AC and ToHit question/suggestion

[Quirky1]

I'm new to DDO, but an old PnP player and I've read some strange things on the boards about high level play and AC. From what I've read, AC doesn't matter at high level play. This sounds like a problem.

It has always been a problem that there are so many different AC bonuses, and the fact that different type of bonuses stack. More so in DDO where you take gear and enhancement into the equation. In order to fix this they have made it possible to stack ToHit in an even more absurd fashion (mainly by making it easy to get very high STR values and extra good BAB in the attack chains).

In a game with absolute numbers (compared to relative numbers with diminishing returns) there will allways be a party where the fighter will automatically fail every will save and the well geared save specialist cleric/monk/paladin will make every will save. As soon as their respective saves differs by more than 20 this will happen. The same goes for AC, skill DC, Spell DC, etc. It's the inherrent weakness in a d20 system.

In the PnP game this is seldom a large problem, since the majority of the campaigns are relatively (compared to DDO at least) low level and even at high level the gear scaling isn't as brutal as in DDO.

From what I have read on the boards AC is really great in the mid game, but completely loses it's value at higher level, unless you are a top geared AC tank, and even then it's mostly useless. I can only assume that this is due to the d20 limitation. If the dungeon is set for a balance around a tank with an AC around 80, anyone having less than 60 will always be hit.

Even if one uses the common house rule and roll AC, instead of adding a set 10, to it, you will only postpone the problem a little. Instead of a spread of 20 you get a spread of 40. It's a huge difference, but still when players can attain an AC of 100+, it is not so much. Further more you can have monsters have more of a differentiated attack sequence, more like players where the first attack (or in the case of DDO the last attack) is at maximum BAB and the rest are rolled with a penalty or withour a bonus as the case may be. This will give another 10 or 15 points of difference.

So instead of the PnP version with it's 20 difference you will have a difference of 40+15, and that makes a player with a 100 AC somewhat in balance with a player with 45 AC. If the 100 AC player have reached the threshold where he only gets hit on a natural 20, then the 45 AC player will always get hit, while the AC 46 player actually can manage to avoid a hit now and then.

So my question is:

How dows AC work at high levels in DDO? Is it a d20 gap or a double d20 gap? Do monsters have several attacks with lesser toHit on some of them, just like players or are all of a monsters attacks the same? How does natural 1's and natural 20's come in to play? Is AC and high ToHit values worthless at high level play, and if so do Turbine have a plan to fix it?

[Shade]

This sounds like a problem.

AC works fine on pretty much everything in the game on casual/normal difficulty.

On higher difficulty settings, it's set to values that are generally unreachble. Is that a problem?
Not really. It's just easier for them to eliminate a variable from the playing field when they balance the monsters damage output against us.

Same reason every purple named has true seeing now so gear/spells with blur/displacement aren't factors either.

Far as the element of it being part of the customization - It's still challenging to build a strong defensive tank as there are tons of other factors in DDO that are very important for tanks. (HP, DR, Threat generation, Percentile damage mitigation, Saves, Healing amp, Various skills, Various feats, etc)

And thats clearly the route they are headed with the recent changes shield mastery and to the defender lines (masive HP increases, and percentile damge mitigation)

Seem ideal to me. As it gives newer/lesser geared players an additional layer to defend themself on the easier difficulties, while the veterans/geared players have less options so they need to focus more heavily and use more challenging tactics.

Also whats up with making suggestion then clearly stating you don't actually know whats going on? Maybe you should check the situation yourself before suggesting such drastic changes?

[sirgog]

Player AC needs developer attention in the level 15+ region.

An effective AC in level 17 or 18 Normal/Hard content is possible, but quite difficult to obtain without raid loot and major sacrifices in your character build.

Getting AC to work at all in level 16+ Elite content requires a lot of raid loot. On the other hand, being effective in (say) level 18 Elite content as a crowd control oriented caster doesn't require any raid loot.


There was a significant discussion on the forums re. AC recently where, IIRC, about 80% of responses favored some sort of overhaul of endgame monster To-Hit to use additional dice (50+3d20 instead of 90+1d20, or something similar). Another ~15% of people thought that would be OK if it happened, but not a good use of developer time, and a single person (who already responded in this thread) thought the current system of player AC being totally useless against bosses in Epic content was working well.

