Player Character Balance

[avepepix]

We are based on 3.5 the d20 system and it even starts to break down at upper levels and with the enhancement system and the Monty Haul loot system it happened here much faster than it does in pnp I don't see how they can easily "balance" with taking large steps away from its roots and if they do I question if I will continue to play. If they leave heroic pretty much alone and concentrate on epic then I could continue there. But I fear they are going to totally ruin the game that I have enjoyed playing for the last 8 years.

Dont loose your fate.
Some classes needs love, its only that. The perfect balance dont exist, maybe a little boost to some classes will help.

[SirValentine]

Well in pnp capstone dont exist =)

Right...and neither does the enhancement system. Since the enhancement system itself is a big source of current imbalance, using another part of it, capstones, to try to partially counter-act that doesn't seem crazy.

The capstone dont make any diference

Hence people asking for better capstones.

[Nédime]

Well, the answer to "what edition?" should be a no-brainer: DDO was specifically designed from v3.5.

Roger that, Sir, but seems to me we're kinda far from it now, no ?

[Nédime]

We are based on 3.5 the d20 system and it even starts to break down at upper levels and with the enhancement system and the Monty Haul loot system it happened here much faster than it does in pnp I don't see how they can easily "balance" with taking large steps away from its roots and if they do I question if I will continue to play. If they leave heroic pretty much alone and concentrate on epic then I could continue there. But I fear they are going to totally ruin the game that I have enjoyed playing for the last 8 years.

Tbh, I don't care much for heroic, I mean, as a multi-TR i have leveled well and awfully built toons with an elite streak till 20. I've also played my 1st and 2nd life toons with multi-TR and while they're not as powerful, I managed to go through quite easily (well there are still some specific quests that can be harder for some builds and easier for other on elite : spies, invaders, running with devils, spinner, ETK, ...).

I'm not sure if the balance problem is such an acute problem on heroic. When I was overwhelmed I could fascinate/entral half a dungeon and finsih them one by one.

[Sir_L0LL0]

[Fhauvial]

I'm not sure if the balance problem is such an acute problem on heroic. When I was overwhelmed I could fascinate/entral half a dungeon and finsih them one by one.

Heroics feel like they're at a much better balance point. It's Epic that's blatantly broken.

[Amundir]

I started reading, but then skipped to end. Man there are alot of posts, heh.

IMO, the place to start in balancing is to take a look at the base classes. Examine each class at lv 20. Ask people to identify why playing the class (in non-epic content) is undesirable. Identify pain points. Change them. See the backlash, cause obviously that will ripple up into epic content, which will be the hardest part cause there are so many variances a person can take with the current epic destiny system.

Some things off the top of my head to consider (which people will hate. they do not take into account what you may *need* to do epic content currently).
1) Raise level Evasion is aquired.
Why: Increases the cost to benifit for splashing.
2) Require 10 (maybe 8) levels of certain base classes as a prereq for selecting/using an epic destiny (possibly exempting twists).
Why: Focuses the destinies to classes related to them, which personally makes sense. Also could help with then looking at builds 20+ and looking for pain points. I know many will hammer this as 'the opposite to ddos character customization', but lets consider that that possibly is a factor in the imbalance. I don't mean to say it's bad, just that possibly it could be scaled back some.

[CeltEireson]

Heroics feel like they're at a much better balance point. It's Epic that's blatantly broken.

Probably more a case of that's its not as apparent in heroics, or at least not for experienced players. But yes the higher level you go the more there seems to be an imbalance.

[Krell]

Here is what I posted in another thread about how to balance and fix pure classes. The only change suggested was that perhaps the percentage healing for the occult slayer lvl 18 core was too high.

I agree if the goal is to get more classes and EDs effective in EE, these suggestions would get us closer. The number of builds (classes/races/EDs) that are effective in EE are too small, and more players keep gravitating towards them leading to less diversity. I don't think the answer is to further restrict the number of effective builds through nerfing. Another alternative is to nerf builds and look at EE difficulty, although that may be less popular. One way or the other I think we need more builds that are effective in top level content so that players can enjoy the diversity of DDO and still be welcome in most groups. Once you have the high level goal and strategy, I think working out the change details will be easier. Personally I would be curious to know if the overall goal is to make EE exclusive to a small percent of players, to boost up more builds to be effective in EE, or to look at EE difficulty. I think that would help us to better focus our feedback.

