Enough with the insta kills in epics?

[steelblueskies]

if a epic mobs see a deth spell go off it should cast dw on itself like the eladrin in running with the devils.
it would also be nice if casters were forced to use buff removing spells like disjunction or greater dispell

It would be excellent if debuffs and dispels on mobs didmore then remove pad on wards and buffs.

Fvs aov guard eats fortification and light and alignment damage are upped.
Sorc pres get to debuff or eat inherent resists.

Wizards and clerics and melée generally get the useful debuff wrong-end-of-the-poo-stick.
Hold festival upped damage but trivialized by completely shutting down ai.
Curses are preeminently a joke or just don't work comparatively. Ditto bane effects or prayer debuff.
An aov fvs walks into the room and mobs get: -2 ac, -2 hit, -2 saves, -2 spell resistance. Just because the aov fvs is there. That's pretty danger zero opportunity cost to me, meanwhile the rest of the class litter is actually spending to get one effect from that list or half of one effect from that list. Carrier debuffs for example.

Arcanes could live without instadeath and cc cheese if truly worthwhile debuffs existed.

How about a 50% increase to damage akin to the new helpless type debuff, that doesn't lock the monsters down into immobility.
Things like that while stripping the new funk, that makes things more interesting.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

Theirs half a dozen casters (that i know of and so do you i think) running about on Khyber with Dc's at 50 odd which is enough to drop the lot in EDA. Poor ole Zexxi never even shot a rat.

Made for a quick completion though. It was impressive and i for one don't begrudge them their moment in the sun.

Obviously the whole question of Epics and ''best of the best'' is a different thing.The ''best of the best'' can now make a cup of tea, do the washing, argue with ''mommy'' , hand out an ''axer'' package and still complete the hardest Epic with one hand tied behind their backs.

The problem being these Toons are on a different planet to the one they were when this started. These Toons have raised the bar and Turbine will have to do likewise if they wish to keep them keen.

Which they may or may not do considering the tiny (if informed and vocal) minirity they represent

And this is the real problem.
When the casual player has a DC of 36-38ish. And the super grinder can reach a 50! Where do you set the save DC's at?

Some may argue that "best of the best" should tailor to the super grinder, but I am totally against that.

TRing to completionist, is not the best of the best in my book.

A non-TR lvl 20 should be able to complete the hardest content in the game IMO.
Maybe not without some good loot. But he shouldn't have to grind a rediculous amount to be able to play content.

Of course this is why they had Epic ward to begin with. But that takes a lot of fun out of the game too.



I said it already, but I'll say it again.
Design lvl 20+ content with variety of monster stats, so that everyone can have a time to shine, and everyone can have a time to struggle.

The current incarnation or epics is "NOT" lvl 20+ content IMO. Not the way it should be.

Why are we fighting Bugbears and Trolls at lvl 20?
We should be fighting powerful outsiders with saves, SR, and immunities.
And BUFFS!

They should cast Deathward on themselves. And we should cast Mordekainen's on them to get rid of it.

The Beholders with Antimagic is a step in the right direction.

Anti-magic fields would be another.

Both would handi=cap casters and still let Rogues do their stuff.

Monsters that cast Mass Holds on us would be nice too!


How many of your uber casters have done Acute Delirium on elite yet?
Oh, casters are powerful in their to be sure. But melee are useful too. (and so are ranged guys. )

Anyway, even for those with 50 DC spells. I think there are still challenges in the game, and I still think melees are useful.

But I also think when I see an LFM for ToD asking for a single tank, that justice will be finally served.

[Viisari]

Anyway, even for those with 50 DC spells. I think there are still challenges in the game, and I still think melees are useful.

The only challenge these people have left in this game is trying to beat content as fast as they can. This is why you see things like epic deeps 5mins or eDQ1 in 8 mins or so. So yes, seeing as the content cannot really challenge them, they set their own challenges, that is, doing speed runs.

Melees might be useful, but anything a melee can do, a caster can probably do better. That probably applies to tanking too now with U9 here, or why is it that I hear of more and more people using favored souls and sorcs to tank elite horoth and suulo in tod? If they are able to keep the aggro from melees and have sufficient HP, they are the superior choice because they can heal themselves and require no extra resources from other healers in the group.

So if a caster can do everything better than a melee, there's no reason to play a melee from pure power perspective and the only reason to play a melee is flavor.

