Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[camgib]

It is only unbalanced because of lack of creativity/time in the content, not because of it's innate ability. Vorpal was exactly the same. The problem was not vorpal, the problem was inflating mob HP to insane numbers to give an illusion of challenge and time taken to complete. So people chose vorpal over DPS because they like the shortest path and inane, static mob beatdowns are not fun.

That is the problem at its root, not what you describe. Constrained system design lacking creativity is at fault here, not instakills. Probably because of the player-led and marketing-supported demands for high content outturn, I would guess.

I get the feeling that the devs are reaching for the easy button here to make for a more balanced game experience. Wouldn't a better solution be to design the encounter around the abilities of the expected participants rather than nerf one of the participants based on the perceived imbalance that a poor design created? Why not raise the saves on hard and elite epic level mobs to a point at which instant death spells would be difficult to achieve without debuffing the mobs first? Require arcanes to expend more spell points per wail so that their pool shrinks and they NEED the other characters to complete rather than forcing them to sit in a quest, waiting for their timers to clear. While this might be unfair to lesser geared characters, what are they doing trying to run content for which they are unprepared anyway?

With this mechanic I'll be farming the epics the same as always, just getting a cup of coffee between wails as I wait for the timer. This doesn't seem like an effective way to balance the quest to me.

[butcheredspirit]

I like haunting mostly, but what I really like is the hint that haunting as a limiting factor could also act as a buff of some sort. You could key a necro damage modifier off of a higher haunting value. The higher your haunting value, the more damage you deal with spells like necrotic bolt or SLA's so you could get a see-saw effect of swapping from instakill to dps then back again as your hanut levels out once more.

That does sound interesting and would be kinda cool to see pale masters racking up haunting points, then expending them on some uber negative energy ability.

However haunting isn't just about Pale Masters, it's going to nerf every spell casting class.
Perhaps more so, the classes who have less DPS alternatives for killing.

[Zio_Kose]

Can we have new wizzy PL? will give +10 DC because +1 is ridiculous and useless with this new system...

[CaptainPurge]

Can we have new wizzy PL? will give +10 DC because +1 is ridiculous and useless with this new system...

No. You must grind triple Wiz PL and any experience pots and hearts of wood that make it so.

[Habreno]

I like haunting mostly, but what I really like is the hint that haunting as a limiting factor could also act as a buff of some sort. You could key a necro damage modifier off of a higher haunting value. The higher your haunting value, the more damage you deal with spells like necrotic bolt or SLA's so you could get a see-saw effect of swapping from instakill to dps then back again as your hanut levels out once more.

For some encounters, you might be encouraged to rack up a high haunt before engaging a boss to maximize your dps.

A high haunt value could trigger a fear aura effect like the mummy fear that locks down mobs.

Maybe even trigger an epic moment off of a certain haunt threshold for some massive finishing move.

There is plenty of potential here for turning a limiting factor into an alternate route to victory.

This has great promise. However, everything needs to be ironed out.


Perhaps the Haunting debuff provides a straight-up Insightful Spellcasting bonus, which, for every stack, you gain 10 stacking spellpower?

[Udalric]

Dear turbine

New complicated mechanic is costly and time consuming also could generate many bugs .
If you want to fix instakill issue do it through balancing particular spell. Wail of banshee is main concern here so add cap (5/6 etc) to it and lenghten cooldown to 60 sec . Simple easy solutions are always most effective. If you really have *SO* much time and money to spare better finish out Pre.

[HatsuharuZ]

I dislike the proposed "haunting" debuff.

Why not just increase the cooldowns on AoE death spells? Casters have plenty of other spells they can use between casts of death spells. And while you're at it, give casters a "harried" penalty to DCs and concentration checks during a red alert.

[gravestones]

Not when an ability is fundamentally unbalanced; then the ability should be changed, not the encounters. It's plain and simple for me. Always tackle problems at their root, don't make elaborate changes to hide a fundamental problem.

The simplest solution would probably be this: remove instakills altogether and replace it with negative energy damage spells (including some nice AoE). Give pale masters bonusses to these negative energy spells, and have necro DC's work on them. Makes for a nice selfhealing caster build that has great versatility in damage spells and in crowd controlling.

Explain how insta-kills, and even Wail for that matter, are "fundamentally" unbalanced.

Explain how rewriting an entire class of spells and a prestige class (read: insta-kills and Pale Masters have a long history in the pen and paper "root" of this game) isn't an "elaborate change".

The problem IS the encounters, not the spells. The spells are actually functioning true to the pen and paper vision, it is the encounters that have become, by and large, simplified and without texture and nuance to compliment the multitude of spells available to casters.

Let us look at this from another perspective: it is fundamentally unbalanced that a melee can keep on swinging ad infinitum, while arcane and divine casters are limited by a finite blue bar.

