Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[aerosole]

Casters do not have to just be buff and heal bots... But they either need a weakness somewhere or their casting power needs to be curtailed... I semi-like this solution because it lets a caster keep his super-power but limits how often he can use it.

Maybe it would be better and easier to just increase the cooldown timer on wail and CoD again. This Haunting system is an attempt to limit those spells, but not as aggressively as a larger cooldown timer would.

Spot on right there. Haunting looks like its designed to avoid a bigger nerf of increased cool-downs that hits everyone flatly.

High dc casters can probably deal with a longer cool-down, but its the moderate dc caster who will suffer due to a less reliable dc. It becomes that much harder for a new player to play a caster.

The problem is, its not an easy mechanic to understand. There are many suggestions that tries to "mitigate" the haunting mechanic, but are actually a bigger nerf than haunting itself!! Such as much higher saves and SR. People seems to prefer insta-killing at, say, 50% chance all the time, rather than be able to insta-kill at 95% chance some of the time, provided they do it at a reasonable rate. I think there was even one suggestion that proposes limiting wail to 5x per rest.

If a straight up cool-down increase appears more platable, maybe that's the way for Turbine to go...?

[munificence]

Time to respec my max necro DC wizard to Sorc. Haunting, Hard to Kill, just come out and say you don't think instantkill is valid, and remove it (and wizard) from the game.

[Faent]

You will still be able to use your necromancy spells at full power, just not all the time... They are very powerful, and being able to wail at max DC every couple of minutes is still extremely useful.

False. They will not be very powerful. Either I go for max Necro to have a useful Wail every several minutes and be a gimped DPS caster (or hage/holdbot) the rest of the time, or I go for max Necro to ignore Wail and have a single instakill every 15 seconds. Neither is remotely powerful compared to a sorcerer, and frankly, neither are worth any investment in Necro.

[CavernDragon]

I run a little of each class, Ranger, Pallymonk, Clr, and PM. I love to see the CC on my TR'ed PM when I run with friends. I put in a lot of Hours to bring both my Death DC's and CC up to a level to make it work for the best of the party. Now by putting a debuff on my Necro DC's you limit the way I play my PM and remove some of the fun. Hence My friends will have to find someone else to CC for them. I will not TR my PM but put him on the back burner till the dev's come up with a better idea. or revert back to the way it was.

I think its a joke: Haunting a Undead True neutral Wizard that has little regard for life.. ROFLMAO. OK Dev's ya got me.. ...

[slimkj]

Casters do not have to just be buff and heal bots... But they either need a weakness somewhere or their casting power needs to be curtailed...

Why? So I can spend even more time in quests I've already run hundreds of times?

I can see Epic H/E needing something if the time is not there to design the content better to work around the issue. But game-wide? Why? All these small steps to slow me down, to keep me at someone else's idea of the right pace... irritating and a slap in the face to those who've worked at their casters to improve them.

The possible problems

• Lack of time to design epic-feeling content that hampers instakill casters enough to make the expansion feel of value, time-wise.
• Lack of sufficient content to make the expansion feel of value, time-wise.
• Some feeling their characters don't get to contribute enough in end-game content.

The wrong solutions

• Alter game mechanics to weaken/nullify some classes.
• Negate the many hours, and real money, invested by people in their characters to correct earlier design error.

The correct solution

• Do not rush out content, design it well and with enough complex systems to adequately challenge all class types.

This expansion is littered with changes that make me worry we are fast heading for the democracy of boredom for which so many clamour. Every class doing everything equally with slightly different graphics at a tedious pace.

[VorpalKnight]

False. They will not be very powerful. Either I go for max Necro to have a useful Wail every several minutes and be a gimped DPS caster (or hage/holdbot) the rest of the time, or I go for max Necro to ignore Wail and have a single instakill every 15 seconds. Neither is remotely powerful compared to a sorcerer, and frankly, neither are worth any investment in Necro.

Well Wizard pale masters have higher d/c so they should be able to land damage spells more reliably than a sorc, their damage from spells is very good actually, IK just outshines it in most content though. And before anyone says tr, nothing stopping wizard from getting past lifes from sorc or the reverse.

[Faent]

Maybe it would be better and easier to just increase the cooldown timer on wail and CoD again. This Haunting system is an attempt to limit those spells, but not as aggressively as a larger cooldown timer would.