[Angelus_dead]

Is AC and high ToHit values worthless at high level play, and if so do Turbine have a plan to fix it?

A close look at this blog post from last week (http://my.ddo.com/ddoqablog/2011/09/...fore-the-calm/) indicates that if Turbine has a plan to improve AC, it's a secret that exists only in the mind of an individual designer so far. The other staffers clearly haven't heard of it.

Further more you can have monsters have more of a differentiated attack sequence, more like players where the first attack (or in the case of DDO the last attack) is at maximum BAB and the rest are rolled with a penalty or withour a bonus as the case may be. This will give another 10 or 15 points of difference.

Things like that have been a popular suggestion among players for years.

[Quirky1]

If they have implementet auto fail and auto success on natural 1's and natural 20's. Can't this system be used to get a proper bell curve to the d20 system?

If mobs get an increased chance of natural 20's based on their status, orange, red, etc and the dungeon difficulty settings, where a normal mook in a normal dungeon has a 20 and an epic boss has a auto success on a naturl 15-20 and vice versa for auto fail. A player versus an epic boss has a To Hit auto fail on 1-5 but only an auto fail on a natural 1 against a mook in a normal dungeon.

So this gives a little wriggle room for improvement on both the low and the high end of the To Hit and AC scale. If you have over kill on To Hit versus an epic boss, then for every 5 or 10 extra to Hit you have above the minimum needed to always hit, you decrease the auto fail from 1-5 to 1-4, all the way down to the natural 1. This means that a it's ok to have a +50 to hit on a 40 AC epic boss, since it means your fumble chance will decrease and your over all dps will increase compared to having a +40 To Hit which otherwise should have been enough.

The same goes for extremely high AC. Even if the boss only have a +60 to hit and you would be "safe" with an AC of 80, an increase to AC 100 would mean that the Epic Boss natural auto hit on 16-20 turns into a a natural 18-20 or something like that, effectively almost halving the melee damage on you. But the increase in AC against a normal dungeon mob with only natural 20's won't be affected at all.

In turn, characters with a very low AC could always benefit a little by increasing their AC in order to gain a little in the other end of the spectrum. A normal mob in a normal dungeon would have a auto miss chance on a natural 1-5, but if they have a +50 to hit and you only have an AC of 40, they will decrease that miss chance, just like a player would to a 1-2 miss chance or a 1-4 depending on the 1 in 10 or 1 in 5 rule). So by increasing your AC to 50, the mob will have their whole miss chance of 1-5. The benefit of you increasing your AC by 10, isn't that great (maybe 5-10% less damage or so), but at least there is an advantage to it, and it's always easier to increase a stat that is below the treshold for the dungeon than it is to increase your best and most optimized values.

In short, extremely low and high AC and To Hit values would come in to play. There wouldn't be any cases of AC doesn't matter or my To Hit is so high I don't have to buff it in this dungeon.

This system should be fairly easy to implement code wise. Balance wise you don't have to make many changes if any. Mobs and player character will have the same system. And the only testing would be to find the correct value for the ratio of over kill AC or To Hit needed to increase or decrease the natural 1-5 and 16-20 rolls, by 1.

Vorpal effects and other natural 20 rolls wouldn't be affected ofcourse.

This suggestion combined with a double d20 roll, where you actively roll your AC instead of getting a static +10 bonus as in PnP, should increase the span of AC and To Hit to such an extent that it will always be a good idea to increas one or the other a few more points.

Just a thought... and most likely an itteration of old ideas already presented and dismissed on these boards. :-)

[Quirky1]

A close look at this blog post from last week (http://my.ddo.com/ddoqablog/2011/09/...fore-the-calm/) indicates that if Turbine has a plan to improve AC, it's a secret that exists only in the mind of an individual designer so far. The other staffers clearly haven't heard of it.


Things like that have been a popular suggestion among players for years.

