Barbarian capstone seems to give a hidden haste boost

[Bufo_Alvarius]

If there wasn't a imbalance between haste boost and damage boost this would be true.

8 str for a min vs 12 str for 3+ min

Fix this imbalance!!!

Yes its sarcasm, but it just shows how terrible your logic is.


Hate to say it fellow barbs but that nerf bat is looming.

[grodon9999]

Very interesting - any Barb 20 TWFs get a chance to test against a TW Kensai?

[gemineye]

hehe, thanks for the neg rep for my last post. you mistake me for someone who cares. you would be better served giving neg rep to someone who is willing to cry about it.

however, my point stands. neg rep away, if you will. at least have the balls to quote me or say something before you neg me. or are you less of a man??

I thought you weren't gonna cry about it?

[sephiroth1084]

I guess we now know where the missing 10% of the ranger's capstone went.

[Vanshilar]

Yes, the video was done without rage. From the video you can see that the only "buff" I had was the House P trinket.

You can't use a two-handed vicious weapon to test, because when a glancing blow procs, it will also result in an additional point of self-damage. Each trial would have different numbers of glancing blow procs, and thus screw up counting the number of hits in this way. It's easier to just count how many times you've seen one of the swings go through (say, the "baseball swing" where the weapon goes from right to left), then multiply by 4, which you should be able to do in real-time (i.e. just playing the video at normal speed).

[LawstCawz]

This is rediculous.

Any ETA on fixing this?

Talking about overpowered...

So lets take a fighter CAPSTONE and just stick on the tail end of the barb one...
Can I get the pally one stuck to my fighter one then? thanks.

How much thought did this post take? All the number crunchers show barbs being close to fighters based off attack speed data that would have included the capstone.

[cforce]

Very interesting - any Barb 20 TWFs get a chance to test against a TW Kensai?

Actually, I would presume *any* Barb 20 with the Capstone could test against any fighter 20. If memory serves, the attack animations without any of the TWF feats are still the same; you just take a monster to-hit penalty?

It's refreshing to see this -- one of the really "wierd" outstanding items in M_A's attack speed thread was that some folks claimed a much larger jump in BAB speed when they went from BAB 19 to BAB 20 -- and others didn't see it. A hidden Barb capstone effect could explain that troubling discrepancy away....

[Emili]

Devs, please ignore this entire thread. It does not exist. It never has, and never will. You will forget any ideas you may have about the Barb capstone acting funny, except that it does not have increased glancing blow damage yet.



A Pure barb is going to hit level 20, take the capstone, and never swing a weapon without the capstone again. So they get used to their attack speed, and never actually compare it to non-capstone speeds.

Arguing that this effect should be nerfed because it is better than the capstone of another class is the wrong argument: Fighters should be arguing for a MORE POWERFUL capstone, not a weaker barb one! However, nobody is arguing that barbs are overpowered at the moment--there seems to be a fair balance between fighters/barbs. The barb capstone has been working this way for 9 months; just because someone noticed its additional benefit does not mean that people have not been using this benefit that whole time. Nine months of live-server testing shows that the barb capstone is not unbalanced in regards to this hidden attack speed boost.

Naturally, though, people who like DPS calculations and theoreticals (MUCH more common on the forums than the in-game population) this means a bunch more work to do.

Has Shade posted an updated video of THF twitch? I know he posted one at 136 APM, but that was pre-haste nerf and pre-"BAB=attack speed" changes (Update 2?).

Never thought about it as I twitch my THF barb and my fighter is TWF and only use a two hander on her once in a blue moon and I'm never logged into both at that same time ... and I agree they should not nerf the barb cap but give a better one or enhance the existing fighter one... make the fighter one 20% alacrity or add a superior weapon specialization to it.

[sephiroth1084]

Devs, please ignore this entire thread. It does not exist. It never has, and never will. You will forget any ideas you may have about the Barb capstone acting funny, except that it does not have increased glancing blow damage yet.



A Pure barb is going to hit level 20, take the capstone, and never swing a weapon without the capstone again. So they get used to their attack speed, and never actually compare it to non-capstone speeds.

Arguing that this effect should be nerfed because it is better than the capstone of another class is the wrong argument: Fighters should be arguing for a MORE POWERFUL capstone, not a weaker barb one! However, nobody is arguing that barbs are overpowered at the moment--there seems to be a fair balance between fighters/barbs. The barb capstone has been working this way for 9 months; just because someone noticed its additional benefit does not mean that people have not been using this benefit that whole time. Nine months of live-server testing shows that the barb capstone is not unbalanced in regards to this hidden attack speed boost.

Naturally, though, people who like DPS calculations and theoreticals (MUCH more common on the forums than the in-game population) this means a bunch more work to do.

Has Shade posted an updated video of THF twitch? I know he posted one at 136 APM, but that was pre-haste nerf and pre-"BAB=attack speed" changes (Update 2?).

