Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[Scraap]

There are plenty of mobs in eDA that your guildie IS NOT instakilling. Focus on them. If you're running after that warlock or ranger to try to kill it before your guildie kills it, you're playing stupid.

Was kinda the motivation behind

It might actually be more palatable to the "they stole our kill" crowd if they did it the other way around:
"Tortured Spirits": -1 DC for every 1/4 of a mob's health that was already gone that you insta-killed (So 3/4 = -1, 1/2 = -2, 1/4 = -3) max -10, 2 minutes. (Besides, let's face it, if they haven't gotten something down to 3/4 before your finger goes off, are you really doing anyone any favors by letting them continue to take damage while dealing it at that rate?)

as a concession.

I also wouldn't particularly use a 1 room quest where most things pop right in range right on time as an example of normal questing to judge against.

[Elaril]

This is an even worse idea, in its current form, than hard to kill. If there were some type of soft cap, like every wail once your over ten stacks adds only one stack to your debuff, coupled with a mechanic where, once at ten stacks, each 15 second tick removes half your stacks, it would be ok. As it stands now, it's basically a non-functioning overly long lockout timer.

I mean, encouraging the casting of other spells is very good, but forcing a player to operate below their peak level of effectiveness for what will basically be entire quests just isn't cool. I'd urge you to make some major adjustments to this.

[Voldomar]

Yeah I know right? I mean I can count atleast three, and they're all immune to instakills due to boss immunties :<

Thanks to this kind of feedback no wonder we've come to this awful mechanic. Even the best caster is NOT a death-spell-chaingun as many of you seem to believe.

Given the current proposed system, if you wail in eDA, and knock out a group of bats and scorpions, you'll be done with your instakills for the rest of the duration of the wave. You're now a hage/disco/holdbot for people like Thrudh. Ok, so clearly don't ever touch Wail or Circle... Finger some trash every 15 seconds while being a hage/disco/holdbot for people like Thrudh.

Eladrin's proposal is not a little nerf. It's a nerf of epic proportions, and it basically removes Circle/Wail from the game. It relegates the use of Finger to once every fifteen seconds (and this will be the only instakill spell you'll ever be using). The most epic casters will be able to "play through" this insane nerf by adding an extra Finger here or there, and that's about it.

Don't be duped. Eladrin has proposed one of the greatest nerfs this game has ever seen.

I'm still waiting to see a debuff for fully geared, multi-tr, melees that lower their attack bonus every X kills... Sounds stupid right? So is Haunting.
At this point just remove instakills from the game and rework pre and class abilities. Whiners will be happy for about 5 minutes, after that they'll focus their attention onto the others caster's perks and we're going to start this dance all over again.

[Faent]

Thanks to this kind of feedback no wonder we've come to this awful mechanic. Even the best caster is NOT a death-spell-chaingun as many of you seem to believe.

Yep. He's not talking out of his mouth. I play a 44 Necro DC geared-to-the-hilt Archmage in eDA, and I can assure you he's blowing smoke.

[Gyxis]

As to the suggestion at hand. I find it interesting but very flawed. I'll list some obvious drawbacks:

A. the dynamic penalty essentially creates an equilbrium of uselessness that all casters will surf. As others have mentioned, a 50DC caster and a 40DC caster are equivalent after the first 2 rooms of a dungeon, due to the penalty being directly proportional to success. That is terrible game design. Being better at something (necro DC, here) should never result in a greater penalty than being mediocre.

It means the high dc caster has a bigger window to accrue "auto-kills" before his dc starts to fail, assuming both casters allow their penalty to reset periodically. As they approach a fresh encounter, the high dc caster can reliably kill off more mobs, while the lower dc caster starts to struggle after the first 2-3 mobs.

Of course, if both casters use necro spells indiscriminately, both will end up with mediocre dcs and wasting their sp most of the time.

B. you are making people into pikers. This is also terrible game design. As an example of what I mean, see Abbot raid. I love abbot. But that is because I nearly always run tiles. Other people hate abbot. And that is because they have to wait around for 5-8mins, literally just wait, while 2 people have fun. This is why I always bring grease clickies to roids when I go there. As to the argument that arcanes have other options than instakills: yes, that is true. But they should be options to be used when appropriate, not a forced choice.

Piking is different from insta-killing, say, average of 1 mob every 15 sec and then waiting for the debuff to reset.

Unless you are soloing, then you will need to wait from time to time for the game to "catch up" to your rate of kills. Haunting is basically an enforced increase in cool-downs for the solo caster.

