Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[sphagh3]

Circle of Death then Wail of Banshee will no longer be a useful combination.

Casters will dump CoD off their spell list once they can cast Wail. If this was not intended, please consider adding a delay of 1-3 seconds before the haunting takes effect.

[HalfORCastrator]

I'd first like to say that this solution is much more elegant than "hard to kill". Two thumbs up!

Second, I don't agree with putting this penalty on heroic lvls. Your reasoning doesn't fall in line with your former solution. Why didn't you include hard to kill in heroic lvls? Because you were trying to balance the endgame, and nothing has changed here. I'm joining the "Epic Hard/Elite only" camp. Just keep it in those difficulty settings.

With the epic destinies, It is true. Sorry. Think about it. 60 DC Wail of the banshee. That is almost NO fail. The expansion changes the playing field so much.

Aren't the hard/elite epics untuned right now or something? Ie, hp, saves, dmg of mobs not tuned correctly, overly easy right now?

[DeafeningWhisper]

(1) How does this affect Implosion? Is it going to drop your DC over the course of the Implosion? If so, that would totally nerf Implosion.

(2) Which spells does this apply to, exactly?

(3) Which spells does the debuff apply to? If I Wail a group of five mobs, will my Finger DC then be at -10 or worse?

(4) If so, then I have to Finger *before* I wail? That's unacceptable.

(5) The timer seems excessive. It sounds like if I wail 10 mobs, I just got stuck not using any other death spells for something like two minutes. Not cool.

(6) Is something like this still restricted to Epic Hard/Elite only, or were you planning on implementing this across the board?

(6) Re-read Eladrin's last post they want to have it at all levels and difficulties for "consistency", you know the same reason you cut of a one legged man's remaining leg "consistency".

[Sarnind]

This is a good compromise

[Autolycus]

You are thinking Pre Expansion though.
The saves are not being increase from what I have seen. So your 45 DC wail would still see GREAT success in epics. The thing is, if you specialize in DC in the xpac, you will see numbers of 60-65.

So with -8 DC, you would still be sitting at 52-57 DC. That would still be successful. You would have to get up to like 8-12 stacks to start seeing it drop off in effectiveness to a degree that makes it not usable. And honestly even at
45, your Wail would work failry well. It does now even.

I swear you people will not be happy until they remove all the training wheels and allow you to just walk through epics and hit 1 button every 5 or 6 rooms and kill everything. the hardest content should not be designed for 1 single player to decimate while eating doritos and watching american idol with their girlfriend over the phone yapping their ears off and updating their facebook from time to him.

Epic Elite if nothing else should be something that you have to round up a balanced party of elite players to complete. Not something that 1 man just destroys in 20 minutes one afternoon because he was bored and had nothing better to do.

What about the casting Divines for whom their few main offensive spells are instadeath? They can't get anywhere near the DC of Arcanes. And they're talking about implementing this on all levels, not just Epic Elite. Oh, wait, we don't want Divines offensively casting or fighting, just hjeal me.

[Alcedes]

I'd first like to say that this solution is much more elegant than "hard to kill". Two thumbs up!

Second, I don't agree with putting this penalty on heroic lvls. Your reasoning doesn't fall in line with your former solution. Why didn't you include hard to kill in heroic lvls? Because you were trying to balance the endgame, and nothing has changed here. I'm joining the "Epic Hard/Elite only" camp. Just keep it in those difficulty settings.


Aren't the hard/elite epics untuned right now or something? Ie, hp, saves, dmg of mobs not tuned correctly, overly easy right now?

No. As far as I am aware, this is how they are intended for release on Live. Epics are not nearly as challenging as they once were. Everyone is screaming DOOOOOM and most have not even tried to run them yet.

[varusso]

Thank you for the feedback on the Hard to Kill buff. We're planning on making changes to it based on your comments.

<snip>[/I]

Its better but still a bit excessive, if you are actually trying for balance.

* Have ONLY AOE insta-kills generate/be affected by haunting counters. Leave the one-shot kill spells alone; they arent the problem.
* Put a hard-cap on Haunting. An arcane who is just doing his job and contributing could easily be rendered near-useless by the massive DC-debuff if they are necro-specced and their primary focus is to insta-kill stuff.
* Reduce the timer to remove the Haunting counters, or give us some way to USE the counters or get rid of them faster than just standing around with our "Fingers" up our....well you get the idea. Standing around waiting for a timer to expire is BORING and unproductive, not to mention completely counter to having *FUN*.

And just to be clear: this should ONLY be on epic hard and elite. It should NOT be in heroic AT ALL and should NOT be on epic-normal.

[Galeria]

I'd really love an explanation from the devs as well as to why they feel the death spells are so incredibly OP. That's just not at all been my experience grouping at end game.

Agree. Would love to see the actual stats for existing epics across the worlds and see how big of a problem this really is.

It's entirely possible that I and all the people I run with are just really bad casters that we don't kill every epic mob before anyone else can get there. I know there are a few people who can do this, but I find it hard to believe that it's so very common.

I could definitely be wrong, but the stats should tell us something.

[Hokiewa]

Yeah, too bad wizards have no other spells at all besides FoD, Circle of Death, PK, and Wail of Banshee.

Oh wait...

This is of course a ridiculous arguement

[DeafeningWhisper]

No. As far as I am aware, this is how they are intended for release on Live. Epics are not nearly as challenging as they once were. Everyone is screaming DOOOOOM and most have not even tried to run them yet.

LOL, might wanna read a bit more there, epic hard and elite are broken and have been since close Beta 1. The mobs don't scale the way they should, it's a well known fact.

