Savant Prestige Information

[dkyle]

I am thinking I will be using conjuration for my focus and using web as my CC in the future. May even take a double focus and not worry about spell resistance feats. We are just going to have to see how all the changes work themselves out.

Yes, a lot hinges on exactly what changes happen to the helpless state. Web may end up being superior to Mass Hold.

[Angelus_dead]

Wouldn't mind at least a "skimmed by a Dev" post.

Thinking the fact they went silent over 2 hours ago, is that maybe they are finally seeing things like the players do, but would like some confirmation this car wreck may get a "fail master" type revision prior to release.

Given the 5+ dev posts already in this thread, we can be quite sure that they're at minimum continuing to "skim" it, and a post confirming that wouldn't really be informative. (After all, if they reply with a "skimmed it" blurb, some players will complain that it was misinformation and he hadn't really skimmed at all)

There are other alternative explanation for the lack of additional posts that are more likely. The most-probable is simply that the previous posts were mostly expansions or clarifications of basic rule-mechanics topics, and didn't go much into the further-reaching topic of how it will impact interclass balance and gameplay as a whole. Those bigger topics have more room for error or misunderstanding, so naturally the devs would be less eager to weigh in on them. (Especially since they know that a factual mistake there would be brought up against them later)

They'll probably prefer to wait until players have actually tried it a while before responding further. Since they're publishing the Savant details, I suspect it'll be appearing on Lamannia pretty soon! Of course, the devs haven't always got good results from this methodology. You're quite correct that the first release of Pale Master contained serious flaws, which players had immediately detected without needing to wait for a hands-on test.

[Coldin]

Wouldn't mind at least a "skimmed by a Dev" post.

Thinking the fact they went silent over 2 hours ago, is that maybe they are finally seeing things like the players do, but would like some confirmation this car wreck may get a "fail master" type revision prior to release.

Doubtful you'll see any significant revisions to the PRE until it's released on Lamannia and players can actually do real testing. The dev silence is probably because Eladrin had to go back to work (and now that the work day is nearly over).

People could probably just take a moment to relax. There's obviously spell changes coming in addition to this PRE. Some people may not mind giving up one element of spells for significantly increased damage in another.

Looking through my current Sorc's spell list, I'll be giving up Cloudkill, Stoneskin, Acid Blast, and Acid Fog. Losing Acid Blast and Acid Fog will certainly hurt a bit, but I can probably invest more into Firewall and Ice Storm now to offset it's loss.

Of course, we can all just cry Doom, and say how bad this whole PRE is and all it's changes, and how we'll never use it. Because that's really productive conversation.

[Kirlian]

Requiring Empower or Maximise is like requiring Power Attack for Frenzied Berserker. Yeah, it's a prereq, but it's not really a cost. An elemental savant would have to be insane not to take at least one of them.

But I agree that the spell focus prereq is excessive.

thank you.
The point is, sorc is asked to take extra feat where he has no feat to sacrifice. Why not to leave us on tier 1 requirements for max or emp and forget teh second one( I'm not impressed with the sorc past life going into consideration as well) Instead of giving sor +1 DC on conjuration/evocation they have to spend a feat on it. Lets not start again on AP costs of dmg bust to the elements/force lines. This whole savant thinggy is looking really poor to compare with what fvs will get. And yes I read Eladrin announcement about 'significant' changes to epic/end game content with mob hp being reduced and some death immunity being cut down on some of them. for that you will need spell penetration. So back to the beginning. is you want to spend a feat on conjuration/evocation you are most likely to drop spell penetration, this is going to affect sorcerers chance to land any spells that have spell penetration check, and please dont start on wizard passive past life, if I or anybody else has wizard's past life its to improve one's spell penetration check not to substitute a feat.

[bobbryan2]

Of course, the devs haven't always got good results from this methodology. You're quite correct that the first release of Pale Master contained serious flaws, which players had immediately detected without needing to wait for a hands-on test.