Though, I do agree this is a "forced choice". Personally, I prefer a debuff that inflates the sp cost of death effects rather than a dc penalty. If you make a mistake early on and accumulates too much debuff, then find yourself needing that fod now or BAD STUFF happens, dc loss is frustrating. Its a penalty box that makes you wait it out and watch helpessly while the debuff counter smirks at you: "learn to hold back some next time!".

With inflated sp cost, at least you can down a pot and pull off that much needed fod/wail. You won't want to do it often, but its possible. Brute force through it with pots, employ other spells, or play more patiently. More choices are good.

C. The magnitude of the haunted effect as it is proposed will be very large. Imagine a typical encounter: first thing you do is finger (with energy drain if necessary) the caster-type in the back, then drop CC, gather mobs, and wail. The wail will already be at -2DC, and if you succeed in killing 5 creatures, you are now at -12 DC and completely useless with instakills for the next.... 90seconds. That is a very very long time, 90 seconds.

That seems to be the intent, yes. Slow down the amazing rate at which insta-kill effects are... killing stuff vs other methods?

[Viisari]

Yep. He's not talking out of his mouth. I play a 44 Necro DC geared-to-the-hilt Archmage in eDA, and I can assure you he's blowing smoke.

Funny thing, I've got an archmage with the exact same necro dc.

[Faent]

That seems to be the intent, yes. Slow down the amazing rate at which insta-kill effects are... killing stuff vs other methods?

If Eladrin's proposal is to be taken seriously, the intent is to basically get rid of wizards period. There will be no point in striving for a high Necro DC in order to use Finger once every fifteen seconds. And you're sure as hell not going to Wail or Circle anything, because that will gimp your primary investment (Necro) for the next several minutes. Better to just give up Necro focus entirely and convert to a sorcerer.

This idea is, as presented, so unbelievably absurd I ought to be dead now from banging my head on my desk as I try to ponder the mind-boggling lunacy of the proposal. But I'm not dead yet, and I'm not banging my head on my desk, because I assume that Eladrin is leading off with the most absurd and ridiculous possible suggestion for cooldowns and penalties he thought he could get away with in order to soften people up for a slight weakening of the initial proposal.

[Faent]

Funny thing, I've got an archmage with the exact same necro dc.

So stop blowing smoke.

[Voldomar]

This is a better suggestion than anything I had come up with. Death spells still work but can't be spammed unless you are just fishing for 1s.

Two concerns:

1 - In content you explicitly intend to be easy, but where HP bloat is over the top, Haunting will likely be a real nuisance. Thinking Inspired Quarter type content here
2 - Finger, Slay Living and Destruction get (slightly) caught up with the overpowered spells in the same nerf.


Suggestion:

- Have Haunting be a 5 second per stack debuff giving -1 to deathspell DCs.
- Single-target death spells cause one stack.
- Multi-target death spells cause three stacks per target.

Reasonable.
But then you have to fix this: you gather 4 mobs, wail, only 1 of them dies and you have 15s debuff and -3 DCs cause you used wail.
It could work but it needs to be tied to the number of kills per cast and not to the spell itself.

[irivan]

The entire idea of the system is contrived, and pointless, more importantly it is being created not because of game balance, but to satisfy a smaller portion of the player base.

Personally, and I am not kidding about this at all, it makes me not want to play the game at all.

I am not going to sit here and say that I am going to quit, but I will say that it increases the chances that I could get picked off by another game, like say Skyrim Online, or Neverwinter Online when those games come around.

This proposed change will be the greatest nerf of all time, aimed at punishing players for doing something well, and within the rules. Additionally they are adding rules that don't exist in the core set at all, not that they haven't done that before, but this will be by far the biggest departure from DnD yet.

Right now I am having buyers remorse with the expansion pack. Big time.

Also I think that if they were concerned about soloing quests etc, that they should have just made end fights on eHard, and eElite crazy hard. At least then they dont have to debuff anyone, and Melee Characters are absolutely needed in the mission to beat a seriously beefed up monster. And those casters that do win those battles are just the creme of the crop, the 1%.

What ever they do, taking insta kills and using blanket immunities and deranged, contrived, and invented metrics to nerf an Epic level caster is beyone the pale of ridiculous.

We are about to journey into Epic levels, with powers that are no longer "Epicly Powerful", We are going to be level 25 and less powerful than we were before.

Not to mention, no Epic level spells, just a hand full of decent damage clickies with long cool down timers.