And we are talking about nerfing heroic lvls, not epics.

[Alcedes]

What about the casting Divines for whom their few main offensive spells are instadeath? They can't get anywhere near the DC of Arcanes. And they're talking about implementing this on all levels, not just Epic Elite. Oh, wait, we don't want Divines offensively casting or fighting, just hjeal me.

If the divines had their way, they would be the healers they ahve always been, the melee of a fighter or barb, the casting damage of a sorc, and the death DC's of a wizard.


That being said, i sadly agree with your point. this will be a devastating debuff on Divines.

Seeing as how they are all "divine" they should be more at home dealing with lost spirits. Maybe divines should get his for half the dc and for half the duration? It would make sense.

OR how about give divines a class feat with a long timer...like maybe 2-3 minutes TOPS, called Exorcism. Or something along those lines. This would in effect, allow them to purge the haunting every few minutes keeping the numbers from getting too high.

[Faent]

Even the most hardcore casters would stuggle to just plow through that, and you don't want to slow down people needlessly.

No, this is exactly what you want to do. You're on your knees begging Turbine to slow casters down.

[Hokiewa]

LOL, might wanna read a bit more there, epic hard and elite are broken and have been since close Beta 1. The mobs don't scale the way they should, it's a well known fact.

And we are talking about nerfing heroic lvls, not epics.

Epic normal as well, as the original Hard to Kill only affected epic hard/elite.

[Tiemmothi]

This is a good compromise

About a good of a compromise as feeding you to a tiger shark instead of a great white shark.

[Postumus]

When a death spell successfully kills one or more targets, the caster acquires a debuff called "Haunting" for each target killed, for a short period of time.

This sounds a bit like that weak idea Shade had a while back about how to nerf these spells, but not quite as melee biased.

How does this work with Implosion and Destruction? Will it have the same haunting effect? What about spells like Banishment, Dismissal, and death to undeath? Will they be affected also?

While I appreciate the challenges involved with designing challenging content around instakills, I do not agree with some members of the vocal minority that this is some game breaking situation that needs to be solved by changing the fundamentals of these spells.

Why can't enemy casters be set to cast deathward on themselves and their allies more frequently? Why can't certain mob types be coded to have deathward (in effect a deathblock item) rather than a blanket immunity to all mobs. For instance: I would expect epic drow to have deathward and deathblock items, but not epic rats and non-humanoids.

In any case, I'm happy you are listening to the player base and taking another stab at this.

[eris2323]

Dear turbine; if you go through with this.... plan.

Please consider giving not only a lesser heart of reincarnation to every character on every server, but provide a true heart to every character as well. It's okay if they are bound to character. We don't mind.

I am pretty sure I did not pay 80 dollars to have my character penalized for using core class abilities as a surprise change, this late in the game.

[Faent]

*tinfoil hat on*

Arcane spellsurge: (Active Cooldown: 4 mins) +5 to all spell DCs for 20 seconds
Spell School augmentation (3 ranks - 1 AP): (Passive) Chosen school spells have 5% chance to reduce target <save depending on school> by 10 for 10 seconds

I guess Haunting was their plan A from the beginning...

*tinfoil hat off*

Very likely.

[Snapdragoon]

-20 for 15 seconds, -18 for 15 seconds, -16 for 15 seconds, and so on.

that seems way to much for way too long

There are other possibilities for the future as well. One of the recent ideas in the pit is that when we revamp the enhancements, have a few things that improve with your Haunt level. An ability that grants a bonus to Negative Energy Spell Power based on it, or that consumes souls for some effect? That's got to go into the Pale Master tree.

that seems like a cool idea though, i like the feel of it with Palemaster. instantly murder a mob to make your SLA's more powerfull for a while, when the weaken repeat. makes the insta kill more of a prequal to the effect, rather then the whole effect.

[Faent]

Divine casters are typically weaker at the instakills than wizards, due to the lack of extra feats, or enhancements to improve their DCs, yet they have one fourth the AOE instakill capacity. Would you consider reducing this timer to 30 seconds to bring it more in line with wail?

If Haunting applies to Implosion as planned, the Implosion timer just went up even more (for well-geared toons that can land it reliably). If the timer was reduced to 10 seconds/kill, the Implosion timer still went up (for the well-geared toons). Frankly, this should not apply to Implosion.

Maybe make it just apply to Wail (and the save DC increase JUST applies to the use of Wail as well.) Circle of Death already has a double save.

[DarkForte]

Think like this: if you are casting wail, you SHOULD be killing at least 3 mobs, most likely 5 or 6 (else, what would be the point of even doing it? Cast web instead), giving you a debuff of over a MINUTE. In fast-paced content, with high-save mobs, this is akin to putting a 1:15 cooldown on wail. Only it's not limited to wail. It affects wail, finger AND CoD. In this case, why have CoD as an option to wail? You only use it when wail is on cooldown, i.e. all your necromancies are worthless.

Eladrin seems to be missing the point that an arcane with -10 to his DCs is comparable an arcane that has exactly the same gear as the debuffed one, only he started with 8 int and put 3 level ups into dex, and isn't wearing his +7 item. Does that seem right to you?

<SARCASM> On another note, every successful monk stun should give -2 DC to all your tactical feats. Every heal you cast should give a -40 spell power penalty on your healing spells. No, even better! Every spell of an element you cast gives -40 spell power and -2 DC for spells of the same school! That will make melees that much better! </SARCASM>
EDIT: Just to make sure no one misinterprets this.

The solution to this has been presented multiple times before: introduce more high-fort/orange-named mobs in epics. It's much more elegant than introducing a penalty for doing what you are supposed to do.