Enough with the insta kills in epics?

[-Satureon-]

To OP and just a suggestion:

What if give some deadly instakill thing to the other classes too (ofc still depending on high numbers every insta kill)?
For example:
- ranger deadly shot
- barbarian death blow
- fighter deadly slice
- bard song of death
etc.
etc.
etc.

and raise mob saves 5-10 higher.

[Ehllie]

I like the fact people can instakill mobs in epics. Going back to the mass holding frenzy was before would be completely idiotic. On the other hand, i agree with OP that it's really frustrating hitting a few mobs 2 times just to see them being one shot by fods & wails.
All it requires is a little bit of adjustment in mobs saves imho.

[Arctigis]

I like the fact people can instakill mobs in epics. Going back to the mass holding frenzy was before would be completely idiotic. On the other hand, i agree with OP that it's really frustrating hitting a few mobs 2 times just to see them being one shot by fods & wails.
All it requires is a little bit of adjustment in mobs saves imho.

Right, but I think it's very hard to do. The gulf between the haves and have nots is just too great in a D20
system. More tactical debuffing would certainly help though; I like the will save debuff - perhaps this could
be extended to other saves? (e.g. if you make your wail save you have a -3 fort debuff for 3 - 6 seconds).

I also think adding an 'instant death' feat/enhancement for melee might be OK - the question is, how do
you factor in the cost? (e.g. Wail/Fod/CoD have a finite resource cost)

[-Satureon-]

I also think adding an 'instant death' feat/enhancement for melee might be OK - the question is, how do
you factor in the cost? (e.g. Wail/Fod/CoD have a finite resource cost)

Maybe Hp or other restrictments (for example dps debuff in short time till cooldown timer up).

[alexp80]

To OP and just a suggestion:

What if give some deadly instakill thing to the other classes too (ofc still depending on high numbers every insta kill)?
For example:
- ranger deadly shot
- barbarian death blow
- fighter deadly slice
- bard song of death
etc.
etc.
etc.

and raise mob saves 5-10 higher.

/sarcasm on

Sure, and why not adding the ability to casters to dps for a infinite amount of time?

oh well, we are loosing class differences, but who cares?

/sarcasm off

[grodon9999]

Remove the HP restriction from Vorpal. Solved, next issue please.

[-Satureon-]

To alexp80 secret agent: Nirvana-argument never make any solution to any problem...

I like Grodon's idea also. Definitely much cheaper than extend something in the class-content, probably the best solution can be atm

[WestportStan]

I love the 'The rogue is getting more kills than me...' complaint.

[KillEveryone]

Remove the HP restriction from Vorpal. Solved, next issue please.

I agree.

I've not used vorpal much when I was THF because I would DPS the critter to a point that it just didn't really matter if I finally rolled a 20 so I gave it up. I did better with a real DPS DR breaker in my hand than I did with a vorpal DR breaker.

They are much better TWF but I would still DPS critters down to a point that it didn't really matter when I rolled that 20. I sold mine before the changes because they just were not worth having in my backpack.

[Rodasch]

True, there are melees that could handle octopus Now I haven't actually tried it on my melee, but I'd think clearing the glyph room in monkey for example would be very difficult, there are quite a few wildmen and atleast one caster there, so even *if* it can be done, you're probably chucking silver flame pots like a drunkard. And then comes the fight with the prince.

So yes, while it *might* be possible, it'll be much, much slower with melees, arcane can clear half the room with one click and just dd to start when the glyph is used, there is no need to kill the prince in any of the rooms.

The whole point has been that what a melee can do, caster can do better, which makes melees pointless.

The new Cleave makes short work of a room full of monkeys, you charge the caster and let the others run up to you while you're tripping/stunning the caster to keep him from pwning your face. When they're all gathered on you you supreme cleave, jump out of the middle, spin around, stun/trip the caster again (if still alive) give the swarm of monkeys time to gather around again and cleave again. A solid melee shouldn't need more than a couple swings this way to level most of the monkeys if not all of them.

