Fix spell criticals!!

[prowessss]

Firstly I want to say I LOVE YOU TURBINE!

What's the deal with spell criticals?? When your wall of fire criticals, the whole thing is doing critical damage thru its entire duration... BUT if you shoot frost lance, one of them may critical and the rest do normal damage... What's the deal with this? AoE spells are obviously either critical or not critical... why can't they be rolled per hit, not per cast? Doesn't that make more sense?

I can imagine this is a tough fix... But in my humble opinion, it's one of the most important things to be fixed.

[jcTharin]

i would like to see this

[Angelus_dead]

BUT if you shoot frost lance, one of them may critical and the rest do normal damage... What's the deal with this?

Note that independent spell crits for each of the rays is more useful to the players than the alternative.

AoE spells are obviously either critical or not critical... why can't they be rolled per hit, not per cast? Doesn't that make more sense?

Yes, that might make more sense. It would remove an aspect of gameplay: the mages who cast a few FWs waiting for a crit before using it to kill monsters.

Changing that would make it harder for them to do DPS, particularly on epic. Of course, it would overall be a good idea if mage DPS was changed a whole lot so that spells aside from FW were viable in standard situations.

[Xionanx]

Spell criticals are fine the way they are. The effect you are experiencing with frost lance is a "seperate" ray. Ie, each ray does x damage, so when you fire 3, sometimes not all 3 will hit, especially if the target is moving. Also, each ray rolls for a crit individually.

Its the same for MM, Scorching Ray, etc.. any spells that have multiple individual hits on a single cast, each hit is rolled seperately.

however, spells that have Damage over time effects roll thier crit ONCE. So melf acid arrow, firewal, acid fog, etc.. all check the crit 1 time and then does its damage over time based off of that.

What you are asking for would cause a huge amount of server load.. because each "tick" of damage only occurs if there is a target in the effect of the damage. So what you would be proposing would require that each time an enemy enters or leaves an AoE spell they would roll to see if they are crit by the AoE, and then each tick they would roll to see if crit.. etc.

Regardless, I think its a bad idea to fix something that isn't broke in the first place.

EDIT: On a side note I can agree with Angelus on principle, there are way to many things in this game that do way to much damage. Spells, monsters, etc in the D&D setting were never meant to be this overpowered and its caused IMO major balance issue. If it were up to me, I would remove "Potency" and "SPell Criticals" all together from DDO, but in turn monsters would need to be toned down to compensate.

[Angelus_dead]

What you are asking for would cause a huge amount of server load.. because each "tick" of damage only occurs if there is a target in the effect of the damage. So what you would be proposing would require that each time an enemy enters or leaves an AoE spell they would roll to see if they are crit by the AoE, and then each tick they would roll to see if crit.. etc.

Reading an RNG every damage tick would only make a noticeable increase in load to the most pathetically constructed of game servers.

[Xionanx]

Reading an RNG every damage tick would only make a noticeable increase in load to the most pathetically constructed of game servers.

You've been playing on the same servers I have right? I've seen the game start to lag horribly when you have ~12 mobs chasing you. Shroud is horrible nightmare as it is. I mean, if you really want to see how crappy the servers are, recruit 10 caster buddies, buff yourselves, and then step in/out of a globe of invulnerability at the same time... the delay on the buffs coming on and off is just sad....

[Aspenor]

THis suggestion makes no sense.

[Spisey]

/not signed

just adding more equations into every second of casting or melee is asking for more trouble. Lag already sucks as it is.

[prowessss]

I knew the implications when i made the suggestion.

I still think this suggestion should be duly noted by the devs. I can understand if it'd be an impossibility but it really is how the damage should be rolled.

When I DM I always roll criticals seperately for each instance of the damage. They're already rolling whatever damage dice... i can't imagine it would hurt the servers too terribly to roll a d100, then the 2d6 or whatever...

[Aschbart]

I don't agree that bringing down spell DPS is a good idea, or even remotely easy to implement, although I completely agree the numbers are out of whack as they are. The problem however is the entire system:

Spell damage needs to be high
-> because monsters have insane HP
This is so
-> because melee damage is insane
and this is
-> because there is tons of stacking bonuses from enhancements and on equipment in ranges never meant for a D20 system, boosting the damage through the roof, the sky, and not stopping there. All these bonuses improve melee dps considerably, and when combined in the right mix get you dps monsters that could easily confront any level 20 Pen and Paper character in just a bathrobe - and beat the hell out of him with a wet towel!

But I'm deviating - what I wanted to express is that you cannot tone down just the spell damage, and maybe monster HP, because that would imbalance melee DPS, so you'd have to tone down that as well, decrease stacking bonuses, limit access to powerful weapon enchantments more, reduce stacking bonuses from enhancements and the ability to multiply such effects by clever multiclassing. In short, the whole system would need an overhaul, and that is not gonna happen.

[Aschbart]

I knew the implications when i made the suggestion.

I still think this suggestion should be duly noted by the devs. I can understand if it'd be an impossibility but it really is how the damage should be rolled.

When I DM I always roll criticals seperately for each instance of the damage. They're already rolling whatever damage dice... i can't imagine it would hurt the servers too terribly to roll a d100, then the 2d6 or whatever...

I was inclined to agree, but when I think about it I don't: what causes lags is traffic - every number that needs to be transferred to the clients causes added load on the servers that handle communication. Of course, the rolling is done on the server and that by itself shouldn't cause any notable delays. But at the very least you need to transfer the information whether or not a given tick of damage was a crit or not, so the client can display it as a big fat number on your screen. This may seem to be just be a tiny increase, and maybe it is. But big lags are made of lots of tiny increases in data transfer...