A Thread Which is Not about how Shadows Respond to Fire Spells

[Seanus]

1) Further reduce the rate of phasing (as Eladrin suggests he's doing) and the amount of time spent phased out.
2) Implement more spells that help deal these creatures (Corpse Candle, Ghost Trap, Incorporeal Nova).
3) Incorporate the 50% miss chance for spells that don't have the Force descriptor. Add methods to help address this ("Ghost touch" type metamagic, enhancements, or weapon modifiers).
4) Force most incorporeal creatures (those who don't have spring attack) to remain stationary for several seconds after they phase in.
5) Remove the portion of phasing that un-targets the creature.
6) Do not charge spell points for spells which are cast at invalid targets. (Change spells to "pay on completion," like you did with Lay on Hands, except in concentration-failure situations).

I think those are reasonable solutions, because each one of the aforementioned "fixes" isn't crippling to the creature. That, and I think it would be wise to incorporate more rules on how spellcasting affects the incorporeal creatures, to further elevate the challenge that they represent while still making them more manageable. Then, the incorporeal creatures aren't losing anything, and we'll quit complaining (for now, till something else inevitably comes up).

[llevenbaxx]

OK, where are they when they "phase out" in the middle of a room with no solid objects around to speak of?

[MysticTheurge]

OK, where are they when they "phase out" in the middle of a room with no solid objects around to speak of?

In the floor.

[Bogenbroom]

I have to mark one down for the camp that is *AGAINST* removing phasing creatures, but *FOR* augmenting the combat options for them.

I will repeat my position. The mixing of creatures that require different combat tactics is the beauty of Mod 5. It is how (or at least one way) they are addressing the issue of over-inflated enemies. You create the same level of difficulty with more reasonably powered creatures if you can't kill all of those creatures with the same big-boomer. It is something they've been doing a very nice job of since Ataraxia came out.

So "Yes" there needs to be a viable method for combating phasing creatures, but "No" they needn't vanish.

[MysticTheurge]

You create the same level of difficulty with more reasonably powered creatures if you can't kill all of those creatures with the same big-boomer. It is something they've been doing a very nice job of since Ataraxia came out.

There are slick ways of doing this and bad ways of doing it though.

This is the same philosophy that led to threnal's Slimes and Reavers combo.

[Sibyl]

I know I'd be lots happier if I could at least keep the silly creatures in my focus orb. It seems that when they remove themselves from combat (by phasing or burrowing, for example) they also disappear from my focus orb. Both click targeting and tab targeting took a turn for the worse in Module 5, and trying to re-target the same monster every few seconds is quite irritating when you have to click on them multiple times before they show up in your focus orb again.

Why do I need to have the monsters in my focus orb since I don't use auto-attack? Because if I blindly swing or fire arrows or cast spells in various directions, the game often picks the wrong target to apply them to (or the attacks don't land at all). The only way I know of to consistently get my attacks to land on the monster I want to hit is for that monster to be targeted in my focus orb.

I can only imagine the pain is even worse for those who use auto-attack instead of free swinging.

[Bogenbroom]

There are slick ways of doing this and bad ways of doing it though.

This is the same philosophy that led to threnal's Slimes and Reavers combo.

Indeed. And what I was referring to in Ataraxia is the Dwarves & Rusties combo. I agree in certain instances they can be aggravating, but I much prefer that to Uber-Reavers or Uber-Dwarves.

It is actually a step beyond the phasing issue. With the Reavers & Slimes combo you are prevented from using one method (by fear of equipment damage) rather than the situation with phasers where you may have to use two tactics simultaneously.

In my future-seeing-googles I forsee a time when we will end up with a mix of creatures where one of the creatures will actually feed off the easiest attack method for the other. Like mixing fire elementals with undead-phasers.

As much as the concept may give us the willies, I think for game play it is excellent. It creates (or forces) variety to game play methods. My opinion of course.

[Elthbert]

While it mentions both shadows and fire spells the following thread is not about how they respond to each other. Rather it is about how players respond to all incorporeal creatures and why. It's also about what can be done about that to improve the game. It has nothing to do with the changes from monday's patch.

Look guys, and by guys I mean Devs, here's the deal. The reason people use Wall of Fire on your undead is that they suck. We mostly use it on the incorporeal undead and here's why.

