Remove/Replace Fortification.

[Artos_Fabril]

http://ddowiki.com/page/Epic_Chimera's_Fang
In case you were wondering what direction the Devs are going with this one, I present you the first item enabling 150% fort. You might also note the destruction mod and big bonus to sunder. I think Eladrin might have been tipping his hand more than we thought about upcoming changes to Fort.

[Matuse]

Seems more like they have the idea that someone is going around in lesser or moderate fort, and that current fort items don't stack...but this one will, to add up to giving those two better protection.

Seems silly, given the Minos, Mineral accessories, or even the VoD fullplate...but a lot of epic items fall well into the category of silly.

[Artos_Fabril]

So by your own arguments players should never be put in a situation where they run even the most remote risk of dying?

No, the perceived risk of dying adds excitement, while dying due to seemingly random chance just adds frustration. The Devs realized this years ago when they added heroic durability during development and gave everyone a maxed hitdie at every level-up. Level 1 and 2 (or higher) characters dying instantly from a random trash mob attack isn't fun, so they got enough hitpoints to survive.

Now, knowing that most players are not going to willingly put themselves in a situation where they can be instantly killed, and that most group leaders are not going to put themselves in a situation where they could be short 10-20% damage effectiveness (or worse, 50-100% healing) due to a single dice roll, what direction do you think "acceptable builds" would take?

Looking at, in particular, one new item from the newest content patch, we see that the devs are looking at increasing the need for fortification from 1/2 item slot or less, to at least 2 fractional item slots in epic content. whether that extends down into lower levels remains to be seen. It seems not-unlikely, however, that instead of 3 tiers of fort topping out at 9, we'll have at least 5 tiers, topping out in epic content. As they add more epic content and fill itemization gaps in lower levels, we might see fort at 100% at 9, 125% at 15, and 150% in epic.

That doesn't do a lot for the people who think it's a stupid system and want it removed, but it does help the people who enjoy progressing their characters steadily throughout their characters' careers, and offers a glimmer of hope to those who rely on critical or sneak attack damage to succeed (because if fort goes over 100%, there must be some way to reduce or bypass it, right?). Unless there are plans to make a more drastic change, like making Fort into a %reduction to critical damage, where crit damage can be set at anywhere from 1-200 (or whatever) percent base.

[Artos_Fabril]

Seems more like they have the idea that someone is going around in lesser or moderate fort, and that current fort items don't stack...but this one will, to add up to giving those two better protection.

Seems silly, given the Minos, Mineral accessories, or even the VoD fullplate...but a lot of epic items fall well into the category of silly.

I might think that too, if it wasn't for this:

We've been debating something similar to this, actually. Sunder, Improved Sunder, Destruction, Eagle Claw Strike, and the like would be fortification modifying effects instead of (or in addition to some of) their current effects, and we'd add other abilities that add to or lower fortification percentage as well. (We'd also likely add more possible treasure effects than the current 25/75/100%)

A secondary thing we're considering to go along with that is changing undead, constructs, and other similar creatures to having a base 200% fortification, and if you bust it down below 100%, rendering them vulnerable to critical hits and sneak attacks.

All still under debate at the moment.

Where he very nearly comes out and says "Fort greater than 100% will have a benefit"

[Anderei]

I do like heavy fortification, however I agree its too easily available. I dislike "magic" heavy fortification. If you want heavy fort, you have to wear a heavy armor with a ton of penality, or take that WF feat which makes you unhealable, not an additional magic addon on one of the best helmets in the game, the only one which gives yet another stackable HP.

If you keep "magic" heavy fort, make it more easily dispelled, I suppose disjunction would already do that, but other dispels should be there for magic fort.

No I do not like the idea of being able to reduce fort on undeads, because they are not sneak attackable or criticalable, because they have no organism, they dont care much for a hole straight through their body, etc.

[gavagai]

A) This is true, except for ignoring the case that people can not wear fortification currently and suck because they get one shotted.

Just to lay it out there: If Turbine enables crits without rebalancing damage, so that good builds are getting 1-shot frequently, then we all agree there are some big problems.

Most of my points revolve around the simple perspective that:
If a mob's DPS today against a 100% Fort character is the same as the mob's DPS against a 0% Fort character in this alternative AC-seeker fortification system, then characters that dump defense are still ok -- though their damage intake is more spiked. The only difference is that characters with "casual" AC values high enough to offer 5%, 50% or 100% fortification will be taking even less damage than they would under today's 100% Fort.