The parallels are there already. It's already been implied that elemental savant will benefit more from epic revisions. Just like pale masters would benefit from new spells being released in the future.

But releasing broken PrE for months didn't do them any real favors. If epics are changed so that max DC enchantments are needed for casters, then perhaps there's hope for the PrE. But they need to be released concurrently.

[Geonis]

Given the 5+ dev posts already in this thread, we can be quite sure that they're at minimum continuing to "skim" it, and a post confirming that wouldn't really be informative. (After all, if they reply with a "skimmed it" blurb, some players will complain that it was misinformation and he hadn't really skimmed at all)

There are other alternative explanation for the lack of additional posts that are more likely. The most-probable is simply that the previous posts were mostly expansions or clarifications of basic rule-mechanics topics, and didn't go much into the further-reaching topic of how it will impact interclass balance and gameplay as a whole. Those bigger topics have more room for error or misunderstanding, so naturally the devs would be less eager to weigh in on them. (Especially since they know that a factual mistake there would be brought up against them later)

They'll probably prefer to wait until players have actually tried it a while before responding further. Since they're publishing the Savant details, I suspect it'll be appearing on Lamannia pretty soon! Of course, the devs haven't always got good results from this methodology. You're quite correct that the first release of Pale Master contained serious flaws, which players had immediately detected without needing to wait for a hands-on test.

The last Dev post in this thread was near 3 hours ago, and I never assume anything.

If the viability of this PrE is based on basic rule-mechanics changes, then it would have been a better idea to release those (or at least the info on them), then release Savant.

I understand they may want to see how it turns out in gameplay, but with my understanding of the current gameplay of DDO, it was a waste of developer time to create Savant (in this form). Possible (as yet unannounced) changes to basic gameplay does not mean I should sit back and wait, as that would be taken as agreement that this (Savant) is satisfactory.

[Geonis]

Doubtful you'll see any significant revisions to the PRE until it's released on Lamannia and players can actually do real testing. The dev silence is probably because Eladrin had to go back to work (and now that the work day is nearly over).

People could probably just take a moment to relax. There's obviously spell changes coming in addition to this PRE. Some people may not mind giving up one element of spells for significantly increased damage in another.

Looking through my current Sorc's spell list, I'll be giving up Cloudkill, Stoneskin, Acid Blast, and Acid Fog. Losing Acid Blast and Acid Fog will certainly hurt a bit, but I can probably invest more into Firewall and Ice Storm now to offset it's loss.

Of course, we can all just cry Doom, and say how bad this whole PRE is and all it's changes, and how we'll never use it. Because that's really productive conversation.

Your definition of "significant" and mine vary.... widely.

[Angelus_dead]

What mechanism causes you to need to lose more in one area than you gain in another? What's the resisting force?

The obvious basic one is the fundamental improvement/impairment inequality. That is, a random change to a functional system is far more likely to reduce the performance than to increase it. To make a system work better at a strong point tends to be mentally and technically challenging, while to make it worse at a weak point is easy.

[Thriand]

Your definition of "significant" and mine vary.... widely.

Your definition of "widely" and mine vary.... significantly

Completely irrelevant and off topic, I just really wanted to say that

[Geonis]

Your definition of "widely" and mine vary.... significantly

How cute, you took a quote of mine and rearranged it to say something else. It has no relation to the current topic anymore, and is now trying to define how I define widely, rather than stating that two peoples' "value" of significant vary. Good attempt, poor execution, little bearing on this discussion.

[Thriand]

How cute, you took a quote of mine and rearranged it to say something else. It has no relation to the current topic anymore, and is now trying to define how I define widely, rather than stating that two peoples' "value" of significant vary. Good attempt, poor execution, little bearing on this discussion.

Chill out dude, I just thought it was an entertaining statement, I'm bored and still at work, hoping that eladrin will come back to this thread with relevant information before I leave. Perhaps take the time to read the rest of the post, I openly admitted it was completely irrelevant.