[Qhualor]

I agree if the goal is to get more classes and EDs effective in EE, these suggestions would get us closer. The number of builds (classes/races/EDs) that are effective in EE are too small, and more players keep gravitating towards them leading to less diversity. I don't think the answer is to further restrict the number of effective builds through nerfing. Another alternative is to nerf builds and look at EE difficulty, although that may be less popular. One way or the other I think we need more builds that are effective in top level content so that players can enjoy the diversity of DDO and still be welcome in most groups. Once you have the high level goal and strategy, I think working out the change details will be easier. Personally I would be curious to know if the overall goal is to make EE exclusive to a small percent of players, to boost up more builds to be effective in EE, or to look at EE difficulty. I think that would help us to better focus our feedback.

ive been paying closer attention to builds in epics for the past couple weeks on my server. most pure builds are divine/arcane types, but I would say they make up the majority of the pures I see in epics. I would say 3/4 of the players have 2-9 levels of rogue/monk, but monk makes up for most of that percentage. in EEs I would say 8 times out of 10 a group is made of ranged/caster types, while on EH its a random mixture of everything.

this is the way players have gravitated to building characters due to how the content is designed. if some how the devs were able to create a better balance so that all classes and builds can feel useful and not feel like a constant soulstone, im willing to bet there would be less nerf rages against certain FOTM builds and everyone can play what they want, pure or mix. the game would be a lot more fun if there could be more variety that is certainly viable in end game content than what we have now.

[Uska]

Heroics feel like they're at a much better balance point. It's Epic that's blatantly broken.

Yah that's one reason I think they need to concentrate their balancing actions on ED's and not core class abilities as they are likely to break heroic level play that way.

[CaptainSpacePony]

Just had a lengthy discussion about Paladins. My friend really wants to play a paladin, and I too admit to having an unhealthy affection for the holy rollers myself.

We discussed numerous builds and almost everyone would be better if it was something other than paladin (beyond the 1st 2 levels).

He recommended a partial fix that would be very easy to implement:
Give paladins the war priest tree.
More PRR, deity's weapon, blur, ameliorating strikes, etc.

It still won't be enough, but it would go a long way and be in flavor. I've always thought the WP tree was modeled after paladins in the 1st place.

Here's hoping the devs are still reading this thread.

[HatsuharuZ]

Just had a lengthy discussion about Paladins. My friend really wants to play a paladin, and I too admit to having an unhealthy affection for the holy rollers myself.

We discussed numerous builds and almost everyone would be better if it was something other than paladin (beyond the 1st 2 levels).

He recommended a partial fix that would be very easy to implement:
Give paladins the war priest tree.
More PRR, deity's weapon, blur, ameliorating strikes, etc.

It still won't be enough, but it would go a long way and be in flavor. I've always thought the WP tree was modeled after paladins in the 1st place.

Here's hoping the devs are still reading this thread.

That would be easy, but... I don't think it's a good idea. Warpriest has already made paladins redundant.

[Vargouille]

OK!

My apologies: I still don't have an extremely substantial post to give right at this moment, because my brain is melting, but I've caught up on every post in this thread so far!

You guys have a lot to say. Also, you don't need to repeat yourself in the hopes that we'll see it. Because I'm reading every single post. (I will neither confirm nor deny some amount of so-called "skimming" that may occur when I see a specific poster making a post that starts off sounding very similar to other posts by that poster).

Next steps: Soon(tm), I'm going to try to summarize what I feel you guys have said (from my nine pages of notes... luckily I could just add "+1" to many of the thoughts after one or two dozen pages). This serves multiple purposes, including sorting the information out in my own head, telling you guys where we are all collectively at, and sending around to the rest of the DDO development team for those who are not so crazy as to try to read this entire thread. (I'll do my best to give some amount of developer comments as well, but the bulk of that might need to follow later.)

There were some great individual posts (and some of my 'quick' notes are, "Go back and read this guy's post again for some good thoughts"), and lots of good stuff to hear from everyone. There were some clear patterns, many of which helped reinforce what we already thought was going on (but it's extremely helpful to us to hear it from you!), and some occasional surprises. There were a few ideas I personally hadn't seen before that were Quite Interesting and could end up making it into DDO.

