target cap in D&D. It did half damage on secondary hits, but that was the trade-off for being one of the few party-friendly AoEs that only hit enemies.

[janave]

+MCL favors Ball, since it has an MCL of 15. Redo the same calc with +6MCL and it will be slightly closer. 40% of Meteor damage is also force, which (although not as bad after the belt nerf) will be lower just because it's split. Completely agree on immunity dropping and target cap. Besides those, I think metas and DC are big ones though. When Chain hits for half of Meteor and costs 80% as much with metas, efficiency goes down the drain.

EDIT: I also think Air Savant could get some + MCL on Ball specifically in its cores. Same for Cone of Cold on Water. Chain could also benefit from having its target cap raised. It's basically the same AoE as Ball anyway. There was no target cap in D&D. It did half damage on secondary hits, but that was the trade-off for being one of the few party-friendly AoEs that only hit enemies.

Ahh true in the 1st Sorcerer nerf they removed the easy MCL grabs from Earth, so you are probably right, still close:)

[mikarddo]

Just for notation:

My Sorcerer cannot use new gear, where I play only one competent Sorcerer i trust for advice breaks 8k ( uses DOM2 with some sacrifices I dont want to make), most of the good ones have around 6.5 to 7.5k, Meteor is stupidly sp efficient, try an Air / Water caster at level cap, they burn thru spell points FAST. I find that it is much better to throw IKs when possible than keep nuking with Air and Water. A capstone using Sorcerer loses -10%. I mostly see Fire casters exaggerate the spell points bonuses, and easy to see why if one has experience with multiple builds.

My claim started with a very important "if". I did not say that sorcs always have enough mana, only that if/when they do, the spell point cost is not important when comparing to a warlock.

I certainly do run out of mana often enough on my sorc to know that :)

[OfElectricMen]

Tell me something, if you were on a melee DPS, thrower or bow/crossbow user and your attack animation suddenly had you standing still for 2-3s out of every 6s rotation would you be OK with that? I don't think so, so why should spell DPSers be OK with it?
Well, I'd be mildly annoyed, unless I had made a full attack and so only had a 5-ft step available.

[OfElectricMen]

And what would you consider a moderate pace of leveling? 13.3 CR-appropriate encounters.

[DarkSkysz]

Who TF cares about balance on a pure pve game...I mean... these kobolds complaning about balance should go back to the sewers and let us, the players, enjoy our overpower spells.

[ggmarquez]

While that goal is indeed commendable, how would you use this data to factor in what exactly needs to change? Take the monk for example. If we decide that that particular class is overperforming, what do we reduce (or for the underperforming classes, increase)? The survivability? The damage? The DCs? What about the ability to hit more than one target?

you can't really expect a specific answer to such a general question. i can give a general answer though... in an in-depth analysis of all, or as close as we can come to all, relevant game systems and design features, when something is or is not balanced, it will manifest in some empirical form, and becomes a data point. it doesn't need an arbitrary numerical representation. if confront any foe is doing more damage per second than any other destiny active attack, we don't need to first define how much damage per second it should be doing, then subtract that number from the current amount, and make an adjustment with such precise mathematical clarity. it seems counter intuitive to put it that way, because it's all just math, after all. but i stand by that statement. there is no valid reason to place the onus of such deliberate, highly detail focused scrutiny, on the player-base. you know it isn't balanced because it's being built around, not because the equation reveals an exact amount of additional damage beyond what other similar abilities are outputting. it seems like you want to suggest all balance changes need to first conform to some 'standard' that is being deviated from. and that to do so, without first defining with numerical precision, would be impossible. or at least a mistake. but i don't think that it's necessary or prudent to wait for that level of detail. adding a 2 second cooldown to CaF was a good start. but it was still being used to cancel attack animations in the attack chain, to provide higher dps where it wasn't intended. even without the exact numbers in front of us, we the players could still see it was preforming, in a way which was never intended, beyond the scope of its purported purpose.


Not sure what you mean exactly by "enhancing the experience". Also, you mention bugs, but I would think that in the discussion of balance we'd also be looking at factors that are working as intended. Let's say that in this example of yours, the clerics turns did work on all of those monsters as you proposed, but they instead were given a save, and whatever means you acquired this power specified that it could work in that way. How would you determine that the ability needs to be tuned down?

enhancing the experience. right, on it's own, that figure of speech does have a certain culinary ring to it. maybe i should have said... modify the playstyle to add a layer of enjoyment and provide quality to the class through meaningful choices intended to give players a broader spectrum when making decisions which influence the way they build their characters. but joseph heller taught me about prose being too prolix. i think i'll stick with enhances the experience, as its a bit more succinct. as to the question, how to determine when to tune down a specific ability: this is where exhaustive playtesting becomes more and more relevant. if turn undead were capable of providing an unbalanced advantage, at any point in the leveling process, it would demonstrate itself, and eventually work to the meta. meaning, the playerbase, at large, would adopt turn based builds and prioritize turning as a preference. if that happened, i would look closely at how other insta-kill effects were implemented... maybe cap max turn at the same level as wail, or circle of death. but that hasn't happened because turn is still such a niche ability, and its most useful feature, using turn attempts to fuel CaF, was recently nerfed.


I don't understand. How can you say that we are looking at balance without representing each of the builds fairly? If I state that monks are in a terrible position but never really took the time to play the class effectively, then how does that serve as adequate data for the actual state of the class wrt balance? Furthermore, you say that we are simply looking at the broader base of balance, and I'd appreciate some clarification on this, because as far as I know, there is or should be a metric for balance. You'd never really have a working system for balance by making the classes with little to no regard for said metric and then define the metric based on the relative position of each of the classes to each other. There's a reason there's such a thing as a reference point.

representing builds fairly, and watching 2 players run those builds, aren't the same thing. if you state that monks are in a terrible position, i can either ignore you, or attempt to refute your statement with my own evidence. because you have merely stated an opinion. the data you are asking about isn't derived from your play experiences, or mine. but rather, from the amalgam of all player experience, over the course of a meta cycle. which is why, again, exhaustive playtesting is very important. one person, playing monk poorly, doesn't indicate anything other than that they play monk poorly. 27 concurrent raid completions of the latest raid, all by different players, all on some ranged monk bow using hybrid build, means nerf monk, nerf manyshot, nerf ips and then nerf monk again for good measure. ;)


There's a reason there's such a thing as a reference point.

this is important enough to quote a second time. the point of reference is determined on live. lama is where we get a small showcase for upcoming changes which take this point of reference, and we glimpse how the meta may shift, as the dev's attempt to balance for the future, since obviously balancing for the past is impossible and would be in poor taste. the live servers are collecting the data used to establish this reference point, in real time, minute by minute, even as i'm typing this. it isn't substantial in the same way as a fixed integer. it's a flow. an ebb and a tide. poetry again... i know, i know. but really, DDO plays, in part, like a poem, rather than a mathematical formula. there's music in it, not just in dryad and the demigod, but in everything from the banker who refuses to give us the bank ui until it's auto-closed on us once, to the piece of newspaper which keeps floating around the same parts of the harbor, over and over.


Fair enough. However, we are discussing the notion of balance both without those data points and the goal they represent. I'll also add that how the devs wish to "balance" the game does not necessarily align with how the players would balance it. I'm not saying this as a bad thing of course, I'm merely suggesting that when discussing balances we are taking half measures when we don't clarify what we really expect the standard to be and why and how to achieve it.

well, not to put to a fine a point on it, but... the standard is obviously enjoyment. if it isn't enjoyable, why is it even in the game? there isn't really an adequate method of establishing 'enjoyment' and expressing it mathematically. if the additional cooldown recently added to meteor swarm impedes the ability of the player using it from deriving any enjoyment or satisfaction by that use, something is certainly wrong. but i don't think one whinge thread is enough to relay that information, or signifies that a walk-back on the extra cooldown is required. it is, however, a good starting point for further investigation. it may turn out that enough players feel similarly to the OP. then, perhaps, a different solution to the problem will present itself.


2 is better than 0 when it is relevant. If the data doesn't convey anything with regards to what I'm looking for then it's inconsequential, isn't it? That's why it's just as important to know what we want and what information would help with our awareness/understanding as it is to actually get said information.

but, of course, this is just pretense for disregarding any opinion you disagree with. if two people tell you what you wish never to hear, you say that the data doesn't convey anything. then label it inconsequential. all data is meaningful, its only in a specific context that it becomes relevant/irrelevant. if you say monks are in a terrible place, and i say CaF is overpreforming and needs to be adjusted... the data doesn't convey anything with regard to what you are looking for. but that doesn't make it inconsequential, right? obviously i should post my data in a different thread, because it isn't relevant to your beg for better monk... but if CaF really is over-tuned, it shouldn't be considered inconsequential to anything other than your own little monk-is-bad pity party.