[KillEveryone]

Casters can very much contribute without mass insta death and assassins can very much contribute without their tier 3 insta kill.

It can only be considered hypocritical under your false, make believe premisses. It really doesn't make me a hypocrit.

My "make believe premisses" is true, you just don't like hearing the truth.

Sine you don't want casters to contribute with insta death spells, you are once again wanting casters to be pigenholed back into buffing and cc role.

Face it, you are all about the kill count and you are upset you are not getting it.

Yes, you are being hypocritical.

[Aaxeyu]

My "make believe premisses" is true, you just don't like hearing the truth.

No, it's not true: Casters and assassins were not useless before U9. This discussion should really end here. It's clear as day that you are wrong.

Sine you don't want casters to contribute with insta death spells, you are once again wanting casters to be pigenholed back into buffing and cc role.

You forget debuff, damage dealing, self healing and tanking.

Oh noes, casters are pigeon holed into a buffing, ccing, debuffing, DPSing, selfhealing and tanking role! Abandon ship!

Face it, you are all about the kill count and you are upset you are not getting it.

Yes, you are being hypocritical.

ROFL. The kill count argument is hilarious at best. If anything it's the casters* that care so much about the kill count.

You still don't have the faintest clue what hypocritical means, do you?

*by casters I mean those who so vividly defend casters.

[steelblueskies]

Sorc v wiz re: usefulness.

Would granting , all else being equal, barbarians a flat out 20% increase in damage v fighters, double fighter attack rate, half ability and skill cooldowns and allowing them double hp, then granting fighters a click to instant kill which they must focus tactics to the stratosphere including past lives, then removing the ability for that instant kill balance to work be reasonable? This is what it sounds like to half the arcanes hearing the remove instakill still be useful talk.

There's balance point #1.
now add other classes. See the merry hell we have?

[Creeper]

Necro damage spells.

Roll a PM and try your Necro damage spells on Epic then get back with us.

[Truga]

Roll a PM and try your Necro damage spells on Epic then get back with us.

Hey, my maximized necro ray crits for 1000 damage! And it only costs like 50 spell points! That's insane damage I can put out at range, 40+ times with full SP! Are you suggesting barbarians can do better? Surely, not!

[mournbladereigns]

Arcane contribution was reduced to haste, rage and mass hold.
Thats 3 spells out of, how many we got, 150, 200?

Assuming you had the Mass Hold DC, otherwise your contribution was to be declined.

[shenthing]

Epic... there seems to be some confusion as to what this really means. While DDO is not table-top, a lot is drawn from table-top and epic is simply above level 20. In D&D, once a caster gets to certain prestige classes and hits 20, yeah they can really clear out a dungeon on their own... even in an epic setting.
I for one like the fact the while DDO is not strictly P&P, it does *try* to hold the the basic ideals and mythos. If you want something more balanced, play another game. I could be in support of making it more difficult for casters at early levels and things like witch-hunters, but as long as the game carries the lasbel D&D, casters should be more powerful at end-game.

[mournbladereigns]

You people have been saying this for months now. Do you really think it takes "the playerbase" months to notice such a big thing? I think by now, even the thickest players would have noticed.

However, "the (level 20 wizard) playerbase" sports on average what, 37-38 necro DC? I think that's about the right number, considering my average pug experience. My crappy first life wizard has 40, and he does fine, but I use energy drain, when I need to FoD things. Wail works about 50/50 on trash, so unless there's at least 5 around I don't even bother hitting the hotkey.

Hell, even in hard+ shavarath, 40 DC wail/fod doesn't work well enough to bother most of the time. I know this is subjective, and melees will say it works too often, but if there's a mob of 20 enemies around me and I hit "kill everything around me" and 5+ are left standing, I call that bad. At least icestorm will kill them in a single or two casts every single time unlike wail which might take several casts (now with 30 second cooldown aww yeah).

Hell, I've seen kobolds in waterworks massively save wails (wow, I wish I threw 20s all the time too). And this didn't happen just once or twice. When you get that kind of bull on your melee you can start complaining. Thank god it at least now does some damage on a save, maybe saving you a cast of firewall/icestorm.

