Combat Feedback for Update 5.

[chubbs99]

You know, I and probably others wouldn't have such a hard time swallowing this change if along with these proposed changes was a complete rework of everything "broken" or at least everything needing to be fixed.

I would have absolutely zero issues with the combat changes if at the same time

AC was changed to mean something. I've mentioned this earlier in the thread, but my idea is having at level, melee being able to hit trash 90% of the time, red bosses 80% of the time, and purple raid bosses 70% of the time. While these numbers may not be realistic in DnD, we all know anything is possible in DDO.

For a full BAB class with say 32 str. 20 (bab) + 16 (str) + 5 (weapon) + 2 (GH) + 4 (bard song) = +47 to hit. So, say Trash's AC around 50, Red names around 52, and Raid Bosses around 54.
[edit] Similar can be done to monster vs Player AC to bring somewhat of a ballance. However monster should probably be hitting at a higher %, but still less then current. Maybe say when CR = Player Level Trash hits 70%, Red hits 80%, Raid Boss hits 90-100%[/edit]

[edit2]Wasn't thinking the last edit through very well. What I'm meaning is say CR 20 vs Player level 20. Assuming To hit is about the same (which it isn't and shouldn't be for all mobs), A player with 50 AC can expect to be hit 70% of the time by trash, say 80% by red, and 90-100% by Raid bosses. Obviously these numbers are silly, but without knowing 100% what a good mob To hit spread is for any given CR level, its hard to provide constructive Player AC examples. [/edit2]

Combine the AC change with Off Hand nerf and players will be hitting ALOT less making the server happy. To make the players happy Mob health can be scaled back accordingly.

Now to keep casters in check (sorry guys), while making them still more useful then haste bots in most instances, Make Spell Resistance effect ALL spells. Increase mob SR accordingly, and get rid of blanket immunities (including bosses, replace with reasonable resistance, or absorption %). This way if done similar to AC %'s a caster can hit a raid boss ~70% of the time, while some may QQ, this will still allow them to provide some DPS support.

This will make AC actually important, and make Spell Pen more important. While at the same time keeping things challenging at higher levels and keeping the server from wanting to committing Harakiri. Call it DDO v2.0 if you want to, but at least bundle it all up into 1 update so that everything is fixed at the same time rather then a little here, a little more 6 months done the road, and maybe eventually when we are back to pre EU subscription rates everything is where you (Turbine) want and combat works, players are happy, and servers are happy.

[aggietex84]

Ok, I'm trying to grasp all the hidden effects and changes that are going on here, if anyone wouldn't mind helping explain I'd greatly appreciate it. If someone could just correct the following list for me whenever I mess up, so I can see where I misread/misunderstood the change, it would be greatly appreciated.

A. Monks and Rangers with with TWF feats will not lose any attacks/second compared to what they are now.
B. Fighters and Paladins with proper feats will lose some 20% offhand attacks/second, and gain some 10% mainhand attacks/second (plus whatever double strikes proc from abilities)
C. Builds with no TWF feats will lose ALOT of offhand attack/second. (or has this changed from previous? have they always had less offhand attacks?)
D. Haste will no longer give more attacks/second.
E. Melee alacritiy is no more and will not give more attacks/second.
F. Items that boost attack speed are being removed/changed entirely.


Forgive me for not reading the 100+ pages of whines about "I DON'T UNDERSTAND BUT ITS A NERF, I HATE NERFS, YOU RUINED MY LIFE!!! FIX IT NAO" and the subsequent 10+ pages of smart resourceful information and reasonable questions; but I just don't have the time...

[IronClan]

These changes are interrelated and all part of a complex system, it's amazing that a user base that can analyze and appreciate tiny min/max single digit or low double digit percentage improvements in their character builds from multi classing "synergy's" apparently have such a massively hard time understanding these nearly identical interrelationships in the combat system...