Wasn't stopping there, just wanted to understand what exactly you were looking for.

what i am looking for? why, nothing short of the best and most awesome'ist player experience possible, from on of the greatest and most amazing'ist of all the MMO's i've ever played... naturally. why, are you looking for something else?


Quite simply because the two classes are different in what they can do and to what extent. A caster that specializes in dealing damage is probably going to finish encounters faster (and therefore the quest). That's not to say that each class shouldn't finish classes at roughly the same time, but rather that I don't see why they should. I mean, some classes are easier to solo with than others. Some classes have more versatility. Obviously being more versatile should take away from the benefits that result from having a specialty. Or, let's take warlock. Warlock has the eldritch blasts, which do not cost spell points. I think we could both agree that those blasts probably shouldn't do as much damage as full-blown 9th level spells that cost 40-50 a piece. Why and how, then, should a warlock be able to clear a dungeon as quickly as casters that actually utilize spell points for the majority of their damage?

do you really support the notion that any one class should not be able to complete a quest in relatively the same time-frame as any other class? sounds like class prejudice. not saying you're classist... but it sorta' sounds like a classist remark. should female characters also be forced to conform to your standards? maybe have less carrying capacity? better cooking and cleaning skills, but lower strength and endurance? ;-)

[Tuxedoman96]

you can't really expect a specific answer to such a general question. i can give a general answer though... in an in-depth analysis of all, or as close as we can come to all, relevant game systems and design features, when something is or is not balanced, it will manifest in some empirical form, and becomes a data point. it doesn't need an arbitrary numerical representation. if confront any foe is doing more damage per second than any other destiny active attack, we don't need to first define how much damage per second it should be doing, then subtract that number from the current amount, and make an adjustment with such precise mathematical clarity.

However, with that example, we have to look at whether the extra damage for confront any foe is justified. CAF uses up charges, so it has another limiting factor in addition to a cooldown (albeit an admittedly short one). And those are just a couple aspects that we're looking at. We could look at its former ability to hit multiple targets and do a triple cleave and other aspects to get a better grasp on its utility. However, there isn't anything inherently negative about an ability doing more damage than other abilities because of these other considerations. It helps not to look at the abilities in a vacuum.


it seems counter intuitive to put it that way, because it's all just math, after all. but i stand by that statement. there is no valid reason to place the onus of such deliberate, highly detail focused scrutiny, on the player-base.

I'm not saying that the player base must do this. I'm merely pointing out the unlikelihood of effectively balancing classes and abilities without having the whole picture.


you know it isn't balanced because it's being built around, not because the equation reveals an exact amount of additional damage beyond what other similar abilities are outputting.

Really? It isn't balanced because it's being built around? If that was the case then summoning builds must be overpowered because there are people that build around it. What about flame blade or the shadow blade? And who are we looking at that builds around these overperforming abilities anyways? How likely is average person to recognize or utilize the true "brokenness" of an ability? There could be any number of reasons that a person builds a toon around an ability. Effectiveness, flavor, challenge, ease of use, etc., such that it shouldn't be immediately obvious that that particular ability is overperforming.


it seems like you want to suggest all balance changes need to first conform to some 'standard' that is being deviated from. and that to do so, without first defining with numerical precision, would be impossible. or at least a mistake. but i don't think that it's necessary or prudent to wait for that level of detail.

I do think that there should be a standard. However, for the second part of your statement, this numerical precision, I'm actually stating the opposite, because there are certain aspects of a class that can't be compared quantitatively. That's why I asked how much the ability to heal is worth. What about the ability to do damage from a distance? However, the numbers are still important. I was pointing out the problem with your thought experiment because it seemed to rely only on anecdotal evidence. When we aren't taking into account fair representations of the classes and abilities then how do you expect to balance them?


adding a 2 second cooldown to CaF was a good start. but it was still being used to cancel attack animations in the attack chain, to provide higher dps where it wasn't intended. even without the exact numbers in front of us, we the players could still see it was preforming, in a way which was never intended, beyond the scope of its purported purpose.

Again, you're talking about abilities that are being used in ways that weren't intended, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about abilities that are used as they were designed to be used. The continuous use of bugged examples makes me wonder if you think that abilities and classes cannot be imbalanced without being bugged in some way. Look at warlock or inquisitive when they first came out. Can you honestly say that they were balanced on arrival, or that if they weren't, that it was the result of a bug?


enhancing the experience. right, on it's own, that figure of speech does have a certain culinary ring to it. maybe i should have said... modify the playstyle to add a layer of enjoyment and provide quality to the class through meaningful choices intended to give players a broader spectrum when making decisions which influence the way they build their characters. but joseph heller taught me about prose being too prolix. i think i'll stick with enhances the experience, as its a bit more succinct. as to the question, how to determine when to tune down a specific ability: this is where exhaustive playtesting becomes more and more relevant. if turn undead were capable of providing an unbalanced advantage, at any point in the leveling process, it would demonstrate itself, and eventually work to the meta. meaning, the playerbase, at large, would adopt turn based builds and prioritize turning as a preference. if that happened, i would look closely at how other insta-kill effects were implemented... maybe cap max turn at the same level as wail, or circle of death. but that hasn't happened because turn is still such a niche ability, and its most useful feature, using turn attempts to fuel CaF, was recently nerfed.

Fair enough.


representing builds fairly, and watching 2 players run those builds, aren't the same thing. if you state that monks are in a terrible position, i can either ignore you, or attempt to refute your statement with my own evidence. because you have merely stated an opinion. the data you are asking about isn't derived from your play experiences, or mine. but rather, from the amalgam of all player experience, over the course of a meta cycle. which is why, again, exhaustive playtesting is very important. one person, playing monk poorly, doesn't indicate anything other than that they play monk poorly.

The data I'm asking about is from comparing numbers and seeing what all is involved in retrieving said numbers. A truly fair representation of a build would be showing what effects and values you can get in the absence of gear (since a lot of items benefit more than one class and we're looking at the classes individually). Gear should have its own balancing metric. By your line of reasoning, if most players decide that the monk is in a bad position then it must be in a bad position because that is the amalgamation of the player experience. This, however, doesn't account for the possibility that many of those players might not be playing monk even close to its true potential.


27 concurrent raid completions of the latest raid, all by different players, all on some ranged monk bow using hybrid build, means nerf monk, nerf manyshot, nerf ips and then nerf monk again for good measure. ;)

And that's how we get blanket nerfs. It might be one attack for the monk or one aspect of ranged that is overperforming. To nerf all these things without pinpointing the issue doesn't really aid the cause of balance because you end up hurting builds that weren't overperforming in the process. Take the inquisitive. Now I'm not gonna say that a blanket nerf to ranged was unwarranted, but I will say that if I saw nothing but inquisitives running around then I wonder what is more likely: that inquisitive alone needed a nerf or that all ranged needed to be docked. Again, not saying that we didn't need to reduce ranged damage, but with all of those data points pointing towards one particular build it wouldn't be immediately obvious to me that the ranged style in general was overperforming. Even if you were joking about the monk nerfs, I find the humor to be in poor taste because it demonstrates a hammer-smashing approach to changes that I think is not terribly efficient.


this is important enough to quote a second time. the point of reference is determined on live. lama is where we get a small showcase for upcoming changes which take this point of reference, and we glimpse how the meta may shift, as the dev's attempt to balance for the future, since obviously balancing for the past is impossible and would be in poor taste. the live servers are collecting the data used to establish this reference point, in real time, minute by minute, even as i'm typing this. it isn't substantial in the same way as a fixed integer. it's a flow. an ebb and a tide. poetry again... i know, i know. but really, DDO plays, in part, like a poem, rather than a mathematical formula. there's music in it, not just in dryad and the demigod, but in everything from the banker who refuses to give us the bank ui until it's auto-closed on us once, to the piece of newspaper which keeps floating around the same parts of the harbor, over and over.