Today, Characters without Heavy Fort get 1-shot because: ubiquitous heavy fort items makes mob base damage and crits unbalanced; those characters are often poorly built (correlates with not knowing about heavy fort) because user ignorance or because the premade paths are really crappy.

B) It would take significant slot investment to reach the same result as before for many builds outside of EPIC. In epic, it would be impossible to reach the result for many builds. This changes certain builds into 0% fort builds where it matters, end game.

Slotting for a casually effective AC (within 20 points of being effective) is only a challenge because people disregard it. But much of that is choice. A level 9 caster with a 12 DEX (16 with Cat's Grace), +5 armored bracers, haste, recitation and pot buffs has an easy +17 AC right there; that would be a 47 AC with the +20 fort item and nothing else. That's good even up til Gianthold.

If you assume that the DPS we experience today with 100% Fort would be the same as the DPS with 0% fort under the antiseeker system, then the caster that dumps defense will be no worse off, except that the damage will be more spiked; but he will be rewarded with as much as a 75% Fort of avoiding crits for casting Cat's Grace, drinking those pots, and merely attempting to have a casual AC.

The problem isn't that there aren't enough AC-specced characters. Any system that requires mad specialization to get minimal benefits is bad, and that's why Epic is so screwy to many build types: some types of specialization just aren't viable anymore.

The problem is that D&D offers many means to achieve casual AC, and the game gives no incentive for those measures to be used. While I adore DDO regardless, I do see this indifference towards AC and defense as a major flaw in character design. While this isn't the "only" way to make casual AC mean something, its certainly an interesting way.

C) Many AC builds would be granted large benefits from this sort of a shift. My favorite toons are AC builds. I still think this proposal is extremely flawed. Where it matters, end game, many builds will be forced into a no win situation pimp out on AC gear and lose out on dps gear or be a crit absorbing machine. Some builds will not even have this choice and will just be crit absorbers.

"No win situation?" Nothing in this proposal is making AC necessary. At worst, they take the same DPS as they do presently but with less baseline damage and more damage spikes.

There are few classes which, pre-Epic, cannot attain an AC which would not be useful with a +20 or +25 anti-seeker bonus.

If there are one-shotting nightmare mobs doing 60 base damage with a 13-20/x12 crit profile, they will have to be toned down substantially. And to be fair, they should never have existed anyway. If they exist, they only exist because Heavy Fort justified the insane imbalances, because only fools wouldn't have it.

D) This is the ultimate fallacy of this proposal. Low hit point builds who are not AC builds will be destroyed by this proposal end game. The problem here is again the end game to hits get to a point where a 'modest' investment is still worthless with a +20 on the dice. There is no lessening of damage for these builds. Great example, pimped out AC spellsword type build. You end up with a mid 80's or maybe if your really pimping out AC 90's AC with the +20 AC bonus. In epic that means pretty much nothing. Now that build with mediocre hit points not only is still getting hit every time, but they are getting hit for more spike damage. This means that those two crits in a row is insta-death.

Again, the poor spellsword should be taking, on average, the same damage without fort as he currently is taking with fort.

I understand that Epic is the place where most suggestions face problems, because for all content the laws of balance just go out the window in Epic. And anti-seeker isn't going to single-handedly solve the puzzle of the d20 AC system.

Just as Turbine will probably have 100%+ Fort with their upcoming changes, there's no reason why Epic Fort gear wouldn't be upgraded to give a higher anti-seeker, like +35 or +40 even.

E) This also is false. Some of these builds would survive. They have to have high hit points though to do so. If they were middle the road hit point builds they would be clear losers in this change. With spike damage the need for high hit points becomes greater not lesser.

My math is probably **** here, but I'll try:

If base damage is reduced by 10% and a character with a high enough AC+antiseeker avoids 100% of incoming crits, she would experience a -20% reduction in DPS from fort alone from what she sees today, assuming nothing misses her.

Of course HPs will remain crucial. But this will make it so that things other than more hit points can contribute to damage mitigation. Having a high-enough AC to get fort is like having an extra 10% HPs -- at least until you hit traps or spells.

*What if mobs do more then just *3 on a crit? I have not taken off my heavy fort in epic quests to check this out in a LONG time.