This is manifestly false. The proper use of a Wail by a high DC caster PUTS ALL YOUR INSTAKILLS ON A SEVERAL MINUTE LONG TIMER. By "not as aggressively" did you mean "instead of a five minute timer on Wail"!?!?! And in any case, it's *obvious* that putting Wail/CoD on a *fracking five minute timer* would be FAR less of a nerf than Eladrin's current proposal.

[Dolphious]

Personally I think the current timers are fine, if a bit short/light. If an archer has to wait 2 minutes between manyshots to be maximally effective, I don't see anything wrong with a caster needing to wait 2 minutes between wails. They still have lots of options (more than an archer by a long shot... no pun intended). I like the idea of having to mix up strategies with each fight. If you make the timer too short or the debuff to small, people will just wait it out.

And if you decide that it's too harsh, you can always tone it down in a few updates you'll get few complaints, OTOH if you try to increase it you'll go through the whole nerdrage, dooOOoom, ragequite drama all over again.

[munificence]

Well Wizard pale masters have higher d/c so they should be able to land damage spells more reliably than a sorc, their damage from spells is very good actually, IK just outshines it in most content though. And before anyone says tr, nothing stopping wizard from getting past lifes from sorc or the reverse.

Come on... while wizards have access to the same damage spells, we don't get the HUGE spell point pool, the level adjustment on damage spells, and the spell like abilities to even come NEAR a sorceror in terms of damage. Essentially, the new change makes wizards a crowd control class, and any one who plays a high-DC wizard will strongly consider respeccing.

[Synthetic]

I thinks it's a good idea, and don't support a cap on DC penalties though the time could be capped or shortened (relative to the DC penalty i.e. lower the DC penalty you probably wouldn't have to shorten the time).

For that matter maybe make it so the higher the penalty the shorter the time 1 stack 15 secs 2 stacks 14 3 stacks 13 etc. until you have a 1 second stack - i.e. -30+ DC but coming off every second. As each stack comes off and there are fewer stacks the time would take longer - i.e. it's not 15seconds to go from -30 to 0.

Heroic levels have it scaling -1 DC 10 sec stack on normal -1 with 15 second stack on hard -1 and 20 sec stack on elite and save the -2 for epics with the same time scaling.

[Cryohazard]

<snip>

Mental Fatigue: You have (successfully) cast a very powerful spell that has temporarily drained your mental abilities. You recieve a -2 penalty to INT, WIS, & CHA. -10 to search, spot, listen, & disable device. -2 to your necromancy DCs and Will save. Your slightly numb state causes you to move 10% slower. Lasts 60 seconds, Progresses to Mental Exhaustion if another similar spell is cast while under the effect of Mental Fatigue. (Warforged are not immune to Mental Fatigue or Exhaustion. Cannot be cured by Restoration effect, but can be removed by Unyeilding Soverienty or using a greater or major mnemonic effect.

Mental Exhaustion: You have (successfully) cast a very powerful spell that has temporarily drained your mental abilities. You recieve a -4 penalty to INT, WIS, & CHA. -10 to search, spot, listen, & disable device. -4 to your necromancy DCs and Will save . Your numb state causes you to move 30% slower. Replaces Mental Fatigue Lasts 40 seconds and then is reduced to Mental Fatigue. (Warforged are not immune to Mental Fatigue or Exhaustion. Cannot be cured by Restoration effect, but can be removed by Unyeilding Soverienty or using a major mnemonic effect.

Madness: Your continued overexertion has caused to you lose your grip on reality. Your altered mental state has opened several small pathways to Xoriat, and your incredible use of mental energy has not gone unnoticed. (Spawns 2d3 Mindflayers who want to eat your brain and a 2% chance that Quixellops will show up and want to play drinking games)

That last part is just for fun, but it does sound alot more like my DM's hehe

Grim

+1 for the Quixellops idea . But seriously, this is one of the better ideas I've seen in the thread, and it sounds much less doom-nerfy than HTK or Haunting.

My PM sits at a modest 43 Necro DC. A 60 sec 4-8 DC penalty (which bumps mine down to 39 or 35 DC, which rarely succeeds in epic content) is crippling enough to discourage your average caster from spamming wail/CoD every time it wasn't on cooldown.

On the flip side, the most powerful casters with their 50+ DCs would be able to power through the debuff and keep wailing away, satisfying the people that spent copious amounts of time grinding their toon out.

[Beethoven]

We want to let you use Wail when you need it, but use some other spells as well. Extremely well geared UberCasters can "play through" the debuff ...
-20 for 15 seconds, -18 for 15 seconds, -16 for 15 seconds, and so on.