Your poetic descriptions are superfluous. My point isn't that we need to have it exactly the same. In fact, if you read what I typed the past few posts I was pointing out the immense difficulty in doing so without stripping meaning and uniqueness from the game. My point is that when someone says that the tide is too high (using your analogy) but they didn't bother to stand up... then I can't take such comments seriously. Is it still true for that person? As much as an opinion can be I suppose, but if the devs are looking to see how high the tide should be for a standing person then my complaints as a sitting person doesn't really provide meaningful information, does it?


well, not to put to a fine a point on it, but... the standard is obviously enjoyment. if it isn't enjoyable, why is it even in the game? there isn't really an adequate method of establishing 'enjoyment' and expressing it mathematically. if the additional cooldown recently added to meteor swarm impedes the ability of the player using it from deriving any enjoyment or satisfaction by that use, something is certainly wrong. but i don't think one whinge thread is enough to relay that information, or signifies that a walk-back on the extra cooldown is required. it is, however, a good starting point for further investigation. it may turn out that enough players feel similarly to the OP. then, perhaps, a different solution to the problem will present itself.

Enjoyment may be a factor in balance or QoL changes, but it isn't the only aspect. I very much enjoy my CC casters. That doesn't mean that I can complete quests with CC alone. Although, perhaps there is a more illustrative example. Suppose most people really liked pressing one button to break through encounters. Pressing that one button to not deal with monsters is enjoyable for them. Can we still say that this leads to a healthy game? Additionally, as you've previously stated, you cannot quantify enjoyment. I'd go even further and say that some classes will inherently be more enjoyable than others. It is unlikely, for example, for the devs to change how the barbarian compares to the other classes wrt performance such that I will be more inclined to play them. That's my playstyle. I enjoy the classes I play precisely because of what they can do conceptually and not because they are more effective than others. I understand that not everyone is of a similar mind, but I'm saying this to illustrate a point. My enjoyment of a class, or yours, or anyone else's, is not completely indicative of the class's performance.


but, of course, this is just pretense for disregarding any opinion you disagree with. if two people tell you what you wish never to hear, you say that the data doesn't convey anything. then label it inconsequential. all data is meaningful, its only in a specific context that it becomes relevant/irrelevant. if you say monks are in a terrible place, and i say CaF is overpreforming and needs to be adjusted... the data doesn't convey anything with regard to what you are looking for. but that doesn't make it inconsequential, right?

Not at all. I'll take contrasting opinions when they are relevant to the discussion. If I'm trying to discuss whether or not a class is overperforming, I'm going to look at empirical evidence that shows this. I'm going to look at what people are doing that allows them to overperform or (if they are not doing it) what is making them underperform. The enjoyment of said class is a secondary issue. In the example I gave above, it could be the case that despite not really enjoying barbarian empirical evidence shows that it is overperforming compared to other classes, because those are two different aspects.


obviously i should post my data in a different thread, because it isn't relevant to your beg for better monk... but if CaF really is over-tuned, it shouldn't be considered inconsequential to anything other than your own little monk-is-bad pity party.

Not begging for anything actually. I gave monk as an example because it has a low floor and a high ceiling. I also gave examples of warlock and sorc, but I could just as easily give any other class. The point was to demonstrate more than sheer numerical superiority goes into balance considerations, and it seems you and I already agree on this. And also, I suppose CaF might be over-tuned, but if I didn't know why and in what way then how would I know it simply isn't because I'm not using it right? Going even further, how would I know if a particular change actually addresses the issue?


what i am looking for? why, nothing short of the best and most awesome'ist player experience possible, from on of the greatest and most amazing'ist of all the MMO's i've ever played... naturally. why, are you looking for something else?

I'm asking this in regards to your thought experiment. When conducting an experiment, we should look at what we want to observe. The "most awesome'ist player experience" is a great ideal to have but isn't experimentally derived data.


do you really support the notion that any one class should not be able to complete a quest in relatively the same time-frame as any other class? sounds like class prejudice. not saying you're classist... but it sorta' sounds like a classist remark. should female characters also be forced to conform to your standards? maybe have less carrying capacity? better cooking and cleaning skills, but lower strength and endurance? ;-)

I'm saying that there should be benefits and drawbacks. If the drawback happens to be completion time but I get benefits that justify that then so be it. Really nice ad hominem by the way, but I sincerely doubt that it adds to the discussion any.

[ggmarquez]

However, with that example, we have to look at whether the extra damage for confront any foe is justified. CAF uses up charges, so it has another limiting factor in addition to a cooldown (albeit an admittedly short one). And those are just a couple aspects that we're looking at. We could look at its former ability to hit multiple targets and do a triple cleave and other aspects to get a better grasp on its utility. However, there isn't anything inherently negative about an ability doing more damage than other abilities because of these other considerations. It helps not to look at the abilities in a vacuum.

i'm actually unaware of any vacuum in which i could view our class and ED abilities. is there some third party software or something? i'm unfamiliar with using outside resources, mostly i just play. at any rate, i was referring to pre-nerf CaF, where the lack of any cooldown allowed it to hit faster than any standard attack animation. which is why they added the 2 second cooldown to begin with. because you could just pop turn of the tide and then ignore the entire attack-chain sequence by spamming CaF. which resulted in a significant dps increase, at least until you ran out of charges. but because it ignored standard attack animations, it was bypassing the built in safe-guards which limit number of attacks per second. so no bueno.


I'm not saying that the player base must do this. I'm merely pointing out the unlikelihood of effectively balancing classes and abilities without having the whole picture.

oh indeed, it would very difficult to achieve any semblance of balance without the bigger picture. which is why it's left to "them" and not to "us". but, of course, this facilitates an almost adversarial relationship between devs and players and perpetuates the "us vs them" trope. tricky tricky.


Really? It isn't balanced because it's being built around? If that was the case then summoning builds must be overpowered because there are people that build around it. What about flame blade or the shadow blade? And who are we looking at that builds around these overperforming abilities anyways? How likely is average person to recognize or utilize the true "brokenness" of an ability? There could be any number of reasons that a person builds a toon around an ability. Effectiveness, flavor, challenge, ease of use, etc., such that it shouldn't be immediately obvious that that particular ability is overperforming.

summoning builds are actually a great example. yes, people try to build them. once. then they come here, or elsewhere, and complain that such a build can't function in the current landscape of the game, realize it won't result in anything actionable, and TR out of the build. it may be possible that some aspects of summoning builds are actually overpreforming. but if that is the case, there isn't a whisper of it anywhere, and all evidence is to the contrary.

which is exactly what i mean by 'build around' balance. CaF was worth building around, because it was broken. summoner builds are also broken, but in the opposite direction. they aren't worth building around. it doesn't take more than a cursory search to determine that this is both true, and the reasons behind that truth.


I do think that there should be a standard. However, for the second part of your statement, this numerical precision, I'm actually stating the opposite, because there are certain aspects of a class that can't be compared quantitatively. That's why I asked how much the ability to heal is worth. What about the ability to do damage from a distance? However, the numbers are still important. I was pointing out the problem with your thought experiment because it seemed to rely only on anecdotal evidence. When we aren't taking into account fair representations of the classes and abilities then how do you expect to balance them?

well, there isn't a realistic way to determine a fair representation of any class or build. in chess, a computer can calculate the move with the highest probability of leading to an advantage. DDO doesn't have a deep blue. or a stock fish. what we have are players, some willing to bug report, some willing to rant on the forums, some only willing to share in private on their guild's discord, and some who won't do any or all of that. so our information arsenal, so to speak, must needs come from the playerbase itself. i've never seen a perfectly played monk. though i've seen many monks who looked to be played very very well. but every single one of them may have mistimed their finishers, failed to but debuffs into a red-named rotation, forgot to utilize a handy quick-swap etc. etc. the point being, we approximate fair representation of class and build, based on out human abilities, rather than trusting a predefined 'zero sum game' extrapolation from artificial intelligence or similar source material.


Again, you're talking about abilities that are being used in ways that weren't intended, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about abilities that are used as they were designed to be used. The continuous use of bugged examples makes me wonder if you think that abilities and classes cannot be imbalanced without being bugged in some way. Look at warlock or inquisitive when they first came out. Can you honestly say that they were balanced on arrival, or that if they weren't, that it was the result of a bug?

i haven't actually read through the terms of service, at least in its entirety. but from what i've been able to gather, almost everything players do in-game, other than spending money, could be construed as a violation of ToS, in some form, or another. that is a silly thing to say, but it reflects the attitude i've chosen to adopt. basically, i have no idea what is, or isn't, meant to be used, one way, or another. i may have picked examples of bugs rather than abilities i believe to be working as intended, for my examples, yes. but that's only because its harder to come up with a solid example of something that is actually working properly, and use it contextually here. like, jump capping at 40. this is to be expected, as it has been this way for such a long time, no one would think twice about it... until the moment they discover a certain race/gender combo can get higher/lower max jump. if lower, they would bug report, flame the forums until it was fixed. if higher, they may just sit on that info until they can figure out how to 'build around' it. because having a higher jump than what is normally allowed, may have unknown advantages making it worth 'building around'. i suppose we could have that same discussion without bringing bugs into it, just by reflecting upon the fact that even with a modest jump score, it's already still too easy to find safe spots and perches in a large percentage of total quest content. fair. but i have no idea how i would go about interpreting that kind of data, since i don't know how much of that is against ToS or the dev's intention.