That's all part of the balancing calculus. For instance, if adding crits represents a 300% increase in damage output, then base damage will have to be cut by however much it would take to bring that back down to 100% of current damage. So big crit baddies will more likely toned down more.

*Essentially 0% fort builds will be common in epic. It's not intellectually honest to think that a +20 to AC is going to be enough to put plenty of builds on the d20 in EPIC. Particularly against red/purple names.

It would be tricky balancing those challenges for Barbs, since their natural PnP bonuses (DR, sneak attack immunity, huge hit point pools) aren't well balanced to the kind of damage Epic monsters deliver, even after rescaling. But again, they shouldn't be taking that much more damage in the aggregate.

It might be more merciful to the clerics to have an actual S&B tank around for those major boss fights. I personally think an Epic +35 anti-seeker bonus sounds nifty -- and that would help virtually everyone except the Barbs. Frenzied Berserkers are infamously indifferent about defense. IMO one of the Barb PrE lines should enable scaling DR beyond 9/- among other benefits, so Barbs would at least have a choice.

*Insta-crit conditions. This should be self evident why this is a problem.

This is a really good point.

*You will not fix the AC issue with this sort of thing. You only end up either nerfing all players or boosting AC builds. In other words, it is extremely unbalanced in it's effect to different types of builds. This is never a good thing, unless it is the primary focus of a change to begin with due to an existing imbalance.

Well, I think we'd all agree there are plenty imbalances in the way classes are treated when they hit epic. And not all of them can be/will be easily fixed. Offensive CC, for instance, or death attack immunities which now obsolete 2 PrEs (Assassin and Pale Master). Character AC is moving in the same direction, and as builds become more optimized to dump defense and pump DPS you'll see more extremes in the HPs and DPS of Epic mobs too. I can't pretend to know how to fix it all or even whether they are high enough priority to fix vis-a-vis new content, but I think A_D's idea is a good way for the vicious HP/DPS cycle to at least slow down a bit.

If Devs are reading, I hope they are getting the point that rebalancing mob DPS is the keystone in redesigning Fort. With it, it could be an interesting addition. Without it, there will be intense frustration.

[Artos_Fabril]

If a mob's DPS today against a 100% Fort character is the same as the mob's DPS against a 0% Fort character in this alternative AC-seeker fortification system, then characters that dump defense are still ok -- though their damage intake is more spiked. The only difference is that characters with "casual" AC values high enough to offer 5%, 50% or 100% fortification will be taking even less damage than they would under today's 100% Fort.

Spike damage is what kills characters. Any moderately competent healer, or any character who brings a stack of the leave appropriate self healing (potions, wands, scrolls) can handle steady incoming damage in most situations. If your goal is to kill more characters, increasing spike damage is the way to do it.

Any increase to mob spike damage that is dangerous to fighters or barbs is going to be capable of one-shotting (or one-rounding, for multi-attack mobs) less resilient classes. If that's the goal (and A_D and Borror0, at least, have declared that it is) then why beat around the bush talking about how average damage will be lower and AC will be important to all characters?

If the goal is instead to create those "Oh sh##" moments, as Kromize stated in the original post:

Lower levels are more fun because of unexpected critical hits, causing those "Oh sh##!" moments. Instead of limiting the amount of crits, increase them, and increase the ways to increase a chance for a critical hit, etc. For example, increase the chance to score a critical hit if your attack counts as a sneak attack.

You're going to have to rethink the strategy, because when you're looking at a difference of 240HP between a max HP WF barb and a max HP WF sorc/wiz (20(14-4)+40) anything that constitutes an "Oh sh##!" moment for the barb is going to be an "eff this!" moment for the sorc/wiz. It only gets worse if you have to account for, say a drow sorc/wiz, who's down another 80HP even if (s)he's also maxed out for HP. Your lowest AC non-barb classes are also your squishiest.

If there are one-shotting nightmare mobs doing 60 base damage with a 13-20/x12 crit profile, they will have to be toned down substantially. And to be fair, they should never have existed anyway. If they exist, they only exist because Heavy Fort justified the insane imbalances, because only fools wouldn't have it.

All it takes to one-shot a 350HP character is a mob with a troll-type triple attack with a 20/x3 crit profile and 40 base damage, and that assumes the character who eats that attack was topped off.

[zealous]

Rogues don't NEED this kind of cookie

For some bizzare reason my rogue has dps problems against constructs, undead, portals and harry elite while having moderate dps problems against other mobs with fortification.