When prince spawns you might have trouble unless you have a ddoor click or scroll and umd, or a dragonmark of passage (used to have this on my rogue just because a rogue with ddoor at will is rediculously powerful. Eventually gave it up to take khopesh proficiency, but might get it back now that I"m swapping her back to rapiers)

I haven't really touched this subject, though I'd say there's a rather good reason for that. It's way I've played the game for a now, that is, I've only been running endgame raids and epics, so I've half forgotten there even is a another part to the game

And now that I'm doing TR's again, I don't really concern myself with the fact casters are overpowered, simply because the content I'm playing is just a grind for me to get to level 20 ASAP and I want to be done with it quick, and if caster can make it go quicker, cool.

That might sound a little hypocritical in the light of my previous arguments I guess, but that's because of the way I view most non-epic and non-raid content, I don't really care much for them, and when I run them, I just want to be done with them and be capped again. (Now this isn't always true, some quests are rather interesting, but it holds true when grinding for xp)

I honestly hate grinding the same quest over and over for rare-gear-drop-01, so epics in general get on my nerves, but I do them because we have to in order to get the gear. I can understand WHY the items are rare and why they want us to grind for them, but I still don't like having to do it. I'd rather be doing new things or playing new characters than running the same character through the same mission for the 800th time looking for my eardweller, or twisted talisman, or torc, or whatever.

To me, the levelling is the fun part, and level 20 is a waypoint between TR's to farm up gear for the next life to use to make levelling easier or more fun, or whatever.

That's the reason my sorc is still first life, I've been holding on to a True heart for months, telling myself I won't tr til I get a torc. Queen has been stingy, 52 kills with no torc.

Also, I still don't understand this talk about being a haste bot, heck, in ecof I rarely even cast haste because sp conservation can be an issue there and I always go for no-pot runs. I just tell people to use clickies if the quest warrants it. I have never been a hastebot in any epic quest, maybe a holdbot sometimes, but there was more to casting than just spamming hold everywhere, and even if it would work well with just spamming hold, there was still much more you could do to make the quest go faster.

So, I dunno, IMO if you were a just a hastebot&holdbot pre-U9 you were doing it wrong, but that's just my opinion, I was never called one or spoken to like one, and pre-U9, I didn't do much else than run epics on my caster.

"haste/holdbot" is an oversimplification for the purposes of illustration. Just like calling a cleric a healbot is an oversimplification, they still cast buffs, cures, and probably toss a non-heal spell here and there to help reduce sp expended for heals.

The reference was to the primary duties expected of casters during that time...Mass Hold (and high enchantment DC's), Extended haste and rage for the melees, and that was your "DPS" contribution for the most part, other than a pew pew here and a debuff there, or random FtS, dance, or webs. Every now and then you got to toss firewall or icestorm to speed up the killing or energy drain to make hold last better, or whatever, but the spells you HAD to have were mass hold, and if you failed to mass hold, you were "gimp" or "don't know your class" according to the community. It was common perception and practice that Mass Hold and Haste were the two MOST efficient (and thus necessary) spells in the arcane spell book for epic completion. Everything else was gravy. We were enablers for others who sometimes got to sneak in damage if we were having a good sp day, or if the group was smart enough to have enough monsters in one spot to make an aoe super efficient.

There already are some quests with epic drow for the spell res part, namely evon3, eoob, etides and ebob. You still don't have much need for melees though, simply because even though the spell res makes them pretty much immune to instakills and other spells that check for spell res, drow often have low hp so nuking can be viable.

Nuking should always be viable in those situations, nuking is dps, not instakills. That's the whole point, isn't it?

The first suggestion might work, but it could also lead to a situation where instakills are viewed as useless again because they don't work well enough for most casters.

As long as they CAN Work, some crybaby saying "they don't work enough" is not the same thing as them being useless. Even a 15-20% success rate for a first life sorc with good gear and a spell focus necro is not useless, it just means that sorc needs to prep by using debuffs and level drains to make his kills more successful (as it should be), while still allowing some chance for failure for captian necro archmage with 45 DC to keep him from onepress killing the whole dungeon.

I still think a good, atleast partial, solution would be to add more divines to epic quests. There's nothing I hate more than a divine mob in any epic quest, they always spam deathward on themselves and around them so everything becomes immune to instakills AND energy drain, which means you basically have to nuke them or have a melee beat them down. But as it is, situations like this are very rare in epics.