The data I'm asking about is from comparing numbers and seeing what all is involved in retrieving said numbers. A truly fair representation of a build would be showing what effects and values you can get in the absence of gear (since a lot of items benefit more than one class and we're looking at the classes individually). Gear should have its own balancing metric. By your line of reasoning, if most players decide that the monk is in a bad position then it must be in a bad position because that is the amalgamation of the player experience. This, however, doesn't account for the possibility that many of those players might not be playing monk even close to its true potential.

which is true, and it's fair to point out. however, i would find it hard to believe, going by just the limited number of "good" monk players i've personally known, that most players would decide this. in the unlikely event that most players did decide that monks are in a rut, i would examine why it was posited in such a way, and if i concluded that literally none of the players playing monk were actually utilizing the class to its full potential, i would have no choice but to conclude that the class was designed poorly. and that it would need an overhaul in order to justify continuing to offer access to the class for real life coppers.


And that's how we get blanket nerfs. It might be one attack for the monk or one aspect of ranged that is overperforming. To nerf all these things without pinpointing the issue doesn't really aid the cause of balance because you end up hurting builds that weren't overperforming in the process. Take the inquisitive. Now I'm not gonna say that a blanket nerf to ranged was unwarranted, but I will say that if I saw nothing but inquisitives running around then I wonder what is more likely: that inquisitive alone needed a nerf or that all ranged needed to be docked. Again, not saying that we didn't need to reduce ranged damage, but with all of those data points pointing towards one particular build it wouldn't be immediately obvious to me that the ranged style in general was overperforming. Even if you were joking about the monk nerfs, I find the humor to be in poor taste because it demonstrates a hammer-smashing approach to changes that I think is not terribly efficient.

i didn't mean i agree with how they handled monk nerfs, or any nerfs in particular. i only meant it was humorous to consider how monkcher was forced out of the limelight, only to be replaced by the next thing, and then the next, ad nauseam. buff/nerf cycles keep the meta moving. otherwise we wouldn't have the range of diversity which is a hallmark of D&D. it's true that it often feels like putting balance behind "balance", where offering overprefomance for straight cash can kill the buzz... but without some turn-around, all classes and builds would be left in a static power relationship, the "hierarchy of classes" focused on keeping everything where it is, without a chance to bring anything up from the bottom, or move the top builds down so others can have a chance to shine. this obviously muddies the definition of balance, and also leaves a bad feeling in my mouth when using the term in such a way. but if you start with all 15 classes being not-very balanced at all, and every so often offer an update which attempts to bring a little more balance than before, eventually players will come to recognize that every update, every patch, offers a healthier, more fair and workable game space, for everyone. at least ideally.



Your poetic descriptions are superfluous.

yes. and may i put that in my sig? thank you ;)


My point isn't that we need to have it exactly the same. In fact, if you read what I typed the past few posts I was pointing out the immense difficulty in doing so without stripping meaning and uniqueness from the game. My point is that when someone says that the tide is too high (using your analogy) but they didn't bother to stand up... then I can't take such comments seriously. Is it still true for that person? As much as an opinion can be I suppose, but if the devs are looking to see how high the tide should be for a standing person then my complaints as a sitting person doesn't really provide meaningful information, does it?

quite right. but even those with a height disadvantage may play DDO and shouldn't necessarily be ignored. the water may come up to my chest, but my friend in a wheel-chair would be drowning if he tried to stand beside me. my opinions aren't right, and his wrong, just because i can breath easier with my height.


Enjoyment may be a factor in balance or QoL changes, but it isn't the only aspect. I very much enjoy my CC casters. That doesn't mean that I can complete quests with CC alone. Although, perhaps there is a more illustrative example. Suppose most people really liked pressing one button to break through encounters. Pressing that one button to not deal with monsters is enjoyable for them. Can we still say that this leads to a healthy game? Additionally, as you've previously stated, you cannot quantify enjoyment. I'd go even further and say that some classes will inherently be more enjoyable than others. It is unlikely, for example, for the devs to change how the barbarian compares to the other classes wrt performance such that I will be more inclined to play them. That's my playstyle. I enjoy the classes I play precisely because of what they can do conceptually and not because they are more effective than others. I understand that not everyone is of a similar mind, but I'm saying this to illustrate a point. My enjoyment of a class, or yours, or anyone else's, is not completely indicative of the class's performance.

but you know, it isn't just fire sorcs who can press one button to complete a quest. if that really is a source of satisfaction for some, they actually have ample opportunities to build for that level of play. but, what i meant by enjoyment, wasn't so much that every ability and action necessarily needs be enjoyable for everyone. merely, if it works the way it was designed, that it should be enjoyable to those who use it. that seems a small distinction, allow me to expound by analogy: you are a baker. purveyor of delicious baked goods. in the first instance, you attempt to force every patron to eat chocolate-chip cookies, because you believe that chocolate-chip cookies will be enjoyable. obviously this will fail. in the second instance, you attempt to make chocolate-chip cookies, which when consumed by those who have selected them, will be enjoyable. this may not always succeed, but you'll do much better business.


Not at all. I'll take contrasting opinions when they are relevant to the discussion. If I'm trying to discuss whether or not a class is overperforming, I'm going to look at empirical evidence that shows this. I'm going to look at what people are doing that allows them to overperform or (if they are not doing it) what is making them underperform. The enjoyment of said class is a secondary issue. In the example I gave above, it could be the case that despite not really enjoying barbarian empirical evidence shows that it is overperforming compared to other classes, because those are two different aspects.

yes, this seems very logical. i put myself through an abundance of alchemist bombadier builds, even though it was overpreforming, because i wanted to experience it. eventually i came to enjoy it less than other builds, precisely because it was OP, and i felt like i didn't have to work at it, to make it work. indeed, i understand the idea all too well. but then, i had stopped playing alchemist precisely because i no longer enjoyed it, and moved on to some melee builds. now that alchemist has been through it's first baby nerf, i might try it again, just to see how enjoyable it has become. (though i'll probably still complain about how strong it is)


Not begging for anything actually. I gave monk as an example because it has a low floor and a high ceiling. I also gave examples of warlock and sorc, but I could just as easily give any other class. The point was to demonstrate more than sheer numerical superiority goes into balance considerations, and it seems you and I already agree on this. And also, I suppose CaF might be over-tuned, but if I didn't know why and in what way then how would I know it simply isn't because I'm not using it right? Going even further, how would I know if a particular change actually addresses the issue?

oh, yeah i didn't mean you were actually begging on behalf of monks. i should have said hypothetical beg thread. apologies.

how would anyone known anything about any ability? by using it. playtesting. exhaustive playtesting. if you find that CaF, boulders might, momentum swing, and celestial mandate, all behave in the same way... that is, a cleave-like ability which overwrites your normal attack animations, hits multiple targets, and has a +w component, but only CaF has no cooldown.... you know that it will always do more dps, not just to a group, but even a raid boss. because no cooldown + ignores normal attack animations is a recipe for very very delicious cookies indeed.


I'm asking this in regards to your thought experiment. When conducting an experiment, we should look at what we want to observe. The "most awesome'ist player experience" is a great ideal to have but isn't experimentally derived data.

i mean, i know DDO can feel like a never ending social experiment. but at the end of the day, it's still just a game. all data is meaningful, we just have to find where to put it, in order to find its relevance. hard data and raw facts are great. thoughts an opinions aren't all that bad either. not really. but its the poetry of DDO i'm interested in. even if it's got a lot of numbers strewn about it.


