Upgrading the difficulty on the two raids.

[budalic]

Stupid to make a DDO Store expection only on the preview server when they instead could kill of potion P2W in one good swipe - preview server or not.

The problem is that potions are good seller, especially among casual crowd.

IMO, the cooldown on pots would make them less useful, while still keeping sales. Vast majority of DDO Store SP Pot sales comes from casual players - players that spend a lot of time doing quests, don't care about optimal build and gear, and that are willing to pay money to make easy (for hardcore crowd) quests even easier, to make them completable on their skill level. Only time I've ever seen such pot was when it was being linked by guildie I was helping to do New Invasion (it was pre-u9, so at the end I was forced to go down into pit alone and Necro Blast the boss - was very annoying).

So, assigning timer would nerf pots for hardcore players that buy them with pp and hoard stacks of 100s of them; while still making them desired for casual players who buy them from DDO store.

EDIT: Not that I care either way, though... if somebody wants to drink a bunch of pots, big deal... not my problem.

[LordPiglet]

i think it's sort of ridiculous for Matt to suggest changing something he's never experienced first hand.

I also think it's ridicluous that you 7 manned an Epic raid in 2 days from it coming out.

However it's well known that what Revenents do is short man extremely hard raids with a high level of success, resources be darned.

Us losers have to accept that those guys are exceptionally good at beating ridiculous raids with small numbers. In some ways it might even be an advantage to have less people to heal, coordinate, buff, instruct etc.

I think at the end of the day this might actually be a positive thing: you can take the best equipment in the game and give it to lots of hard core players, but only the best are actually going to do ridiculous things like TOD elite 4 man or beat the new Epic raid right away.

Shade tried it with a full group and failed, more than once. If Shade and a group of end game geared players can fail multiple times, this raid IS NOT too easy.

Those of you who are saying it is are just all sour grapes because you and your buddies aren't pulling off what Rev did. Either test on Lam or wait till live to bellyache I say.

Lets see, didn't they have like 5 FvS in that party? For all intensive purposes aren't SP unlimited since they can just get pointsalot and buy a ton of pots from the store?

These guys ran as a guild, are guys who play together constantly who know information and how to communicate. They were at an advantage, especially if shade knew less the 1/2 his party or certain members didn't come prepared to straight up brute force it.

[Drfirewater79]

Yeah you just want it easy peasy whereas I want to get my butt kicked. Beating a raid on the first attempt or two is a letdown.

I was in a pretty elite group that wiped twice on normal .... get the elitism out of normal and make epic super stupid hard .. and i am down ..

but when experienced players wipe on normal its way too hard.

(that being said we would have beat it the second time if not for the targeting bug that made it so we couldnt kill the last wave of trash mobs)

[Drfirewater79]

I've read a few ridiculous things in my time here on these forums but few as ludicrous as critiquing something you have never experienced. Sure, a number of groups brute forced victories out of LOB. How many healers on live will be willing to suck down 40+ store pots to win? What people are leaving out of their posts are the resources use to get that completion. Pots on Lam are free. Shades Elite had 30+ deaths. People in their skivies because of broken gear. Of course, strategies will develop (having been in a few runs I have some ideas) and some of the bugs add to the difficulty but but even then the Lord is a beast who will punish the unprepared.

^This

the raid is bugged as all hell right now .. but its still a really hard raid even on normal .. the fact that you can play it on EPIC suggests that it can get much MUCH harder then stupidly hard which it is ... come live no healer is gonna want to do that raid on anything other then normal ... unless they are a million aire and dont mind buying 100 pots each completion.

[GeneralDiomedes]

It sounds to me like they have created the most difficult encounter yet in the game. And by difficult, I don't mean poorly designed quest mechanics that simply don't work properly (Abbot/Titan).

Actually, I cannot think of a fight scenario which could not be beaten in one day given current DDO game mechanics.

[Postumus]

Any chance you can downgrade the difficulty for the two raids or at least one of the raids on epic. The raids appear far too difficult. Resources are hard to come by in game so if I have to use some resources ouch. I would love a lesser challenge. I actually want to win at attempts in completing a raid for the first time for a few weeks that would be awesome. The old abbot and Titan were both horrible - don't give us one of those raids. The game is much too difficult on epic.

[Razcar]

[...]
So, assigning timer would nerf pots for hardcore players that buy them with pp and hoard stacks of 100s of them; while still making them desired for casual players who buy them from DDO store.