Debunked? Where??? You have your opinion I have mine.... Offering up loads of ideas to over complicate a system that works just fine now, and to drive more resource usage, and then causally dismissing that, offers up what?

Read previous posts in this thread by among others me and Borror0, e.g. on page 11 and 12 of this thread.

To sum it up, a change like the one proposed by A_D would likely be trivial to implement. A change like the one Eladrin hinted at would likely not be.

I.e. you were repeating already stated arguments instead of providing counter arguments to the counter arguments to those arguments.

Additionally, with a system with above 100% fort as a baseline, you would need "more items for all characters" too. The difference being there not being many of them around. A change like this would also move survivability from build to itemization, something that imo would diminish one of the strengths of DDO, i.e. how large a proportion of your character is made up of build.

From turbine's perspective creating a player created incentive to grind for new items might be a good way to retain players though.

[zealous]

No, the perceived risk of dying adds excitement, while dying due to seemingly random chance just adds frustration.

You mean like spells causing death 5% of the time unless you have a gazillion hp?
Those situations already exist in game.

Apart from those though, is ther really ever much of a chance to die in a semi competent party running level appropriate content?

And you won't be dying seemingly randomly if it's done right. Even a somewhat low hp character generally survives a crit at pre heavy fort levels. And personally I find it much more involving and exciting knowing that if that crit hits, I'd better get out of the way before the next swing connects.

At higher levels the only risk of dying is generally failing to notice that the healer prefer to spend his mana on bbs than on healing me. Or optionally the healer going oom while lacking scrolls etc. due to having to overheal the zealous lvl20 200hp rogue deciding that aggro is king.

The Devs realized this years ago when they added heroic durability during development and gave everyone a maxed hitdie at every level-up. Level 1 and 2 (or higher) characters dying instantly from a random trash mob attack isn't fun, so they got enough hitpoints to survive.

Now, knowing that most players are not going to willingly put themselves in a situation where they can be instantly killed, and that most group leaders are not going to put themselves in a situation where they could be short 10-20% damage effectiveness (or worse, 50-100% healing) due to a single dice roll, what direction do you think "acceptable builds" would take?

Looking at, in particular, one new item from the newest content patch, we see that the devs are looking at increasing the need for fortification from 1/2 item slot or less, to at least 2 fractional item slots in epic content. whether that extends down into lower levels remains to be seen. It seems not-unlikely, however, that instead of 3 tiers of fort topping out at 9, we'll have at least 5 tiers, topping out in epic content. As they add more epic content and fill itemization gaps in lower levels, we might see fort at 100% at 9, 125% at 15, and 150% in epic.

That doesn't do a lot for the people who think it's a stupid system and want it removed, but it does help the people who enjoy progressing their characters steadily throughout their characters' careers, and offers a glimmer of hope to those who rely on critical or sneak attack damage to succeed (because if fort goes over 100%, there must be some way to reduce or bypass it, right?). Unless there are plans to make a more drastic change, like making Fort into a %reduction to critical damage, where crit damage can be set at anywhere from 1-200 (or whatever) percent base.

But the thing with this proposal is that you will have one of two scenarios:
A. Power creep, you can always gain immunity
B. For certain encounters you will always have a 20% risk of crit independant of build.

While I'd prefer B. in front of the current situation, given the same good balancing that would be needed with A_Ds suggestion.

The difference is that with A_Ds suggestion you get more options, you don't only have the choice between grinding for equipment or face the crits, you have the option to invest in AC too.

You could still have multiple stacking items with different sources of anti-seeker, you could still have the same amount of security against crits with the same amount of items even if you totally neglected AC. However, you would have the choice to protect yourself either with AC, a combination of AC and anti-seeker or purely by anti seeker.

[BlackSteel]

having special attacks that lower fort will do most of the things that those that favor a heavy fort nerf want. (the introduction of more spiked damage) . a good deal of mobs sunder now, altho perhaps more could, or some spells should be tweaked to debuff in the same manner.


changing fort over to a seeker type bonus on the hand will simply make people ignore the feature altogether. A bunch of S n B intimitanks will not pop up all of a sudden; there wont be an increase in demand for this type of role. Squishy characters will simply save an item slot and bite the bullet. My FvS isnt going to get a usable AC, unless the 'seeker' like bonus is so high to make the point moot. Nor is my barbarian or my caster or my fighter/monk. (my cleric/monk 'might' benefit from it)

slightly scaling back incoming damage to make room for criticals is a strawman arguement for anyone trying to use it. as anyone who will make that claim already knows that predictable normal hits are not dangerous; they could leave the damage the same and it wouldnt matter. spike damage is a killer, predicatable damage is not (unless you're badly prepared for it). Thats why caster mobs are so dangerous. Its why squishy characters go from full to zero agaisnt ogres so easily. Or people explode on green rays.