Thanks for the link and I guessed these ideas would have been discussed before. DnD palyers tend to be a creative and chatty bunch. :-) I am new to DDO and is therefor out of the loop so to speak. I will try to catch up on old threads, but there are so many, hehe.

[honkuimushi]

Currently DDO uses a single 20 for to hit. Several people, myself included, have asked that mobs take a penalty to some of their attacks to simulate the D&D iterative attack penalties. But so far, that has not been changed. The reason players' get bonuses on later attacks instead of penalties is to encourage people to stand still and use the entire attack chain. Since it taked time to go through the animation,(though it used to be much worse) there is no reason to not inturrupt it and use only your first attack if that attack has the highest attack bonus anyway.

[Angelus_dead]

Several people, myself included, have asked that mobs take a penalty to some of their attacks to simulate the D&D iterative attack penalties. But so far, that has not been changed.

Actually it somewhat has been changed for non-boss monsters in epic dungeons.

[honkuimushi]

Actually it somewhat has been changed for non-boss monsters in epic dungeons.

True, forgot about that.

[Mindspat]

How dows AC work at high levels in DDO? Is it a d20 gap or a double d20 gap? Do monsters have several attacks with lesser toHit on some of them, just like players or are all of a monsters attacks the same? How does natural 1's and natural 20's come in to play? Is AC and high ToHit values worthless at high level play, and if so do Turbine have a plan to fix it?

Welcome to DDO!

You have to seperate the content in a variety of ways to answer your question. There's normal, hard, elite, epic and raids. Each of those have their own version of trash mobs, red names, bosses, raid bosses, etc.

If you're playing epic content you should plan on being hit with just about every swing from a mob. In this type of content Displacement (50% chance miss) is the best thing to have available, but most of the bosses will ignore it.

Running Shavarath quests on normal is pretty decent high level content. It's fun, pretty well done and there tends to be a lot of chests in the quests. That content gives you a diverse environment in terms of AC and toHit chances. For instance, the Orthons aren't going to hit someone with a decent AC nearly as much as the Bearded Devils.

To put things in perspective, I play an Elf Sorcerer that has what I think a lot of people would say is a decent Armor Class value. After casting a few buffs and once we get rolling I'll change 2 items (braces and a rapier) which allows me to have a self buffed AC in the high 60's. Adding Paladin and Bard buffs pushes the AC into the mid 70's. The character has an unbuffed HP total of 347. It's a WaterSavant and I can UMD Heal scrolls without failure. My results vary from what I see and hear from a lot of people that claim AC is worthless.

The largest gripe about "AC doesn't matter" is usually paired against raid bosses or epic content. When you take those two factor's out of the equation AC starts to matter. AC is not supposed to make you invincible, it's supposed to mitigate damage. Even if it's only beneficial against trash mobs that means it's saving those resources for something else.

What a lot of players do is pursue the meat-head approach. They ignore AC or other means of mitigation and dump everythining into getting the most hitpoints possible. While it's never bad to have as many hitpoints as you can get it can become a burden when you're survival is not dependant upon mitigation and soley rested on someone else consuming resources to keep you alive.

Yes, armor class does matter. Throw an extended displacement and haste on the party and after the 50% chance to miss on a melee attack the mob will then have to roll against AC.

I play three characters. The Elf Sorcerer with a high AC, a Half-Orc Barbarian with no AC and a Human Cleric. My experiance covers the spectrum of content in this game and I often get a laugh at someone when they claim their falsehoods aren't fiction.

And what is Turbine thinking? who the hell knows what some of those developres think. We see some pretty good ideas but we also see stuff that leaves with a big "***". I suppose you could try you luck at this: http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=282419

An effective AC in level 17 or 18 Normal/Hard content is possible, but quite difficult to obtain without raid loot and major sacrifices in your character build.

Getting AC to work at all in level 16+ Elite content requires a lot of raid loot. On the other hand, being effective in (say) level 18 Elite content as a crowd control oriented caster doesn't require any raid loot.

