Enough with the insta kills in epics?

[Vellrad]

I think the best avaible gear should not be requirement to do epics- you can't reqire epic gear avaible from epic quests to do epic quests. This is why epics shouldn't be balanced to highest possible numbers.
However, there should be new lv21+ quests, with N/H/E difficulty and harder than current epics.

[steelblueskies]

Cannith crafting finally eased th dc acquisition problem by offering +2 foci on non epic upgraded items. That eliminated one chicken and egg at the same time dc's other than enchantment and conjuration became far more viable.
Also offered +1 foci, although these were available on even non raid random loot.

I think shades original axer is still a first life toon to hold onto crit rage. Who's gonna call that bad boy gimp vs anybody?

Multi tr's, festival cookies, potions out the wazoo and min/max everything to push dc casting.
Maximum possible dc etc thread should point out problems for the unenlightened really fast.
And of course this ignores those who actually play different. Likenthe fellow posting to ask why he gets harrassed and insulted for playing a half Orc sorceror.

Solo farming tactics developed at least in part due to poor class optimal loot distribution, and highly variable difficulty.
Melée players seem to have problems with slow and patient, or don't stand there or rush in there'll be traps.
Pug wiz king. Over and over, groaning happens, and people run to stand exactly where traps will pop, all in keeping with their rush it mindset.

Heck even talk of needing arcanes to be efficient pre u9 was min/max.
It could be done by any class with time invested. If time to complete was the problem people should have been burning torches and grabbing pitchforks over poor design with respect to time cost.

In fact looking at it all as it's developed, if cc and instant death are so powerful you have to do nothing, then clearly the efficiency must have gone through the roof with respect to time as well.

Really really get the impression more strongly every day these threads crawl on, you fellas haven't sat down and taken a hard enough look into formulating exactly what you want, why you want it, and how the rest of the playerbase will respond to the changes and how that will turnaround and affect you.

Paladins bring utility and the capacity for some big heals with their dps.
Bards can specialize all over the place if they work at it, or generalize.
Rogues can umd like kings for utility on top of trap skills and possibly instant death.
We already know the versatility of cleric/fvs/sorc/wiz.
Monks can bring some utility as well.

That leaves, out of the mass of "melée" classes two that stand as, by design, self centered, non utility to the party melée dps.
For complaining about usefulness there, see my comment on shades axer, still sitting at first life.

It kind of seems like you guys have fallen into the social drinker scenario.
You joined the party in ddo at one point in time, there was alchohol there(fighter barb), and friends and you had a good time(king of the hill in pug perception). This process repeated for a while until the time came when you started thinking the alchohol(fighter, barb) made for the good time, or at least makes a good time better, out of training and habit, even in situations when it's wildly innapropriate. And worse you now want to try fixing your bad time by upping your proof, at the expense of others. You have become the functional equivalent of alchoholics in this analogy, as you now feel you cannot enjoy yourself without fighters and barbs as the centerpiece, and can no longer see how they differ from all the other melée while looking to justify how everyone else must change to suit you not doing so.

I hate going this argumentative route but: this is how things are. Accept reality. Or reject it and find another that suits you better. Games like this will always weave change and evolve.
Don't be the guy who suicides when their beloved build gets nerfed. Don't set fire to everyone else.
State your thoughts, feelings, or impressions along the lines of tolero's helpful guide to actionable feedback, then either find something else you have a good time doing, do the same thing you still have a good time doing in whatever fashion still works, or go take a break.

Might be they change things in a direction that suits you by the time you get back, or everythings overhauled totally.

Heck if I can absolutely prove it, or anyone can.

[svinja]

I think the best avaible gear should not be requirement to do epics- you can't reqire epic gear avaible from epic quests to do epic quests. This is why epics shouldn't be balanced to highest possible numbers.
However, there should be new lv21+ quests, with N/H/E difficulty and harder than current epics.

But the same problem will appear again a few months later. These new quests would have to drop new gear, which is better than the current epic gear, or nobody would do them much. They would also have to be balanced for people without that gear, because otherwise they would not be completable, except by finding glitches etc which is not the direction any developer wants to take. And when people get all that gear, the cycle will continue, they will whine again about quests being too easy.