I'm saying that there should be benefits and drawbacks. If the drawback happens to be completion time but I get benefits that justify that then so be it. Really nice ad hominem by the way, but I sincerely doubt that it adds to the discussion any.

levity adds to all manner of meaningful discourse. i'm not trying to win any internet points. you can have them all. :)

[Tuxedoman96]

i'm actually unaware of any vacuum in which i could view our class and ED abilities. is there some third party software or something? i'm unfamiliar with using outside resources, mostly i just play. at any rate, i was referring to pre-nerf CaF, where the lack of any cooldown allowed it to hit faster than any standard attack animation. which is why they added the 2 second cooldown to begin with. because you could just pop turn of the tide and then ignore the entire attack-chain sequence by spamming CaF. which resulted in a significant dps increase, at least until you ran out of charges. but because it ignored standard attack animations, it was bypassing the built in safe-guards which limit number of attacks per second. so no bueno.

What I meant was that just doing a numerical comparison on damage doesn't provide all of the necessary details that would indicate whether or not something needs to be changed. Let's say that there was an ability that did 5 times the damage of any other ability in the game. Now let's say that you could only use this ability once per rest. If we were just looking at the damage than it would appear as if we should reduce the damage of the ability, without factoring in the fact that you can only use that ability once per rest and therefore can't spam it.


oh indeed, it would very difficult to achieve any semblance of balance without the bigger picture. which is why it's left to "them" and not to "us". but, of course, this facilitates an almost adversarial relationship between devs and players and perpetuates the "us vs them" trope. tricky tricky.

Well, it's less about any sort of "us vs them" and more that it's more reliable and effective to discuss and provide feedback on whether something should or shouldn't be changed when we are looking at it from more than one angle.


summoning builds are actually a great example. yes, people try to build them. once. then they come here, or elsewhere, and complain that such a build can't function in the current landscape of the game, realize it won't result in anything actionable, and TR out of the build. it may be possible that some aspects of summoning builds are actually overpreforming. but if that is the case, there isn't a whisper of it anywhere, and all evidence is to the contrary.

What I was pointing out was that you can still build around such a concept. In fact, you could build around such a concept and be decent in other areas. Will you have the best build in the game? Probably not, but I think it's better to not set hasty generalizations like merely "building around" something as a benchmark for determining that something needs to change. If I saw most people building around summons, then perhaps that's grounds for investigation, but the mere act of building around summons should not be concerning or indicative of some broken mechanic.


which is exactly what i mean by 'build around' balance. CaF was worth building around, because it was broken. summoner builds are also broken, but in the opposite direction. they aren't worth building around. it doesn't take more than a cursory search to determine that this is both true, and the reasons behind that truth.

Whether or not something is worth building around really depends on the person.


well, there isn't a realistic way to determine a fair representation of any class or build. in chess, a computer can calculate the move with the highest probability of leading to an advantage. DDO doesn't have a deep blue. or a stock fish. what we have are players, some willing to bug report, some willing to rant on the forums, some only willing to share in private on their guild's discord, and some who won't do any or all of that. so our information arsenal, so to speak, must needs come from the playerbase itself. i've never seen a perfectly played monk. though i've seen many monks who looked to be played very very well. but every single one of them may have mistimed their finishers, failed to but debuffs into a red-named rotation, forgot to utilize a handy quick-swap etc. etc. the point being, we approximate fair representation of class and build, based on out human abilities, rather than trusting a predefined 'zero sum game' extrapolation from artificial intelligence or similar source material.

Certainly, we are looking at the human application of these abilities. That's why we should look at players that play that class (if we are going to use monk as an example) often and see what it is that is being done to great effect. If even some of the best monk players are outperformed in every aspect by the other classes then that leads me to think that monks should be reviewed. I would not use the average of player experiences to discuss balance changes, because, quite honestly, the average might be a far cry from the potential of the class, especially when that potential is largely attributed to skill rather than gearing. I am of the mind that balance should measure potential vs potential whereas QoL should measure the average experience vs average experience.


i haven't actually read through the terms of service, at least in its entirety. but from what i've been able to gather, almost everything players do in-game, other than spending money, could be construed as a violation of ToS, in some form, or another. that is a silly thing to say, but it reflects the attitude i've chosen to adopt. basically, i have no idea what is, or isn't, meant to be used, one way, or another. i may have picked examples of bugs rather than abilities i believe to be working as intended, for my examples, yes. but that's only because its harder to come up with a solid example of something that is actually working properly, and use it contextually here. like, jump capping at 40. this is to be expected, as it has been this way for such a long time, no one would think twice about it... until the moment they discover a certain race/gender combo can get higher/lower max jump. if lower, they would bug report, flame the forums until it was fixed. if higher, they may just sit on that info until they can figure out how to 'build around' it. because having a higher jump than what is normally allowed, may have unknown advantages making it worth 'building around'. i suppose we could have that same discussion without bringing bugs into it, just by reflecting upon the fact that even with a modest jump score, it's already still too easy to find safe spots and perches in a large percentage of total quest content. fair. but i have no idea how i would go about interpreting that kind of data, since i don't know how much of that is against ToS or the dev's intention.

I will concede that most aspects of the game are murky. However, some addition to the game are so much more powerful than their contemporaries that it's hard to see it as anything but deliberate. It's hard to say that inquisitve was anything close to balanced when it came out. The devs obviously had the data that would've shown that that ranged style would be much more powerful than the other ranged styles. They have a lot more information on hand then we do, especially because they also have their agendas, which for the most part, we can only speculate about. Most of the players pointed out how much more powerful inquisitive would be compared to the other ranged styles, which means that just the information we were given was enough to predict a clear difference in performance. And of course, the devs are human, just like us, so there is always the benefit of the doubt. However, when you have to nerf every aspect of that ranged style, it makes me wonder how big of a "mistake" (if the players want to call it that) one person has to make before the other person has to wonder if it isn't intentional.


which is true, and it's fair to point out. however, i would find it hard to believe, going by just the limited number of "good" monk players i've personally known, that most players would decide this. in the unlikely event that most players did decide that monks are in a rut, i would examine why it was posited in such a way, and if i concluded that literally none of the players playing monk were actually utilizing the class to its full potential, i would have no choice but to conclude that the class was designed poorly. and that it would need an overhaul in order to justify continuing to offer access to the class for real life coppers.

True, but such a change would be better left as a QoL change rather than a balance one. As I've said above, balance changes should address potential vs potential, because it is the players' skill that brings out said potential. The QoL changes would just make it so that most players have an easier time utilizing a decent amount of that potential, and I'm all for QoL changes. What I mean is that if the monk would need to be overhauled because of general handling difficulty, then the ideal scenario would be to make changes such that the ceiling remains at the same height but the floor is raised by an amount deemed appropriate.


i didn't mean i agree with how they handled monk nerfs, or any nerfs in particular. i only meant it was humorous to consider how monkcher was forced out of the limelight, only to be replaced by the next thing, and then the next, ad nauseam. buff/nerf cycles keep the meta moving. otherwise we wouldn't have the range of diversity which is a hallmark of D&D. it's true that it often feels like putting balance behind "balance", where offering overprefomance for straight cash can kill the buzz... but without some turn-around, all classes and builds would be left in a static power relationship, the "hierarchy of classes" focused on keeping everything where it is, without a chance to bring anything up from the bottom, or move the top builds down so others can have a chance to shine. this obviously muddies the definition of balance, and also leaves a bad feeling in my mouth when using the term in such a way.

Well yes, we are talking about relative rankings here, and I agree that the META should not go unchallenged and unchanged, but there is a difference between having builds/classes that are so much better than the alternatives that everyone is using them and having builds/classes that are better than the alternatives to a degree that while some players are using them as the META, the majority of the players can still play what they enjoy without feeling that they offer very little to the party if they aren't pandering to that META.


but if you start with all 15 classes being not-very balanced at all, and every so often offer an update which attempts to bring a little more balance than before, eventually players will come to recognize that every update, every patch, offers a healthier, more fair and workable game space, for everyone. at least ideally.

That only really works if the changes you make to the classes (and the addition of new classes) don't make them exceedingly more powerful than the others. Otherwise all you've really done is changed the position on the totem without bringing the power levels (for lack of a better term) closer to each other. I dabble in idealism myself, because as a giant purple man once said "reality is often disappointing".


yes. and may i put that in my sig? thank you ;)

Seems like you already have.


quite right. but even those with a height disadvantage may play DDO and shouldn't necessarily be ignored. the water may come up to my chest, but my friend in a wheel-chair would be drowning if he tried to stand beside me. my opinions aren't right, and his wrong, just because i can breath easier with my height.