On very long engagements with limited rest shrines, the DPS output of a melee greatly exceeds that of any arcane. In fact, melee have the potential for unlimited damage output, with no cap and no cost! That is utterly outrageous and fundamentally unbalancing. Arcanes and divines get to stand around and do nothing while the melee enjoy themselves, racking up damage to their hearts' content.

Akin to Haunting, melee should be constrained by Fatigue. Anytime a melee scores a critical hit, they accumulate a debuff of -2 to hit that lasts 30 seconds. These debuffs stack. In order to clear the debuff, the melee must stop scoring critical hits and allow the debuff to clear. In the meantime, melee can use less effective weapons with lower crit modifiers, or perhaps up their UMD so that they can use wands that cause damage or even scrolls.

Melee will have a choice: continue to try to score critical hits for greater damage and ultimately be unable to hit for quite a while, or score a couple of critical hits and take a break from their primary weapons focus and favorite weapons while the Fatigue wears off.

Sounds good doesn't it?

[irivan]

I dislike the proposed "haunting" debuff.

Why not just increase the cooldowns on AoE death spells? Casters have plenty of other spells they can use between casts of death spells. And while you're at it, give casters a "harried" penalty to DCs and concentration checks during a red alert.

They really need to just back off, and do nothing at all at this point. Just dont mess with it.

If they want to make the game more difficult for casters they should just bump mob saving throws by a few points and call it a day. Use more Orange Named bosses if they think that will help.


But anything else is going to put them in a bad way.

[sephiroth1084]

Since when is a dozen or so 'many?' A good 5-1 are against this latest half-baked scheme to nerf save or die spells. HTK was 6-1 against.

This obviously isn't what most players here want to see happen.

Many is an indefinite designation. My point was that it wasn't melee-centric players posting in favor of this, but people who are (prominently, in some cases) fans of playing casters.

As for the people who are against this, many of them will always be against any change to the game that makes them weaker, or forces them to work harder, or play smarter, without concerning themselves at all with considering the problem and irrespective of the proposed solution. Most don't acknowledge that there even is a problem, which is totally ridiculous. Many people call for better AI as THE solution, but doesn't acknowledge that it may not be possible (at least right now).

There is a problem. If this could get fixed by improving AI (and if that were a feasible course of action at this time), I'd prefer that to basically any other change, but that seems unlikely, since such suggestions haven't gotten much dev response ever, and this thread is not the first time the topic has been brought up. But people also ignore the fact that simply improving AI won't necessarily solve anything, because a couple of the problems also reside with the facts that no AI is going to be able to adequately challenge tens (or hundreds) of thousands of people all sharing information and experiences, and because we all learn the game pretty well through repetition. An "AI" solution would require improving the way monsters react to us, randomizing their responses, actions, locations, types and buffs, and introducing far more significant randomization into quests, so that we can't say when we step in what route to take, and where the shrines are, and what spells will be the most useful, or the most useful here, and the most useful there. That's a lot of work for a relatively small development team, and may be too much for the current DDO system (code, servers, etc...) to handle properly--remember, AI has a lot of overhead and can lead to more of the lag that all of the same players are constantly complaining about on the forums.

The problem doesn't exist just because a vocal minority of players have complained about something--the devs quite obviously have acknowledged this problem for a long time, which is why the original epics had blanket death spell immunity, and even after removing that portion of Epic Ward in most quests, they returned it in epic challenges, and proposed Hard to Kill in the first place, and rather than dropping the idea entirely when met with such overwhelming negative reaction to it, they instead proposed another solution. It should be clear to everyone that the devs feel that the ability to instantly kill monsters, and especially groups of monsters, with ease is a problem.

And if you think the devs' opinions are simply tugged this way and that by a small group of players, like so many marionettes, then you are sadly mistaken. Just look at all the archery discussions that the devs have commented on for the last 6 years: nearly every player to post in such a thread has mentioned that they feel that ranged combat is much too weak, while most dev comments have indicated that they are hesitant to improve archery, despite having (inadvertently?) made a beast out of a similar style in the form of artificers, and while ignoring the fact that casters are 10x as strong as any archer would be even with major buffs. Clearly not listening to ANYONE there.

So how do we solve the problem? Some people want longer cooldowns, which just means you get to use death spells less often. Period. Some want monster's saves to just be increased, while ignoring the fact that that carries all sorts of other negative consequences with it, like gimping the abilities other classes have (Assassinate, Trip, Stun, Touch of Death...there is a long list). Others liked the original Hard to Kill idea, even though it made using instakills almost completely pointless. So what solution is there? What will work without completely screwing lower-DC casters, monks, rogues, paladins, rangers, fighters, barbarians, bards... and without making Spell Focus: Necromancy a waste of a feat slot, along with everything that stems from that?