The last two pages seem to be people who are holding on to the false hope that this nerf is purely intended to improve lag. They intend to nerf TWF for balance reasons; this intent is clearly stated in the summery of developer replies to this thread as reposted below:

italics are the common question or statement some are actual posts some generic
Dev responses in BOLD yellow
Any comment or opinion I add is in normal text

* FIX/UPGRADE the SERVERS instead of nerfing!!!111ONE1
We've already given DDO major upgrades to servers and datacenter, so continued "upgrade your hardware" comments are not contributing to the discussion in a productive manner.

*"Why not just fix lag in raids instead of nerfing" or "You're trying to trick us by hiding a nerf in a lag fix"
I won’t hide that these proposed changes do reduce the effectiveness of off-hand attacks, which reduces the two weapon fighting style’s extreme dominance over two handed fighting.

They aren't nerfing because of lag, they are nerfing due to balance issues, and at the same time they are getting a (small see the lama forum Dev posts) synergy bonus from the nerf (less off hand attacks) that will help lag I believe they put the number around 10%. In addition they are replacing stacking haste boosts to reduce lag (see below)...

* why double strikes and why nerf TWF and fix lag at the same time
[we need to reduce] the number of permanent speed increases in the game that are doing nasty things behind the scenes, [double strike] significantly reduces the overhead in a bunch of the calculations
Implicit: TWF and double strike are interrelated Double strike is necessary to replace speed boosts, specifically. But some balancing of TWF is needed or double strikes would be overpowered (and of course the earlier statement that they feel TWF holds "extreme dominance" over everything else.

* I don't see how this is going to reduce lag. You're replacing physics collision calculations with % proc calculations
Some things are very light, performance-wise. "Chance to proc" is one of the lightest calculations available.

*So a year ago you guys introduce Dungeon Alert to get rid of lag, that evidentally didnt work at all.
Dungeon Alert was meant to control one particular source of lag. (Specifically, pathing and perception systems of large numbers of monsters in a small area, since that's an n^2 problem.) It was never expected to banish all of it. Likewise, these changes are not expected to banish all forms of lag, but should help some of them.

*if this works to lessen the lag, can we finally do away DA
Dungeon Alert actually does help by making it suboptimal to create situations where there are a large number of monsters in a small area. (Dungeons where it automatically triggers through no action of your own need to have their spawns changed.)

* Who cares if lag is reduced if mobs take 50% longer to kill, The sky is falling, DoooOOoooMMMMm etc.
Monsters would take 50% longer to kill only if the off-hand chance was reduced to zero, and a chance to attack under 100% was applied to the main hand as well. (As main hand attacks deal more damage than off-hand, with the exception of the monk.) Depending on who's numbers you trust (and what class/feats) TWF DPS will be lower anywhere from 8%-14% to 16-17%.

*So basically instead of improving the servers communication to get rid of the dps lag you are just going to take the easy way out and nerf twfing
We're attacking the problem from many directions.

In other words there's no simple easy fix to lag... there's also no simple painless way to fix the power creep this game has obviously undergone since GS crafting and monty hall weapon effects (and things like double smites) made TWF the defacto standard.

[AbsynthMinded]

These changes are interrelated and all part of a complex system, it's amazing that a user base that can analyze and appreciate tiny min/max single digit or low double digit percentage improvements in their character builds from multi classing "synergy's" apparently have such a massively hard time understanding these nearly identical interrelationships in the combat system...

I can easily answer this by saying, when it comes to the D&D math, we can learn that in many different locations over a lifetime of play.. However when is comes to video game math, very few players have the experience and education to fully appreciate or understand it. That said, any changes to the core code that effects the D&D math and appearance is going to receive a lot of resistance. If they change all the core code and still make it appear the same at the surface they win. If they change anything that makes the game appear less like D&D and more like 'everything else', they loose.. more or less..

[Zistra]

These changes are interrelated and all part of a complex system, it's amazing that a user base that can analyze and appreciate tiny min/max single digit or low double digit percentage improvements in their character builds from multi classing "synergy's" apparently have such a massively hard time understanding these nearly identical interrelationships in the combat system...