Yes... which is kind of exactly why I suggested this one page back (Which is a suggestion that has been around in different forms for years.)

Turbine should sell them, they make loads of money on SP pots according to their Store sales statics from 2010.

So what they should do IMO is put a cooldown on SP pots in raid content.

15 seconds per pot in Normal raids, 30 secs in Hard and 60 on Elite/Epic, maybe. That would make chugg-to-success quite much harder.

This will not stop low and mid-level pot chuggers - not hinder chuggers in normal quests at all actually - but hard and elite raids would become harder to chug yourself through.

[budalic]

Yes... which is kind of exactly why I suggested this one page back (Which is a suggestion that has been around in different forms for years.)

Oh, I didn't mean to sell it as my own idea, just was to lazy to quote/forgot to type 'as suggested in this thread'.

Mea culpa.

[NeutronStar]

No. We must blindly attack the unknown! It is the key to success.

So you attack the act of having sex with another person in hopes it gets you laid???

[Riggs]

Within a day or two of this being live, some group will drink a zillion SP-pots and win and declare themselves ubb3r on the "Achievements" forum. This option of nearly unlimited SP-pots (they are NOT expensive in RL money) is the most broken thing in this game. A cool-down timer with increasing times as you go C/N/H/E/E would balance this.

A cooldown would be good too if it was long enough. As right now you can go from 0 to full mana in like 5 seconds ...yeah the game is broken, and raids get designed not around what is balanced - but what high spenders can accomplish - which borks the game for everyone who doesnt choose that route.

I dont enjoy game mechanics where the healer is expected to use $$ to keep a group up - not just massive amounts of scrolls but points and real cash.

[Riggs]

Well, I didn't intend to speak of the raid in that regard, though from what I understand from Shade and others that appears to be a shining example of my statement. I am reserving all comments until I have actually tried it.

My comment was meant more as a general statement of the way I see and fear the game progressing. Horroth's badges mitigating the use of a high AC tank, and AC still continuing to be less than useful in epic being existing examples.

I remember after they made their changes to epic attack rolls trying Lormyr out in a simple epic von 1. Had a bard and pally friend come along to test it out, and even with their aura and song boosting my ac to 95 the ogres only rarely missed me.

It is out of control. The game is forcing hp up even more than before, and it is really absurd that a build that can serve you well from level 1-19 becomes nearly useless at level 20. "Oh you have a high ac paladin/ranger/monk/whatever? - ok you can maybe kite something while the real melee(barbs) do the actual work for the epic/raid."

I enjoy playing clerics less and less as DDO goes on.

Turbine's ideal endgame group:
Barbs
Healing cleric/fvs
Sorc

Everything else can be 1-2 shotted no matter their ac, and has a fraction of the dps - so really why bother?

[Riggs]

I've read a few ridiculous things in my time here on these forums but few as ludicrous as critiquing something you have never experienced. Sure, a number of groups brute forced victories out of LOB. How many healers on live will be willing to suck down 40+ store pots to win? What people are leaving out of their posts are the resources use to get that completion. Pots on Lam are free. Shades Elite had 30+ deaths. People in their skivies because of broken gear. Of course, strategies will develop (having been in a few runs I have some ideas) and some of the bugs add to the difficulty but but even then the Lord is a beast who will punish the unprepared.

Any and every guild that raids would probably be more than happy to have everyone chip in 3 pots each to get early epic gear before Turbine nurfs the quest after 2 weeks - like they do pretty much in every update in their history.

Masses of people will brute force it as fast as possible as many times as possible before the nurf bat and then have the gear and not need to run the raid as much while more casual players will once again get lower drop rates once they get there - like happens every time.

It is not about how much dying they had to do on Lam to brute force it - it is the simple fact that brute forcing raids should never have been an option on Lam or live to begin with.

Skill and 1-2 clickies for extra mana sure - but all quests are 'easy' when you can chug 100,000 sp and just keep going when the group should have been wiped.

It reduces tactics in many cases to: just stand there and keep hitting no matter how much damage you are taking - because I have 100 pots worth of mana to keep you alive with.

It breaks the game, all semblance of balance, and needs to be changed - then start designing endgame content around realistic characters not unlimited mana characters.

[Aeneas]

Some Truths.

