Lost Souls

[Tianie]

When in reaper mode, lost souls drop.
I normally play melee, and a sometimes end up clicking on these, when try to click on a bag or rem.
Because of this, I propose a change.
First make lost souls, like bags and such, where everyone can click on them, and they stays for everyone (i.e. everyone gets its).
Lower the SPs recovered to balance that more will be available, and add +2MP, RP, MRR, PRR, and AC for 1 minute, stackable.
This will make them useful for all players, and maybe balance a little in favor for melees.

[Jerevth]

It always struck me that Lost Souls were coded specifically to strike a balance when there were multiple players running the quest; it requires awareness of the others' SPs and teamwork. (Or trolls).

In this instance, "U" or backspace to hardtarget the bag, verify the target, then collect.
At least when Reapers were envisioned and rolled out :cool:

[Tianie]

hmmmm, thought this would get more comments.

[Blerk]

hmmmm, thought this would get more comments.

It's a good idea. I mainly play a melee, combat is fast-paced and I tend to click a lot while fighting. Sometimes that means I accidentally take lost souls that should have been for the party's casters.

People are generally good humoured about it but I'd prefer the game made it harder for these mistakes to occur. So long as any change doesn't mean it becomes a chore for the people who should be using them.

[slarden]

hmmmm, thought this would get more comments.

It's a good idea it just depends on the details. Right now parties typically might have a caster and healer primarily using the lost souls - so 2 of 6 members taking most lost souls. So if they make them bags that drop for everyone, how much is the reduction? It could end up being worse than losing a few lost souls to accidental misclicks if the lost soul rate is dropped to 1/party members * current rate. It would also mean builds that don't use SP for offense have effectively an unlimited mana pool for healing. Not sure if that is good or bad. All that would have to be worked out and balanced and with all the things on the dev to-do list I am guessing they won't have the time to work through all those changes over a few misclicks.

I mean there are a few people on Sarlona that go out of their way to pick up every lost soul they can for reasons unknown without regard to other party members, but most people don't do that and a few accidental misclicks is just not significant during a week of questing.

[Jaxtan]

Perhaps an easier to implement work around would be a UI option to ignore lost souls? That way non SP types could not accidentally click on and consume them. Another option might be if your SP pool is full and you click on a lost soul you do not consume it. If you don’t have any SP, you wouldn’t consume it. Would also prevent accidental over consumption by minor SP types.

[Jerevth]

Perhaps an easier to implement work around would be a UI option to ignore lost souls? That way non SP types could not accidentally click on and consume them. Another option might be if your SP pool is full and you click on a lost soul you do not consume it. If you don’t have any SP, you wouldn’t consume it. Would also prevent accidental over consumption by minor SP types.

SP pool will usually have something in it because of guild buffs.
An ignore selector might be good, though.

It's a decent QOL request to avoid unwanted grabs.
I never ran into the issue because my presets are "combat first" which avoids clicking items while swinging, and I'm of the habit of clicking "U" to grab something I want specifically (Lessons from running "Spinner" when trying to grab the shards). My way isn't everyone's way, though.

[OfElectricMen]

No. That's a terrible idea. Be more careful where you click.

[Redtalktree]

No. That's a terrible idea. Be more careful where you click.


Ditto on that too, lost souls are a bonus on reaper, dont need to add extras to a useable system, you only gonna balls it up, more features = more bugs= more lag = more balls up.

LEAVE IT ALONE

[Zretch]

I've said it before, Lost Souls are a bad fix for a fundamental balance issue in reaper. The issue is that damage spells are scaled down, but damage spell costs are kept the same. Incoming party damage is scaled up, heal spell effects are scaled down, and the cost of heal spells are kept the same. CC duration is scaled down, but the cost of CC spells are kept the same. This means that casters, and only casters, need to spend more resources to perform the same job in reaper that they performed in elite. Rather than have "power balls" drop like this is some kind of platform game, just scale the mana cost of spells down as the reaper skull levels are scaled up. Then you don't need lost souls at all and you can get rid of a kludgy design that has no place in anything that claims to be in the spirit of D&D.

[Blerk]

This means that casters, and only casters, need to spend more resources to perform the same job in reaper that they performed in elite.

I don't think this is accurate.

Firstly, provided your DCs are up to the task, on an instakiller you spend the same amount of SP in reaper that you do in elite. It's only when you reach the point that your failure rate increases that your SP costs go up. And of course, costs go up if you're soloing or for whatever other reason you are the person who also has to do the heavy lifting killing things that can't be instakilled. But not all casters are equally affected by this; even among damage based casters there are varying levels of efficiency.

Secondly, being a melee means doing decreased damage and spending more time in situations where monsters can damage you back, and this very much amounts to an increased use of resources - action boosts, other limited use abilities, defensive clickies and of course the hit points that are keeping them alive.

I find most of the melee vs casters back and forth on the forums to be very pointless and don't want to start another argument with people who can only see these balancing issues in terms of lobbying for themselves and keeping the other camp down. Not saying you are one of those people at all, just making some observations about the oversimplification in the claim that melees don't spend resources in harder content while only casters do.

[slarden]

I don't think this is accurate.

Firstly, provided your DCs are up to the task, on an instakiller you spend the same amount of SP in reaper that you do in elite. It's only when you reach the point that your failure rate increases that your SP costs go up. And of course, costs go up if you're soloing or for whatever other reason you are the person who also has to do the heavy lifting killing things that can't be instakilled. But not all casters are equally affected by this; even among damage based casters there are varying levels of efficiency.