Good suggestion, and I agree.

But imo the best solution would perhaps be if the devs were to start looking at giving more (class) abilities for melees that cc and/or debuff mobs. As it is, only monks have multiple options for these at any given time and others are reduce to using stunning blow (trip doesn't count, I've never seen it work in an epic quest unless the mob rolls a 1) every 15 seconds, if they happen to have enough feats for it.

I don't think we should go beyond the PnP precedents when doing this though. We should look to the feats and such offered in 3.5 rules (including branded supplements) that can be adapted to serve these purposes. I like DDO because it's still very much DnD. If it becomes too much like other MMO's and less like DnD, I'll stop enjoying (and thus stop playing) it.

Obviously these wouldn't change much as long as instakills are as good as they are, but no single solution is going to fix the situation imo. The fact that casters are overpowered is unlikely to be fixed by any changes to mob saves (unless they go way too far over the top and make all save or x -abilities useless) and the best way to fix it would be to start buffing melees, making mobs that are truly difficult for casters to counter and making enemy arcanes (have them use mass buffs and more high level spells, have them cast haste, HA!) and divines (mass deathward, have divines spam fom more often) considerably more dangerous, heck, give them quicken randomly and make them spam more spells with it on. If you want to get really nasty you could start adding casters who have quicken and their priority is to buff themselves with deathward (give them clickies ), displacement and spell immunity: divination and/or enchantment. Or maybe some stealthy mobs that try to target solely casters and require a very high spot for you to see them? Oh, and they also have true seeing items and adamantine weapons. And opportunist (let's tweak it a bit so it gives them 20% doublestrike and bypasses 50% fort) feat.

I like the suggestion Grodon made, just remove the hp cap from vorpals. There's no reason not to let melees in on the instakills for trash. None whatsoever.

[irivan]

Stop being stupid, many of his complaints are valid, even if adding deathblock as it was back isn't the right fix for them.

The only one being stupid here is you, for fighting the useless battle that is his topic, it is pointless, and none of his points have any merit to them at all.

In fact, i am completely in favor of them scrapping this whole BS idea of Balance in this game altogether, if this is DnD as they say it is, then Balance and fairness between classes is the least of their concern.

I am more than willing to put forth, that the game if followed to the letter with all in game powers and abilities for all classes applied and translated, we would not have this discussion, because maybe then people would get off of their WOW balance trips and realize that while this is an MMO, it is also DnD. Casters in DnD have near cosmic powers, and so if you plan to play this game you will accept that, or you wont and you will be angry that your level 20 Barb is just an end boss melee and come here and complain about how un-mighty you feel these days.

[SaIamander]

Have you ever heard the phrase "if you can't beat them, join them" ?

Try puttin down your dps weapon of choice and swingin an improved cursespewing of shattermantle or whatever you may have to knock down the saves of those mobs so your casters can instakill better without setup spells like crushing despair or symbol/circle of death.

Ya you'll still be gettin crushed in the kill count but at least you can feel that you have contributed something.

[Aashrym]

Remove the HP restriction from Vorpal. Solved, next issue please.

This is likely the best option, but also make whirlwind attack a more comparable feat chain to go with it.

[KillEveryone]

Have you ever heard the phrase "if you can't beat them, join them" ?

Try puttin down your dps weapon of choice and swingin an improved cursespewing of shattermantle or whatever you may have to knock down the saves of those mobs so your casters can instakill better without setup spells like crushing despair or symbol/circle of death.

Ya you'll still be gettin crushed in the kill count but at least you can feel that you have contributed something.

I got to say that this is something I didn't see often...very rare did a player have the sense to bring one of these in...when I pugged epics(I only do epics with guild now and don't ever want to pug an epic again.)

The caster had, was expected to, have a high DC to land mass hold. It was upon their shoulders to reduce the saves of the critters that needed to be CC and it was not expected or even required to have any help from melee types to reduce any saves or spell resistance by using those weapons.

If we raise saves, are we also going to raise those saves for mass hold or is it just going to be for insta kills. If you say just insta kills, you really just want a mass hold monkey, don't deny it because that is what it boils it down to. You can try to cover yourself by saying you want a challenge but you really don't. Mass hold made things easy to begin with.