I have GreenSteel Radiance II Rapier with +4 insightful reflexes and a Chattering Ring. Those two items are the only Raid gear I have that gives me an AC in the mid 70's (average raid AC with full party) with my Elf Sorc. I've also spent 1 feat on Light Armor Profecientcy on the same character and it's absolutely not gimped in any way. That being said, I believe you are mistaken to say it's difficult to obtain without raid gear or major sacrifices on the character build as 2 items hardly constitutes being " a lot" of raid loot. It would be more accurate to say it's item intensive.

[Quirky1]

Currently DDO uses a single 20 for to hit. Several people, myself included, have asked that mobs take a penalty to some of their attacks to simulate the D&D iterative attack penalties. But so far, that has not been changed. The reason players' get bonuses on later attacks instead of penalties is to encourage people to stand still and use the entire attack chain. Since it taked time to go through the animation,(though it used to be much worse) there is no reason to not inturrupt it and use only your first attack if that attack has the highest attack bonus anyway.

A single d20 to Hit has been part of DnD for ever, but the system is built for opposing die rolls. But some time during the process Gygax (RIP) and the others decided that the defensive d20 only bogged down game play, and they simplefied that roll to a static 10. This was then added to all DC and AC as a base. Taking this die back into the equation has been a common house rule in many d20 influenced RPG systems.

The benefits being mainly:

1. Greater range of possible results -9 to +29 instead of 1-20 with the same average.
2. Bell curve results, with extreme numbers being less frequent compared to average middle numbers.
3. Easier to balance the best and the worst saves, to hit, AC, skills, etc within a party.

The drawbacks being:

1. Not everyone likes bell curves. They are slightly more complex to calculate with for one.
2. An extra die roll for every action and some extra claculations takes extra time in a PnP environment.
3. At low level players want to feel different and being a fighter with 3 more fortitude than the wizard makes you a tough guy with a 1-20 range of possible results. In a -19 to +19 range, a 3 modifier is half as noticeable.

But in DDO, the opposing die should be used more often. The major drawback of having to roll one more die and make more calculations is not a problem, and the need for a greater range of result at high level is also more important.

But that are only my thoughts. Random functions tend to be CPU intensive on the server, so that might be one reason to keep the die rolls to as few as possible.


Turning the attack chain around with bonuses for standing still, instead of penalties for extra attacks are a very good design choice. One could as easily have a penalty on the first swing and then less of a penalty until the last swing that gets the full BAB and the mechanic would be almost identical to PnP. But I guess they have compensated the mobs so that they have a little more AC (and a lot more HP) to make up for it. And as the developers said, it's more fun to hit than to miss. :-)

The best would of course be that people actually did miss with their first attacks now and then in Epic content even when properly geared. This would make power attack a tactical choice and good To Hit an actual value worth aiming for.

[Quirky1]

Actually it somewhat has been changed for non-boss monsters in epic dungeons.

Sounds interesting. Care to elaborate on how this is implemented?

In PnP monsters have a -5 on secondary attacks unless they have a multi attack feat and lessen the penalty to -2 for the secondary attacks. If they are humanoids and uses weapons they follow the same rules as players do, mostly. Is this how they have implemented this or is there a special case for DDO.

[Quirky1]

Thanks for the welcome Mindspat. I think I will stay around for some time. :-)

You mentioned an arrays of possible mob types and dungeon difficulty levels. Are there any set rules to differentiate the mobs, like hard thrash mobs have double the HP of a normal trash mob or elite bosses having 4 more AC than hard variations of the same boss? Any rules of thumbs like that?

If there are such rules it would be easy to implement an adjustment to natural 1's and natural 20's auto fail and auto success rolls, somewhat in line with my earlier proposition.

The use of displacement (mischance effects), immunities, resistances, fortification, etc, seems to be a much bigger issue at high level than actual AC and I think that those should be important, but not more so than AC. AC should play a role at higher levels as well. And I would also like to see less stacking of To Hit and AC in general. It would be nice if they could be kept to the same range as say, spell DC and saves.

But I'm glad to hear that AC do play a significant role in non epic raid content at least. :-)

I will look up the link. - http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=282419

How wide is the spread of AC at high level? If you compare a well (but not best in slot) equipped AC tank and a non melee caster that has spent maybe a gear slot or two on AC and gotten most of the same raid buffs as the tank?