If you're running with people with 46+ DC, and multiple TR, then you *should* nuke everything into the groud. Anything else would be a joke on your account (or the wizards anyway). I fully intend to have 45+ necro DC once I finish my character, but that will take a couple TRs, a +4 tome and a bunch of gear still. With that amount of effort, there's no reason why someone shouldn't be able to destroy trash mobs anywhere. And then I'll TR into a sorc, and nuke everything into the ground, without even as much as a chance to save on a 20.

Then I'll get bored and go find another game. Maybe you should too!

^THIS^

If your toon is maximally geared out and twinked with past lives, it should be able to beat any content. That's the whole reason to get maximally geared out and twinked with past lives. Sorry if the game doesn't cater to the toon you've spent 5 years twinking.

[Talon_Moonshadow]

The only challenge these people have left in this game is trying to beat content as fast as they can. This is why you see things like epic deeps 5mins or eDQ1 in 8 mins or so. So yes, seeing as the content cannot really challenge them, they set their own challenges, that is, doing speed runs.

Melees might be useful, but anything a melee can do, a caster can probably do better. That probably applies to tanking too now with U9 here, or why is it that I hear of more and more people using favored souls and sorcs to tank elite horoth and suulo in tod? If they are able to keep the aggro from melees and have sufficient HP, they are the superior choice because they can heal themselves and require no extra resources from other healers in the group.

So if a caster can do everything better than a melee, there's no reason to play a melee from pure power perspective and the only reason to play a melee is flavor.

Every character I play is for flavor.

[KillEveryone]

No, it's not true: Casters and assassins were not useless before U9. This discussion should really end here. It's clear as day that you are wrong.

I didn't say casters and assassins were useless. I said that a major factor of a tier III PrE was useless and that insta death spells were useless. Read more closely. It is clear as day that you are wrong.

You forget debuff, damage dealing, self healing and tanking.

Oh noes, casters are pigeon holed into a buffing, ccing, debuffing, DPSing, selfhealing and tanking role! Abandon ship!

And what critter do we have an actual chance at a debuff working beyond energy draining? Dispel doesn't work on stuff that casts it because their levels are too high for it to actually work, same goes for mordikaninns disjunction. Even then, that debuffing we were able to land was more for the benefit to land holds and CC so that the melee types could have an easy quest.

Self healing doesn't help the party.

DPS was OK before U9, not as good as it is now. Even then the most efficient use of SP was to be a CC monkey and let the melee beat on stuff...which is what you are really wanting because you feel your melee is being left out.

Know what, my wizard was also being left out. While I made the quests easy for your melee, I also had to be twinked to land those DCs but a melee didn't need all that twinkage, just a DR breaker, some HP and they were golden. Melee types wanted a caster to make the quest easy for them but also demanded a certain spell DC. Casters HAD to be twinked to the gills because they were the ones making the quests easy for you melee types.

Buffing, CCing...is what you are actually wanting. Face it, this is what you are wanting to go back to.

I get to kill stuff more frequently now while being efficient with my SP. Deal with it.

ROFL. The kill count argument is hilarious at best. If anything it's the casters* that care so much about the kill count.

You still don't have the faintest clue what hypocritical means, do you?

*by casters I mean those who so vividly defend casters.

I know that you are hypocritical. It is written all over what you are wanting.

Kill count argument is still valid, it is what you are defending. I didn't ever care about the kill count but apparently you do since you want my caster to go back to CC and buffing.

Sky Blue.

If you don't want to deal with caster types killing stuff in the quest, don't group with them. Oh wait, you want the mass hold, haste, rage and other buffs because you are still wanting it easy.

[Aaxeyu]

I didn't say casters and assassins were useless. I said that a major factor of a tier III PrE was useless and that insta death spells were useless. Read more closely. It is clear as day that you are wrong.

It's only under the premise that casters are useless without insta kill and assassins are useless without tier 3 insta kill that your explanation for why I am a hypocrit holds. And as those things did not work pre U9 you did infact say that they were useless. If you would stop writing so many BS claims and take a minute to actually think about your position in this discussion I would not have to explain this over and over.

To help you I will write a short summary.
I said that it's not the end of the world if a strong class loses one of the many things they got going for them.
For that you called me a hypocrit for wanting to remove an ability from one class to make another class feel useful.
I said that it can only be considered hypocritical under the premise that removing the ability makes the class useless.
You then said that that was the case.
The discussion invloves both assassins and casters, so that means that you think that casters will become useless if insta kill is removed and that assassins will become useless if their insta kill is removed.
Neither had those pre U9, so that implies that you think that they were useless pre U9.
I say that they were not useless pre U9, and you even agree with that.