The last two pages seem to be people who are holding on to the false hope that this nerf is purely intended to improve lag. They intend to nerf TWF for balance reasons; this intent is clearly stated in the summery of developer replies to this thread as reposted below:

<snipped>

In other words there's no simple easy fix to lag... there's also no simple painless way to fix the power creep this game has obviously undergone since GS crafting and monty hall weapon effects (and things like double smites) made TWF the defacto standard.

I don't believe anyone believes this nerf is or ever was PURELY intended to fix (sorry.. 'improve') lag. That it was bundled in as one half of a post about lag was at best coincidental and at worst sneaky and manipulative. From the beginning, this should have been 2 threads: one about lag and one about game balance. The one about lag would have had 25 posts in it, since with the dearth of information the OP provided about lag, there was room for only the most general of suggestions for what MIGHT be helpful.

Clearly there is a feeling among the devs that game balance needs addressing. The best approach to a problem such as that is to FIRST, see if the player base agrees and SECOND ask for suggestions as to what 'balance' should look like and only THIRD make a recommendation as to what they will do about it and see if it 'flies'. Starting at Step 3 and tying it back to the lag issue was either foolish or underhanded, take your pick. Oh, and only the votes of paying customers (VIP and Premium) should be considered in Step 1, and VIP should count at least double.

I will restate that power creep is IMMENSELY better than nerfs.. if only because it tends to make people happy rather than angry. That being said, it is best to fix anything overpowered IMMEDIATELY, and to reconsider every other option multiple times before nerfing anything that has been status quo for more than 90 days. As Alhaz states, we DO look to optimize, and will take any change and work it to our best advantage ASAP. Rollbacks need to be done BEFORE people get too invested in an ill-considered change.

[IronClan]

I agree with what you're saying with the exception that I don't agree about people wanting the game to be more like D&D. This nerf actually makes TWF more like core D&D rules (except the double strike mechanic but that's haste not TWF). In D&D TWF is mostly attractive to RP'ers, character concept or "philosophy" builds and people who just love Drizzt. or all or parts of the above. That is to say it's FAR from the most dominant playstyle as it is in DDO.

Also I would submit that if DDO instituted several movement rules that they've ignored, such as fatigue/sprinting, not being able to cast spells reliably while jumping, and several others lots of very vocal veteran players would hate hate hate it due to slowing down the game and virtually eliminating zerging.... The game would be far more D&D like but people here by in large don't really want that, at least the most vocal players here don't. They seem to want D&D flavored Half Life 2 without the slower movement and momentary sprint key... Or maybe that's Quake 4 haven't played quake since 3 so who knows.

Some of the best FPS's ever made have slower movement + sprint key and as a result they are MORE tactical and MORE popular but for some reason it's just anathema here.

The above would also lower lag by virtue of lowering the density of combats on a server, slow the players down and combat encounters take longer to get to. Spreading them out a little. But apparently this idea or slowing down combat a little is a poison pill to a great deal of the most vocal players on the forums...

Coming from NWN, it seems hard for me to fathom, but it doesn't seem there's a lot of cross over of players between the two games.... Probably because NWN players got used to slower paced non twitch combat, along with a much better implementation/adaptation of the core rules, and that along with the twitchy style of DDO and perhaps maybe the extreme amount of "elitist" build criticism that goes on, kind of turn them off, I know it nearly put me off to DDO... Only F2P kept me playing.

[Sarr]

Exactly. In my opinion TWF got too good overall, and I always wanted to see it nerfed because it was imbalanced in my opinion.

I still want to see TWF and THF / ranged totally equal in cost and in power. I am very experienced Dungeon Master, winning some contest in the past, and I know that's not how D&D was built. But in D&D DM can always adjust everything behind the curtain and no one will ever know he wasn't transparent about it.

D&D 3.0 and 3.5 was just very imbalanced, because it didn't even need any balance beyond being "believable". If you delved deep into rules, they were really not that perfect. That's why most good DMs modified them to better suit THEIR campaign.