Why shouldn't it be nerfed? It was clearly good enough to warrant going 20 barbarian before anyone noticed the possibility of a hidden effect, and that hidden effect (if there is one) is essentially the same thing that fighters get as their whole capstone (and almost the same thing as rangers get for theirs).

Plus, barbarians are already at, or almost at, the top in terms of DPS--why would they require the 10% boost?

[Shade]

Why shouldn't it be nerfed?

It's against turbine core philosophy to nerf. It's always been like this since the early days of asheron's call.

Turbine wanted to be the Anti-Verant/Sony (at the time there only real competition - EQ's developer). So they did everything as differently as possible.

Where Sony would release things very powerful by mistake and constant nerf each class to attain balance.. Turbine would do the oposite, whenever something was too powerful compared to other skills/items/etc, they would just release new and more powerful ones on the other side to balanced this out. They continued this for years vastly changing the game making it far too easy, then having to released new and stronger monsters to conpensate.

And are continuing it for DDO. Turbine avoids nerfs at all costs.
Critical rage was always incredibly overpowered and Turbine knew it, but despite that for years it was never nerfed, And when the day came that they finally did something about it, it was simply repalced by the superior frenzy berserker and other melee classes were given strong similar enhancements.

Personally still not convinced this even exists tho.

[grodon9999]

Personally still not convinced this even exists tho.

Twitch fighting has an "X" factor to this. Test TWF with auto-attack, takes twitch skills out of the equation.

[eulogy098]

There is a fairly clear visual increase to attack speed between having the enhancement and not. its easy enough for anyone to take a look at. Im not convinced its upwards of 10% but its definitely something that is easy to spot.

Frankly i wouldn't care if they nerfed it as long as they fixed the broken glancing blow procs on it at the same time.

[sephiroth1084]

It's against turbine core philosophy to nerf. It's always been like this since the early days of asheron's call.

Turbine wanted to be the Anti-Verant/Sony (at the time there only real competition - EQ's developer). So they did everything as differently as possible.

Where Sony would release things very powerful by mistake and constant nerf each class to attain balance.. Turbine would do the oposite, whenever something was too powerful compared to other skills/items/etc, they would just release new and more powerful ones on the other side to balanced this out. They continued this for years vastly changing the game making it far too easy, then having to released new and stronger monsters to conpensate.

And are continuing it for DDO. Turbine avoids nerfs at all costs.
Critical rage was always incredibly overpowered and Turbine knew it, but despite that for years it was never nerfed, And when the day came that they finally did something about it, it was simply repalced by the superior frenzy berserker and other melee classes were given strong similar enhancements.

Personally still not convinced this even exists tho.

Uh...they may claim this, but it is clearly not the case, as they have nerfed quite a few things over the 2 and a half years I've been here. And this would likely not be categorized as a nerf, but a bug fix, since it was never mentioned as being an aspect of the capstone, and obviously has no business being there (again assuming the benefit exists at all).

The capstones, to a degree, are meant (even if unsuccessful in this goal) to encourage players to stay pure. Barbarian didn't need a whole lot of help since it gets the enhanced rage at cap anyway (+2 Str/+2 Con), but this was a pretty nice addition and kind of solidified the fact that losing 2 levels of barbarian was a difficult decision to make (unlike for nearly every other class). The capstone has been a compelling reason, and a frequent argument in favor of going pure barbarian without any indication of an alacrity bonus, so it fulfilled its intended design goal without it. With it, the capstone is probably much more powerful than just about any other capstone enhancement, and unnecessarily so.

[Boromirs]

If this is true then Barbarians would need either a bug fix (not a nerf since the mentioned 10% alacrity was never written as being part of the capstone) or Fighters would need a counterbalancing boost to strength +2? similar to Barbarians. I would go with the latter and frankly I dont think it would really alter DPS that much (its more the thought of it that matters).

[Shade]

Uh...they may claim this, but it is clearly not the case, as they have nerfed quite a few things over the 2 and a half years I've been here.

Name one that otherwise couldn't be classified as a "bugfix"

It's just not there style. That's quite clear to me.

To me the closest thing to a nerf I've seen them do was the massive revamp of the enhancement system.. Which removed and nerfed some specific enhancement, but let you take a huge amount more. (like 80 vs 4..) So on the whole, most everyone agreed this was an overall improvement. That's turbine style, whenever something needs to re-balanced, they throw us something else to make it seems less like a nerf.

[Boromirs]

Name one that otherwise couldn't be classified as a "bugfix"

It's just not there style. That's quite clear to me.

To me the closest thing to a nerf I've seen them do was the massive revamp of the enhancement system.. Which removed and nerfed some specific enhancement, but let you take a huge amount more. (like 80 vs 4..) So on the whole, most everyone agreed this was an overall improvement. That's turbine style, whenever something needs to re-balanced, they throw us something else to make it seems less like a nerf.

Bu this isnt a nerf, Shade. I mean it took exactly how many *years* to discover this capstone "ability", thus it was clearly not intended by the devs to be there in the first place or else they would have written it in the skill description at the very least. Therefore, this is accurately classified as a bug.