I'm not saying they should be ignored, nor am I saying that anyone's opinions are wrong. What I'm saying is that the complaints of the person in the wheelchair (to address your addition to my analogy) is best considered with a different question in mind. If I ask "how are the people handling the height of the waves" then the person in the wheelchair would serve as a data point. In fact, I am wholly in support of accessibility features for the game (we could always use more), as I know that there are real-life complications that make it difficult for some people to play the game.


but you know, it isn't just fire sorcs who can press one button to complete a quest. if that really is a source of satisfaction for some, they actually have ample opportunities to build for that level of play. but, what i meant by enjoyment, wasn't so much that every ability and action necessarily needs be enjoyable for everyone. merely, if it works the way it was designed, that it should be enjoyable to those who use it. that seems a small distinction, allow me to expound by analogy: you are a baker. purveyor of delicious baked goods. in the first instance, you attempt to force every patron to eat chocolate-chip cookies, because you believe that chocolate-chip cookies will be enjoyable. obviously this will fail. in the second instance, you attempt to make chocolate-chip cookies, which when consumed by those who have selected them, will be enjoyable. this may not always succeed, but you'll do much better business.

Right. That's why we have different classes. Using your analogy, the classes are like the cookies. There will obviously be classes/cookies that I will prefer over others. Regardless of how well a baker makes oatmeal raisin cookies, I'm not more likely to eat one, although I may eat one to shake things up a bit.


oh, yeah i didn't mean you were actually begging on behalf of monks. i should have said hypothetical beg thread. apologies.

Well, my contention had more to do with the lack of relevance of that comment, funnily enough. I mean, does talking about CaF have any bearing on a hypothetical beg thread for monks? Probably not, although one can't deny that monks might be using that ability. CaF would still have relevance to balance though, and definitely to the Divine Crusader destiny. However, I think it is best to use the microscope approach. Start large, with the whole picture, looking at how close the ideal performance of the classes measure up to each other, and narrow down to abilities and aspects that make certain classes outliers. Also, we should see how classes would act without such abilities. if the class would still be overpowered without CaF, that doesn't mean that CaF shouldn't be adjusted, but it does mean that the problem is likely rooted deeper than just an epic ability.


how would anyone known anything about any ability? by using it. playtesting. exhaustive playtesting. if you find that CaF, boulders might, momentum swing, and celestial mandate, all behave in the same way... that is, a cleave-like ability which overwrites your normal attack animations, hits multiple targets, and has a +w component, but only CaF has no cooldown.... you know that it will always do more dps, not just to a group, but even a raid boss. because no cooldown + ignores normal attack animations is a recipe for very very delicious cookies indeed.

Depends on the other aspects of those other abilities and how they interact with each other. If each one has a short cooldown and they add things other than +[W], like crit range/multi, etc., then an in-depth analysis and comparison would have to be done, and I'd be less inclined to say definitively that CaF is superior. Though I will concede that the lack of a cooldown for CaF makes me lean initially to the idea that that ability is superior. Good thing we don't always go with our gut feeling, right? :D


i mean, i know DDO can feel like a never ending social experiment. but at the end of the day, it's still just a game.

Anything can be a social experiment if you try hard enough :p


all data is meaningful, we just have to find where to put it, in order to find its relevance. hard data and raw facts are great. thoughts an opinions aren't all that bad either. not really.

All data is meaningful, and at the same time meaningless, because at the end of the day, it is the observer who assigns significance to the data. The reason relevance is important is because without it, it becomes much harder to see the connections between the discreet pieces of data and information that manifest. I say this as a person who peruses the internet for random knowledge that is often not relevant for daily activity. :D


but its the poetry of DDO i'm interested in. even if it's got a lot of numbers strewn about it.

The scientific pursuit, much like the pursuit of poetic expression, has its own form of beauty. :)


levity adds to all manner of meaningful discourse. i'm not trying to win any internet points. you can have them all. :)

But what do I buy with these points? :confused:

[Tilomere]

Instead of quantifying inputs, you can just look at resulting XP/sec. One stat to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.

If "whatevers" really is valuable, it will be reflected in the xp report. :)

[ggmarquez]

What I meant was that just doing a numerical comparison on damage doesn't provide all of the necessary details that would indicate whether or not something needs to be changed. Let's say that there was an ability that did 5 times the damage of any other ability in the game. Now let's say that you could only use this ability once per rest. If we were just looking at the damage than it would appear as if we should reduce the damage of the ability, without factoring in the fact that you can only use that ability once per rest and therefore can't spam it.

right. but then we would need to evaluate the interactions between the ability with 5x damage, and other boosts, from enhancement trees, feats and ED's to determine if there was the potential for abuse. like, adrenaline + melee power action boost + prowess + whatever else, and the result is the ability to kill mamma hound without charming the puppies in hox with nothing more than a single, once per rest ability, abused to one-shot a raid boss. which is exactly what happened with adrenaline, and why they changed hox that first time, after ED's came out.


What I was pointing out was that you can still build around such a concept. In fact, you could build around such a concept and be decent in other areas. Will you have the best build in the game? Probably not, but I think it's better to not set hasty generalizations like merely "building around" something as a benchmark for determining that something needs to change. If I saw most people building around summons, then perhaps that's grounds for investigation, but the mere act of building around summons should not be concerning or indicative of some broken mechanic.

yes, you 'can' build around silly things... like jump. i've seen it done. someone went through the trouble of building a max jump character, even knowing it was useless. then there's that famous max swim build... but that only serves as an illustration of how heavy-handed the game itself is, when penalizing characters for being built around any of the myriad features and abilities which have no tangible benefits inside of quests.


Whether or not something is worth building around really depends on the person.

snake blood. i don't think i really need to explain this one, but nobody builds around snake blood. it's a feat. we all know it, some people even take it, usually for role-play purposes. but nobody builds around it. it doesn't depend on the person. at least, not entirely.


I will concede that most aspects of the game are murky. However, some addition to the game are so much more powerful than their contemporaries that it's hard to see it as anything but deliberate. It's hard to say that inquisitve was anything close to balanced when it came out. The devs obviously had the data that would've shown that that ranged style would be much more powerful than the other ranged styles. They have a lot more information on hand then we do, especially because they also have their agendas, which for the most part, we can only speculate about. Most of the players pointed out how much more powerful inquisitive would be compared to the other ranged styles, which means that just the information we were given was enough to predict a clear difference in performance. And of course, the devs are human, just like us, so there is always the benefit of the doubt. However, when you have to nerf every aspect of that ranged style, it makes me wonder how big of a "mistake" (if the players want to call it that) one person has to make before the other person has to wonder if it isn't intentional.

i don't think they nerfed 'every aspect' of inquisitive. draw distance was left alone... infinite still, i presume. reload animations and attack speed scaling with bab untouched. movement speed while kiting was also unchanged. i could go on...

yes, inquisitive was powerful, and became pretty popular. and they reigned it in, and now it's less powerful and less popular. but i still use the inquisitive tree, run some lives and alts as inquisitive, and i still see inqui's around. so whatever changes they made seem to have worked toward a level of 'balance' perhaps already achieved. at least for now.


Well yes, we are talking about relative rankings here, and I agree that the META should not go unchallenged and unchanged, but there is a difference between having builds/classes that are so much better than the alternatives that everyone is using them and having builds/classes that are better than the alternatives to a degree that while some players are using them as the META, the majority of the players can still play what they enjoy without feeling that they offer very little to the party if they aren't pandering to that META.

right. inquisitive was just a single data point, on a long line of similar points, which draw an arrow. the arrow points forward, toward the newest class or universal tree, and indicates a trend. warlock, alchemist, horizon walker and whatever else to come down the pipe-line... it's all going to be a continuation of this trend. money moves the meta. because if warm feelings and a sense of pride in work well-done could keep a business running, we would all be living in the lap of luxury already.


That only really works if the changes you make to the classes (and the addition of new classes) don't make them exceedingly more powerful than the others. Otherwise all you've really done is changed the position on the totem without bringing the power levels (for lack of a better term) closer to each other. I dabble in idealism myself, because as a giant purple man once said "reality is often disappointing".

yes, perhaps. but it looks like the design goal is to re-establish 'balance' within the class's that already exist, determine if anything needs adjustment, then release the new thing at a level ahead of everything else, no only to drive sales, but to shake up the meta. then repeat the process with every new class or design feature, creating meta cycles which stimulate sales and invigorate the current game climate.

whether this is good or bad is for each player themselves to decide.


