Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[Dolphious]

And before the PRE of PM, all you heard were moans about how squishy the wizard was and how he sucked if he wasn't a WF. Now they have a PRE that gives them some survivability and folks moan about that. Seriously the complaining has come full circle.

*shrug* balancing involves some back and forth, it's pretty unsurprising that over the course of a game that's been around so long that certain elements could hit both extremes at various times.

[phalaeo]

Pleeeeeeeeeeeease don't take my Wail! Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!!!

[Eillyss]

/facepalm

*I* have a human PM so I noted that... yes WF casters are also unreasonable durable also.

edit: in fact I even mentioned WF casters in my previous post.... double /facepalm

Ooooh!!! you mean a ~34 int wiz? ooohhh wait a minute... you are one of those low-mid dc casters eladrin is talkin about!!!

/facepalm

[GermanicusMaximus]

Last post from a Dev = Page 6?

Wow!

Devs please come back.

Devs take a break on the weekend, at least I hope they do. They are already likely working at a wicked pace, and at some point you just hit the wall...

Assuming Eladrin had the luxury of 2 days off, just look at what he has waiting for him tomorrow morning (along with everything else already on his plate).

[Dolphious]

Ooooh!!! you mean a ~34 int wiz? ooohhh wait a minute... you are one of those low-mid dc casters eladrin is talkin about!!!

/facepalm

Yup, very ungeared, and generally unloved. Still managed to solo adq2 at lvl 15 on my first try... none of my other toons that get much more love could have managed that.

[GermanicusMaximus]

See, that quote makes me think this is ALL about other people whining and not about devs going "hmm, how can we make this more of a team game?'

Because if the 'rest of the party' is also casters (which it could very well be), they aren't the ones harping about 'teamwork,' they just play together.

I think its apparent that this isn't really about "teamwork". If it is, my divine caster, who is being expected to throw heals while the trash is being cleared, would appreciate allowing the PM to do his job so our team can move on.

This is about classes who want guaranteed slots in a party, regardless of the DDO tradition of flexible party construction. "We need X of class A, Y of class B, and Z of class C" is a hallmark of a major MMO that all DDO players opted NOT to play.

[HatsuharuZ]

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.

There are no easy answers, here. However, Wail of the Banshee *is* a powerful spell, and it should have an equally potent cooldown time. This "haunting" debuff is essentially penalizing casters for using their spells. Sure, they could use more orange names, but that would take alot of work. Manipulating the cooldown times of powerful spells is the simplest method of doing this.

Now, I think of a number of ways to nerf casters:

1) Reduce the number of spell points casters can achieve

2) Remove all items that improve spell DCs.

3) Take out insta-kill spells from the game


However, all of these can cause lots of grief. In fact, if the developers do ANYTHING to lower the effectiveness of spellcasters, there will be grief. The trick is to find the solution to the problem that causes the least amount of grief. By only changing a few spells, the amount of grief will be minimal. Increased cooldowns for the mass insta-kill spells is probably the best way, imo.

[Faent]

There's a lot of confusion about the impact of Haunting as it's been proposed. I want to chime in and say that LeLoric is correct regarding the essentially hard limit of 1kill/15secs. To explain this, let's use an example.

/snip

That was a very elegant way to explain what's going on. I wish I'd thought to explain it like that. +1 to you, Sir. I think it should be perfectly clear to everyone, thanks to your explanation, just how massive a nerf Haunting actually is. What's bringing people around, is, I think, explanations of the nature of the nerf, and that was the best one so far.

I'm currently doing some testing. I ran a test test eDA today, and I expect to run several more test eDA's tomorrow (or over the next few days) to try to determine how much of a nerf to Wail would be a reasonable one. I am not going to post the results of my testing until I am finished, and I won't make any further suggestions as to how to fix Wail until I complete it.

On the subject of testing, I'll mention the strategy I'm using now, just in case I can improve it. In a party of melees (with a healer), I maximize my kill-count in eDA by denying melees Mass Holds, setting up some solid CC (43 DC Web + 42 DC Discoball + Mind Fog), laying down a Cloudkill under the Discoball, dropping a Symbol of Death, and then hitting the mobs that land in that mess with Circle of Death followed by Wail of the Banshee. Did I miss anything (other than Solid Fog, I should say).

[Eillyss]

Yup, very ungeared, and generally unloved. Still managed to solo adq2 at lvl 15 on my first try... none of my other toons that get much more love could have managed that.

Nice achievement mate... but... wrong thread... try posting that in: Achievement

[Faent]

I think its apparent that this isn't really about "teamwork".

It's partly about teamwork. A lot of players who are complaining want to feel like they are contributing more to the team, and the DEV's have apparently heard and internalized this. Eladrin has basically said as much in the initial post in this thread, and IIRC, he said it elsewhere as well. I don't have all the old hidden thread hardlinks saved, however.