Here, Turbine has much harder job. Well, 1000x harder job that average DM ever had. Especially when they could go Warhammer Online route and never have complaints about Warhammer rules, be it miniature s's or RPG-game's, because Warhammer Online... just doesn't use ANY Warhammer rules .

That's why I'm worried and almost sure than next DDO MMO may be just Forgotten Realms fluff, some random dice fluff and... no D&D rules at all. Or just very little of them.

But back to the topic - yes, this is TWF nerf, and not only TWF nerf. And it may help lag a bit, but was never intended to fix it. That was clear from the start, Turbine said it themselves. They just didn't say "hey, we want to nerf TWF". Well, they're not that suicidal, I guess?

[Athlonpv]

If dps lag happens it is due to the amount of messages being put through a buffer where the buffer isn't able to cope with the output.

A simple way to circumvent this is to not abuse the text buffer output to handle the single hits but do them per 5 (or more)hits. This will seem rather in accurate and will need getting used to but it saves tuning gaming mechanics.

And maybe only do this for raids or even just make it an optional in the gameplay options.

[macros123]

Exactly. In my opinion TWF got too good overall, and I always wanted to see it nerfed because it was imbalanced in my opinion.

I still want to see TWF and THF / ranged totally equal in cost and in power. I am very experienced Dungeon Master, winning some contest in the past, and I know that's not how D&D was built. But in D&D DM can always adjust everything behind the curtain and no one will ever know he wasn't transparent about it.

D&D 3.0 and 3.5 was just very imbalanced, because it didn't even need any balance beyond being "believable". If you delved deep into rules, they were really not that perfect. That's why most good DMs modified them to better suit THEIR campaign.

Here, Turbine has much harder job. Well, 1000x harder job that average DM ever had. Especially when they could go Warhammer Online route and never have complaints about Warhammer rules, be it miniature s's or RPG-game's, because Warhammer Online... just doesn't use ANY Warhammer rules .

That's why I'm worried and almost sure than next DDO MMO may be just Forgotten Realms fluff, some random dice fluff and... no D&D rules at all. Or just very little of them.

But back to the topic - yes, this is TWF nerf, and not only TWF nerf. And it may help lag a bit, but was never intended to fix it. That was clear from the start, Turbine said it themselves. They just didn't say "hey, we want to nerf TWF". Well, they're not that suicidal, I guess?

No one would care that TWF and THF were equal in power except for the fact that TWF DOES COST MORE. That anyone can create any character with 18 STR and throw him a decent greataxe can equal someone who has been forced to dedicate 15 Dex, 3 feats and twice the weapon costs is ridiculous.

If they are going to be equal in power then they NEED to be equal in cost.

And as an aside, the amount of time between when this thread was begun asking for our opinions to the time that Lamania went live was very small. I am fairly certain that a change as significant as this was not programmed in so short a time, and that this was going to happen no matter what the population had to say about it.

[smatt]

No one would care that TWF and THF were equal in power except for the fact that TWF DOES COST MORE. That anyone can create any character with 18 STR and throw him a decent greataxe can equal someone who has been forced to dedicate 15 Dex, 3 feats and twice the weapon costs is ridiculous.

If they are going to be equal in power then they NEED to be equal in cost.

And as an aside, the amount of time between when this thread was begun asking for our opinions to the time that Lamania went live was very small. I am fairly certain that a change as significant as this was not programmed in so short a time, and that this was going to happen no matter what the population had to say about it.

LOL, no they don't.... Taking different classes and only taking into consdieration DPS output while ignoring or not utilizing all the other aspects of those classes is a player choice.. Cost of a build should ahve nothign to do with the power of said class DPS wise...

[Ebondevil]

LOL, no they don't.... Taking different classes and only taking into consdieration DPS output while ignoring or not utilizing all the other aspects of those classes is a player choice.. Cost of a build should ahve nothign to do with the power of said class DPS wise...