I wanted Deathblock and Death Ward to get changed in the same way that Neutralize Poison did in regards to death spells and effects, replacing immunity with a bonus to saves and a "no fail on 1" clause, in part because of the issue here, but mostly due to the larger issue of immunities ultimately being bad for the game. We didn't get that. Instead, we got a system that allows casters to keep using their spells, but forces them to do so tactically, or they suffer penalties for a short while (that they can power through if they are very well developed). It retains the value of being able to kill lots of things quickly, but limits that power somewhat. Do you have a better, likely solution?

----------------------------------------------------------------
TL;DR Many players simply refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem. The devs clearly feel that there is a problem all on their own; it isn't simply due to a vocal subset of players convincing them of this. Improving AI isn't as easy a solution as everyone seems to think, likely cannot ever be enough to sufficient challenge such a large group of intelligence-sharing people, and may cause a significant increase in lag.

The Haunting solution maintains the usefulness of the ability to kill many enemies quickly, but puts a damper on doing so too often, forces players to play tactically, and doesn't incidentally nerf a bunch of other characters in the process.

If you really don't like it, acknowledge the problem and propose a reasonable solution (ie., one that doesn't hamstring the playstyle more than this does and doesn't have a lot of collateral damage for other characters, while actually addressing the existing issue). Calls for "just leave it as it is," and, "there isn't a problem here," are short-sighted and ignorant.

[eris2323]

Nope, you're incorrect... I JUST (tonight) finished leveling a FvS TR back to 20... Divine caster with blade barrier, wings, Divine Punishment, self-healing...

Massive easy button. There was very little challenge ever. And very little need for tactical play or any kind of good gear.




There is very little skill involved with kiting a bunch of mobs through a blade barrier, or rounding up 2-3 rooms worth of mobs and hitting wail.

Probably the character I play that takes the most skill is my archer, to be honest.

But you've already said elsewhere, you won't be happy until all casters are just buffbots and holdbots; all divines lose dots and blade barrier and are only healers.....

And you're very vocal. Are you the reason the devs are breaking the game for everyone else?

Might I suggest minesweeper, so the rest of us can enjoy our game?

[Faent]

So what solution is there? What will work without completely screwing lower-DC casters, monks, rogues, paladins, rangers, fighters, barbarians, bards... and without making Spell Focus: Necromancy a waste of a feat slot, along with everything that stems from that?

It's not hard to figure that out. Wail is pretty much the only problem.

If you really don't like it, acknowledge the problem and propose a reasonable solution (ie., one that doesn't hamstring the playstyle more than this does and doesn't have a lot of collateral damage for other characters, while actually addressing the existing issue).

A lot of us already did this. Change Wail. It's really just that simple.

[eris2323]

It's not hard to figure that out. Wail is pretty much the only problem.



A lot of us already did this. Change Wail. It's really just that simple.

Really? To my eyes, it's more simple.

Stop listening to the 3% of the forum whiners who have specced themselves out to be gods; they chose to do that.

If they don't want to be overpowered, they don't HAVE to be. So they make multiple past lives, and spend all this time gaining power... and then complain it is too powerful?

If we don't want to play with gods, we don't have to.

Why ruin the game for everyone else, on account of 3% of forum whiners who are VERY vocal?

Just because they're vocal?

Seems like a lot of people becoming vocal over the last few days.

[jandhaer]

Ill sign this when melees have an endurance bar or something similiar working as a debuff that decreases STR and RATE OF ATTACK as they run out of juice.

*** Im A Melee Im carrying this club the size of a medium tree and I can swing it at maximum speed at maximum strength FOREVER and I never ever ever get tired or slow down even the tiniest bit *** /sarcasm off

[Braegan]

TL;DR Many players simply refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem. The devs clearly feel that there is a problem all on their own; it isn't simply due to a vocal subset of players convincing them of this. Improving AI isn't as easy a solution as everyone seems to think, likely cannot ever be enough to sufficient challenge such a large group of intelligence-sharing people, and may cause a significant increase in lag.

The Haunting solution maintains the usefulness of the ability to kill many enemies quickly, but puts a damper on doing so too often, forces players to play tactically, and doesn't incidentally nerf a bunch of other characters in the process.

If you really don't like it, acknowledge the problem and propose a reasonable solution (ie., one that doesn't hamstring the playstyle more than this does and doesn't have a lot of collateral damage for other characters, while actually addressing the existing issue). Calls for "just leave it as it is," and, "there isn't a problem here," are short-sighted and ignorant.