If you say you want all saves raised, what is really going to happen to casters then? A good portion won't land enough CC to be able to survive enough fights and I really don't see melee types changing their mindset and actually helping to reduce saves and spell resistance. It is again going to fall back onto the caster to have a high enough DC to land reliably and any debuffing needed will still be on the casters shoulders and blue bar.

The players cry that others are not feeling useful but those other classes needed a arcane anyway to make the quest easier but it was expected for that caster to have a certain performance without any help from melee types reducing saves.

I really feel that those crying about insta kills are crying about the wrong thing. If you want melee types to feel like they are helping, ask for buffs to those classes and feats.

If you don't like insta death in epics, don't use it. It really is that simple. Use mass holds for the melee types to feel useful and you can also nuke.

[Viisari]

*snip*

Cool thing you understand game balance. Even if the source material is an unbalanced piece of ****, there's no reason something derived from it should be.

[Arctigis]

Remove the HP restriction from Vorpal. Solved, next issue please.

Not quite. If they give it a save and make it do more damage on a failed save then yes. It's a 0 cost opportunity
and should not be as powerful as Wail/FoD.

[pHo3nix]

To OP and just a suggestion:

What if give some deadly instakill thing to the other classes too (ofc still depending on high numbers every insta kill)?
For example:
- ranger deadly shot
- barbarian death blow
- fighter deadly slice
- bard song of death
etc.
etc.
etc.

and raise mob saves 5-10 higher.

Raising the saves could be ok.

Giving all classes the same ability with different names is just a cheap and boring solution.

[pHo3nix]

Cool thing you understand game balance. Even if the source material is an unbalanced piece of ****, there's no reason something derived from it should be.

A lot of people play DDO cause they like DnD with all its imbalances and flaws. If they are going to make a WoW clone then people would just go to play WoW, no more reasons to stay here.

Epics now are better than before, but not perfect.
Can you complete quests with the old "perfect" party? Yes.
Can you complete quests with different types of party? Yes.
Does it take 5 more min to finish a quest with 5 melees instead that 5 casters? Maybe, but who cares? Are you paid to establish speed records? I doubt so, so just play what you have fun playing and let others have fun in their own way. There are many more options now than before, and it's a step in the right direction.

[phum]

Not quite. If they give it a save and make it do more damage on a failed save then yes. It's a 0 cost opportunity
and should not be as powerful as Wail/FoD.

The opportunity cost is the dmg in melee. Although it can be mitigated, it is potentially quite severe for a non-selfhealer. Also the proc rate is 0.05*comfirm roll(<1), which is pretty much always much lower than the chance for an arcane landing his wails (if he is using it. If the chance is 0.05, should he really be using it?). Taking into account twf attack speed and finger/wail cds.. bleh

Statistically unrestricted vorpal and a wail of a good dc are so different that the mana cost with todays concopp,torc,bauble etc gear is really insignificant imo and cancels out at healing costs.. I'm more in line with the additional feats/whatever fighting skills Viisari outlined.

But really imo too the best short term solution is to add those additional divine mobs in epics. Increasing amount of different instakills in epics would result in just more of instakill fest of the trash. I'm much more in favor of variety and some strategic skills.

[Aaxeyu]

A lot of people play DDO cause they like DnD with all its imbalances and flaws. If they are going to make a WoW clone then people would just go to play WoW, no more reasons to stay here.

No one is asking for a DDO to become a wow clone.
If you think balance doesn't matter, then any changes won't matetr to you anyway, so why do you even care to argue about it?
My guess is that you just want your particular imbalance, but you don't consider the consequences.

Epics now are better than before, but not perfect.
Can you complete quests with the old "perfect" party? Yes.
Can you complete quests with different types of party? Yes.
Does it take 5 more min to finish a quest with 5 melees instead that 5 casters? Maybe, but who cares? Are you paid to establish speed records? I doubt so, so just play what you have fun playing and let others have fun in their own way. There are many more options now than before, and it's a step in the right direction.

You could complete quests with 6 casters before the change. Infact, melees are far worse off now than catsers were before. But it's all fine and dandy according to you.
Why is kill count that important for you?