Combat Feedback for Update 5.

[GhostNull]

The Paladin spell Zeal now grants a +10% Sacred bonus to double attack with the main hand instead of a 10% speed increase.

Since you're taking away the only other DPS spell for Paladins, can they get the level 3 spell Righteous Fury then?

Righteous Fury:
Level: 3
Duration: 1 min/level
Effects: +4 Sacred STR bonus, 5 temp HP/level(Max 50)

[Gercho]

Its funny how the devs answer the positive feedback and ignore the negative feedback.... why would i want to keep playing my twf paladin drow? i cant fix him not even lr'ing, only tr is left for him and i hate tr...

[slimkj]

Firstly, thanks for the comprehensive post and consultation. It's not been my experience of MMOs that this is common so good for you.

I have mixed feelings about this, particularly for monks. Most of the appeal for me, to be honest, of the monk class is the style of fewer HP damage per hit but many hits at high speed. If the speed was lower or bore no discernible difference to any other melee class I'd see far less reason to play one (and theoretically to pay for one, I suppose). Edit: I see I've misunderstood this and the speed will stay the same. Durrr, apologies! Forget I said anything then. It's certainly worth testing.

Edit2: So we would lose the insight bonus, ok. Then my point stands. Why wouldn't I just play any other melee and neck haste pots all day? I love the fact that the T4 wind stance lets me not manage haste clickies or pots any more. It's all about the speed!

However, I realise this aesthetic preference on my part is probably not quite as important as everyone being able to enjoy the game lag-free. I will say though that my playing experience tells me DPS lag is not my main problem, it's in certain quests (such as Shadow Crypt) where there is regular, frequent lag which is apparently unrelated to any damage output on mine or anyone else's part which I find much more frustrating.

This would tempt me to get a Lamannia client installed, I think, as I'd want to play this out before I put any more time into xp gathering for current characters, or in fact possible future TR plans for my monk that's close to cap. Along with the +5 Mith BP I got yesterday, it may also spur me to finally recreate my Tempest ranger over here.

[TFPAQ]

I'm guessing this thread is gonna grow ^2 pretty quick. I've followed Big E's thought process and tentatively I see some pros/cons on both sides (multi-proc smite, trips, etc, chance for full strength damage on the second main hand strike using PA, etc).

At the same time looking at the table data E provided, it does appear that pretty much everyone's "off-hand" is well ... off. If I have a chance of "only" 55% to make an off-hand attack after spending multiple feats on the TWF line. Aren't I better served counting on the "second chance" main hand proc with S&Bing it?

Sure is going to reduce the amount of ingredients I need to pull for crafting as the off-hand chances don't make me want to waste too many larges on off-hand gear...

Let's leave everything as it is and just use the initial main-hand check for the off-hand attack and see if that clears up the lag on Lammie first ... you hit or you missed... done.

That should simplify the physics and at least establish a baseline for how much of the lagging is due to the current physics calculations.

[Visty]

And of course this means Zeal, Fighter Alacrity, and Monk Wind Stance (Insight Portion) no longer help ranged attacks, meaning this partly nerfs ranged attacks. Can we expect double-shots (or heck, triple shots for the shuriken in wind stance) at a later date?

this is really something which should be adressed too
or maybe double strike just adds for ranged too and just worded poorly

[Judo]

I'd rather have the lag than these proposed changes. hell no. If you do this please give me Green Steel Deconstruction so I can un-gimp my toons from this horrible nerf. Do you want us to play anything other and THR barbs.

This is ********

/signed

[grodon9999]

This will be your "Sony" moment where you break the game like SWG.

[Cashiry]

Oh and how do you expect to get feedback, act on that feedback, and re-test with feedback before update 5 goes live on this far reaching of a change?

Ya, I'm with ya on this Cyr... If it hits Lamania with Update 5, it will come to live servers. I forsee no changes to this system and it is coming. Time to gear up for THF.

I'm sorry but 55% chance to land your off hand attack with a base GTWF build is a waste of 3 Feats and attribute points to get those Feats. You are going away from the D&D system once again.