Content will always be easy if you overgear it, and eventually you will overgear it if you dedicate time to obtaining gear, not sure why this is not well understood in the DDO community like it is in the WoW community. The only way to really "fix" this is for all end game content to require special player skills, an extraordinary level of teamwork, or something like that to complete. And there will be huge backlash in DDO if this ever happens.

[Truga]

And when people get all that gear, the cycle will continue, they will whine again about quests being too easy.

This.

[Merlocke]

I prefer the old way, instakilling is lame imo. So were the old vorpals.

[alexp80]

I think we are missing the main point.

1) As already said, game will never be balanced for *any* top geared and experienced group.

2) Finally, casters (not only arcanes) have options. Pre u9 a caster was mandatory for most epics, but just for buffs and hold. Now, with my pale master, i have options to play different. I can CC when I want to and when needed, I can instakill and I can also do magic dps.

Personally i think the better way is to change a bit the quests... having quests that needs a different approach from casters will be a fun for all the players.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

Terrible idea. So you think it's reasonable to make TRs almost mandatory for wizards? Melee doesn't have any of these problems. A first life barbarian can do just fine even compared to a TR one. The fact that wizard TR benefits are overpowered compared to other past lives doesn't mean mobs should be balanced against 3 wizard past lives, if anything it means the wiz past life should be nerfed.

And look up the word "optimal", TR is already required for wizards to be optimal. What you are suggesting is to make TR required for even being a viable CC/instakill caster.

It is ridiculous how many people see a problem, and their first idea is to add more grind to the game to fix it. Get a life.

Looks like I've given out to much rep lately....I'll get back with ya.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

I think the best avaible gear should not be requirement to do epics- you can't reqire epic gear avaible from epic quests to do epic quests. This is why epics shouldn't be balanced to highest possible numbers.
However, there should be new lv21+ quests, with N/H/E difficulty and harder than current epics.

And you too.

[grodon9999]

please don't raise the fort save, I'm dropping Stunning blow and a 50 DC fighter because it sucks enough right now that it's not worth the bother. Raising the saves some more would just being doubling down on stupid.

Maybe raise SR . . . or have some mobs that have higher SR mixed in with others for variety.

Raise or eliminate the HP threashold for vorpals.

Lower or eliminate the Epic resistance to stat damage.

[voodoogroves]

please don't raise the fort save, I'm dropping Stunning blow and a 50 DC fighter because it sucks enough right now that it's not worth the bother. Raising the saves some more would just being doubling down on stupid.

Maybe raise SR . . . or have some mobs that have higher SR mixed in with others for variety.

Raise or eliminate the HP threashold for vorpals.

Lower or eliminate the Epic resistance to stat damage.

How about a bonus to Saves vs. Spells a la dwarves? Or a bonus to Saves vs Enchantment for some? SR raise for some? That's what I want ... some variety. Sure, maybe we learn we simply can't stun epic dwarves and dueregar ... but we can epic drow, but with spells they have wicked SR ... etc.

There are plenty of ways to make folks resistant to A but not B that isn't blanket across-the- board immunities, wards, buffs, etc.

[grodon9999]

How about a bonus to Saves vs. Spells a la dwarves? Or a bonus to Saves vs Enchantment for some? SR raise for some? That's what I want ... some variety. Sure, maybe we learn we simply can't stun epic dwarves and dueregar ... but we can epic drow, but with spells they have wicked SR ... etc.

There are plenty of ways to make folks resistant to A but not B that isn't blanket across-the- board immunities, wards, buffs, etc.

Or just accept the fact that if somebody's gonna work their tail off to get a 46 necro DC they SHOULD be a god.

Epics are just so 2009 anyway, leave them as is and balance future content around different stuff.

[voodoogroves]

Or just accept the fact that if somebody's gonna work their tail off to get a 46 necro DC they SHOULD be a god.

Epics are just so 2009 anyway, leave them as is and balance future content around different stuff.

That too.

[grgurius]

Comments that you need (or needed before) geared to the hilt, multiple past lives caster to run epics are simply rubbish.
Only difference between my sorcs first life and tred life is 40 more hp and +1 evocation dc. I was running them moderately geared, heavily geared, first life, tred, and they were always easier then shavarath which is lvl 18 content.

Only difference now is that the focus has switched from cc to insta kills. More things change, more they stay the same.

