"Why balance is something desirable?"

[BurningDownTheHouse]

i have been playing my sorc now for about 2 months and i have noticed one major thing that makes casters to powerfull.

we cast way to many spells. i have seen casters with 2500sp.. this is rediculous.. at 30 sp for a unenhanced firball.
that is over 800 fireballs getting thrown by one caster without haveing to rest!!!!

limit the ammount of spells casters can throw. then they won't drop spells like rain on the mobs, they will have to think more tacticly about when and where to place spells etc...

then mod hp can come down and you can rebalance the game.
but as long as casters can throw out a spell every 6 seconds for over 2 mineuts the mob hp will have to remain high, and the dps tanks are going to have huge balance issues.

Am i the only one who noticed that 2500/30 is not ~800 but only ~80 (83.33333 to be exact)?
83 unenhanced fireballs is not overpowered...

[BurningDownTheHouse]

i agree it is not only impractable, but nearly impossable for the game to have to pause for each persons turn.

but come on. in origional source material a caster caps at what 5 to 9 8th level spells depending on their revelant stat.
even if you add all of their spells together, the caster in ddo can throw 10 times more spalls all of 8th level.
how is that more balanced?

Again, it's not 10 times more, maybe a bit more because of bonus spellpoints from items and feats. Lets say 150%. Thats all.

[FluffyCalico]

Am i the only one who noticed that 2500/30 is not ~800 but only ~80 (83.33333 to be exact)?
83 unenhanced fireballs is not overpowered...

Espically since in DnD a adventure would be like 25 critters not 200

[Thadion]

ok, so my math was wrong, i'm at work and tired. and thank you for pointing that out.
i still say 80 spells of any levels way overpowered. if they dropped it down a lot closer to what is is in pnp then people will have to actually think about things before they cast and use those sp.
mabye not throw hast every min, and still expect to drop firewalls and pk every single encounter.


all i have to comepair this to is pnp.and i have been playing for 25+ years. and as a caster it would be insane to think you could solo agenst any monsters in a mass that are even close to you in power....

but all i have is that to go on.. like i said i have only been playing ddo for about 2 months, so i'm still a noob.

[Angelus_dead]

*** are you talking about. Played real DnD since I was kid. It is very balanced.

Uh, I don't know how much time is implied by "I was a kid", but D&D is not anything close to balanced. It is likely that your DM changed the rules to run a balanced game, but that certainly doesn't mean that the rules were balanced- that would be an Oberoni fallacy

poof all balanced the way it's supposed to be.

Laughable.

Try this: make a party of four normal level 16 D&D PCs, and then have an evil Rogue16 sneak up and attack them. Then try it again with an evil Wizard16 and see how it goes that time.

[BurningDownTheHouse]

ok, so my math was wrong, i'm at work and tired. and thank you for pointing that out.
i still say 80 spells of any levels way overpowered. if they dropped it down a lot closer to what is is in pnp then people will have to actually think about things before they cast and use those sp.
mabye not throw hast every min, and still expect to drop firewalls and pk every single encounter.


all i have to comepair this to is pnp.and i have been playing for 25+ years. and as a caster it would be insane to think you could solo agenst any monsters in a mass that are even close to you in power....

but all i have is that to go on.. like i said i have only been playing ddo for about 2 months, so i'm still a noob.

I too played PnP D&D from childhood, most of the time my characters didn't event get close to 16th level (or the power equivalent of such). One wizard who did though, could easily solo a few encounters a day while the rest of party stood there and watched. Now, if the DM would have made the encounters harder, they would have been way overpowered for the rest of the group. Even in PnP casters become much more powerful than any other class when they reach the high levels.

[FluffyCalico]

i still say 80 spells of any levels way overpowered. .

You do know a level 20 sorc gets 6 spells of every level right ? Thats in standard DnD levels 1-9 for 60 spells per rest. + can gets bounes spells per rest and should have a familair.

So no 80 is not overpowered when gear is factored in. Melee damage 10x what it should be and 10x the number of things to kill.