I'm not saying they should be ignored, nor am I saying that anyone's opinions are wrong. What I'm saying is that the complaints of the person in the wheelchair (to address your addition to my analogy) is best considered with a different question in mind. If I ask "how are the people handling the height of the waves" then the person in the wheelchair would serve as a data point. In fact, I am wholly in support of accessibility features for the game (we could always use more), as I know that there are real-life complications that make it difficult for some people to play the game.

this is really the crux of almost every argument involving balance. a very long time ago, in a very different game, i played with a man who had lost a hand, and two finger on the other. he was a good fella' and had a wonderful disposition, even-keeled with a fine sense of humor. a joy to play with, at all times. but his physical stature put him at a disadvantage when it came to game-play. i wouldn't have traded all my experience and time spent with that particular person, even for the best player or the highest rated, despite it being a highly competitive pvp game.

when someone button mashes, or uses a single ability to overcome all in-game challenges... it could be for physical reasons. or any number of reasons beyond our comprehension or their control. so it's hard for me to criticize anyone who plays a certain way, and it's equally difficult to justify using the sort of language i've often encounter here, when requesting changes to certain play-styles. being insensitive is uncool.

but you know... that friend of mine did more with 3 fingers than i ever would have believed. and he didn't complain about his disadvantage. he played as well as he could, and made everyone around him aware that he loved it. both the game, and the challenge it represented, especially with his handicap.

i don't think we need to see the game brought down, to the benefit of a few who otherwise would have a harder time. but i also don't think we should ignore the fact that not every one will have the ability or opportunity to fully utilize any class or feature to its maximum potential.


Right. That's why we have different classes. Using your analogy, the classes are like the cookies. There will obviously be classes/cookies that I will prefer over others. Regardless of how well a baker makes oatmeal raisin cookies, I'm not more likely to eat one, although I may eat one to shake things up a bit.

just so. i would go even further and suggest that every feature inside of the game is a cookie. if any part of the game experience leaves a bad flavor in the mouth or mind of the player, the baker needs to know. it's hard to bake a better cookie without that level of feedback.


Depends on the other aspects of those other abilities and how they interact with each other. If each one has a short cooldown and they add things other than +[W], like crit range/multi, etc., then an in-depth analysis and comparison would have to be done, and I'd be less inclined to say definitively that CaF is superior. Though I will concede that the lack of a cooldown for CaF makes me lean initially to the idea that that ability is superior. Good thing we don't always go with our gut feeling, right? :D

yes, well... gut feeling works well when theory-crafting. play-testing doesn't let your gut get away with very much. when something is working better than it should, you know. because you've already been using it, and learned to abuse it, even if that wasn't your initial intent.


All data is meaningful, and at the same time meaningless, because at the end of the day, it is the observer who assigns significance to the data. The reason relevance is important is because without it, it becomes much harder to see the connections between the discreet pieces of data and information that manifest. I say this as a person who peruses the internet for random knowledge that is often not relevant for daily activity. :D

right. i was replying to those remarks, in that manner, because you seemed so willing to dismiss what you considered irrelevant. relevance is difficult to determine, and it would be a shame to throw away a large portion of accumulated data, only to discover, at a later time, that it wasn't so irrelevant after all.


But what do I buy with these points? :confused:

you know, i'm not really sure, myself. some people really care about those things though, for some reason. like, they check in which foursquare and it really matters to them how many 'likes' they get on their facebook page. :shrugs:

[ggmarquez]

Instead of quantifying inputs, you can just look at resulting XP/sec. One stat to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.

If "whatevers" really is valuable, it will be reflected in the xp report. :)

but what if i'm running 6 accounts in an end game raid, using exploit builds? the xp report will probably show a relatively longer completion time, since i'm soloing. but at the same time, i'm using features in a way that they were not designed to be used.

[Tuxedoman96]

right. but then we would need to evaluate the interactions between the ability with 5x damage, and other boosts, from enhancement trees, feats and ED's to determine if there was the potential for abuse. like, adrenaline + melee power action boost + prowess + whatever else, and the result is the ability to kill mamma hound without charming the puppies in hox with nothing more than a single, once per rest ability, abused to one-shot a raid boss. which is exactly what happened with adrenaline, and why they changed hox that first time, after ED's came out.

That's what I said before. That's what I meant by not looking at the abilities in a vacuum.


yes, you 'can' build around silly things... like jump. i've seen it done. someone went through the trouble of building a max jump character, even knowing it was useless. then there's that famous max swim build... but that only serves as an illustration of how heavy-handed the game itself is, when penalizing characters for being built around any of the myriad features and abilities which have no tangible benefits inside of quests.

Not sure what your point is here. I was simply stating that your initial definition of an overpowered ability/build was too general to really distinguish between those that are OP and those that aren't.


snake blood. i don't think i really need to explain this one, but nobody builds around snake blood. it's a feat.

That's a misleading example, because you are looking at one particular feat rather than a concept. Of course no one is going to build around Snake Blood because there's simply not enough other aspects that are related to it to build a concept around. With the building around summons example I gave, you're not just taking one summon spells; you are acquiring a myriad of summoning abilities and feats and enhancements and items to improve upon that idea. Power Attack is a good example of a feat you can build around precisely because there are so many abilities that are related to it. You have at least 2 stacking enhancements for increasing the damage of the feat, one enhancement that adds damage to ranged that increases with bonuses to PA, and an epic enhancement that increases your weapon dice multiplier when you have PA activated. Now is this OP? Can't really say for sure, but I can say that there would probably be more people building around Snake Blood if there were other abilities that were connected to it.


we all know it, some people even take it, usually for role-play purposes.

People building around a concept for flavor doesn't actual refute my point.


but nobody builds around it. it doesn't depend on the person. at least, not entirely.

I never said that it depends entirely on the person, but you can't deny that the whims of the player plays a part in what they design, and that's what I was getting at.


i don't think they nerfed 'every aspect' of inquisitive. draw distance was left alone... infinite still, i presume. reload animations and attack speed scaling with bab untouched. movement speed while kiting was also unchanged. i could go on...

You're right. May I then amend my statement to several key aspects of the combat style? They nerfed the number of dice (damage), they nerfed the ranged power scaling (damage), they nerfed the benefit from doubleshot (RoF), and they nerfed IPS (which hit the other ranged styles). Having to nerf more than one factor of the ranged style makes me doubt that the tree was pushed out with the intention of balance or even "slightly better" in mind. It's also not like they couldn't have known that that ranged style would be vastly superior to the other ranged styles. They not only had the math pointed out by the players, they had the lamannia preview for player playtesting, and more importantly, they have their own internal testing to show how inquisitive would fare. That said, I do wish that they kept the lamannia servers up more often for play-testing, but I understand from a financial point of view why they don't.


yes, inquisitive was powerful, and became pretty popular. and they reigned it in, and now it's less powerful and less popular. but i still use the inquisitive tree, run some lives and alts as inquisitive, and i still see inqui's around. so whatever changes they made seem to have worked toward a level of 'balance' perhaps already achieved. at least for now.

You're not getting my point. I'm saying that the tree didn't have to be so much more powerful than the alternatives, and furthermore, that so many nerfs shouldn't have happened at once, or at the very least the tree should have been introduced in such a way that so many nerfs wouldn't have needed to be made all at once. I'm saying this as a guy that didn't play inquisitive when it first came out by the way. The problem is a matter of principle. How is anyone to know that the classes are being balanced appropriately if they are immediately recognized as overpowered when they are put on the shelves and then several different parts of it are nerfed all at once? And keep in mind, when I'm talking about overpowered, I'm not talking about merely "better than everything else"; I'm talking about "so much better than everything else that you'd only be playing any 'competing' alternative for flavor" (competing here referring to the styles that fall under the same umbrella, so I wouldn't compare inquisitive to THF for example).


right. inquisitive was just a single data point, on a long line of similar points, which draw an arrow. the arrow points forward, toward the newest class or universal tree, and indicates a trend. warlock, alchemist, horizon walker and whatever else to come down the pipe-line... it's all going to be a continuation of this trend. money moves the meta. because if warm feelings and a sense of pride in work well-done could keep a business running, we would all be living in the lap of luxury already.

yes, perhaps. but it looks like the design goal is to re-establish 'balance' within the class's that already exist, determine if anything needs adjustment, then release the new thing at a level ahead of everything else, no only to drive sales, but to shake up the meta. then repeat the process with every new class or design feature, creating meta cycles which stimulate sales and invigorate the current game climate.

whether this is good or bad is for each player themselves to decide.