[Geonis]

Chill out dude, I just thought it was an entertaining statement, I'm bored and still at work, hoping that eladrin will come back to this thread with relevant information before I leave. Perhaps take the time to read the rest of the post, I openly admitted it was completely irrelevant.

Same, work is boring, and we finally get info on Sorc (my favorite class) PrE and it is worse than I imagined, so I have been a bit offensive here. Don't take offense, my anger is more at the Devs for even letting an abomination like this through.

[Jaid314]

looks fair to me TBH, the PrE turns you into an even better nuker in your chosen element.

lets see, you get:

bonus damage dice on your chosen element spells above their 'cap'
you get to lower the resistance of your targets simply by looking at them.
you get a debuff that makes a target vulnerable, and take even more damage
and you get free spammable damage spells.

and we havent even seen t3 yet.

at the cost of making the damage from the opposing element a waste of spell points.


had the elements never been grouped up to start with I dont think we would see such anger at the PrE. The fact that you get to have max damage in both fire and cold for the same cost has spoiled us. Had they been seperated before the PrE's, you would already have atleast a few people with specs in other combinations.

Not to mention having a fire sorceror, much less a highly specialized one in the form of a savant, being just as specialized in cold spells doesnt really mesh thematically.

i get a bonus to a handful of the actual worthwhile damage spells, at the expense of the other damage spells that are needed to fill in the blanks where damage spells are worthwhile but the main ones don't work.

honestly, i don't care that i get fire/ice cheaply, specifically. i care that i get 2 specialisations at all, cheaply. if they weren't doubling the cost of the crit lines, i would probably at the very least consider resetting my enhancements to try out, say, ice/electric (not that i have any electric spells, but in theory i'd consider it) or ice/force. but i've got much better uses for 6 AP than the nothing i would gain by resetting enhancements. given a choice between keeping my cheap enhancements, or trading them in for expensive ones that do the exact same thing... well, i'll keep the cheap ones thanks. i kinda almost wish i could spend the extra 2 points for 50% base damage increase, but it's not worth the cost of 8 AP to get +10% enhancement.

but that is a separate issue to the prestige enhancement. the prestige enhancement simply flat-out isn't worth it, barring some major changes in either the gameplay (which i doubt will be major enough to make a DPS-spec caster worthwhile), or in the pattern of what each tier does. i don't mean it isn't worth it because of the spell level thing either (although that's kinda disappointing too), i mean "you expect me to waste a feat on this POS prestige line? seriously?"

this PrE only barely even improves things for the DPS-focused sorcerers in 95% of the content (and no, the curse is not going to factor significantly in the vast majority of content, because most stuff will die before it stacks meaningfully, and it has a 20 second cooldown before you can use it again... so you might curse one thing, nuke it, then spend the next 18 seconds waiting for your curse again so you can hit 1 more trash mob with it and nuke it a little crispier than usual. meaning it's only going to matter at all vs bosses, where your job usually isn't to DPS the boss down anyways as an arcane...).

[Ridag]

That's how you know the devs are doing a good job... Choices should ALWAYS be difficult... That's the mark of a good game.

That would be wonderful if every class had to make the same tough choices in their PREs, but currently that is nowhere near the case.

[Solmage]

Changes have been made to the helpless state to make it affect all damage sources, but makes the state a bit less game-breaking. Many spells have been modified to make them more in-line with expected efficiency.

I don't suppose this means that held monsters will finally be unable to make reflex saves, since they can't move out of the way. (Well, except for pesky stone statues but seriously..)

Now, as for my perspective on the changes: Overall, it seems like we're getting a bit weaker, not stronger.

Yes, the PrE boosts us, but it also has some serious drawbacks to the way things are right now. I can go nuke the Abbot with my DBFs & meteor swarms, attack Arretrikos with my polar ray, nuke elite shavarath trash with cones of cold (dancing sphere to lower reflex and keep the 20 mobs at a time busy), etc.