[Thadion]

so then what causes the huge hp escalation in the baddies then if not to much casing? and what has made it so that the tanks do 10x the ammount of dam?

i haven't plaied a tank yet, so i don't really know how they run or what damage they do

[FluffyCalico]

so then what causes the huge hp escalation in the baddies then if not to much casing? and what has made it so that the tanks do 10x the ammount of dam?

i haven't plaied a tank yet, so i don't really know how they run or what damage they do

That would be when they realeased with +5 weapons, +5 mithril full plate, +4 stat items, +2 tomes dropping like candy, things like retribution in the hands of I think level 7s (+1 holy, pure good, true law). This was all when the cap was 10. I mean if it were +5 and a scimitar instead of a long sword it would rival shroud crafting. Simpily put the average level 16 with no (none) raid gear, not a single piece, still has gear a normal level 20 DnD character would kill for. I mean a well geared level 10 in this game is better equipped than any level 20 DnD fighter I have ever seen.
Also making the characters get full hit die every level was bad. I know they wanted to take out the randomness but they should have done die/2 rounded up for odd levels and rounded down for even levels. And that +20HP or whatever you start with needs to go away. No way a sorc/wiz should have 24 HP at level 1 before con bounses. They should have 1-4 HP before con bounses.

[Thadion]

I don't know what type of gear you get later, i'm only a lvl 9 sorc, but yes i already have stuff that my level 20 casters would love to have.

and i totally agree about the 20 hp added durring char gen.. but i have played full hp on charecters in pnp and it made little differance, as long as you gave baddies full hp as well.. but i never had to give them close to what the mobs in ddo have...

[Scipio]

Nah, the ogre working the night shift would show up to let the one working the day shift leave.

How very Acme!

[Angelus_dead]

so then what causes the huge hp escalation in the baddies then if not to much casing?

As already explained, the answer is animation speed.

Because DDO is non-turn-based, they needed a serious imbalance in the attack rate between players and monsters. With the attack rate so uneven, monsters needed a huge hitpoint boost if they were to live long enough to do anything threatening.

[negative]

As already explained, the answer is animation speed.

Because DDO is non-turn-based, they needed a serious imbalance in the attack rate between players and monsters. With the attack rate so uneven, monsters needed a huge hitpoint boost if they were to live long enough to do anything threatening.

Even if the gap wasn't there, and monsters attack just as fast as PC's (doing less damage or having lower to-hits so we don't die before we can react), you'd still want the mosters to live longer, so that the pacing and speed of the game feels right. And since you can't slow down the PC's attack rate (because it also ruins the pacing of the game), you're really only left with the HP boost option.

Course, then your casters need to do more damage per spell so they can feel like they are contributing. But be carefull, if you bump them up too much then melee DPS feels insignifcant...oh wait.

Just to be clear A_D, I'm agreeing with you, mostly. It's less the gap, more the PC's fast attack rate, period.

[Borror0]

Because DDO is non-turn-based, they needed a serious imbalance in the attack rate between players and monsters.

Not sure I understand that logic.

[Angelus_dead]

Not sure I understand that logic.

It's rather difficult to convincingly explain, and I'm low on energy. It's really obvious if you make the change and watch what happens, though.

See, in D&D or low-population D&D-based games like NWN, variable time advancement is used. You pause during combat when stuff gets important and tricky, but accelerate when things are less interesting. That opens a lot of flexibility in game design, because UI operational time is removed as a balancing factor. For a clearcut example, look at the whole category of "interrupt" effects such as Rogue Defensive Roll in D&D. That version cannot be directly translated to DDO because it assumes the rogue player can pause time to make a choice in the middle of an enemy attack.

The extensive consequence is that enemy actions cannot be at the same full speed as player attacks, otherwise the game becomes too intense and exhausting to play for very long. To test this, compare PVP vs PVE combat... just imagine the PVE enemies of a dungeon moved at the same rate as a PVP human opponent. If you look at the history of video games with corresponding GUIs you'll see this is an established pattern (go back to Doom and TR to start)

So anyway, the reasoning outline:
1. MMORPG project
2. Many players in the same instance
3. Can't vary the rate of time advancement
4. Monsters taking actions as fast as players would be too intense
5. Monsters must attack slower
6. Slow monsters hardly get any chance to challenge the players.
7. Increase their hp so they live long enough to hurt you.
8. Now damaging spells are relatively weakened compared to either death spells or non-mana-limited damaging attacks.

[Angelus_dead]

you'd still want the mosters to live longer, so that the pacing and speed of the game feels right

Yes, but that's something that's really hard to explain in sufficient detail to make a strong argument, although it's easy to observe if you just give it a try (assuming you're in position to modify game software).

That's a pitfall frequently faced by community-faced devs, including the DDO guys: players will demand things that are obviously bad, if only they had tried them a little.

[AyumiAmakusa]

Well this makes sense.