You say that as if there aren't any people that would purchase such things for the sake of having a different playstyle to explore. Also, I know that money moves the meta. That much is apparent. But the meta should (and does) exist for the power-gamers, and those players would gravitate to the new meta even if the next best thing is only marginally better, because it'll still be the most effective. There's no reason why players that just want to contribute to the party should feel the need to hop onto the meta to be useful. That only breeds ill sentiment in said players. There's no way that sending out an OP class/tree wasn't going to annoy the players that want to contribute in their group, and there's no way that nerfing so many aspects of said class/tree at once wasn't going to aggravate anyone who was using it for fun or profit (or both). And then there are those who are annoyed by the whole process because it looks dubious and underhanded.


this is really the crux of almost every argument involving balance. a very long time ago, in a very different game, i played with a man who had lost a hand, and two finger on the other. he was a good fella' and had a wonderful disposition, even-keeled with a fine sense of humor. a joy to play with, at all times. but his physical stature put him at a disadvantage when it came to game-play. i wouldn't have traded all my experience and time spent with that particular person, even for the best player or the highest rated, despite it being a highly competitive pvp game.

when someone button mashes, or uses a single ability to overcome all in-game challenges... it could be for physical reasons. or any number of reasons beyond our comprehension or their control. so it's hard for me to criticize anyone who plays a certain way, and it's equally difficult to justify using the sort of language i've often encounter here, when requesting changes to certain play-styles. being insensitive is uncool.

The forums could always stand to be a little more civil.


but you know... that friend of mine did more with 3 fingers than i ever would have believed. and he didn't complain about his disadvantage. he played as well as he could, and made everyone around him aware that he loved it. both the game, and the challenge it represented, especially with his handicap.

i don't think we need to see the game brought down, to the benefit of a few who otherwise would have a harder time. but i also don't think we should ignore the fact that not every one will have the ability or opportunity to fully utilize any class or feature to its maximum potential.

That's the whole purpose of QoL fixes and accessibility changes I would think.


just so. i would go even further and suggest that every feature inside of the game is a cookie. if any part of the game experience leaves a bad flavor in the mouth or mind of the player, the baker needs to know. it's hard to bake a better cookie without that level of feedback.

I think the communication on both sides needs to be improved. I've read other players mention that the devs here are much better than in other mmos, and I don't dispute that, but "better" is not the same as "good".


yes, well... gut feeling works well when theory-crafting. play-testing doesn't let your gut get away with very much. when something is working better than it should, you know. because you've already been using it, and learned to abuse it, even if that wasn't your initial intent.

Theory-crafting works fine when you have a lot of information. At the very least, if you can see that something is overpowered in the theory-crafting stages then it will very likely be overpowered in play-testing. I usually reserve judgement for determining that something is underwhelming though, as we usually aren't told what is supposed to work with what (although in that case the true power comes from the combination of abilities rather than the individual abilities themselves).


right. i was replying to those remarks, in that manner, because you seemed so willing to dismiss what you considered irrelevant. relevance is difficult to determine, and it would be a shame to throw away a large portion of accumulated data, only to discover, at a later time, that it wasn't so irrelevant after all.

It's not that I'm "dismissive" of that information so much as it is that I think that such information would be better addressed with a different question and under different parameters. Deciding that data is irrelevant to a certain question or topic is not the same as deciding that data is irrelevant to all questions and topics. It's also not the same as throwing it out. I experiment in the game all the time, often acquiring information that wasn't necessarily related to what I was originally testing out (that's how I found out that extending a spell extends the duration of "Feigned Health", for example). That still doesn't make the information I collected relevant to my initial question. I believe you are equating relevance to importance when they are not the same thing.

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

Every time I post on this forum I am reminded of why I rarely post on this forum, there are always those people who feel the need to respond with unsolicited "advice" (snark) in order to attempt to make themselves look better by putting down others.

I completely agree - every time I post to these forums I feel like I get hazed for having an opinion which is opposite everyone else's 'how dare I post it.' Someone actually said as a reaction to one of my posts they'd be embarrassed to me me in real life because of something I posted here. Talk about anti-social. I often have to psych myself up to participate here on these forums. I still do because I love DDO and feel protective of it. But I have to be honest, the way the community spits bile and ire, it makes me feel as if I'd be better off not.

I agree with you by the way, the nerf to the cool down of MS was not warranted. People don't realize that even with very high DCs in legendary Reaper content just about all the mobs make their reflex saving throws and take 0 damage from lower level spells. So the lvl 8 and 9 spells are the only effective ones - MS particularly because the bludgeon effect is not subject to a save, so it does dmg regardless when mobs save vs the fire and take 0 dmg. But you NEED to spam spells quickly to do any DPS at all, and most of the mobs in the newer RL/SHARN/FW content save anyway and have improved evasion.

I suspect, on a blackboard somewhere at SSG there is, written in white chalk, 'ABN: Always Be Nerfing.'
and Glengarry Glen Ross is playing on autoloop on a VHS player in a conference room there because 'Coffee is for Nerfers'

[Tebaco]

Dear SSG

Fire sorcs have already had 2 nerfs again recently, the belt and the Max Level, please reconsider the cooldown nerf. It's not so much the DPS loss, it's the fact that it's completely messed with the spell rotation. If you want to spam DPS, you could go Meteor Swarm, Delayed Blast Fireball, Fireball, maybe Scorch depending on how fast you can spam keys, then back to Meteor Swarm, etc. Now there's still a good 2 seconds on MS and there are no other viable fire spells to put into the rotation without SLAs which will cost you 9 APs. Pretty please reconsider, it's painful having to twiddle your thumbs in between spell rotations. I accept having to do that on my wizzy's neg spells but this really shouldn't be a thing on a DPS caster :(

I have same feeling like you. And my solution for this is just stop playing game.
I tried it after the first nerf. It was playable but significant nerf. I used lot of more spell points. But after next patch when meteor swarm cooldown was nerfed it become unplayable. I checked spell list what add or change but there is no room for changes. Class fire sorc is broken now. And i am off the game. Good luck and have fun all.

[Lafshmaf]

I completely agree - every time I post to these forums I feel like I get hazed for having an opinion which is opposite everyone else's 'how dare I post it.' Someone actually said as a reaction to one of my posts they'd be embarrassed to me me in real life because of something I posted here. Talk about anti-social. I often have to psych myself up to participate here on these forums. I still do because I love DDO and feel protective of it. But I have to be honest, the way the community spits bile and ire, it makes me feel as if I'd be better off not.

I agree with you by the way, the nerf to the cool down of MS was not warranted. People don't realize that even with very high DCs in legendary Reaper content just about all the mobs make their reflex saving throws and take 0 damage from lower level spells. So the lvl 8 and 9 spells are the only effective ones - MS particularly because the bludgeon effect is not subject to a save, so it does dmg regardless when mobs save vs the fire and take 0 dmg. But you NEED to spam spells quickly to do any DPS at all, and most of the mobs in the newer RL/SHARN/FW content save anyway and have improved evasion.

I suspect, on a blackboard somewhere at SSG there is, written in white chalk, 'ABN: Always Be Nerfing.'
and Glengarry Glen Ross is playing on autoloop on a VHS player in a conference room there because 'Coffee is for Nerfers'

You are posting in a public forum which is frequented by all kinds of people with differing opinions. If you are looking for universal agreement or praise, ask, I don't know, your mother maybe? Also, I suspect you are an adult, so at some point in your life you possibly should have learned how to face adversity.

[Nimdeadlee]

You are posting in a public forum which is frequented by all kinds of people with differing opinions. If you are looking for universal agreement or praise, ask, I don't know, your mother maybe? Also, I suspect you are an adult, so at some point in your life you possibly should have learned how to face adversity.

Is it too much to expect rational, logical arguments in discourse rather than belligerent ad hominems? You know, like adults should have learnt at some point in their life.

I guess so.

[Lafshmaf]

Is it too much to expect rational, logical arguments in discourse rather than belligerent ad hominems? You know, like adults should have learnt at some point in their life.

I guess so.

and tarnish the purpose of this account? Nah.

You are wrong though, while confrontational, there is no ad hominem here. If you understood what that really means, you would see it. But I write it out for you more clearly.

a) poster complains people are not compliant with his opinions and voice just that => argument: it is not reasonable to expect everyone to comply with your opinion, it is completely normal for a diverse audience to differ from yours.
b) parents are - not always - but very often, very supportive and will support your opinion
c) a very important aspect of growing up is understanding the world is not compliant to your wishes and your opinions are not always going unchallenged. It can be expected of an adult to have learned that lesson, otherwise he can be considered immature still.

now go and learn more about those cool discussion related terms you can bring up on the internet. kthanxbye.