[Seliana]

Eladrin,

If what is causing the lag is the number of dice being rolled at once why cant we start simplifying dice rolls to be much more efficient instead of changing the number of attacks everyone gets per second. Here is an example of maintaining randomness in on hit effects, but dropping the number of dice needed to achieve the calculation significantly.

A level 20 reincarnated monk is using a +5 Shocking(1d6) of Puregood(1d6) of Frost(1d6) handwrap, he has the Henshin Mystic monk set equipped(1d6) and is wearing a Red Dragonscale Robe(1d6) where his fists do 2d12 damage base, His TOD rings have 2d6 holy and 1d6 acid on them as well, and he hits his Stormstrike I(1d6) attack when he swings.

So his damage roll would be 1d6shock + 1d6good + 1d6frost + 1d6henshin + 1d6dragonscale + 1d6stormstrike + 2d6holy +1d6acid + 2d12base + 5 on every swing. That's 11 dice rolls every swing, but with a quick change we can drop that to 2 dice rolls every swing without taking away from that monks attack speed. What if the system simply rolled a single dice and applied it to all on hit effects of a weapon that involved that size dice roll.

For example the system simply rolled 1d6 and resulted in a 2, then rolled 1d12 and resulted in a 10. You could take that single number for each dice size and apply it to all effects. Thus it would deal 2shock + 2good + 2frost + 2henshin + 2dragonscale + 2stormstrike + 4holy +2acid + 20base + 5 = 43 damage

This simple change could result in up to 82% more cpu efficiency per attack to be made for some characters on every swing.

[EyeRekon]

Traditionally the software development mantra is "make it work, then make it fast." In this case it seems that combat is working, but just not fast enough. I think fundamentally changing how combat works may be the wrong approach. Now I certainly don't know the underlying architecture of the DDO system, but if high end Raid lag is due to heavy processing requirements then the server is simply lacking computing capacity to accommodate the load. Computing capacity is understood to be a far cheaper resource than development efforts are.

In the age of clouds and virtualization, why not spawn a dedicated combat server which will handle all the combat processing and I/O for high-end content? That will liberate the main servers from the task by reducing resource contention. Furthermore these combat server instances can be spawned as-needed to conserve resources and automatically scale with resource/load demand.

In other words the problem might have an architectural solution that would enable advancements in many other areas. A square peg can fit into a round hole, if the hole is big enough. Rather than grind off the square's edges, you can expand the hole. Making combat fit into existing lag realities is different from making lag realities fit existing combat.

If you don't do that already that is...

[Visty]

This will be your "Sony" moment where you break the game like SWG.

bit exaggerating, no?

[Cyr]

Are haste boosts getting the shaft also here?

If so the monster build just went from respectable to garbage. The halo effects from all this are enormous. Jeez, tempest 1 is shafted really hard also I am seeing. There goes a ton of interesting builds.

Heck with the arcane boost from the other changes it is Arcanes, divines, THF barbs, and THF pali's. I'm not seeing any compelling reasons anymore for ranger splashes or rangers period. Monks also are getting a big kick in the gut so they are out too. THF fighters if haste boost is shafted are out also. TWF fighters are gimped completly...thanks for that btw finally got Cyr back to a point where he was decent again... Rogues got a big dps loss also....

Wow, I can't even believe this is being considered seriously.

[Gratch]

You wanna know what the markets are doing? You can't handle these markets.

Monk items - slashed prices - going down - fast fast. handwraps... insanely low. Will they ever come back up?

Falchions going up... rising... stellar prices.

Rapiers, shortswords, scimitars, longswords and even khopeshes are edging down cautiously.

RED ALERT
A sword of shadows scroll was traded for 4 million plat. These things are so on fire, the sorcs are ashamed to have fire spells.

Breaking news: Yes, we're at the headquarters of [Power Gamer Guild] now. Apparently the guild has split in two. There was a SoS shard up for roll and it got mistakenly transferred to a wizard, who declaimed it to now be his loot and he was keeping it for a possible TR into a Barbo. Tensions ran high, drama ensues and yes, there are now two guilds.