1. Norg probably spoke out of turn, but like alot of us, it really did seem at first hearing about the win that this was going to be another raid that you fail once or twice, learn the patterns, and dominate - on any difficulty. He wasn't the only person who immediately said to themself "I can't believe they screwed up epic again."

2. If you're going to post accomplishments of any kind, be prepared for some backlash, nobody likes bragging (and yes just posting the fact that you beat it is bragging after a fashion). Even if you aren't doing it in a particularly asinine way as some have in the past, just throwing the fact out there gets people's hackles up. I was part of a couple elite run raid firsts myself and i've seen the way these threads go from both sides of the line.

3. Revenants are a good guild with some very experienced and talented players. Nobody is surprised that they were able to accomplish this. To be fair though, there's enough pretty terrific players in all of the guilds Norg mentioned to have finished it as well, and i don't doubt that they will, albeit probably not on day 1. (i personally like to run it on all of the difficulties in order when new stuff comes out because the experience differs so greatly each time)

4. Judging difficulty based on the experience of such a small sample size is ridiculous. In BOTH directions, too hard and too easy. There's always somebody out there who thinks of a way to beat a raid that you never even considered. Even if this raid is released "as-is", it will get figured out, our tactics will improve, we'll get tips from other guilds and other servers, and we'll be flying through it the same way that we fly through all the other content.

So,

Golf clap, nice job Revs thanks for testing. Now stop F-ing around and come back to Khyber so we can run actual content. Especially you, Axer. I still need to complete a bunch of epics before this junk hits live!

[Rumbaar]

The top 1% beat it within hours, I'm sure that's an indication of the rest of the 99% of the DDO population ...

Not so subtle brag thread, congrats.

[Lormyr]

It is out of control. The game is forcing hp up even more than before, and it is really absurd that a build that can serve you well from level 1-19 becomes nearly useless at level 20. "Oh you have a high ac paladin/ranger/monk/whatever? - ok you can maybe kite something while the real melee(barbs) do the actual work for the epic/raid."

There is still time to turn things around. Turbine just needs to pull itself together, acknowledge it as a less than desirable situation, and work to correct it.

I think a simple but substantial start would be to either do away with grazing hits altogether, or scale them back to only occuring on a die roll of 18 or 19+ that would otherwise miss. 13+ or 15+ (I cannot recall which it is) is more than a little bit silly, even for elite and epic when combined with the AC needed to be considered useful on such difficulties in the first place.

A nice second step would be to reduce the amount of damage taken on a grazing hit. 50 point grazing hits are ugly, and a little bit insulting. Might as well have just been a regular hit at that point.

[Riggs]

There is still time to turn things around. Turbine just needs to pull itself together, acknowledge it as a less than desirable situation, and work to correct it.

I think a simple but substantial start would be to either do away with grazing hits altogether, or scale them back to only occuring on a die roll of 18 or 19+ that would otherwise miss. 13+ or 15+ (I cannot recall which it is) is more than a little bit silly, even for elite and epic when combined with the AC needed to be considered useful on such difficulties in the first place.

A nice second step would be to reduce the amount of damage taken on a grazing hit. 50 point grazing hits are ugly, and a little bit insulting. Might as well have just been a regular hit at that point.

I think monsters hit on a 15 or better on elite and players are 13+ if I remember.

One idea I posted a long time ago, that of course went into the hole of other unused ideas was what we did in old house rules games that were a mashup of a few systems (Rolemaster/Gurps/Champions/Some D&D etc).

The more you hit by, the more damage you did. Making a high skill fighter deadly with even a dagger - regardless of strength - which is exactly what a level 20 fighter should be - deadly with any weapon even without Titan strength.

The alternative to grazing hits was if you MISS - you do say half damage if you miss by 2-4, and 10% of base damage 4-5 or some such (we were using a 3d6 system so it was more miss by 1-2 or so).

So if you get close you do some damage - but with auto hits already on a 20 getting hit for half damage on a 15 or better is just absurd. No matter if your AC is 150 you get hit 1 in 4 swings no matter what - on top of all the increasingly amounts of unavoidable, no to hit roll no evasion damage - Turbine is just saying "Play barbs because we just dont want ac to matter and people get to avoid damage."

A cynical person might say - well unavoidable damage = more healing and more healing = pots = DDO Store sales $$...but I am not going to say that.

Because I just dont want to think about a system where someone higher up in accounting decides to have the game changed from what it was fun and should be - to one where you must spend $$ to compete at the higher content.