I'd like to thank those who filled out surveys, as well, which you are welcome to still do for another couple of days (at which point we'll probably try to aggregate the data we have, so after that it won't be as useful). We know the survey wasn't perfect, and also not extensive -- not being overly extensive was by design, as we don't want to waste your time, nor ours. For instance, we knowingly left out Races, for time the being, and didn't want the survey to get into individual abilities yet -- we selfishly like having you guys come up with the list of abilities that deserve more attention (for good or ill) rather than us focusing the discussion on the ones we pick. The broad view is what we wanted, and what we got!

None of the reactions to this are necessarily going to be imminent. I'd like to assuage any fears that this post was in direct preparation for incoming nerfs. The previously discussed upcoming patch certainly won't, and the next update may or may not have any significant changes based on this discussion (much of this is based on time and doing it right). However, there's some obvious takeaways from both this and No-Dice's Monster Stat thread that should help us direct new content to a better place.

There was one item that came up a few times that makes it clear some players have the wrong idea: Balance is definitely not about making many different play styles (or classes, or EDs, etc.) play the same. Balance is about making many different playstyles viable, so you (the players) feel like there are as many legitimate options as we can possibly give you. The greatest concern we have, and a major driver of discussing this right now, is the worry that there are not as many legitimate playstyles as we could be giving you.

The single laser-focused item for a preview of the summary of the thread: Melee in Epic Elite probably needs some help. There's many possible ways to come at this problem, while trying to address other issues as well. Identifying problems now, solutions later!

Thanks again for a lot of great feedback! Happy for it to keep coming.

[Qhualor]

The single laser-focused item for a preview of the summary of the thread: Melee in Epic Elite probably needs some help. There's many possible ways to come at this problem, while trying to address other issues as well. Identifying problems now, solutions later!

happy to hear this is an acknowledged problem and anxiously awaits your proposals.

[Samir_Bennal]

OK!

The single laser-focused item for a preview of the summary of the thread: Melee in Epic Elite probably needs some help. There's many possible ways to come at this problem, while trying to address other issues as well. Identifying problems now, solutions later!

Thanks again for a lot of great feedback! Happy for it to keep coming.

Maybe my fighter will finally come back after his almost 2 year vacation sitting on the shelf waiting to be useful again.

[sirgog]

The single laser-focused item for a preview of the summary of the thread: Melee in Epic Elite probably needs some help. There's many possible ways to come at this problem, while trying to address other issues as well. Identifying problems now, solutions later!

On this specific thing (which I did not touch in my earlier posts but is a real issue):

The real issue here is the PRR formula, which means that melee players have hit a point of extreme diminishing returns on PRR and so it can't provide any further defense than it does now.

I think the solution is to change the currently very complex formula to the following:

Player base PRR = 100 (not the current 0)
To lose 100 HP from physical damage, you need to take damage equal to your PRR.

So if your only PRR source is a +20 PRR item, each 120 damage you suffer is converted to 100 HP lost.


This would remove the soft cap on PRR and help melee survivability scale up better with player gear.

[EllisDee37]

To me, the compelling reason that casters and melee need to be on roughly even footing is that they're playing exactly the same content. It's not fun if one caster can solo content that takes 5 melees and a very good healer, assuming roughly equal levels of player skill.

The reason I feel that casters and melee don't need to be on roughly equal footing is because, at least in my mind: "Casters kill trash, melee kill bosses." Despite being an avid soloer for much of the game's content, I don't feel any particular need to balance the game around soloing.

The other reason is because it's pretty much impossible to discuss balancing melee without having a bunch of people come in and try to shut it down with comments about how it doesn't matter how imbalanced melees are because they're all way behind casters.

You're also disregarding ranged here.

I am indeed, and agreed that it's a major omission. Almost comically so. But since I don't play ranged characters I can't comment intelligently on them. (Other than the incredibly obvious, which is that getting both manyshot and 10k stars makes pure ranger arcane archers second-class range characters, which is just plain wrong.)

Depends on what you mean by "roughly even footing". It's OK if, say, casters excels at some things melees are weak at, as long as there's other meaningful areas where melees excel and casters are weaker.

Yes, that was my thinking. (Casters trash, melee boss.)