The problem here is that most melees play stupid. Sorry, I said it. A well-played caster plays very smart. In a good group of well-played melees and well-played casters, the melees are going to focus on the mobs they know will give the instakill caster trouble. If you have a well-played caster and some clueless melees, the melees are going to run for the mob with the low FORT save and then watch it die in front of their eyes. And that's going to really annoy them when it happens over and over. And after all, they've learned to go for casters first, since those pose a danger to them. So they're just doing what they learned to do.

Instead, if they were smart, they'd know what kind of caster they have in their group, and they'd go for the stuff he's going to go for LAST. You have someone who can eliminate the most dangerous mobs faster than any melees can, and so he's going to do it and should be doing it, just as the Arcane Archer needs to be eliminating casters before melees can get to them.

But since there are so many melees who don't know anything about the mechanics of the game, don't understand saves, don't know how casters operate, and so on, they're going to continue to feel like they are denied kills constantly when they are really playing in a very substandard way. (And honestly, most melees aren't max-DPS melees anyway. If you aren't building for max DPS, and you're running with an endgame geared caster built for max DPS, you are really in no position to get upset when you are outclassed. Multiply so if you are not playing smart.)

If Turbine wants to change the game so that gimped melees can feel like they are keeping up with endgame casters, well, it'll be a very sad day. That's not the goal they should be aiming for, though if they did it, it would certainly make a lot of bad players happier.

[Drona]

There's a lot of confusion about the impact of Haunting as it's been proposed. I want to chime in and say that LeLoric is correct regarding the essentially hard limit of 1kill/15secs. To explain this, let's use an example.

Suppose you have a 50 DC caster. Suppose further that in our hypothetical quest, 40DC is the 'minimum useful' threshhold. How you definite that varies, and it doesnt really matter at all for the conclusion, but it's the point at which instakills are no longer effective vs other options, considering their SP cost/likelihood of success/cooldowns.

So, suppose our caster wails the first 4 mobs he sees. Now he's at a -8 DC for 60 seconds. He hops around the corner, and find 2 mobs, fingers one. Now he's at -10DC, corresponding to our 40DC 'useful' threshhold. At this point, for instakills to remain a viable option, he cannot kill more than 1 creature every 15 secs, else the haunting stacks will accumulate and give his instakills a DC below 40, making them no longer worthwhile. This remains true for the duration of the quest (or till shrine if haunting resets there).

This is a gigantic problem. They way it works out is that regardless of how high you start at with your DCs, once you hit the minimum useful DC level, you get to kill 1 thing every 15 seconds. If you exceed that, your DC will inexorably creep below the useful level, and instakills are no longer efficient/worthwhile. The crux of the problem: it barely matters where you starting DC is. A 40DC caster and a 50 DC caster work at PRECISELY the same trash-clearing efficiency (kills/sec) after the first few mobs. If the quest has a 'minimum useful DC' of 40 like we specified above, the 50 DC caster operates exactly like the 40DC caster over the entire quest, except he has a cushion of 5mobs spread throughout it somewhere, it can be at the beginning or the end, but it is always 5mobs, and that is it. Doesnt matter how many mobs are in the quest, or how long it is. As long as you bump up against the haunting timer (and you will... trash encounters happen very fast in a good group, 1 kill per 15 seconds is way less than it seems), all casters who can instakill at all are essentially equalized.

TLDR, this is a bad mechanic which makes ALL DC casters equally limited. It's an unnecessary mechanic where we already have many margins of adjustment to affect the usefulness of instakills: mob hp, fort saves, SR, DW-casting creatures, and orange names are all better ways of adjusting encounters. I'm going to beat this point again: more heterogeneity in mob-types within encounters would be an entirely better solution. Some mobs with very high fortsave/SR (but not superhigh Hp! if there arent other efficient ways of dealing with the mob, then what's the point?) mixed into encounters is a far better solution.

Excellent post!

Hope this will enlighten even the dumbest person who is supporting this haunting.....

[justagame]

There are so many less annoying / less harmful ways to do this. If it's the AOEs that are a problem, then:

1. Increase the sp cost on Wail and Circle, and increase the cooldowns moderately
2. Have a smaller sp cost increase on implosion (it has a cap already, and already has a long cooldown).
3. Leave the single-target instakills alone (they aren't the problem here)

So much simpler, it doesn't disproportionately penalize players who have invested in DCs, doesn't disproportionatly hit divines (who have few alternatives), and doesn't send people running for the hills. More importantly, it's not an over-reaction to what extremely good/geared players are doing (something so many nerfs appear to be, unfortunately).

[Drona]

A lot of players who are complaining want to feel like they are contributing more to the team, and the DEV's have apparently heard and internalized this. Eladrin has basically said as much in the initial post in this thread, and IIRC, he said it elsewhere as well.

I say to those players: Put up your own LFM. Do not take sorcs or wizards or FVS in your group. You have the freedom to do so.
There is not a single dungeon/raid in this game that states the above mentioned classes are mandatory in a party.

[MeliCat]

See, that quote makes me think this is ALL about other people whining and not about devs going "hmm, how can we make this more of a team game?'

