Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[Dolphious]

I like this, and I think it is a much more elegant solution than what you previously had.

I think 15 seconds is a pretty short cool down for a pretty minor debuff. That's the same timer as is on stunning blow, which completely prevents you from using the ability. I'd recommend a 30 second timer. Or a -5 penalty for 15 seconds as that would make a serious impact on the likelihood of the spell landing, -2 is just a 10% drop in effectiveness.

[Rasczak]

I...wow...I like it.

[stainer]

First I agree that insta-death did trivialize the content in beta, they would basically run to end of quest and my viewpoint is that everyone should have fun with the quest - as a whole. A quest should not be an end-boss for most.

That wasn't because arcanes were able to bug the ap distribution so they could max all ap lines, was it?

[MrkGrismer]

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.

The 15 seconds is too long. Finger of death has an 8 second cooldown meaning we cant even cast finger each time its off cooldown and stay free of hauntings. Single target fingers are not the issue here. 6 sec debuff would work fine its a long delay for those that like to masskill large numbers but doesn't penalize the spot killer.

Well, he is not talking about a debuff that stops casting, but one that applies a stacking penalty on death spell DCs, making your spells easier to save against (less effective).

Since it is based on how many successes it would have a tendency to 'level the playing field' between those that are better at death and those that are less good at death.

[LeLoric]

Would this impact an arcanes ability to solo?

Not really it just means after i wail/circle a bunch of mobs I just tab out to forums while the timers tick off

[Ganolyn]

Would this impact an arcanes ability to solo?

I doubt it, but it might slow them down a bit. OH THE HORROR!!!!

[justagame]

Two questions:

1. Would this be an epic-only effect? Because IMO it's actually worse to change the 1-19 game based on what happens in epic content. Your ordinary run-of-the-mill caster is being punished in everyday content because of what the cream of the crop players can do in the very hardest content.

2. Does it increment per spell, or per death? I ask because wail deaths are all at once, but implosion deaths are sequential. After the first mob dies to implosion, do the second and third mobs see lower DC's within the same casting? Or does it not increment until the next casting?

[destiny4405]

you should look at the enemies and not at PCs.

i think you should look at the echrono model and go from there. groups of mobs have (or should) a devil that can't be insta killed, archers that stay out of wail reach, melees, cleric that casts DW and cometfall, wizards that, at least in beta, spam mass hold, stunning symbol and abis that cast very powerfull spells.

because of the undead form bug, i didn't test my PM in new content, but seeing how mobs are much smarter and their composition and abillities have much more variety, i think he would need all the help he can get.

[Malshier]

Still lame.

If I manage to take out 6 mobs with 1 wail, my DC drops from 44 (my current on live) to 32. So for 15 seconds, I'd better not try to use FoD or Circle of Death, or risk further degradation of my DC. I guess I can still use PK. And TTS. Wait no. TTS has a CR cap. Nevermind.

I guess this is ok since it won't hurt my implosions.

You say you don't want to hurt casters with low to middling DCs. Well guess what? You just turned everyone into a caster with low to middling DCs.

[stainer]

Not really it just means after i wail/circle a bunch of mobs I just tab out to forums while the timers tick off

Bahahahaha

[LeLoric]

Well, he is not talking about a debuff that stops casting, but one that applies a stacking penalty on death spell DCs, making your spells easier to save against (less effective).

Since it is based on how many successes it would have a tendency to 'level the playing field' between those that are better at death and those that are less good at death.

Ahhh 1984 gotcha.

[Malshier]

Oh I just re-read the part about it being in heroic hard and epic. That's just asinine.

[Thrudh]

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

Instant death effects are a powerful tool that are difficult to strike perfect balance with. We've wavered over time from completely unusable (old Epic blanket Death Wards) to excessively strong (the current live situation). When they're completely unusable, that's a bad thing because it decreases the number of options you have to deal with encounters. When they're too strong, they likewise decrease the number of viable options that exist, and can dramatically reduce the enjoyment of other characters in your party.