[grodon9999]

How wide is the spread of AC at high level? If you compare a well (but not best in slot) equipped AC tank and a non melee caster that has spent maybe a gear slot or two on AC and gotten most of the same raid buffs as the tank?

Caster? Forget about it, you have better stuff use in your equipment slots.

AC works fine in level 1-19 Casual through Elite IF YOU BUILD FOR IT. With many classes it's a foolish option to build for it.

[aiastelmon]

I would maintain that AC does not work fine after about level 12, specifically once you reach Gianthold.

Here is a thread with some pertinent (if statistically limited) info:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=156972

Note, the point of this is that it is actually possible to make AC useful in Gianthold for a dedicated AC build. But the investment to do so is quite significant in terms of item slots, feats, character build points, etc. The fact that this is up for debate at this low level of the game shows the extent to which the AC system is broken, in my opinion.

[Quirky1]

Caster? Forget about it, you have better stuff use in your equipment slots.

AC works fine in level 1-19 Casual through Elite IF YOU BUILD FOR IT. With many classes it's a foolish option to build for it.

I know you have better uses for every slot than AC if you are a caster, especially with the AC system a bit broken. What I am after is how broken it is.

The reason that a non melee wizard gets a BAB progression, apart from a ray spell or two, is the d20 gap. The goal of the system is to balance it so that at max level a dedicated melee BAB class will have 20 more of BAB and other bonuses compared to the non melee 1/2 progression BAB. The reason being so that the AC or difficulty level can be set somewhere in between and avoid the auto fail and auto success. In short the wizard should have at least a small chance to hit with his staff at high levels and preferably the fighter should have a small chance of failure versus the same mob.

In theory this means for basic PnP that a +10 BAB compared to +20 BAB progression leaves a 10 pnt difference. Add to that a difference of 10 points of starting strength for another +5 and some inherrent bonuses like weapon focuses, rages, STR improvements during level up, etc and you have a difference of around 20. In reality the fighter will most likely have a better weapon, some other tids bits that improves this even further but this will make up for the decrease that comes with multiple attacks. All in all the average attack difference will be about 5 + 1 per level between the best and the worst in a party. The same goes for saves (and skills in 4th edition). This is PnP.

In DDO this system seems to be out of whack somewhat. With all the good gear, enhancement, special buffs that stack with everything else and so on, the actual comparable level is much higher than 20 in DDO. Probably closer to level 25 or even 30. This means that the d20 gap is too small to encompass this difference and so the DCs, the ACs and the monster To Hits will be balanced around the top characters in a raid or party for each category leaving the low scorers hopelessly behind.
And so AC becomes useless for a majority of the characters at high level. To Hit would becomes useless, had not the devs implemented bonuses so that even average hitter could hit, so instead the top hitters will always have Power attack on and twitch (losing their higher ToHit attacks) since they always hit anyways.

This is a problem and it can be solved in many ways:

1. Ignore this balancing factor and accept that barbarians for example will forego AC and ToHit and go for resists and extra damage instead. Seems to be the current solution, but I don't like it, mostly for estetical reasons. But even if this is the solution one should be able to trade in extra ToThit for other things more easily, one example would be a greater Power Attack or more stances that lowers To Hit but gives other advantages like damage reduction or partial imunities.

2. Increase the d20 gap to a double d20 gap by adding a die instead of all the static +10 AC, +10 DC to the base difficulty value, etc. This increases the d20 GAP from 1-20 + 10, to 2-40. You also get a bell curve as an added bonus to the die rolls.

3. Even out the high end and the low end with some sort of bonus for overkill to hit values and penalties for sub par values. This can be done in several ways. I suggested one method earlier in the thread. Increasing crit multiplier when your confirm rolls are more than 20, 30 and 40 above the targets AC for example, would also make it important not to sit around with an AC 10 at level 20 and get MASSIVE crits and the high ToHit fighters would get back some extra dps by getting good crits even when they have more to Hit than the mob has AC.

4. Nerf stacking rules on abilities and equipment and lower the effective d20 gap. Nerfs are no fun though and if the level cap is raised or the equipment gets better in the future this problem will come back.