The conclusion we can draw from that is:
It is not I who am a hypocrit, it is you who are confused.

I didn't ever care about the kill count

I get to kill stuff more frequently now. Deal with it.

Note to self: Next 4th of july, stay far away from the forums.

[dingal]

Arcane contribution was reduced to haste, rage and mass hold.
Thats 3 spells out of, how many we got, 150, 200?

Here are some of the spells I used regularly in Epics so to say Epic only consisted of 3 spells is a little oversimplified. If those are the only 3 you used you weren't doing a very good job.

I'm not trying to call you out but simply illustrate the fact that casters had more to do before than everyone wants to believe.

1. Mass Hold
2. Firewal
3. Symbol of Persuasion
4. Flesh to Stone
5. Web
6. Energy Drain
7. Enervation
8. Cloudkill
9. Ice Storm

Then of course buffs

1. Displace
2. Blur
3. Haste
4. Rage
5. Resist
6. Protection from Elements
7. Shield
8. Protection from Evil
9. Fire Shield
10. Lesser Death Aura
11. Death Aura
12. etc

I actually think casters had a LOT more to do then than melee has to do now. I could but didn't like to run epics without a caster pre-u9 due to CC being a really critical part of nearly any efficient run.

I am starting to prefer the change actually.

What I'd like to see is higher fort saves and higher spell resistance (not drow level SR but maybe SR32 similar to Chrono devils. This would be a heavier tax on casters doing instakills and require TR's to be optimal. This would thus even the playing field a bit.

[dingal]

Actually what the heck am I even saying? Ive run these same quests 100000 times I don't want them harder. Make new quests harder and leave the same boring grind alone!

[Rodasch]

ROFL. The kill count argument is hilarious at best. If anything it's the casters* that care so much about the kill count.

You still don't have the faintest clue what hypocritical means, do you?

*by casters I mean those who so vividly defend casters.

It might surprise you to know that in 99% of missions I run I don't even bother hitting the x key to see killcounts, death counts, completion times, or any of that other stuff. I just don't care about them. My measure of success is "did we have fun" and "did we complete". Beyond that, I like to see people get loot they want. All those counts and stuff don't mean jack-all to me unless I set myself a goal that involves one just for a challenge, such as "can I complete this mission with less than 5 kills yet still get ransack bonus without dying" or whatever.

Care so much about kill count? Not this caster.

I don't look at it on my melees or cleric either. I don't care who killed them as long as they die and I did all I could to help the mission succeed.

[Viisari]

Know what, my wizard was also being left out. While I made the quests easy for your melee, I also had to be twinked to land those DCs but a melee didn't need all that twinkage, just a DR breaker, some HP and they were golden. Melee types wanted a caster to make the quest easy for them but also demanded a certain spell DC. Casters HAD to be twinked to the gills because they were the ones making the quests easy for you melee types.

Heh, start your own group then? I started running epics daily on my caster when his DC was 37 I think, that's not really twinked at all. I ran pretty much all epics except sands ones and did just fine, if someone is telling you need this and that, go start your own group and stop whining, I never really had these problems everyone seems to complain about even if my DC was below their expectations.

DC does not make or break the caster, playerskill does, DC merely makes it much easier to be good.

But yeah, it is true that most people don't realize that.

[pHo3nix]

Heh, start your own group then? I started running epics daily on my caster when his DC was 37 I think, that's not really twinked at all. I ran pretty much all epics except sands ones and did just fine, if someone is telling you need this and that, go start your own group and stop whining, I never really had these problems everyone seems to complain about even if my DC was below their expectations.

DC does not make or break the caster, playerskill does, DC merely makes it much easier to be good.

Yes, my wizard is really gimped and does just fine in the epics i run, but those are the easy ones, never taken him in a eChrono run to completion (farming scrolls in the 1st part is easy anyway ) or eADQ1 cause i know he sucks bad :P

Simply put epics weren't before and aren't now that epic anyway: and to those saying that there's nothing epic in wailing mobs, i reply again: what's so epic in beating on held mobs?

[svinja]

What I'd like to see is higher fort saves and higher spell resistance (not drow level SR but maybe SR32 similar to Chrono devils. This would be a heavier tax on casters doing instakills and require TR's to be optimal. This would thus even the playing field a bit.

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.