in my opinion, trying to rebalance AC issues by addressing fort is not the right approach. a good deal of characters will never give two donkey licks about AC, no matter what. BUT those characters that do, should be given the means to be successful with it. What this means is finish off more PrE's (as defensive ones give more build options as well). Introduce more loot with similar nonstacking bonuses to give AC builds more versatility in gear slots/build. This will in turn bring most AC characters into the same range.

how about a heavy armor or shield with dodge +4. Or add dodge +2 a craftable blue or red slot. a +10 epic shield. Lets see more items with insight bonuses, or smaller dodge bonuses. Make dodge +3 able to go somewhere besides a ring slot or DT armor.

Yes its grindy, but you know casters grind out baubles or epic rings. DPS chars grind out dual tower sets. Any character worth their salt wants to be dripping in raid loot. The AC character isnt a unique snowflake. Yes, their role may not be as effective, or effective at all until they start collecting the right gear. But you know what, the difference between a newbie character that pikes his way to 20, and an epic/raid gear DPS character is huge as well. HUGE!

consider a barbarian, typical raid loot will give :

+9 more str
+4 more straight damage
+ 5% more melee haste
+8 sneak attack damage
+ 11 more to hit (sneak/shintao/epic spectrals) does not include str

then toss on a shroud weapon or an epic SoS and the piker is looking like a pitiful contribution to the party in comparison.

[Artos_Fabril]

You mean like spells causing death 5% of the time unless you have a gazillion hp?
Those situations already exist in game.

And there are ways around those too, deathblock for instance also only takes 1/2 or less of an item's attributes, and has a lower +value to boot.

But the thing with this proposal is that you will have one of two scenarios:
A. Power creep, you can always gain immunity
B. For certain encounters you will always have a 20% risk of crit independant of build.

While I'd prefer B. in front of the current situation, given the same good balancing that would be needed with A_Ds suggestion.

If you want to introduce a risk of crit independent of build to certain encounters, just build encounters with a mechanic to reduce or ignore fort, or give certain bosses a "force burst" or "maiming" type effect that activates on a crit roll regardless of fort and deals a damage type players can't be protected against. As a bonus, you don't have to re-tune, test, re-re-tune, test, etc. mob damage between level 9 and epic.

The difference is that with A_Ds suggestion you get more options, you don't only have the choice between grinding for equipment or face the crits, you have the option to invest in AC too.

How is "investing in AC" different from "grinding for equipment"?

You could still have multiple stacking items with different sources of anti-seeker, you could still have the same amount of security against crits with the same amount of items even if you totally neglected AC. However, you would have the choice to protect yourself either with AC, a combination of AC and anti-seeker or purely by anti seeker.

So to have multiple stacking bonuses to "anti-seeker", do you advocate adding: anti-seeker(dodge), anti-seeker(feat), anti-seeker(insight), anti-seeker(competence), anti-seeker(armor), anti-seeker(protection), anti-seeker(enhancement)? If not, what are your ideas for multiple stacking sources of anti-seeker bonuses? While you're at it, what should the +values and MLs for various ammounts be? Does anti-seeker(insight) show up only at greensteel+ levels, or does it exist as another item modifier on weapons or armor at low levels? Do you just make it a blanket database change to fortification items already in game? If so, does that solve any of the "problems" you're concerned with?

You're making this out to be a very simple change, implementable by doing a fast replace all in the database, and moving on to other content. That's exactly the sort of implementation that worries many of us.

[gavagai]

Any increase to mob spike damage that is dangerous to fighters or barbs is going to be capable of one-shotting (or one-rounding, for multi-attack mobs) less resilient classes. If that's the goal (and A_D and Borror0, at least, have declared that it is) then why beat around the bush talking about how average damage will be lower and AC will be important to all characters?

Like I said before, if fort becomes reduced and damage isn't rescaled to prevent well-built characters from endless slaughter, something is wrong.