Maybe its time for DDO to do it, just revert to PnP and give us a set number of spells per day, drop mana all together, at least then they would be going back to the rules instead of away from it, and making it so that you could only cast wail and Circle a max of 5 times in between rests, but they should also return original ranges, etc...Like wail effects all that can hear it for example.

This entire thread, and change of the metric though is burning me out.

There are lots of good looking MMO's coming up, maybe ill just try one of them.

[Faent]

Reasonable. But then you have to fix this: you gather 4 mobs, wail, only 1 of them dies and you have 15s debuff and -3 DCs cause you used wail. It could work but it needs to be tied to the number of kills per cast and not to the spell itself.

The system needs to keep Wail and Circle as useable spells. No high Necro DC caster is ever going to cast these if it gimps their primary investment in Necro for several minutes. They will either be completely dumped spells, or they'll be used as single target instakills for when Finger is on timer (Finger one mob, drop a Wail on the next lonely mob).

[nibel]

Read only the few first pages and the dev posts. But I loved the new idea. Instakill become a tactical decision instead of a swiss army hammer. Group is being overwhelmed by mobs? Wail is a panic button. That perched caster is raining death on your party? Finger it. Group of archers gathered together and the melees are busy to go there? Circle them all.

I remember when they raised the cooldown in all death spells in U9, and how everyone was saying the same thing: "You killed instakill. I'll go roll a sorcerer". And yet, there are many palemasters still on live, just using more than 2 spells (wail-finger-rinse-repeat) to work around cooldowns. I expect the debuff to work the same.

Can you give us some clarification on what you mean by Death magic?

According to the SRD, a Death Attack is anything that instantly kill the target. By correlation, I think death magic is any magic that apply a death attack. So, in the game now is: Circle of Death, Finger of Death, Wail of Banshee, Slay Living, and Destruction.

Maybe Undeath to Death (on SRD it lacks the Death descriptor, but in practice is the same), Implosion (same as UtD), and Phantasmal Killer (Technically, a fear effect, not a death effect. You can test it because duegars are immune to fear).

[Faent]

Group is being overwhelmed by mobs? Wail is a panic button. That perched caster is raining death on your party? Finger it. Group of archers gathered together and the melees are busy to go there? Circle them all.

You're going to load these spells and work hard to achieve a high Necro DC so that you can then totally gimp your investment in Necro spells for the next several minutes in that rare situation when you're panicing? Yeah right. If you're still even playing a wizard, you'd Mass Hold the problematic trash.

[Krell]

So an instakill of 10 mobs means a couple minutes of ineffective DC for all levels of Heroic and Epic content. How does that compare to a Sorc that can blast a few AOEs then move on to the next group? If the timer was shorter and it was restricted to Epic hard and/or elite I could see it as balancing.

In this form I don't see much incentive to have a PM or other death spell focused builds in a group compared to other arcanes. It reminds me of when I TR'ed my tempest rangers into other classes.

[Forzah]

So stop blowing smoke.

He isn't. I'm playing with him often and what he says is true. Maybe he fails a FoD once or twice, but at the end of the run he has killed over 70% of the mobs in elite DA on his own without a melee touching it; in a group full of max geared people, and that's with only 1 past life! Similar figures hold for other quests as well, except for quests with a lot of drow. That kind of power is quite simply too much, I'm sure Viisari agrees with me. He doesn't have the same myopic view as you; you don't look at what's good for the game, but only at your own enjoyment.

[irivan]

Read only the few first pages and the dev posts. But I loved the new idea. Instakill become a tactical decision instead of a swiss army hammer. Group is being overwhelmed by mobs? Wail is a panic button. That perched caster is raining death on your party? Finger it. Group of archers gathered together and the melees are busy to go there? Circle them all.

I remember when they raised the cooldown in all death spells in U9, and how everyone was saying the same thing: "You killed instakill. I'll go roll a sorcerer". And yet, there are many palemasters still on live, just using more than 2 spells (wail-finger-rinse-repeat) to work around cooldowns. I expect the debuff to work the same.



According to the SRD, a Death Attack is anything that instantly kill the target. By correlation, I think death magic is any magic that apply a death attack. So, in the game now is: Circle of Death, Finger of Death, Wail of Banshee, Slay Living, and Destruction.

Maybe Undeath to Death (on SRD it lacks the Death descriptor, but in practice is the same), Implosion (same as UtD), and Phantasmal Killer (Technically, a fear effect, not a death effect. You can test it because duegars are immune to fear).

Totally disagree with this. Completely.

You are failing to take something into account.