You can't cast spells on them. They phase out all the time and you waste your SPs on "not a valid target." I even tried casting some spells now that I have quicken. It still doesn't work. You either spam them, wasting about 75% of them and landing the rest, which is not good for your SPs, or you just give up on spells other than persistent AoE spells.

This problem is almost equally true for everyone else. Melee characters' best option is to stand around swinging at thin air hoping to catch them when they phase back in. Ranged characters have it easiest, relatively speaking, but given the problems inherent in Ranged attacks in DDO, that's not saying much. They also suffer from some of the same issues as everyone else, what with the things disappearing right out from under your arrows.

Wall of Fire on the other hand hits them every time they phase in. It's like you custom designed it for these super-annoying crappy-ass mobs. But then you get upset that people are just Wall of Fire-ing everything. But the problem, honestly, isn't Wall of Fire. It's the phasing.

People would still Wall of Fire if they didn't phase, but we wouldn't layer them and drag them all over. We also wouldn't be quite as upset when you just made things immune to Wall of Fire because there would be other valid, useful, reasonable tactics to use against them.

I know you've justified this phasing before by saying the things are intangibly sinking into the floor, and I've fired back with several reasons why your justification is flawed. The biggest reason is the Ready action, which allows PCs to essentially hold their actions until the target appears and fire at will. This means your sink-into-the-floor tactic really just delays everyone's assault on you in D&D. It's nothing like the "I'm going to waste all your SPs and make you just stand around looking like a dumb ass" tactic that it is in DDO. Thus, quite clearly, there's a problem with your implementation of this tactic.

And all of this is on top of the already existing difficulties of incorporeal undead. It's bad enough that no one can crit them, or sneak attack them and that we all have to use our ghost touch weapons, which are generally sub par (or suffer a 50% miss chance). And there's almost no chance to hit them with an instant death effect and stop it all before it starts, since all the spells don't work and the chances of finding a ghost-touch disrupting weapon is slim-to-none. Then you add this "feature" that just wastes time, resources and patience without actually adding anything to the game. It's not fun.

Since there's pretty much no way to implement "ready an action" for a real-time game like DDO, it's time to just give up the ghost (pun intended) and get rid of the phasing that incorporeal creatures do. I'll even let you keep it on Ogre Magi and Phase Spiders (since both of them have abilities that are much closer to their implementation), but the incorporeal undead have to stop. I don't lightly ask you to do things that would just benefit the players. And I'd never do it for no reason at all. But this has always been a problem and it's just getting worse.

So here's the deal. Get rid of the phasing and I guarantee you that the majority of the complaints about how LotD sucks will stop. It's a tactic that's not in keeping with the D&D rules. It's a tactic that's extremely unpleasant for the players (and not in a "Aw shucks, you got me" kind of way). And it's a tactic that needs to go.

/signed

[BigNastyMP]

Which tends to fall into the same field as, say, Fireball and Magic Missile. If they phase out as you cast it, you waste the spell.

Try command undead and control undead on phasing shadows. Find out how the charm spells don't fail like a fireball does. Learn your spells, learn to aim and cast without autotarget. Try standing still for a second to let them phase in and start attacking you.

Deathward stops a shade's strength damage attack. On elite, they hit for ~15 points of bludgeon damage (still no one can explain that, where's the outrage over the incorporeal creatures doing bludgeoning damage?). These mobs are not very difficult even with blanket fire immunity and their phasing ability. Y'all made me go look look up alternative sayings for making a mountain out of a molehill.

[MysticTheurge]

Try command undead and control undead on phasing shadows. Find out how the charm spells don't fail like a fireball does. Learn your spells, learn to aim and cast without autotarget. Try standing still for a second to let them phase in and start attacking you.

Way to suggest that anyone having problems with incorporeal creatures is just a n00b.

Yeah, you can cast spells on them, sometimes, if you're lucky, or have good twitch skills. But, honestly, and I guess this gets to the crux of the problem, they've made a twitch game out of D&D, which is not a twitch game. The source material for this game has attracted a lot of people who are not videogamers in the traditional sense. They don't want to platform, or twitch-game, or spend their time having to learn how to lead targets and fire at exactly the right moment.