Hard to Kill was intended to be a system that would put some restrictions on death spells, dropping once the enemy was reduced to half health, in an attempt to promote teamwork between casters and the rest of the party. We intended for this to turn death spells into an "execute" sort of mechanic - the party could take the monster down to half health, and then a Pale Master (or other caster) could finish it off.

The system turned out to be too restrictive, and we're planning on making changes to it.

In the Hard to Kill thread, there was a suggestion to use a system similar to the change we made to Saves vs. Poison. We considered this internally - giving players and monsters a bonus to Saves vs. Death Magic* (but not physical death effects like Assassinate) if they were at high health, and a penalty if they were low on health (on death's door!) This would not have included the "don't fail saves on a natural 1". Monsters on different difficulty settings would have had different save bonuses.

This would have kept the desired "let people do something in fights, prep monsters with Improved Sunder, and stuff like that", but we decided that it would have excessively harmed casters with low to middling DC's, who would go from being able to occasionally land a death effect to ending up in a situation pretty similar to the original Hard to Kill.

We want you to be able to have the "moment" of killing a bunch of creatures with a death spell, but don't want to leave the rest of the party with little to do. We want to control how often you're clearing rooms of all enemies with a few quick casts of a spell, but don't want to have even longer cooldowns (which again unfairly harm weaker casters the most, since their death effects are less likely to actually stick). We realized that the key was to let you use your death effects, but apply restrictions only when they're used successfully.

Our current idea is as follows:

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.

We're still working out details, but right now, Haunting is a stacking debuff that lasts 15 seconds and applies a -2 penalty to Death Magic save DC's. It decrements by 1 stack whenever the timer runs out.

We may consider a small buff on Hard/Elite/Epic Hard/Epic Elite difficulties to Saves vs. Death Magic for players and monsters at full or very high health, as well as a penalty at very low health, but at much smaller numbers than we were considering previously, when that was considered as a standalone system prior to the implementation of Hard to Kill.

This system essentially would create a "soft cooldown" that is triggered primarily by mass death effects, but still lets a caster Finger of Death a creature or two in fights. It has no effect unless you succeed, so weaker casters aren't harmed by it, and in emergencies even if your Haunted stack is high, Power Word: Kill can still strike down an enemy. (Its effectiveness is not reduced because it doesn't have a saving throw.)

Since your cooldowns wouldn't be longer than they are now, it would be up to you whether you wanted to chain death effects together, debuff opponents with spells like Energy Drain or work with a character with Improved Sunder to overcome the Haunting, or save your Wail for strategic moments when it will have the biggest effect.

We're still working out the details on this, and will then send it on to the engineers. Let us know what you think! Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

* I love making first edition references.

I think this is a very interesting idea, and I like how it works, where you can still use your insta-death spells, but not constantly.

But I think the Haunting effect is way too strong...

On wail where you hit 10 mobs means -20 to DCs for 150 seconds?

I think it should be -1 DC for every mob you kill with a 10 second stacking timer BUT (and this is important) cap out at -5 DC and 50 seconds, decreasing by 1 DC every 10 seconds. Or maybe -10 DC and 100 seconds (since our DCs are going way up with EDs)

It definitely needs some kind of hard cap I think.

[Meat-Head]

This idea is soooo much better than the last one it's not even funny.

I think this idea is great with some tweaks.

I'll jump on the wagon of please make sure it doesn't apply to monks/rogues (I think you said it wouldn't which is good).

The debuff amount and timer could be played with but overall this is good. (It needs a cap as some are suggesting)


Also, the saves decreasing with health is great.


Good ideas are good.

[stainer]

Oh I just re-read the part about it being in heroic hard and epic. That's just asinine.

No. It is brilliant. It keeps players from expecting to be good at end game, thus allowing them reroll quicker.

[Avidus]

Still lame.

If I manage to take out 6 mobs with 1 wail, my DC drops from 44 (my current on live) to 32. So for 15 seconds, I'd better not try to use FoD or Circle of Death, or risk further degradation of my DC. I guess I can still use PK. And TTS. Wait no. TTS has a CR cap. Nevermind.