Because if the 'rest of the party' is also casters (which it could very well be), they aren't the ones harping about 'teamwork,' they just play together.

If you are not a team player, then anything the game is going to do is not going to make you one. When you come to a party to play then you have a shared goal. If you work with others to greater and faster achieve this team goal then you are a team player. If you don't, you're not. No game change is going to make that happen.

We just did an eDA. 2x overgeared PMs, me on a first lifer FvS with pretty ordinary gear, a geared monk, a pally, a fairly geared bard. The kills were pretty evenly spread. So my first lifer with **** gear is keeping up and contributing no problems cos everyone is working as a team (bard and PMs are contributing CC) - and regardless of working as a team or not we just wanna kill stuff ASAP cos that is fun.

Trying to think how that eDA would go with the new changes... PMs will not get as many kills? They will be relegated to CC (which they were doing anyway as par for the course) and sit back and do SLAs I guess while waiting for timers? Bard, pally no change. Monk may lose some kills. My FvS is just as screwed though - implode and sit back, destruct and slay living and again I can do nothing - I just have to wait or extremely ineffectually hit stuff with a sword (this is a caster build FvS wis 41). So all this change does is slow down eDA and makes it less fun as there is less we can do. Making things longer makes resources be more likely to be used up - DDO is very much about timing your sp - so hey it's a good thing my FvS has to wait longer as I'm going to most likely have to heal more. Let's say we had even less CC in there - a first lifer less geared bard and maybe less geared wizzes. My insta-kills that used to help the party manage the incoming damage - gone - so um... yeah... definitely not as fun or effective.

All I see in this change is a totally unfair penalty to first lifers and a ****ing off of multi-TRs for zero reason.

[Saiyren]

I much prefer this Haunting than the Hard to Kill.
I'm on my second life being a PM Wizard. Had a hard enough time insta-killing things with terrible DC's the first time around with my highest DC being a 34 (if I remembered correctly).
the -2 penalty/15 seconds seems slightly excessive and it would be great if it could change to maybe -1/15 seconds or -2/8 seconds since the spell cooldowns aren't that long.
The suggestion to increase the cost of certain spells, seems reasonable provided that the increase in sp isn't too great... remember we're wizards, not sorcs. Our spell points are already limited.

[Zio_Kose]

one moment...

All this have no sense:

Increase lv cap at 25
Introduce epic destiny
Insert a new difficulty in quest (epic hard/elite)

You have to fight new strong hight CR mobs, be prepared for these tough new challenges, we put the overpower epic destiny to rise to the occasion... but wait a second... we have to nerf your old spell because is to much OP...

Melee with epic destiny ability will kill trash in about 1 sec, that's not the same as istantkill?

Over 1k dmg on hit, several ability will do that aoe, but that's ok because first life melee without gear are happy right? new noobs players are happy right? but if is caster with spell who cost SP and need PL and gear is unbalance? 9 PL for increase Spell Pen, 1 years for 3/4 equip, and now we have to TR our PM in sorcerer?

it's ridiculous put new hard content and the epic destiny for strengthen classes, and then see people cry for nerf something old that is used now that the lvl cap is 20.

[Dolphious]

Nice achievement mate... but... wrong thread... try posting that in: Achievement

The point was it's not an achievement, easy-peasy. Of course on a non caster, soloing adq2 at levels is either very gear intensive (AC) or very technically challenging, on a caster it's a cakewalk, even on one as gimpy as mine.

[GermanicusMaximus]

The problem here is that most melees play stupid. Sorry, I said it.

Thanks for having the courage to say it. I think most people who play this game extensively, and are active in this thread, know this to be true. We have simply been too diplomatic to state it. However, given the importance of the topic at hand, its probably best that we have a candid conversation about the reality of this game.

Given that we are really just talking about reserving a certain number of spots for melee classes, perhaps the best solution is to return to the original proposal, Hard to Kill, with one significant modification.

Epic Hard and Epic Elite should indeed be only for the best of the best. In that environment, party slots should go to the best of the best, without an artificial game mechanic that reserves a certain number of slots for melee toons.

Hard to Kill can apply to Epic Casual, where melee can have their reserved slots.

Epic Normal? I don't have a strong preference here, other than to ask if there is a significant reason that Hard to Kill needs to be extended to Epic Normal. Without a significant justification, I think we should limit artificial game mechanics as much as possible.

[Vordax]

The point was it's not an achievement, easy-peasy. Of course on a non caster, soloing adq2 at levels is either very gear intensive (AC) or very technically challenging, on a caster it's a cakewalk, even on one as gimpy as mine.

I think the first to solo that quest was a ranger, when the cap was 12. (uber gear didn't exist then)

[Zio_Kose]

The point was it's not an achievement, easy-peasy. Of course on a non caster, soloing adq2 at levels is either very gear intensive (AC) or very technically challenging, on a caster it's a cakewalk, even on one as gimpy as mine.

And all this in that way makes reference to the istantkill? did u FoD Queen?