What if I am not in a party? What if I don't want to be in a Party? Am I just SOL? Either group with unlimited armies of Morons all day, or slog my way through quests at 1 mob every 15 sec? Or alternatively have to buy a million mana pots to DPS my way through it.

What happens in Raids like LOB, where crowd control is an essential function of the caster who must be able to drop that Artificer, or kill all of the trash Epic into the deep, it will make missions that normally take 20 min with a caster and at least double the time, COF will now be a 2 hour grind.

So many bad things about this, that I will not sit here all night and write them all.

The previous system was actually better, because at least you could do mass AOE get them down and finish them off.

But if Turbine goes through with this they are making a definitive statement. You cannot achieve a high end, end game character through soloing without spending a gang of money, so don't solo.

I don't like a lot of people, I cant stand immature types who like to talk about how powerful they are all of the time, our guild has mature people in it only. Now to get **** done when they are not around I am going to have to group with young men who are naive and cant hold a two way conversation and talk endlessly without even taking a breath?

The first metric was bad, this metric is worse. Worse than that they dont need to do anything at all.

It is not broken, and I do not care what they Melee crew thinks, because high end Raid bosses just arent doable without them. I have Melee characters too, but in DnD that is the lot of those classes.

I want to Play DnD, not Turbine and Dragons.

[tinyelvis]

This idea is definitely better than the original, however what bothers me is that you penalize someone for success. Wizard A attacks an 8 strong mob and kills six and then proceeds with a larger penalty than Wizard B who attacks a simalar mob but gets only two kills. This seems wrong very wrong. The guy who plays the game a lot and grinds gear and TR's gets penalized more than the newb. I have not done the math but I am guessing with this system it might be better to have a mediocre DC as opposed to a high one. Kinda like no PM left behind approach. Plus it is very abstract and hard to plan for.

Why not penalize for size of force attacked and failure. For example.
1. Apply a DC reduction based on size of enemy force attacked over one.
2. Automatically deathward or at least give stacking save bonus to foes who make their save.

In the above suggestion, you designers didn't apply the blanket ward, but rather it resulted from poor performance of a caster.

An even better approach (but possibly too computationally intensive)

1. Apply a stacking bonus to the save for each cumulative mob over one every time the spell is cast. For example, when eight orcs are attacked, one orc saves normally, another gets a +1 to save, another +2, ... up to +7. These save bonuses remain for 15 seconds and stack with other similar bonuses.

[Faent]

So an instakill of 10 mobs means a couple minutes of ineffective DC for all levels of Heroic and Epic content.

That was the idea, yes.

How does that compare to a Sorc that can blast a few AOEs then move on to the next group?

Poorly. All high-Necro wizzies will convert to sorcerers or quit playing this game.

If the timer was shorter and it was restricted to Epic hard and/or elite I could see it as balancing.

Maybe. If they want to reduce instakills in Epic H/E to something like one mob every ten or fifteen seconds, I'd be a little ticked, but it wouldn't be bloody murder.

In this form I don't see much incentive to have a PM or other death spell focused builds in a group compared to other arcanes. It reminds me of when I TR'ed my tempest rangers into other classes.

There is no incentive, under this system. Building for Necro DC's would be idiotic. You'd do it only if you wanted to play a flavor-based gimp.

[Faent]

He isn't. I'm playing with him often and what he says is true. Maybe he fails a FoD once or twice, but at the end of the run he has killed over 70% of the mobs in elite DA on his own without a melee touching it; in a group full of max geared people, and that's with only 1 past life! Similar figures hold for other quests as well, except for quests with a lot of drow. That kind of power is quite simply too much, I'm sure Viisari agrees with me. He doesn't have the same myopic view as you; you don't look at what's good for the game, but only at your own enjoyment.

I realize that a Necro arcane can do quite a bit in eDA. There are several reasons for this, of course. One being that the vast bulk of the mobs (bats included) instantly gather on the grouped party, and you can hit any mob with a finger from one spot in the quest. It's about the ideal quest for a Necro arcane to rack up a high kill count in. Still, his Wails and Circles do miss a lot of mobs, as he well knows.

[irivan]

That was the idea, yes.



Poorly. All high-Necro wizzies will convert to sorcerers or quit playing this game.



Maybe. If they want to reduce instakills in Epic H/E to something like one mob every ten or fifteen seconds, I'd be a little ticked, but it wouldn't be bloody murder.



There is no incentive, under this system. Building for Necro DC's would be idiotic. You'd do it only if you wanted to play a flavor-based gimp.

Your last statement is right on.