Again, it's more likely they will remove this anamoly as a bug cleanup in the next update. I'm almost certain it won't be announced (perhaps it will be under the umbrella of a general "bug fixes" mention in the next update). The best thing to do is to check up on it in the next update, meaning someone should do a test again in a couple months to see if it's still there.

[Chai]

It's against turbine core philosophy to nerf. It's always been like this since the early days of asheron's call.

Turbine wanted to be the Anti-Verant/Sony (at the time there only real competition - EQ's developer). So they did everything as differently as possible.

Where Sony would release things very powerful by mistake and constant nerf each class to attain balance.. Turbine would do the oposite, whenever something was too powerful compared to other skills/items/etc, they would just release new and more powerful ones on the other side to balanced this out. They continued this for years vastly changing the game making it far too easy, then having to released new and stronger monsters to conpensate.

And are continuing it for DDO. Turbine avoids nerfs at all costs.
Critical rage was always incredibly overpowered and Turbine knew it, but despite that for years it was never nerfed, And when the day came that they finally did something about it, it was simply repalced by the superior frenzy berserker and other melee classes were given strong similar enhancements.

Personally still not convinced this even exists tho.

These are good observations about the difference in class balance changes made between companies.

The huge issue with Sony / Verant MMOs was PVP. The PVP boards in EQ1 back in 2000 or so basically were gripe after gripe about class balance. Fighters could kill no one, and rogues were next in line, while the wizards, necros, and druids were basically kiting people to death, with no challenge. Balance patches were released ALOT and they were all nerfs. When SWG came out, skill trees were nerfed practically weekly, to the point where you would be the most powerful toon on your server one week, and suck the next. Time investment rants became the norm, because it sucked to invest alot of time in one toon that had certain abilities, only to have those abilities nerfed into semi uselessness.

Turbine doesnt deal with PVP, especially in DDO, the same way other MMO creators deal with it. They dont care about PVP balance. I applaud this because in DnD, there is no PVP balance anyway. They dont have to change classes periodically because class A always pwns class B so the class B people flood the forums with their rants. When they do make a class change, its usually adding something to a class that hasnt had any love for a long time. (go clerics!) While people gripe about needing this stuff sooner, this aint nothing like the EQ days...

If they do make a change, it will likely be an add on fix and not a take away fix, that is, if this is real in the first place.

[sephiroth1084]

Name one that otherwise couldn't be classified as a "bugfix"

It's just not there style. That's quite clear to me.

To me the closest thing to a nerf I've seen them do was the massive revamp of the enhancement system.. Which removed and nerfed some specific enhancement, but let you take a huge amount more. (like 80 vs 4..) So on the whole, most everyone agreed this was an overall improvement. That's turbine style, whenever something needs to re-balanced, they throw us something else to make it seems less like a nerf.

WoP? Con damage in general (nerfed CK). Crit Rage. Rampant immunities might be seen as stealth nerfs to some prevalent spells and strategies.

Nothing else springs to mind at the moment, but there's more.

[MarcusCole]

Waaahh this class I never play possibly has some kinda small bug that I otherwise would of never knew about ever if I didn't read the forums.. omg nerf please.

Hmm so an entire life (and another toon 1/2 way through a TR) as a barb doesn't count? Axer only has had one life iirc, so does that mean he doesn't count as a barb? Just thinkin out loud here

Shhh no one tell him about the secret extra +40 damage we get with the berserker set or the fact our runspeed boosts actaully provide more then you'd think!

Assume makes an ... well you get the idea.

[Vanshilar]

Bu this isnt a nerf, Shade. I mean it took exactly how many *years* to discover this capstone "ability", thus it was clearly not intended by the devs to be there in the first place or else they would have written it in the skill description at the very least. Therefore, this is accurately classified as a bug.

It's not clear when this was introduced. It wasn't necessarily in for years. I mean, when I did striding speed tests in February 2010:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=232590

it turned out that the haste spell was only giving 32% to running speed (at least, to barbs, since all my chars are either barbs or have a barb splash). However, in the thread I referenced there, to MrCow's original testing (which gave me the idea to test it using the /loc command):

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p...4&postcount=41

his testing from late July 2009 was that haste was working properly (i.e. giving 40% to run speed); note his haste testing was also done with a barb, so the results should've been the same. So that change was made sometime in the intervening months. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened with the capstone. Perhaps rangers also get it too, I dunno, unless someone goes and tests it out.

Whether this is a feature or a bug is in the eye of the beholder (I wonder how long before someone makes a reference to a Hound of Xoriat run). However, DDO has plenty of hidden effects, one of the most obvious one being the madstone rage on being hit. Just because it wasn't documented doesn't necessarily mean it's a bug.

I belatedly realized that the title of this should've been an attack speed increase, not a haste boost, since the effect seems to be permanent rather than temporary. Oh well.