I liked the idea at first but that's ... excessive.

Having a high DC is still very useful, so that during the 10 times in a quest when you DO use wail, it lands reliably.

Wail will still be very powerful and very useful... You'll just save it for important situations, not use it in EVERY situation.

That's the problem though, no one is going to waste a good amount of AP, feats and gear slots on something that will be useful a couple times per quest. It degrades Necromancy spells to the same usefullness as Cannith Crafted Bloodrage. Bloodrage is very easy to craft and grants you a full +6 to Strength that stacks with everything. It also decreases your attack speed by 50% for twelve seconds (for every time it procs).

Most people would consider +6 stacking Strength pretty powerful and you could as easily argument the penalty isn't bad if you pace yourself. So, how many of your melees use Cannith crafted Bloodrage regularly? Because as far as I know it is generally considered garbage. Now we going to do the same thing to AM/PM and have them spend AP, feats and gear to buy it.

Penalties and durations as high can easily translate to Palemaster/Necro-AM have a superior DC once every two minutes compared to, say, Air Savants, but the rest of the time the Air Savant will have the same or even better DC and better DPS.

There is no shortage on sorcerer (and in the future potentially Druids) that can challenge a PM/AM (in terms of zerging and killing everything) and even though AM/PM often come out on top (except for quests with many named or high SR mobs), its not by a huge margin.

You put the breaks on necromancy specced casters that hard and their whole point is lost. You were saying using Wail 10 times in a quest? That's what? So roughly 20 minutes of penalty or - in other words - as much time as it takes a well geared, well played Savant to solo an entire (short) epic.

Now, I am not saying all wizard players will swap to sorcerer, but those we are concerned about here (the kind who goes through lengths and efforts to build a caster for killing things and killing them quick) will. They will not be satisfied with pacing themselves for two minutes after every cast. They also are the least likely to take extend or numerous buffs.

So in the end we'll have a rather extansive and somewhat complicated system which actually achieves little; zergers still will zerg except Sorcerer becomes a better choice for them, more team oriented players already alternated between insta-kills, CC and buffs and will continue play as before.

Those who get hurt are the wizard players who were already struggling with getting a working DC, which will go from being only able to kill some stuff to contribute even less.

Casters do not have to just be buff and heal bots... But they either need a weakness somewhere or their casting power needs to be curtailed... I semi-like this solution because it lets a caster keep his super-power but limits how often he can use it.

The thing is all the things which are supposed to be limitations and weaknesses of casters are not addressed by the "fix".
* Spellpoints are mostly eliminated as limiting factor due to SP-regaining items (Torc, C/O) and easily available pots.
* Squish factor is eliminated by no-fail self healing (whether it is Reconstruct or Negative Energy Burst), with SP not being a limiting factor it only leaves the risk of being interupted the wrong moment which Quicken takes care off.
These two factors combined create a situation were a caster can nuke/insta-kill to hearts desire and take risks because any damage taken is quickly taken care off by no-fail heals.

The above holds true no matter if we are now talking about my wife's clonk, her sorcerer, my favored soul or my AM. The Haunting only puts the sorcerer above my AM for zerg-killing.

[Yan_PL]

Idea stated in opening post: not-so-overbearing bonus to saves vs magical instakills in hard/elite, is not entirely bad.

How does that affect my char:
my human sorcerer never got wizard past life feat, nor necromancy focus - his wail DCs are rarely in "useful" range.
However, i still use a lot of instakills spells with energy drain / enervation. My friend, who plays assassin rogue mostly, called me a plumber ('cause i do so much draining). This change makes me have to drain even more levels in group fights where i can't wait off "haunted"; but at the point where i cast 2-3 spells to drain stuff, it's simply easier to finish it off with cheap savant SLAs. heck, I use this tactic in epic challenges on live sometimes - drain, enervate, chain lightning.

[Faent]

Personally I think the current timers are fine, if a bit short/light. If an archer has to wait 2 minutes between manyshots to be maximally effective, I don't see anything wrong with a caster needing to wait 2 minutes between wails.

First, the caster isn't just "waiting two minutes between Wails". The caster has been cut out of ALL instakills and converted into a very weak sorcerer for two minutes. Do you even play a high-Necro caster? If you did, you'd know this isn't how a high-Necro wizard would play under the current proposal. They would *never* Wail (save, perhaps, right before a boss fight when they know that it's all about raw DPS after the Wail).