5. One could also increase the lower limits with very easily accessible loot that doesn't stack but gives a good base line for those that doesn't aim for a top value. One example of this would be a ring with your level as bonus to AC that doesn't stack with anything but basic armor, dex and maybe some raid buffs. That ring wouldn't help AC tanks at all, but it would make it interesting for a sorc or barbarians to actually care about their basic armor and a dex item and maybe get their AC into the competitive lower range even for high level content without sacrificing more equipment slots than it is worth. You could also have items that gives a combination of AC buffs, but not at maximum level. Instead of a +5 enhancement bonus to armor, a +5 natural armor bonus and +5 deflection bonus on three item slots, you get one item with all three at +3/+3/+3 (same loot level as the +5 items). This would not be unbalancing since the AC tanks would still go for the three different items in order to get +15, but a caster could get +9 for the cost of only one slot.

Just a few thoughts on how to solve the problem and keep the spirit of the PnP game behind DDO. My opinion is that all stats should have a benefit at all levels of play. If they don't you should be able to "trade" them like Power Attack for something that does matter. But the best would be to just increase the d20 gap.

[Faent]

Anyone know the to-hit the Lord of Blades has on N/H/E? (Particularly interested in the Elite value here.)

[Mindspat]

Caster? Forget about it, you have better stuff use in your equipment slots.

AC works fine in level 1-19 Casual through Elite IF YOU BUILD FOR IT. With many classes it's a foolish option to build for it.

It is very easy to shuffle items throughout your inventory as there's no Best In Slot item for a caster in DDO. This allows a player to acquire gear and equipment for a personalized build and does not limit them to being required to equip any particular piece of gear or risk being gimped.

This game is about loot. The entire process of playing the game is obtaining loot which directly influences the functionality and status of your character. The bulk of a character's AC is going to come from equiped items and party buffs.

[Quirky1]

I would maintain that AC does not work fine after about level 12, specifically once you reach Gianthold.

Here is a thread with some pertinent (if statistically limited) info:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=156972

Note, the point of this is that it is actually possible to make AC useful in Gianthold for a dedicated AC build. But the investment to do so is quite significant in terms of item slots, feats, character build points, etc. The fact that this is up for debate at this low level of the game shows the extent to which the AC system is broken, in my opinion.

Interesting post, but I think that the problem is bigger than this. The problem is that the spread between a dedicated AC build and an average build with some investment in AC is too big. This means that the developer have to chose to balance an encounter around the AC tank, making the mobs To Hits so high that AC on the other builds is worthless, or they balance it around the average AC of a party and by doing that the dedicated AC tank will be impervious to AC based damage. Neither choice is good.

In order to fix this, the gap between the average AC of a party and the dedicated tank must be made smaller, so the tank will be hit, but not often and the average party member will be hit most of the time but not always. THe only way for this to happen is to lower the stackable AC on the tank, or make it easier for an average party member to reach an AC that is closer to the dedicated tanks AC. And for that to happen we need AC buffs that are easier to get, but doesn't make it easier for the AC tank to increase his AC even further and since the average party member won't get attacked as often as the tank, AC is less valuable for them, so their AC should be cheaper resource wise. Relative AC is also more valuable the closer you get to being unhittable. +2 AC when you get hit on a 17+ halves the damage taken, +2 AC when you get hit on a 2+ only gets you around 10% more mitigation.

So in order for the average party member to use resources for AC they need more efficient ones. Party buffs are free, armor and such are mostly free, DEX is not, enchancements are not and neither are equipment slots. So those needs to be improved in such a way that they don't benefit the AC tank as much as they benefit the average party member. That or nerfs are the only way to close the AC spread down to the d20 gap or double d20 gap if that ideas is alos implemented.

I've listed a few ideas in the earlier post, are there any other ideas the devs are working on or you guys think they should be working on?

[sirgog]

Anyone know the to-hit the Lord of Blades has on N/H/E? (Particularly interested in the Elite value here.)

All I've heard is that on Lamannia, 90 wasn't providing much damage mitigation on Normal, however, this has been changed, and 90 is now very, very effective on Normal.

OTOH, 92 provided no noticeable mitigation on Epic.