Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[gravestones]

First, it's refreshing to see that when hot issue such as this rears it's head, the dev-team has the resources to focus and respond.

Second, it is a step in the right direction, although as presented it requires a reduction in both the amount of the penalty and the duration of the debuff.

Third, there is an issue that needs to be addressed: the myth that most PM's or necro-focused AM's can sweep through epic content and lay low virtually all of the content, with little challenge. This is simply not true, and really only applies to the top percentile of necro-focused arcanes.

Quite frankly, if a player has invested enough lives into an arcane to have +9 spell pen (3 x wizard and 3 x favoured soul past lives), the maximum possible intelligence (i.e. completionist) and farmed out the best possible gear (+4 intelligence tome, tier 3 alchemicals...) then they had better be dominating content, for two reasons.

First, it is consistent with the lore that comprises the foundation of the game - that at the highest levels, spell casters are indeed the most powerful.

Second, if there is no tangible benefit to investing countless hours TR'ing and raiding and farming gear, then where is the underlying motivation to continue?

[Kmnh]

If you want to help the low-middle DC casters and the all caster parties, do it the other way around. Keep mob saves high and make saving on a death spell debuff the mobs.

That way, if a crazy geared pale master brings a newbie along with him, the newbie can use his wail to debuff the mobs while the master lands the actual kills.

Melee-centered builds could use circle of death/implosion as a debuff spell, like they do with hypnotism and crushing despair today.


It would also avoid situations where the party leader says: "ok, the caster has 5 minutes worth of debuffs. Wait in this room and go get a drink, if you move into the next room you will be blacklisted".

[barryman5000]

Doesn't make sense. You guys would be better off increasing the cooldown of death spells. If they are that bad then increase the cooldown and not decrease the dc.

[Nines9]

I like the concept, with a little tweaking maybe. Keep it off of single target spells (finger/pwk/destruct). Keep it out of heroic levels, just hard epic/elite epic. No need for boosts against death spells I would think, idk. Cap the haunting to 5 procs, raise the timer to 20 seconds, which seems reasonable.

I wail 5 or more guys. If I use circle of death within 20 seconds after I'm -10 to my necro dc. By the time my wail is back up I'm still at -8. Assuming I'm going to use my aoe instakill spells whenever they're off timer, I'll be perpetually at either -8 or -10, so going to miss a lot of stuff for the melee to come beat on. But still have single targets available at full potency.

[danotmano1998]

Ok, after rereading the proposal, I'm not clear on what difficulties this new mechanic would apply to.

Also not clear on the numbers. Is it -2 DC for each monster killed? Each Mob?
How much is a "stack"?

(IMO, if you're going to do this it should ONLY be for epic hard/elites. Just gotta throw that out there.)

[Meretrix]

I am very happy the devs are actually listening to us and make changes like this based on feedback but please don't drop any more bombs on us like hard to kill. It was such a poor solution when their are so many other viable ones.

The current proposal sounds like a good compromise I could live with but I wonder why you are so concerned with hurting casters with poor dc. If they have a poor dc and are unable to land spells in hard and elite epics then there are several ways for them to improve their dc and this is the very point of the game is improving your abilities to make content smoother.

[scoobmx]

Just to clarify, by death magic you mean Destruction, Finger of Death, Wail of the Banshee, and Circle of Death, right? In other words, school of necromancy spells? So the following instant-kill spells are NOT affected:
Phantasmal Killer
Trap the Soul
Power Word Kill
Implosion

And so this gives people a reason to use some of these other spells and raise DC's for those to complement necromancy spells.

It would be interesting to have some kind of 'stance' available in the PM enhancement tree that can alter haunting effects. Maybe:
Embrace of Undeath (2 AP)
Toggle this stance to become immune to Haunting effects. The Haunting counter still accumulates but does not begin depleting until this stance is deactivated. You have 0 Constitution, lowering your hit points and fortitude save, but do not suffer helplessness or death as a result. No effects can increase your Constitution above 0 besides deactivating this stance.

[Ape_Man]

And can we get a dev to clarify . .. will this work on ALL difficulty settings or just epic H and E?