Ah the markets - always going off fear or perceived fear or the perception that fear may someday be fearing the peeps.

[This segment of market talk brought to you by the I follow the forum rules when I post my feedback and by the BUY DDO STORE RESPEC HEARTS COMMISSION.]

[le_goat]

The only way i would agree to slowing down my monk is to up the damage dice. any other way and you are nerfing your unreleased pre's and monks would be unable to find a group.

[Grendyll]

I am extremely disappointed to hear of this nerf. 2HF had already caught up to 2WF and even passed it with epic SoS. Elite and Epic play is dominated by 2HF Barbarians and Kensai. All I see is a terrible and unwarranted nerf to 2WF and especially to the poor rogues who already struggle to find a place in high end content.

It sounds like you have proposed to reduce DPS lag by simply reducing DPS altogether. Make no mistake, this change will cost the average rogue 25% of his DPS and greatly nerf all strategies that involve high attack rate (vorpal, smite, banish, WoP, WoE, etc.). The sheer number of attacks being thrown by 2WF was the only thing keeping it remotely competitive with 2HF, now that is gone.

[Sirea]

So, question.

If *our* DPS is being nerfed, how about slightly nerfing mob HP/DPS to go along with it? The changes might be much less noticeable if there was an across-the-board reduction.

Less DPS means more of a burden on healers as well. Such a reduction would help healers that have to deal with mobs dropping slower as a result of these changes.

*crediting this idea to Clam (DragoonPenguin) because he's having a hissy fit in userchat right now saying I stole his idea*

[Judo]

You wanna know what the markets are doing? You can't handle these markets.

Monk items - slashed prices - going down - fast fast. handwraps... insanely low. Will they ever come back up?

Falchions going up... rising... stellar prices.

Rapiers, shortswords, scimitars, longswords and even khopeshes are edging down cautiously.

RED ALERT
A sword of shadows scroll was traded for 4 million plat. These things are so on fire, the sorcs are ashamed to have fire spells.

Breaking news: Yes, we're at the headquarters of [Power Gamer Guild] now. Apparently the guild has split in two. There was a SoS shard up for roll and it got mistakenly transferred to a wizard, who declaimed it to now be his loot and he was keeping it for a possible TR into a Barbo. Tensions ran high, drama ensues and yes, there are now two guilds.

Ah the markets - always going off fear or perceived fear or the perception that fear may someday be fearing the peeps.

[This segment of market talk brought to you by the I follow the forum rules when I post my feedback and by the BUY DDO STORE RESPEC HEARTS COMMISSION.]

/tinfoil hat on

and this coinciding with the release of +5 rezes

coincidence? i think not

i think we all are about to get the big oil bum rush

[Gratan]

hmmm.. let's see what it does to my two twf

13rog/4ftr/2pal - main 100%, offhand 55% (currently 100%,100%)

12ftr/6pal/2rog - main 100%, offhand 55% (currently 100%, 100%)

They'd both get the worst possible outcome for the twf line. So much for building a little out of the box.

And for any monk that is not in windstance we get the same as your above numbers.

[bloodyrag]

good to see some serious thought has been made towards the lag problem but i dont see how it works. less attacks means more time to kill mobs which equates to more healing and more fighting unless mobs hps are also turned down. im all for anything that helps lag just dont go introdusing things before they are fully tested and all problems worked out. a major change like this doesnt want to see a following ten mnor changes as u do rolling fixes to the major change. ]
and to say that warchanters are possibly getting the doubles trike song down the track completly screws over any bard that isnt a warchanter how tough will it b for these other bards to get a grp then

[BattleCircle]

So, question.

If *our* DPS is being nerfed, how about slightly nerfing mob HP/DPS to go along with it? The changes might be much less noticeable if there was an across-the-board reduction.

Less DPS means more of a burden on healers as well. Such a reduction would help healers that have to deal with mobs dropping slower as a result of these changes.

This!!

Who cares if lag is reduced if mobs take 50% longer to kill.