Secondly, being a melee means doing decreased damage and spending more time in situations where monsters can damage you back, and this very much amounts to an increased use of resources - action boosts, other limited use abilities, defensive clickies and of course the hit points that are keeping them alive.

I find most of the melee vs casters back and forth on the forums to be very pointless and don't want to start another argument with people who can only see these balancing issues in terms of lobbying for themselves and keeping the other camp down. Not saying you are one of those people at all, just making some observations about the oversimplification in the claim that melees don't spend resources in harder content while only casters do.

For pure DC casting I think it's somewhere in between but still costs more as you move up skulls. You are right that if you have a high enough DC it's just as effective on R10 as elite, but in my experience across the full selection of level 30+ quest it's never going to be the case and U51 lowered the top end #s a bit. Some enemies are harder to hit and your DCs aren't effective and you have to instead rely on enemy save knowledge.

In addition, despair reapers are a big problem. You have to land spells before the aura goes off. There are fewer useful spells that work on mobs when a despair is up.

With despairs and dooms you want to dps them asap. Vengeance reapers you want to fear or hold. And as far as dps that does scale with skull and there is no question more spell points are needed as you move up skulls.

I agree on the melee clickies. Dropping smaller amounts of clicky recharges would be a good thing for melee and ranged. But normally I find I have enough I just have to use the shrine more as a martial character.

[Zretch]

I don't think this is accurate.

Firstly, provided your DCs are up to the task, on an instakiller you spend the same amount of SP in reaper that you do in elite. It's only when you reach the point that your failure rate increases that your SP costs go up. And of course, costs go up if you're soloing or for whatever other reason you are the person who also has to do the heavy lifting killing things that can't be instakilled. But not all casters are equally affected by this; even among damage based casters there are varying levels of efficiency.

Secondly, being a melee means doing decreased damage and spending more time in situations where monsters can damage you back, and this very much amounts to an increased use of resources - action boosts, other limited use abilities, defensive clickies and of course the hit points that are keeping them alive.

I find most of the melee vs casters back and forth on the forums to be very pointless and don't want to start another argument with people who can only see these balancing issues in terms of lobbying for themselves and keeping the other camp down. Not saying you are one of those people at all, just making some observations about the oversimplification in the claim that melees don't spend resources in harder content while only casters do.

You can't insta-kill about 1/3 of champs in the game, you can't insta-kill orange named mobs in epics, you can't insta-kill bosses or reapers. But let's stop nit-picking and just admit that casters are far more impacted by their spells being watered down as skull levels rising then melee/ranged are by their damage being watered down. The difference between a caster being OOM and a melee/ranged being out of action boosts isn't comparable. There's a reason lost souls exist in the game, because devs saw that casters would struggle with mana in reaper. There's a reason epic defensive fighting exists in the game, because devs saw that melee struggled with incoming damage in reaper. My point isn't that melee or ranged or casters are better, my point was that lost souls are a bad fix to a reaper mechanic that impacts casters due to their dependence on mana as a resource, and my suggested fix did not increase caster DPS, increase caster capability, increase caster DCs, or increase caster power in normal/hard/elite difficulties.

Sure, some people try to self-serve their own interests. Some other people miss the point of what's being said.

[Ganak]

If recalled correctly, the introduction of lost souls at the launch of reaper was to mitigate the impact to casters (spell point consumers) in this new jump of difficulty (at that time). Many years later, would it be too out of whack to suggest lost souls are irrelevant to completing reaper quests on the whole? Perhaps convert from SP boost to HP boosts as melee seem so much more disadvantaged in the modern game. :D

The idea to generalize them is a good one. Win for all :)

[slarden]

If recalled correctly, the introduction of lost souls at the launch of reaper was to mitigate the impact to casters (spell point consumers) in this new jump of difficulty (at that time). Many years later, would it be too out of whack to suggest lost souls are irrelevant to completing reaper quests on the whole? Perhaps convert from SP boost to HP boosts as melee seem so much more disadvantaged in the modern game. :D

The idea to generalize them is a good one. Win for all :)

Speaking of lobbying for favored builds and against other builds...

A few things here. As someone that mostly runs melees in R10s and push reaper raiding (to the tiny extent it's even done on Sarlona) melee's aren't at a disadvantage - still have much better dps and while the loss of meld hurts characters with few reaper pts/hp for sure, it's not proven to be a big deal for me. Prior to U51 raid leaders wanted at most 1 caster - maybe 2 for a few raids like killing time or THTH so the balance problem was actually that the opposite. If they took more casters it was usually a decrease in party dps and could result in a lower skull.

It really frustrated me that I couldn't bring my casters to reaper raiding especially and get my chance for items with reaper bonuses. With U51 martial builds (e.g., melee and archers) are still preferred for dps slots, but taking a few more casters isn't as big of a deal which is a good thing. I mean even on LH public raids I led we would sometimes get 7-8 casters and really struggle with dps prior to U51. I sometimes dropped LOB difficulty to LN if we had too many casters and dps was bad in VOD (which typically was the case with too many casters).

As far as lost souls they would need to implement some sort of cost and resource bar for martial dps similar to spell points if they wanted to remove the lost souls otherwise scaling up damage requirements really only requires resource problems for casters which doesn't make sense. If they want to make resource challenge part of R10 they need to add resource constraints on martial dps as well.

I do think adding a smaller amount of action boost recharge drops is a good thing, but the impact is by no means equivalent to the importance of lost souls. It's quite different for a caster where they are effectively useful without spell points so there is really no comparison point there.

Hp drops would be good for soloing more than anything else. In a balanced party it's completely unnecessary.