In summary:

- Enhancements to boost crit range and crit damage remain at the same cost but provide half the benefit: Essentially the costs get double to reach decent damage on two elements.

- Fire and Cold are by far the most powerful, yet now you're stuck with only one or the other. This one is harsh. When they were grouped it was horribly overpowered to do so, and I clearly remember telling Ms. Sinclair that grouping those two was a bad idea at the time.

Yet correcting this years down the road when the entire game changed and a single sorcerer can't DPS down an elite raid boss, and instead struggles to find something useful to do is... harsh. Overall power of sorcerers would need to increase quite significantly to make this one 'ok'

- Shroud: 1 Air Sorcerer wanted to make our Lit-IIs do more damage. Every other caster, shoo. (edit)

- The feat cost is harsh for non-human sorcerers. It also makes 1 x wizard TR more or less a must. (To free a spell pen feat, and gain an actually useful feat besides conjuration)

- I see no mention of stacking DOTs: So while the new melf's is awesome, I'm betting a shiny copper it won't work at the same time as acid fog, nor will two melf's from two different casters do anything at all.

For that matter, 1 firewall from each caster should stack: ever since that change having more than 1 arcane in the group is annoying, at best, and very counterproductive at worst.

- The wording of the debuff calling it a curse makes me wonder if the shroud boss and other such bosses immune to cursing won't simply ignore this, in which case well that solves the earth savant issue. It also makes the debuff a LOT less interesting however. (At least I'm hoping it doesn't have a save..)

- Polar ray is the only spell that can actually benefit fully from the increase in caster levels. I'm left wondering if you guys shouldn't have changed this to "Increases the max casting level of spells by +2 per level, and the effective level by +1", to allow for epic items that raise max caster level to actually DO something. (The current implementation of effective level +2 but max casting level of +1 only helps spell resistance)

- Of the SLAs, only scorching ray is useful for doing damage at high levels. Acid Arrow would be of some use, if it weren't for the fact the dots won't stack, essentially making re-casting it a bit of a waste of time, since the creature would get hit by it anyway. The spell without the SLA would be just fine. The other two, electric loop and snowball swarm are.. amusing, when scorching ray usually does more damage than a fireball or lightning bolt vs a single enemy, by a large amount too.

Frankly, I expected the huge nerf that is separating the elements and making fire and ice mutually exclusive. But I was hoping for a huge boost in power to go with that huge nerf.


=============================

Ideas/Stuff I hoped for:

+ Spell Frenzy: for 30 seconds 1 x rest you can make all your spells of type X crit. DoTs always crit during this time (this one to DPS and mana dump bosses) - If you don't like the idea of making crit chance useless for 30 seconds, you could add crit chance to crit damage

(When the game first started, a caster could clean a room of monsters - once - because max + empower ate their entire spell pool in 3 casts since they multiplied the spell cost. This replicates that, which in turn replicates the D&D feeling: Sure, the caster can nuke like crazy but can only do so for a very short amount of time due to limited spell slots)

+ 1 useful SLA for each element: Fire: Scorching Ray is a no brainer, Cold: The much weaker frost lance, Electricity: Lightning Bolt, Earth: Orb of Acid (something to toss in between melf's)

+ Changing the MUCH weaker than scorching ray frost lance [same damage, much slower (easily misses enemies in movement or when you're moving), save for half, higher level, far more expensive since needs to be heightened] to be only somewhat weaker by removing the save

+ Improved Elemental Heightening: All your blasting spells of the right element get heightened for free (requires heighten)

+ For Acid (acid fog, etc) to finally start using loaded dice like all other spells

+ Faster damage wand usage to make wands of some small, limited use. Perhaps free damage boosting of wands of the attuned damage type or something as well.

+ something to boost disintegration DC without making FtS the only fort spell that will land.

As a possible plan B, something that enhances its damage and boosts the fail damage to half, since, let's be honest, it's always going to fail against any boss or portal. (Why do portals have a 100 fort save when a 10 would work just as well? the world will never know..)