And on some level, I love what the devs have done in this respect. The twitch aspects of DDO certainly set it apart from other MMOs in many ways. But it's also off-putting to a large portion of their key demographic: D&D players. Every single one of those players wouldn't care if they lost half their SPs to spells that failed because of incorporeal miss chance. They know how that works, they make the choice to risk it and they'll accept the consequences. But a lot of them get very frustrated when they lose spells because the wraith they were casting on is no longer a "valid target" because he "phased out" while they were casting their spell.

There is some level of twitch-gaming that people like that will accept (which generally varies from player to player, but I think there's a level that you'll be able to get most of them to accept), but the phasing thing is way beyond that, for a lot of people.

It's not that incorporeal creatures are hard. In fact, I think most people have made it clear that they don't find that to be the case. It's largely that they're annoying and frustrating. I can handle "hard" in my games, in fact, I often welcome it. Challenge is what makes games worth playing. But when annoying and frustrating start to pop up in games, then something isn't working properly.

[ChaosTheEternal]

I think my point was actually closer to how in PnP if your turn is before the enemy's, even if it decided to phase or meld into a wall, the magic missile would still hit, right? I guess in the real-time game of DDO, you would simply have to literally be faster than the enemy. I would just like to see a greater window of opportunity, if nothing else. XD

Yes, in D&D, if your initiative is higher, then your actions actually come before any of their actions, though some DMs try to say the round happens "all at once", it's just a matter of degrees of when things occur.

If your action is before theirs, you fire the Magic Missile and it unerringly hits them right before they'd completely enter the wall (in the case of Incorporeal undead) or before they completely jump to the Ethereal plane (in the case of real phasing creatures)*. If they act first, it'd be a sense of realization that it'd be a wasted attempt so you don't (or rather, can't) cast a Magic Missile at them.



*Note: It's not that the spell would fizzle due to the target being on the Ethereal Plane, but that the target is now no longer visible, which makes them unable to be targetted with an attack or spell that requires line of sight.

Try command undead and control undead on phasing shadows.

Except both Command Undead and Control Undead are targetted, just like Magic Missile (and both have longer cast times).
If you cast either and the target phases, it fizzles.

And neither of those spells helps phasing spiders, who are prone to phase as much as shadows.

Learn your spells, learn to aim and cast without autotarget.

Tell me how you cast spells that are Target: Foe without targetting them.

Try standing still for a second to let them phase in and start attacking you.

Except for when they phase in and then right back out, even when they are not in an AoE effect or the player is not moving.

Which, as I said before, has happened to me, multiple times.

[BigNastyMP]

By and large, the point here was simply to bring to the fore the fact that undead in general and incorporeal undead in particular are already hard to kill. They're obviously not invincible and I don't believe I ever suggested such a thing. They're just hard to kill, even before you add any sort of phasing in and out.

It's not that incorporeal creatures are hard. In fact, I think most people have made it clear that they don't find that to be the case.

Please forgive me for this, but I am glad that both you and I agree to disagree with you.

I am not calling anyone more of a noob than I am.
Learning to cast the appropriate spells with and without autotarget is tricky. Try to cast command undead on a shade as it phases and you do not lose the spell, the spell does not fizzle, no spellpoints are lost and you get an error message saying "invalid target." Try to cone of cold on that same phasing shadow as it phases and the spell fizzles. Manually aiming those AoE or ray spells prevent the spell from fizzling and if the shadow phases on you, at least you have a chance of hitting other mobs in range.

"Find out how the charm spells don't fail like a fireball does. Learn your spells, learn to aim and cast without autotarget." I said this because different spells act differently agaist the phasers. Spend some time with the shades, get to know them, buy them dinner and take them out on the town. Get similarly intimate with your spells. An open relationship between you, your mobs and your spells will help with any conflicts that arise when all three of you go dancing.

[arikka_hador]

"Find out how the charm spells don't fail like a fireball does. Learn your spells, learn to aim and cast without autotarget." I said this because different spells act differently agaist the phasers. Spend some time with the shades, get to know them, buy them dinner and take them out on the town. Get similarly intimate with your spells. An open relationship between you, your mobs and your spells will help with any conflicts that arise when all three of you go dancing.