I guess this is ok since it won't hurt my implosions.

You say you don't want to hurt casters with low to middling DCs. Well guess what? You just turned everyone into a caster with low to middling DCs.

And after 15 seconds your DC becomes 34...
15 more seconds (30 total) 36...
15 more seconds (45 total) 38...
15 more seconds (60 total) 40...
15 more seconds (75 total) 42...
15 more seconds (90 total) 44...

So 1 wail then a minute and a half before your DC is back to normal IF you don't kill anything with CoD or FoD that is.

[Grace_ana]

Still lame.

If I manage to take out 6 mobs with 1 wail, my DC drops from 44 (my current on live) to 32. So for 15 seconds, I'd better not try to use FoD or Circle of Death, or risk further degradation of my DC. I guess I can still use PK. And TTS. Wait no. TTS has a CR cap. Nevermind.

I guess this is ok since it won't hurt my implosions.

You say you don't want to hurt casters with low to middling DCs. Well guess what? You just turned everyone into a caster with low to middling DCs.

If I'm reading correctly - and I'm not sure I am - it would be 15 seconds PER MOB. So that's 2 minutes before the debuff is completely cleared.

[DarkForte]

Unless you are actually geared to the teeth, on the current epic situation (which corresponds to epic hard), a lot of stuff on the harder epics isn't readily instakilled (at least, if I tried to instakill my way through ecof with my 42 DC, I'd probably be out of sp and dead VERY quickly), especially high fort mobs. This is how you should balance instakills. Giving a blanket immunity or forcing you to halt progress in a quest for 1:30 just so your haunt wears off, henceforth halting EVERYONE ELSE in the party, is no fun to anyone. ESPECIALLY for those casters that don't have ridiculous DCs and can't take multiple debuffs without having unusable DCs.

A better solution would be mixing orange nameds in with other mobs in other epics, the way it is done in eChrono. Since a considerable portion of the opposition (the devils and abishai) are immune to instakills, even if I CoD the archers and all tiefling soldiers, the melee still have a lot to do, and even if I can't instakill those, I can still contribute meaningfully to party success by crowd controlling them. My opinion is that eChrono is the most balanced quest in the game in that respect. My arcane doesn't feel crippled or useless, and neither do the party melee.

Moreover, I'd petition this affect only epic elites, since most of us want to keep running epic hard for the same drop rates we have now (no sense in increasing the grind for acquiring epic scrolls even further, since our arcanes will have extremely reduced effectiveness on scroll-farming hard epics with the debuff as presented). Of course, there's always the option of increasing drop rates so you don't need to have an arcane just to scroll-farm and can acquire your stuff through normal epic questing.

[Scraap]

Our current idea is as follows:

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.

We're still working out details, but right now, Haunting is a stacking debuff that lasts 15 seconds and applies a -2 penalty to Death Magic save DC's. It decrements by 1 stack whenever the timer runs out.

Still mulling it over, so just to make sure I'm reading that right, a necro-focused High DC caster that leads off with the tactic of:

Fingering the cleric, and PKing the wizard nets a -4 penalty that falls off after 1 minute

circle of death (max 4 mobs) and draws the agro of the remainder to the party for mop-up (something I use quite often) would end up with a -8 penalty eventually diminishing back to normal after 2 minutes,

while someone blowing through and wailing, say... 10-15 mobs would be -20 to -30 and about 2.5 to 3.75?

We may consider a small buff on Hard/Elite/Epic Hard/Epic Elite difficulties to Saves vs. Death Magic for players and monsters at full or very high health, as well as a penalty at very low health, but at much smaller numbers than we were considering previously, when that was considered as a standalone system prior to the implementation of Hard to Kill.

As to "works one way here, and another there"... I'd really rather folks get trained in how to use the tactics as they ramp up in difficulty. So I'd much prefer if you're going to do it, do it completely.

[Dolphious]

Oh I just re-read the part about it being in heroic hard and epic. That's just asinine.

Why? I'd say implement it in all content on all difficulties. The differences in base saves should be enough to distinguish norm,hard, elite.