Balance That Vorpal Damage

[PinkDragonJr]

never seen a vorpal under 16, but I'll take your word for it.
and to reiterate, I'm not asking for a change in min level or max damage to kill. but on the damage dealt, and i'm really glad to see all the suggestions coming up for it. we have some good alt ideas here.

Now I can understanding that the 100 is only dealt on a 'failed' vorpal attack so yeah a failure may only get a little damage as compensation, but it's the things that are immune, that's where I'd like to see the 250-500 damage rolls, cause there is no chance for an instant kill anyway. without the chance of success failure is a moot term.

[Syllph]

never seen a vorpal under 16, but I'll take your word for it.

They definitely come as low as 10. I have one or two; I never personally seen lower than 10 though.

[FastTaco]

I find it funny they nerf vorpal so badly then replace it with a beefed up Terror and some HoX wraps, which destroy regular quests and can land insta-kills in epics aswell.

[waterboytkd]

The changes to Vorpal, Banishment, Smiting, and Disruption (hereafter referred to as VORPALS) were both good and bad. Before the changes, using VORPALS was a gamble: your dps took a massive hit all for the hope that you would get your kill effect in quickly. That was, well, iffy design, and it made the weapons more of a personal taste thing than a "I'm clearly the best weapon ability around."

Then they made the change, and the VORPALS, except Vorpal, all got something else: 4d6 damage on every hit, plus the insta-kill effect on a vorpal strike. I found this an excellent change as it made the weapons the obviously best suffix ability (except Banishment, which is a prefix ability; I still dream of being able to make Banishment shards in Cannith Crafting so I can make +5 Banishing of Greater Evil Outsider Bane on my wraps for my light monk, and blessed silver and blessed cold iron greatswords for my melee fvs), as they dealt the most dps, but also had that nice vorpal kicker.

But Vorpal actually just got nerfed. All the other got a functional change to "balance" them against one another and to make them the end-all-be-all of dps abilities against their targeted foe, but Vorpal just got screwed. That's why I think the suggestion to make Vorpal deal 2d6 points of bane damage to any foe with a head (ie any foe that can be killed by Vorpal) in addition to its insta-kill effect is a very good idea. It would make Vorpal the king of the dps abilities, which it clearly should be.

As for the 1000 hp limit...I don't like it. My reason is simple: melees need all the help they can get at end game, especially in epic quests. There's been a lot of discussion on melees vs casters on these forums, and I'm convinced that the first step to making melees more or par with casters is to give them more/stronger special attacks they can use in combat, especially ones that can mitigate incoming damage like stuns, trips, and insta-kills. Changing these VORPALS so that they worked on the target, regardless of hp, would be one way to accomplish that. Besides, what's the harm? Is it really game-breaking for a melee to kill trash mobs like that? It's not like Orange-named or higher tier mobs can be affected (they got that epic deathward thingy on them), and more and more we're seeing epic divine caster mobs opening with mass deathward, which would prevent the insta-kill on vorpals, too. So where's the harm?

(If your curious, the second way you close the caster-melee gap is to give melees some better self-healing options--when you consider that a melee has MUCH more incoming damage than a caster, they need some way to deal with that. Combine that and the above on special attacks with a workable AC system, and melees just might be "fixed".)

[thebeast1985]

the idea i have about this is quite different, why instead of talking about flat damage we don't say... for example a little symbol like this:

%

this would be able to resolve many, many problems, let's say a 20-25% on a critical hit? (not natural 20) and on a natural 20 we could have.. a flat damage PLUS a %

[JOTMON]

Smiting/Disrupting are suffixes because those things work on mobs that are non-paralyzable. Can you imagine the OP-ness of a Paralyzing of Banishing weapon? Banishing of Greater Bane is OP enough, but at least they get a chance to hit you before they die so quickly.

These are pretty nice ..