But... at the higher levels, I find that Halt undead and Charm Undead are pretty ineffective. What I mean is, the undead's will save is so high, they practically never fail. That really discourages me personally, and I feel that is more of a waste of SP than just trying to target and MM or scorching ray or what have you. Then again, it could just be me not having a high enough Charisma or something. How many people manage a 34-36 CHA at level 14 (being a sorcerer for example), and of those people, do the enemies save much less often?

*lol, I'm kind of a noob myself if you can't tell, and I'm not sure if a 34-36 CHA is even possible. But I'm trying to throw an example out there.

[ChaosTheEternal]

Try to cast command undead on a shade as it phases and you do not lose the spell, the spell does not fizzle, no spellpoints are lost and you get an error message saying "invalid target."

I just went out and tested that. Again.

Guess what happened? I pressed to cast Command Undead, Shadow phased as I was casting, I get the error "Invalid Target", and I'm down 15 SPs. I repeated it twice more, once with another cast of Command Undead, and once with Control Undead.

Try to cone of cold on that same phasing shadow as it phases and the spell fizzles.

Just as any other spell can, including the "charm" spells.

Manually aiming those AoE or ray spells prevent the spell from fizzling and if the shadow phases on you, at least you have a chance of hitting other mobs in range.

Yes, it prevents it from fizzling, but if there are no other mobs in range (or at all), it's wasted just as much as if it did fizzle.

[BigNastyMP]

We will just have to agree to disagree then, Chaos. Good luck hunting shadows in your future. If you are ever on Sarlona, look me up, I'll take you out shadow hunting.

[MTG]

the best way i think is for them to fix the phasing thing would be give the casters blink, if the mobs have it why cant we. then the devs and us can see how much fun it is to be not there half the time.

[ChaosTheEternal]

We will just have to agree to disagree then, Chaos. Good luck hunting shadows in your future. If you are ever on Sarlona, look me up, I'll take you out shadow hunting.

Went out in the Orchard, gave myself some buffs, charmed one Shadow, then watched as another came up and blocked to take a screenshot.
http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r...nShot00341.jpg

Stopped blocking, got hit for Str damage, so I began to back up and hit to cast Command Undead (costing 15 SPs), and got this:
http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r...nShot00342.jpg

The whole screenshot, including combat log, is there so you can tell I didn't hit another Command Undead, or any other level 2 spell in the middle.

The spell fizzled, spell points were lost. And it's not just Shadows that cause this problem, because it existed before Shadows did.




Now, if you can have spells fizzle like that and you don't lose SPs for it, awesome. I'd guess I'm just not that lucky, then.

[arikka_hador]

But giving players blink doesn't stop the problem. The problem is that the creatures, namely shadows, spend far too much time phased out. We can phase out, but then there'd be the command to phase in and out, with the 1 second global timer, and the AI also seems to know exactly where we are even when invisible, hiding, and moving silently anyways, so it'd be pointless.

[BigNastyMP]

Good screenshots, Chaos. I have been wrong before... Give me 2 hours and I'll be looking at that same test myself. Again.

[MysticTheurge]

Please forgive me for this, but I am glad that both you and I agree to disagree with you.

There's a difference between being "hard" in the way you suggested and I refuted, and being hard to kill.

Undead creatures are, in comparison with most other things, harder to kill. This is because they have a lot of immunities to the major ways PCs kill things.

Incorporeal creatures are, even in comparison with other undead, harder to kill. This is because in addition to all the undead's natural immunities, they pull their phasing trick.

Neither of these things guarantees that the creature in question is harder (overall) than anything else. There are notable other creatures which one might peg as harder. Air elementals, for instance, have their own quirks which make them hard. Not particularly hard to kill in comparison to anything else (provided you're not a melee character) but they are pretty hard overall.

For the most part, a shadow (since that's the one you brought up) is not a particularly hard encounter. As you point out, they don't hit very hard and a character who's even half-decently prepared is immune to their strength damage. A creature that's not hard, but is hard to kill, results in the very scenario I was describing (the point of which you seem to have missed in your desire to catch me contradicting myself) where there's not a lot of challenge, but simply an encounter that takes a long time because you can't even hit the **** thing. This leads to the aforementioned frustration. Frustration doesn't make for good gaming.

The phasing can certainly, heck it does contribute to making a creature harder over all, but that isn't to say that this makes any particular given encounter with an incorporeal creature "hard." Some are, some aren't. But in either scenario, the phasing is more frustrating than it is challenging.