[Jay203]

sounds interesting thus far
assassin rogues get to go back to neck-slicing without worry and casters can still land their instant-kills
might have to adjust the duration a bit later though

[Burdden]

First I like this idea a lot more, I think in tandum you should either add the relavent timer to power word kill scrolls instead of someone who has stockpiled up a whole bunch, for example end in epic lord of blades with 50+ kills .

Just my 2 cents

Thanks

Smithers

[Grimlock]

-2 to DC's will gimp casters even more than they will be in the next expansion. Why is the focus on limiting existing classes/spells as they are now in the game? We currently have cooldown times that is excessive in the beta for casters. Do we need to restrict them more by lowering their chances for killing mobs now?

Is the goal here to have casters run in, WotB mobs, then kite the surviving mobs around until their -2 DC "Haunting" cooldown has expired then repeat? Even with acquiring 1-3 Wizard past lives that penalty will be felt. Breaking SR for epic creatures will be difficult enough, casters do not need the added burden of their spell DC's being lowered.

I recognize Turbine is doing everything it can to level the playing field between melee types and casters with respect to epic content, but that is not a reality.

[Siftrant]

Do Melees get a new de-buff as well? Reducing their damage and to-hit by a stacking 10% reduction every time they kill something?

Why is it such a problem that casters can do something effectively besides cast Hage?

[Malshier]

BRB buying all the PWK scrolls off the AH on Sarlona.

Oh wait, I already do that.

[Thrudh]

Is the goal here to have casters run in, WotB mobs, then kite the surviving mobs around until their -2 DC "Haunting" cooldown has expired then repeat?

I think the goal is for you to bring some friends, or use different tactics than just wail all the time.

This change still lets you use wail at full (or near full) power for certain situations, but no longer for ALL situations.

[Eladiun]

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.

This is all about Epic Hard and Epic Elite difficulties correct. So, why do we care about casters with low to middlin'd DC's?

Aren't the Hardest settings designed for the best toons?

It seems awfully counter intuitive to create difficulty tuning setting for you hardest difficulty quests while aiming to make them viable for low DC Casters. It's like scaling HP for a mob with the assumption the melee is swing a Club of the Silver Flame.

[brzytki]

I like the change. It tones down the most whined about spells while not affecting my assassinate or Shadowdancer.

One question though: does it mean that we finally get death spells (FoD, Wail, Circle) separated from physical death effects (vorpal, assassinate, QP)? Or will assassinate still be lamely blocked by deathblock/ward?

[THOTHdha]

This system seems much, much better than Hard to Kill. It keeps wizards from clearing the majority of the dungeon ahead of the party, while not gutting the usefulness of instakills. More strategic rather than forced game play is always good. I do have a couple of questions about it, though.

Will Haunting apply to forms of instakills other than the Finger and Wail that you mentioned? Specifically, how about Rogue Assassins? The active ability wouldn't really suffer terribly on it's own, but if this does apply to all death effects the rogue could easily build up Haunting stacks from their uncontrollable vorpals that keep them from being able to use their active ability when they really want it.

Will resting remove the Haunting stack? I think that this is pretty important. I can think of quite a few instances where casters might otherwise be left playing a very back-seat role for a good chunk of the quest in order to make sure that their stack is clear at a certain point, which is clearly no fun, or making the party wait around while their debuffs clear before being ready to continue. Being able to purge the stack by resting makes the balancing of Haunting stacks vs DCs more usable, and since rest shrines are a very limited resource doesn't really disrupt the intended balance of it.

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 seems kind of excessive, in addition to the other system, in regards to the non-Epic difficulties. Doing this for Epic-Hard and Epic-Elite is one thing, but doesn't it seem like applying it to old content would be a bit disruptive?

[Grailhawk]

Its better then Hard to Kill but it has the flaw of penalizing some one for being good at what they do.

[Pewf]

I kind of like it.

It reminds me of a book I read where this mage would cast Insta-Death spells but doing so would drain his own life force, slowly killing him. (totally irrelevant - but that was my favorite character)

I like it a lot as it's not super op, but still leaves the option to insta-kill in.

Only thing I would change is drop it to -1 dc, and hard cap how many Haunting can stack too.

[Cyndrome]

Wow. Is thise planned only for epic hard and epic elite? I am glad Turbine listened to the feed back.