That said, a hero jumping into the enemy army naked should arguably have a higher chance of getting killed. That applies in PnP, and even in DDO up til Gianthold or so. I can't speak for Borr or A_D, but I think what they meant is not that we should have more people dying, but that not bothering about defenses should raise the chance that you'll get killed.

If someone says "it won't matter how much anti-seeker you give, we won't have any meaningful Fort and we'll just die," he is being stubborn. Very few builds have a good reason for being more than 20 points away from useful AC in non-Epic content if they actually try. Barbs and arcane casters excluded. But Devs should implement the Iron Body spell and the Still Spell metamagic feat, since arcane casters have always relied on their spells for defense, not pretty hats.

As I see it, the issue isn't the crit spikes. The issue is that many of us are already used to dumping defense on most standard builds. The reduced reliability of CC and the iffy-ness of AC have, among other things, made combat more dangerous, and made "survivability" basically commensurate with the size of the number in your red bar. As Shade could say, "Barbs represent how Turbine expects us to respond to challenge."

We refuse to admit that most of our builds could have been tweaked to be within 20 to 35 AC points of usefulness. We think of AC and think of ages of tedious grind, and don't even think "how far could I get if I wore a ring that gave me, among other things, +20 or +35 anti-seeker?" I don't know, but I think most of my characters would have been pretty fine even without twink items until Vale.

Anyway. So going forward, Turbine has three ways to increase the challenge in content:
-- Either make base damage go even higher but leaving High Fort untouched.
-- More and faster spawns of zerging monster hordes.
-- Change the damage dynamic, allowing Fort to be more variable.

All of these will require bigger red bars.

But only one has the potential to offer a bloody mechanic in this game that lets us have more choice between twitching like a barb to nurture our red-bars and a building an AC Stalwart Defender / DoS. Something to suggest the future of DDO endgame isn't just swelling red bars and DPS numbers.

I think A_D's proposal is one among possible ways of making that happen, and I like it because frankly I find the idea of rewarding casual AC intuitive. Stacking DR types for armor and shields is another approach, but it just addresses the incoming damage, not build design. Reducing blanket immunities is another approach that I think is good -- if they can weaken our fort and crit us, we should be able to dispel their Wards and zap them; &c.

[Artos_Fabril]

Anyway. So going forward, Turbine has three ways to increase the challenge in content:
-- Either make base damage go even higher but leaving High Fort untouched.
-- More and faster spawns of zerging monster hordes.
-- Change the damage dynamic, allowing Fort to be more variable.

All of these will require bigger red bars.

But only one has the potential to offer a bloody mechanic in this game that lets us have more choice between twitching like a barb to nurture our red-bars and a building an AC Stalwart Defender / DoS. Something to suggest the future of DDO endgame isn't just swelling red bars and DPS numbers.

I think A_D's proposal is one among possible ways of making that happen, and I like it because frankly I find the idea of rewarding casual AC intuitive. Stacking DR types for armor and shields is another approach, but it just addresses the incoming damage, not build design. Reducing blanket immunities is another approach that I think is good -- if they can weaken our fort and crit us, we should be able to dispel their Wards and zap them; &c.

Rather than remove fort entirely and add a different stat in its place, why not make any AC value above 10 give passive fortification? or change fort from a damage avoidance to a damage mitigation stat? Then instead of requiring heavy(+) fort, any amount of fortification would be beneficial.

If it's possible to have enough AC on any standard build to put you within a single anti-seeker item of being uncritable, do you think you will see any builds after the change be considered viable without that? It puts you right back in the situation you have now with heavy fort: everyone has it, because not having it is a death sentence.

That which is not forbidden is compulsory.

Either crit immunity will be attainable, and thus required, or it will be unattainable, and every build will have to be able to soak up a crit. Those are your two options. The first is no change at all from the status quo, it just increases the time investment to get there, which acts as a bar to newer players. The second is even farther in the direction you see us going and down like.

[Arcticwarrior]

Fortification in this game is a thing that players refer to as a must have, and that, in my honest opinion, should never occur in a game.

At least remove 100% fortification, and go to a max of 50%

Have you ever gone into an epic vault of night? Velah CLEAVES for about 50-60 damage. If they remove fortification then there would be no one running epics.