[Dolphious]

First, the caster isn't just "waiting two minutes between Wails". The caster has been cut out of ALL instakills and converted into a very weak sorcerer for two minutes. Do you even play a high-Necro caster? If you did, you'd know this isn't how a high-Necro wizard would play under the current proposal. They would *never* Wail (save, perhaps, right before a boss fight when they know that it's all about raw DPS after the Wail).

That sounds like very sub-optimal play. Why not wail every time you're off "timer" and there is a good opportunity. It's true that you're going to have to be a better and more versatile player now, and not just lean on three spells. I see that as a good thing.

FWIW I have a PM, though not max DC.

[Gkar]

Currently we're thinking of having it in both Heroic and Epic content for consistency.

I think that's a VERY bad decision. You will take out non DPS casting as a way to play. Being able to cast a solid hold is also fun...but if that's all you have *yawn*.

On Epic hard/elite it is a reasonable compromise, but not game wide.

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

Ouch. You can't "play through" a -20 DC. The point of wail is trash. If you can only cast it once and then really can't cast again for 5-6 minutes its useless.

Why not work the stacking more like the DoTs we use on mobs. Each kill adds to the stack. If you kill again before the stack time is down, the stack increases. If you let the stack timer run out, you are back to zero. At least this is something that you can manage.

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.

So that helps an AM out how? Or a cleric or an fvs? PMs aren't the only ones to use death magic.

[Faent]

That sounds like very sub-optimal play.

That's because you don't understand the system. Let me break it down for you (and others):

Suppose I Wail 10 mobs. I just got hit with a massive 150 second nerf to my instakills.

Suppose I do not Wail 10 mobs. I have 10 totally unnerfed Finger kills in me over the next 150 seconds.

So the Wail cost me kills (the ones I would pick up at a slightly lower DC penalty from adding in extra Fingers), cost me selectivity (being able to kill the most dangerous stuff), and converts me into a weak sorcerer for 150 seconds.

Not Wailing at all is the obviously better strategy, and that strategy is so darn weak I might as well not be a high Necro wizzie.

Why not wail every time you're off "timer" and there is a good opportunity.

Explained.

[Dolphious]

That's because you don't understand the system. Let me break it down for you (and others):

Suppose I Wail 10 mobs. I just got hit with a massive 150 second nerf to my instakills.

Suppose I do not Wail 10 mobs. I have 10 totally unnerfed Finger kills in me over the next 150 seconds.

So the Wail cost me kills (the ones I would pick up at a slightly lower DC penalty from adding in extra Fingers), cost me selectivity (being able to kill the most dangerous stuff), and converts me into a weak sorcerer for 150 seconds.



Explained.

so you can kill 10 mobs *all at once* or you can kill 10 mobs *over 150 second* and you're convinced that killing 10 mobs over 150 seconds is going to be the optimal strategy every time? Don't get me wrong, I can see situations where it would be preferable to have a full powered fod to take out particularly dangerous mobs, but there are also plenty of situations where killing them all at once is going to be the way to go.

And you're not just a "very week sorc" unless you made a very narrow build, and have limited equipment. You still have superior CC, and DCs generally (not to mention all the awesome survivability of a PM). And the gap between wizard and sorc DPS is narrowing with the spellpower change (that's why all the doom-sorcs were saying they were going to TR into PMs a couple weeks ago).

[BruceTheHoon]

I'm still struggling with the "here's a fancy new mechanic" when existing mechanics can be used to solve this.

I know right, it boggles the mind. we have a great mechanic that works and the D&D system everyone knows and loves but instead, silly new systems are invented. I just don't get it.

No, it's not a great mechanics. It's the same mechanics as the former AC and you can take a look at what people think is wrong with that in a rather lengthy 'Let's Talk' thread. Great for table play, but doesn't scale well with the numbers in DDO.

I can not comprehend, how one can think that increasing the DCs premanently is a better solution than increasing the DCs for a minute or so.

[DarkForte]

You will still be able to use your necromancy spells at full power, just not all the time... They are very powerful, and being able to wail at max DC every couple of minutes is still extremely useful.

Why would I build my wizard for maximized necro DCs that I can use once every 2 minutes when I can build for mass hold, which I can use EVERY 6 SECONDS? It's downright illogical. It's pretty much the same thing as taking ooze puppet on a sorcerer on the event you meet a gelatinous cube.

PMs are still viable, but now they are obliged to take 2 useless feats, which are only marginally situationally useful.