I can see that in the current state wail-fests are a bit OP. My last run of ToD on hard with my PM (which is on the good side of gear/build but not uber IMO) out of 98 kills I racked up 50. When one person out of 12 is responsible for more then half the entire raids kills that's a wake up call.

I don't like HTK or Haunting for different reasons. HTK makes no sense and would just promote kill sniping/stealing. While Haunting just seems to punish a class/PRE for doing what it does well.

The best suggestion I've seen so far is to place a cap on the number of mobs you can kill with one wail and increase the cool down timer. An SP increase would be too much to feel like a nerf on top of those two. A cap of say 6 mobs per wail with a longer CD would change wail-fests into well-timed, strategic coup de graces.

[eris2323]

I can see that in the current state wail-fests are a bit OP. My last run of ToD on hard with my PM (which is on the good side of gear/build but not uber IMO) out of 98 kills I racked up 50. When one person out of 12 is responsible for more then half the entire raids kills that's a wake up call.

It's a call of some sort. But perhaps the call is to 'increase ranged damage and give fighters/melees some skills that simulate ranged attacks, or super speed to get to the melee, before the LONG RANGE casters can kill'.

That's what I would have jumped to. It's pretty clear the reason why casters get kills is because we do it at a distance.

Melees don't get a charge attack. They can't pull enemies to them. They can't shadowstep 30 feet to the monsters back.

Perhaps they should.

But proposing to destroy an entire prestige, and remove a spell because of that?

You need to sit down and practise thinkin... you do it with your braaaaaaaain. It's the thing zombies are always after.

Editted to include: I still have way more kills than I should in every quest. And I don't have wail. I'm only level 13 this life. It's because I have long range attacks. Melees have to run. We all run at haste speed, because thats basically the max.

See the problem here? It's not wail making me 'overpowered'. It's that ranged and melees are UNDERPOWERED.

[Drona]

EPIC FAIL Turbine. Gratz!!

I play a barb as well, and this change is ridiculous.

[Thrudh]

Heh, I hadn't even thought about that. If this easy-way-out change must be implemented, this needs to be rectified. Given a L25 melee could run through there swinging a fish and still be killing everything it looked at funny.

The level 25 max-geared PaleMaster has many other ways to kill mass numbers of kobolds in Kobold Assault than just wail.

The level 25 max-geared PaleMaster has many other ways to kill mass numbers of mobs in epic quests too.

Wail is not the only spell you get.

[Braegan]

It's a call of some sort. But perhaps the call is to 'increase ranged damage and give fighters/melees some skills that simulate ranged attacks, or super speed to get to the melee, before the LONG RANGE casters can kill'.

That's what I would have jumped to. It's pretty clear the reason why casters get kills is because we do it at a distance.

Melees don't get a charge attack. They can't pull enemies to them. They can't shadowstep 30 feet to the monsters back.

Perhaps they should.

But proposing to destroy an entire prestige, and remove a spell because of that?

You need to sit down and practise thinkin... you do it with your braaaaaaaain. It's the thing zombies are always after.

Editted to include: I still have way more kills than I should in every quest. And I don't have wail. I'm only level 13 this life. It's because I have long range attacks. Melees have to run. We all run at haste speed, because thats basically the max.

See the problem here? It's not wail making me 'overpowered'. It's that ranged and melees are UNDERPOWERED.

Well, wail-festing as I put it was done by me running with the melee into combat and casting wail around myself there was nothing long range about it. Wail is a bit OP and I'd rather that be isolated with proposed changes instead of gutting the class/PRE completely and/or gimping other classes like monks and assassins ability to land an insta-kill.

[Thrudh]

This sums up the sentiment very well. Haunting is too complex to understand all the implications easily.

Turbine's intent is to tone down the power of death magic (wail in particular) hence the cumulative debuff the more kills you get. A straight-up nerf to wail is the simple solution, and will probably entail some direct increase in the cool-down timer.

In trying to soften the blow for the average caster, haunting was invented, so that if a caster fails to instakill, he can try again soon, without being hampered by a universal increased cool-down meant to limit the power of high dc wails. Low dc wails can be re-attempted "quicker" so that weaker casters can feel like they contributed a little too.

For the high dc caster, whether it is a hard-coded cool-down, or a "soft cool-down" like haunting, it probably means the same thing in practice after all the numbers have been tweaked and done with. Wail will end up with a longer cool-down no matter how. But with haunting, FoD is being nerfed too due to the global effect on all death magic.

Design is good-intentioned but extremely convoluted and hard to understand. Keeping it simple may be the best.

Great post... Explains it pefectly.

However, I think it's too complex and affects too many spells... Just increase the timer on wail and be done with it.

Or give us the 5/rest ability like Leap of Faith with a slow regen - I like that idea a lot since then you could spam wail 5 times in certain situations if needed (Might be abused though)