[Cyr]

I must say that epics are a joke after the 'epic pass'. I've run epics with players and toons that I wouldn't want to run elite 17th level content with and had no issues. It's insane how much easier these quests are and frankly they are alot less fun in the end from these changes.

As for the competive difference between the classes...

Well yeah, melee is back in the worst of the dog days of Necro 4. Arcanes are top of the roost by far followed by divines.

[Viisari]

http://koti.mbnet.fi/wink/ddo/yeahtotally.jpg See this here?

Now can someone please give me a reason why I shouldn't take only arcanes, evokers and assassin rogues to my epic runs?

[Arctigis]

Remove the HP limit from Vorpal/Banish/Smite and give it a high(ish) save DC (~36?). Still only applies on
a natural 20. Mob takes 1d6 per character level on a failed save.

[Metathron]

I think people need to look a bit deeper at the underlying causes to this problem.

Fact1: A player who recently reached L20 is not going to be OP in Epics (or Amrath for that matter) with current saves (and they need to be able to run epics because there isn't much other content out there).
Fact2: A maxed out caster is going to be too powerful.

You cannot balance this system just by adjusting the DC of the mobs, because it will either make new characters useless or maxed out characters godly.

This is an underlying problem with using the D20 dice system in an MMO where the unavoidable item creep allows you to outpace the dice. A monster save on 5+ is a 25% chance of insta-kill, but a more geared caster with 5 higher DC actually has a 50% chance, that is double the efficiency. This also translates directly into sp efficiency which is actually the main bottleneck of casters. Few things in the game allow a character to increase their power this much. The other being the SoS, which arguably makes end-game THF impossible to balance against TWF, but that is another discussion.

From what I can tell this scaling problem has reared its head before in DDO, for example with player/mob AC. The solution then was to adjust the D20 system by adding grazing hits (a small constant success %, so the differences between the extremes were reduced) or by adding a separate D20 roll. The latter solution is actually very clever as it makes the tails of the probability distribution longer, and therefore makes differences in gear less substantial.

If we instead give the mob for example +10 to saves, but on each roll also subtract a D20 (avg. 10.5), it would nearly preserve their current saves on average, but make the tails of their rolls longer so even a maxed caster would fail occasionally, and an under-geared caster would have a chance to actually land something once in a while.

How large the additional roll should be could be debated, but it should in the D10 to D20 range.

Another balancing problem with spells and spell efficiency (which is actually the main issue for casters) is currently that area of effect spells are *potentially* so much better than single target spells. If you know the quest well and can round up 10 mobs successfully, you can hit 10 mobs with one spell. That is ten times the efficiency. You would basically never use FoD if don't have Wail on cooldown, and the efficiency of Wail is so much better than FoD that unless your DC is very high , the former is often too inefficient to use reliably. On the other hand, the latter is just too efficient when it goes off in large crowds, and gathering crowds is fairly easy in DDO. Turbine tried to balance Wail by a cooldown, but I'm not sure it really solved the problem. Additional approaches would be to cap it to at most a couple of targets, and/or increase the sp cost somewhat. Even adjusting mob AI so they avoid bunching up too much could work.

The same problem also exists to a smaller extent for damage spells. The way the game is balanced, they are usually too inefficient to use on single targets. Unless it is persistent damage over time spells, which are both much more efficient, and in addition allow no save.

[Rodasch]

http://koti.mbnet.fi/wink/ddo/yeahtotally.jpg See this here?

Now can someone please give me a reason why I shouldn't take only arcanes, evokers and assassin rogues to my epic runs?

Because the bard outkilled the evoker FvS?

[Viisari]

Because the bard outkilled the evoker FvS?

Yeah, warforged favored souls holding a greatsword are usually evokers...

There was no evoker in that party, but they can do a very good job with instakills while also healing the party.

And that bard ain't a normal bard either

<edit> And you managed to miss the whole point anyway, if a wizard can easily outkill everything and anything in the quest, why take melees there? Why not just take another wizard so the killing is faster? And grab a wf sorc for a tank.

[Forzah]

Because the bard outkilled the evoker FvS?

I think he's pretty much the best played bard on the server. Capable of solo'ing epic chains of flames (although he only did 2/3rds of it so far because of a power failure). Although im surprised to see he outkilled the fighter.

Either way... I think Viisari's screenshot summarizes my feelings pretty well.