[Tarnoc]

so it begins.....

so turbine has decided well need to grind for more fort or wat ever they change it too...

some players in thier foolishness want this but dont realize why turbine is doing this

not for us not to make things right...

thier doing this so thier BABYS(content) will eat us up mobs will spam anti fort and be immune to us hitting them back with it...

anyone care to site an example were turbine hasnt used this kinda change to strictly thier advantage?

and as most have stated in the past ddo has the best combat in an mmo atm yet whiners want to change it....this isnt PNP anymore and never could be MAIN REASON you dont have a DM right in front of you making fun decissions as we go through dungeons...ei ok it maybe fun to watch the barb wipe on the epic OOB lightning trap not as fun to watch the party go up and down till they have lvl 5 hps again......

a good DM would do something like have the barb who died in the lightning trap burp out a residual charge just before the party wipes and let him use firstaid on the incap clericI AM SORRY BUT THIS IS NOT DOABLE IN DDO

i say leave things as they are for combat and use time for content and filling out our classes ie PREs maybe epic lvls and say fill out high lvl spells better

[TheDjinnFor]

Either crit immunity will be attainable, and thus required, or it will be unattainable, and every build will have to be able to soak up a crit. Those are your two options.

Says who? Are you going to back up this (as of now) baseless assertion?

[smatt]

Says who? Are you going to back up this (as of now) baseless assertion?

Proof is in the nature of the longstanding buggy mess we already have... Fix the current messes before creating a bunch of new ones,with a change that a few forumites want....

[Cyr]

Just to lay it out there: If Turbine enables crits without rebalancing damage, so that good builds are getting 1-shot frequently, then we all agree there are some big problems.

Most of my points revolve around the simple perspective that:
If a mob's DPS today against a 100% Fort character is the same as the mob's DPS against a 0% Fort character in this alternative AC-seeker fortification system, then characters that dump defense are still ok -- though their damage intake is more spiked. The only difference is that characters with "casual" AC values high enough to offer 5%, 50% or 100% fortification will be taking even less damage than they would under today's 100% Fort.

Today, Characters without Heavy Fort get 1-shot because: ubiquitous heavy fort items makes mob base damage and crits unbalanced; those characters are often poorly built (correlates with not knowing about heavy fort) because user ignorance or because the premade paths are really crappy.

Let me do some simple math for you. It's clear from some of your responses that you have not done this math yet.

A simple reduction in mob damage to achieve the same base dps versus a 0% fort character actually reduces spike damage by far too little to not break many mid hit point builds. Let's say a mob now does 70 damage a swing. If their crit is a *4 on a 20 what would this reduce their base damage to? Something like 62 damage base. So a crit would still do 62*4 = 248 damage. That would be 5% of the time to many toons who just have no hope of reaching the epic AC numbers to matter even with a +20 bonus. So that guy crits for 248 then does a regular 62 in fast order = 300 damage. If the toon was full when it happened no big deal right? What if two crits happened in a row for 496 damage? Single mob percentage of occurance is 0.25% in this case. How about if you have three mobs attacking a single toon? That certainly happens. Right now it is 420 damage for six attacks (2 per mob before healer responds). That is pretty dang harsh, but it happens. The odds of a oh **** crit moment now are way upto ~26% or about a quarter of the time. So one quarter of the time in this case it's 558 damage in short order. That would be insta-death for a good amount of toons. The odds of a double crit in this case are not that bad either...

All this tells you that an AC reductions system is basically flawed in premise since even with a reduction of damage to mantain base dps spike damage will rip people apart. The problem is that some toons will permanently by 0% fort toons in top end content. This is fine IF they also have the large hit point pool to ride through these spikes. However, non barbs or other heavy hit point dumpers need not apply. Arcanes, clerics, bards, and any middle hit point melee who is not AC based already will not be able to ride through these damage spikes even with uber healing. It will raise the minimuim hp bar by a large amount for a majority of toons. This of course will obsolete a lot of builds where it is impossible to reach these hp levels.

[Artos_Fabril]

Says who? Are you going to back up this (as of now) baseless assertion?

Certainly I cannot make a guaranteed factual assertion about the future, but let's try this as an exercise in critical thinking, rather than an exercise in futility.

Crit immunity is available now.
Crit immunity is desirable to (the vast majority of) players.*
Therefore content must be designed and balanced with crit immunity in mind.

Under a new system, you have 2 choices: A. Crit immunity is available, or B. Crit immunity is not available.
If A, then:
Crit immunity is available now.
Crit immunity is desirable to (the vast majority of) players.*
Therefore content must be designed and balanced with crit immunity in mind.