If someone Optimizes for DPS then they should get more DPS than someone who doesn't Optimize for it.

Additionally some classes Should be better at Optimizing for DPS than other classes.

For example a Wizard who Optimizes for DPS shouldn't be as good at Crowd Control as a Wizard who Optimizes for Crowd control, and the wizard who optimizes for Crowd control shouldn't have as much DPS as a wizard that optimizes for DPS, that's the nature of the game.

If someone pays more, they should get more, so the cost of a DPS Build should relate to the DPS output, if TWF costs more in terms of feats and gear and the like then it stands to reason that it should indeed provide more DPS than other styles.

The only fair way to balance out the DPS difference is to either reduce the Cost and DPS of TWF at the same time or to increase the potential options/costs and DPS for other styles.

The DPS for TWF should not be reduced to be on par with something that is a cheaper to gain however or it becomes obsolete and worthless.

[Zaal]

If dps lag happens it is due to the amount of messages being put through a buffer where the buffer isn't able to cope with the output.

A simple way to circumvent this is to not abuse the text buffer output to handle the single hits but do them per 5 (or more)hits. This will seem rather in accurate and will need getting used to but it saves tuning gaming mechanics.

And maybe only do this for raids or even just make it an optional in the gameplay options.

I think it's a bit more than that... The way I see it, it is not only the number of messages but also the size of the messages and as new mechanics are added, the message lengths grow - complicated also by the sheer number of RAID instances which I imagine has grown considerably since MOD 9.

Also, I understand DDO uses the Microsoft .NET messaging Framework rather than one homegrown and specific to DDO requirements. Considering the extra overhead required to operate in the Managed Framework and that the communication tech is generic rather than specific to DDO, seems there is room for improvement here.

Unfortunately, it's cheaper and quicker to nerf the combat system

[Sarr]

I think it's a bit more than that... The way I see it, it is not only the number of messages but also the size of the messages and as new mechanics are added, the message lengths grow - complicated also by the sheer number of RAID instances which I imagine has grown considerably since MOD 9.

Also, I understand DDO uses the Microsoft .NET messaging Framework rather than one homegrown and specific to DDO requirements. Considering the extra overhead required to operate in the Managed Framework and that the communication tech is generic rather than specific to DDO, seems there is room for improvement here.

Unfortunately, it's cheaper and quicker to nerf the combat system

Yeah, they should have rid DDO of NetFramework long ago, especially when it's as old as the 1.1 version (Vista / Win7 has issues with it since a long time).
Maybe I'm not an expert here and maybe I'm totally wrong, but it seems to me just like you wrote.

I really hoped that DDO free-to-play revamp will be an occasion to throw NetFramework away, but no luck.

I'd love to see some developer's / coder's response to that. Maybe we're wrong?

[IronClan]

Um... you guys realize that sending text strings was trivial even back in the days of modem dialup connections right?

[Zaal]

Um... you guys realize that sending text strings was trivial even back in the days of modem dialup connections right?

Sure - and sending text strings is trivial now too!

[Kyln]

If someone Optimizes for DPS then they should get more DPS than someone who doesn't Optimize for it.

Additionally some classes Should be better at Optimizing for DPS than other classes.

For example a Wizard who Optimizes for DPS shouldn't be as good at Crowd Control as a Wizard who Optimizes for Crowd control, and the wizard who optimizes for Crowd control shouldn't have as much DPS as a wizard that optimizes for DPS, that's the nature of the game.

If someone pays more, they should get more, so the cost of a DPS Build should relate to the DPS output, if TWF costs more in terms of feats and gear and the like then it stands to reason that it should indeed provide more DPS than other styles.

The only fair way to balance out the DPS difference is to either reduce the Cost and DPS of TWF at the same time or to increase the potential options/costs and DPS for other styles.

The DPS for TWF should not be reduced to be on par with something that is a cheaper to gain however or it becomes obsolete and worthless.