[axel15810]

This is my first post in this thread, I could write all day, but here are what I feel are the most important things to mention -

Melee vrs. Ranged vrs. Spellcasting -

Melee is the weakest of the three by far unless they are using Master's Blitz. The main reason is because melee takes so much damage as a result of being up in the monster's face. Heavy armor is much weaker than wearing robes or light armor. Heavy armor needs to mean something, especially in Epic Elite, because as of right now it is not near worth giving up Dodge and Evasion for the additional AC/PRR. The defensive effectiveness of AC/PRR based characters drop off completely in Epic Elite, whereas Dodge/Evasion characters do not experience this same drop off because Dodge gives the same miss chance always regardless of difficulty level. Epic Elite monsters have such high to-hit and hit for such high damage that AC/PRR means nothing. Also there is almost no way for Heavy Armor wearers to mitigate spell damage, evasion is the only way in the game to do this and it is only available to light armor or robe wearers. Right now, casters/archers actually have by far superior defensive abilities than heavy armor wearing/shield using tanks! This needs fixing!

Overpowered Monk and Paladin Splashes -

2 Monk and 2 Paladin offer so many benefits that it makes no sense NOT to splash them on most builds. That severely limits potential viable options. All capstones need a serious looking at because for most classes there is almost no reason to ever go pure. Pure builds for every class should not be a bad build choice, and right now unfortunately it is except for every class except perhaps the Wizard and Rogue class.

Overpowered abilities -

I won't go into detail since you seem to be aware from your original post the abilities which are overpowered (10k stars/manyshot being combined, shirardi multiple procs using magic missle/master's blitz/furyshot) are heads and tails above other abilities and need to be looked at.

Race imbalance -

Bladeforged are a big problem. They are by far the best race for most classes. In fact, there is no reason NOT to be bladeforged unless you are a cleric or favored soul, or a enchantment focused wizard. Melee classes are severely gimped if they are NOT bladeforged, as the survivbility gained via the reconstruct SLA is so much more powerful than anything offered by the other races. This is not even considering the defensive advantages gained. This is ruining teamwork in the game, everyone self-heals now. This as a result is killing the divine classes, as they have nobody to heal. There should be some kind of fallback for gaining the ability to self heal. Right now there is not.

[jakeelala]

This is my first post in this thread, I could write all day, but here are what I feel are the most important things to mention -

Melee vrs. Ranged vrs. Spellcasting -

Melee is the weakest of the three by far unless they are using Master's Blitz. The main reason is because melee takes so much damage as a result of being up in the monster's face. Heavy armor is much weaker than wearing robes or light armor. Heavy armor needs to mean something, especially in Epic Elite, because as of right now it is not near worth giving up Dodge and Evasion for the additional AC/PRR. The defensive effectiveness of AC/PRR based characters drop off completely in Epic Elite, whereas Dodge/Evasion characters do not experience this same drop off because Dodge gives the same miss chance always regardless of difficulty level. Epic Elite monsters have such high to-hit and hit for such high damage that AC/PRR means nothing. Also there is almost no way for Heavy Armor wearers to mitigate spell damage, evasion is the only way in the game to do this and it is only available to light armor or robe wearers. Right now, casters/archers actually have by far superior defensive abilities than heavy armor wearing/shield using tanks! This needs fixing!

Overpowered Monk and Paladin Splashes -

2 Monk and 2 Paladin offer so many benefits that it makes no sense NOT to splash them on most builds. That severely limits potential viable options. All capstones need a serious looking at because for most classes there is almost no reason to ever go pure. Pure builds for every class should not be a bad build choice, and right now unfortunately it is except for every class except perhaps the Wizard and Rogue class.

Overpowered abilities -

I won't go into detail since you seem to be aware from your original post the abilities which are overpowered (10k stars/manyshot being combined, shirardi multiple procs using magic missle/master's blitz/furyshot) are heads and tails above other abilities and need to be looked at.

Race imbalance -

Bladeforged are a big problem. They are by far the best race for most classes. In fact, there is no reason NOT to be bladeforged unless you are a cleric or favored soul, or a enchantment focused wizard. Melee classes are severely gimped if they are NOT bladeforged, as the survivbility gained via the reconstruct SLA is so much more powerful than anything offered by the other races. This is not even considering the defensive advantages gained. This is ruining teamwork in the game, everyone self-heals now. This as a result is killing the divine classes, as they have nobody to heal. There should be some kind of fallback for gaining the ability to self heal. Right now there is not.

This is not true.

Elves make phenomenal Dex builds, and inherent Displacement from DM's is very compelling as is a lot of racial dodge. Humans and Drow are arguably still the best DC casters, DC casting is just a bit behind Nuking at the moment so it doesn't matter.

Other races need a buff to make the closer to equal, IMO. Starting with Halflings, Dwarves, and Helfs. They don't need a lot of work, but BF is just too OP.

I do agree BF are the best Melee option in like 99% of cases however.