(As a possible plan C, how about adjusting all existing raid bosses and portals so we can actually, like, land spells on them..)

+ For 2 firewalls from 2 different casters to stack again! (PLEASE )

+ I would remove the vulnerability debuff since it will completely upset the game balance (LitIIs doing a lot more damage than they do now, for example) and instead make our spells bypass X points of resistance. (Incidentally, this is why the FvS PRE is totally broken: It will break the game by allowing anyone instead of only the FvS to ignore fortification and do extra damage with holy weapons - if the debuff only applied to the FvS then it wouldn't be AS bad - and yet you'd still see 6 FvS/14 rogues, just like the old ranger 6 debacle I'm sure) (edit)

(Incidentally, frenzy does about the same as the vulnerability debuff does, but it does so in a more controlled manner: only once per shrine and doesn't mess with what anyone else can or can't do)

[Delt]

Not impressed so far -- and sure wouldn't face a tough choice between sorc or wizard based on this.

Whether or not these PrEs (and hence, sorcs) remain a waste of time depends on what tier 3 brings and, perhaps more importantly, what other actual content/changes (new spells, new quests) come in mod 9 that may take advantage of this new PrE.

I'll reserve judgement for now, I guess.

PS - I won't lie -- I just want to morph into a quasi elemental with a cool animation for tier 3, with full immunity to my given element. Beyond that I don't care. The dork in me trumps the powergamer.

[Geonis]

Not impressed so far -- and sure wouldn't face a tough choice between sorc or wizard based on this.

Whether or not these PrEs (and hence, sorcs) remain a waste of time depends on what tier 3 brings and, perhaps more importantly, what other actual content/changes (new spells, new quests) come in mod 9 that may take advantage of this new PrE.

I'll reserve judgement for now, I guess.

And that is also part of the problem. Hinging a PrE on tier 3 (at level 18) is a horrible idea.

[Solmage]

had the elements never been grouped up to start with I dont think we would see such anger at the PrE. The fact that you get to have max damage in both fire and cold for the same cost has spoiled us

Yes, and it was a really poor choice at the time. Trust me, I got tired of arguing it to Heather Sinclair at the time, together with how she was essentially making wizards pointless and obsolete with other such changes, which ofc happened anyway.

Grouping the 2 most powerful elements together? Yeah, ok, great choice. I know, let's also make max + empower possible 24/7 I bet those 2 combined won't have any detriment to game play... oh wait..

But the game changed since then. A sorcerer doesn't walk up to an elite raid boss like in the old days (titan when vulnerable, reaver, DQ, velah) and blast it to kingdom come with max + empower. The game got changed around those 2 changes. Removing them right now is a huge nerf in power, which would need to be compensated with a huge boost in power to just keep the status quo: A status quo in which sorcerers are struggling already.

So in essence if we change this, we need a powerful boost just to stay as we are, and then on top of that another really nice boost to be on top.

[BlackSteel]

+ I would remove the vulnerability debuff since it will completely upset the game balance (min IIs doing FAR more damage than LitIIs, for example) and instead make our spells bypass X points of resistance. (Incidentally, this is why the FvS PRE is totally broken: It will break the game by allowing anyone instead of only the FvS to ignore fortification and do extra damage with holy weapons - if the debuff only applied to the FvS then it wouldn't be AS bad - and yet you'd still see 6 FvS/14 rogues, just like the old ranger 6 debacle I'm sure)

The vulnerability debuff shouldnt be making anyones Min2's do acid damage on devil bosses. Sure even if you manage to get it stacked five times, the bonus damage still isnt enough to override the acid resistance (crits maybe, but not the regular 1d6 damage). And only the caster himself gets to apply the penalty to the enemies resistance. The debuff and the lowering of resistance are two seperate things.

[Qezuzu]

Now TierII is interesting...

TierIII will probably be very, very cool (I hope).