That is a horrible analogy, sorry. You are comparing CC and DPS specializations vs two different types of DPS specialization.

To be honest, while I am not excited about the proposed changes, I am working on a twf rogue that is going to take tempest I, I have trouble understanding why people are arguing that TWF needs to be superior to THF. So it takes more feats, and requires two different stats? It is cool, offers a greater variety of weapon mod combinations, plus additional side benefits from many of the classes used to get feats for free to do TWF. Not all things are equal cost for equal power and it is not like THF isn't taking a hit as well.

I am willing to wait and see how things pan out.

[Hatchi]

On the surface this looks like something that could really stand out if the game could take true advantage of the multi-core Proc's.. but we all know that way to many are attempting to play on computers that can't do that for many reason they either don't understand or can't afford to upgrade and want to play too.. and the game needs them.. but if this could in fact happen, would it speed up and reduce the lag, probably not.. The games math seems very complex and all that information has to travel thousands of miles in some cases not to mention to way to many computers that all have to answer back to the servers before they can move forward.. What are you left with but to trim down all of it, if the game becomes unplayable we all need to accept even the speed of light has lag.. and then there's packet routing which doesn't go in a straight line but which ever way is open all wanting to go to the same place.. And then there are all the others in the game doing other things and they all need to go through a limited finite space as all those packets are moved.. Truly it is amazing we can play anything at all decently..

Lag or not I just want to say THANKS to all the Dev's and everyone else who fight with this issue, it almost seems like your in a no win thankless position..

All I can add is understanding and forgiveness that somethings have to go or be pared down to make those large gathering work in a timely manner, that's what makes playing here fun. If you want to be hardcore about it all you can really do is pen and paper.. Personally I rather see the changes needed to make the game move forward..

I know on the surface this post does not appear to add to the thread but I beg to differ.. Understanding and accepting a change that has to take place to keep those large gathering moving smoothly is very important to this world..

[bjlinden]

I'm sure this has been posted before (I even saw it a few times in the first 10 or so pages that I actually read, before realizing I could never go through the entire thread) but I felt it deserved reiterating.

If I understand correctly, it seems like it's the physics checks that are causing the majority of the lag, right? If so, then why not just implement the "offhand attacks use the same physics check as the mainhand" idea, and scrap the rest? You'll still be reducing the number of physics checks in half, which would dramatically reduce lag without needing to worry about removing haste effects or adding procs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the haste effects are only a real problem because they lead to more physics checks being done in a shorter amount of time, right? If you're already cutting the number of physics calculations in half, then reducing them by an extra 10% for a few people won't make THAT dramatic a difference.

If the lag is still a major problem, THEN change haste effects to procs, or any other tweaks you may have come up with in the meantime. But making sweeping changes to established systems is just asking for trouble, especially when there's such an easy alternative. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.

---

That being said, my other big concern is how is this going to look, animation-wise? Are the animations going to be mostly saying the same, just that when it looks like we're swinging our offhand, it's actually our mainhand doing the damage? Are we just going to hold our offhand weapons limply at our sides and just swing the other one until we get a proc? Are we going to have to wait for a proc animation to finish before we can do anything else? It seems to me like this could cause problems, too.

[adRyft]

I am interested in knowing if the developers have any consolation prize for TWF toons that are finesse based and not rogues with high sneak attack, who are not even close to the top of the DPS food chain to begin with, and who are now being saddled with a TWENTY PERCENT decrease in their DPS when they were barely part of the problem to begin with. It seems that this update only widens the DPS gap between Clonks and dedicated melee toons.

It was barely enough to get by with before, in some scenarios. I'm not sure it will be enough at all, now. I'd really like it if they at least added a Superior Two Weapon fighting feat to give the possibility of again attaining 100/100, even if it had a natural 19 dex requirement or something like that.

Just curious.

[Kaldaka]

Will they be giving out free respec's (i.e. lesser +6s for those who might want to get rid of 6 levels of ranger??) because of this nerf?

I highly doubt it ... So that's why this nerf = sux