If B, then:
Critical hits will happen.
Not dying is from them is desirable to (the vast majority of) players.*
Therefore the only desirable (again, to the vast majority of players) builds will be those that can survive crits.


*perhaps because being dead is boring, and doesn't get you invited to groups

[Borror0]

There are many aspects of A_D's suggestion that, in implementation, will end up going against Sid Meier's "unholy alliance."

Randomness isn't necessarily bad. It's much more complex than that and, more importantly, does not necessarily conflict with Meier's unholy alliance. In fact, Meier even noted that a certain amount of randomness can be beneficial when he said that "Randomness at a low-level helps with replayability and variety".

Part of the role that the game developer has to fulfill in Meier's unholy alliance is to make the players "feel like they're above average." While part of that entails creating challenges that they will have reasonable chances of defeating, another part entails ensuring that there is still a sense of risk. If the encounter or quest does not maintain the illusion of difficulty, then the players won't feel like they are above average. So, not only does the challenge has to have high chance of success, but it must give the impression that it's actually much harder than it really is.

And that's part of the brilliance of the change. Matuse involuntarily raised that point in an earlier post by saying "With the change, the player takes [slightly] less damage than before (about half of one percent), but that's not how it will feel to them. They'll feel like the game [is much more challenging than it really is]."

Notice that? The players take (barely) less damage, but it feels more difficult! That's exactly the type of things Meier advocates for!

The goal, here, is not to kill players by allowing monsters to unload a streak of high damage hits on them. The goal is expose them to hits damaging enough to temporarily modify their behavior but not significantly raise the difficulty level of the quest or encounter.

Perhaps you're thinking that critical hits would still remain high enough to kill players relatively easily like now. If so, you're mistaken. Like as been said previously, an important step of the change would be to revisit monster DPS in order to avoid excessive deadliness and the randomness in check.

You will not fix the AC issue with this sort of thing. You only end up either nerfing all players or boosting AC builds. In other words, it is extremely unbalanced in it's effect to different types of builds. This is never a good thing, unless it is the primary focus of a change to begin with due to an existing imbalance.

While this is true, this does not consist of an argument against the change for two reasons.

First, builds that focus on Armor Class are generally much weaker than builds that focus on DPS and do not worry with Armor Class, at all. While improving high AC characters is not the main focus of the change, it's a beneficial side effect of the change. The imbalance is so great that this would not be enough to overpower AC builds, anyway.

Secondly, the arguments boils down to "the range of meaningful Armor Class would not be widen enough to work so this is bad." While I agree that other changes, like quasi-iterative attack bonuses, would also be needed in order to address the issue, it does not mean that the change is bad. Pretending otherwise would be a perfect solution fallacy. In fact, no one change would be able to address the problem at once. This change has the capacity of more than doubling the range of meaningful AC; yet, you claim it's not enough. When and if Turbine tries to address this issue, it will require several different fixes - not just one.

Let's assume, for a second, that Turbine makes both this change (and add up to +20 anti-seeker bonuses) and give Epic monsters quasi-iterative bonuses of (1d5-3)*5. Then, the range of meaningful Armor Class would more than triple, going from nineteen to fifty nine. That would mean that all AC values from 90 to 31 would be meaningful, for example. That would require two changes - not just one. Neither are enough, on their own, but done together they are.

Let's say a mob now does 70 damage a swing. If their crit is a *4 on a 20 what would this reduce their base damage to? Something like 62 damage base. So a crit would still do 62*4 = 248 damage.

If the monster has a high critical multiplier (4 or higher), then the monster should have a rather low base damage in order to avoid excessive randomness. To compensate, they should be given higher to-hit so that their overall DPS is not too diminishes but it's imperative that their base damage stays low enough. It might be also a good idea to avoid high concentration of those in one place, again to avoid excessive deadliness. Meanwhile, if the critical multiplier is low (ie x2), it allows for a much higher base damage (especially if the threat range is also low) because the spikes of damage are not as deadly.

The decision of which critical multiplier and base damage to assign to each monster has to be conscious, just like any other monster stats. It should not be surprising or seen as a flaw in the system that tossing numbers randomly without knowing their impact will be a bad idea.

It goes without saying that if you give monsters high base damage and very high critical multipliers, you won't have a fun game. It will be far too deadly and players will die far too frequently. You won't see anyone here debating that. But that does not mean it's a bad idea nor that successful execution is impossible or even difficult.