Player Character Balance

[Recared]

I don't agree with your vision that the game is only good if it requires high saves and evasion. I see no qualitative difference between "you have to have top saves and evasion to be effective" and "you have to have top dps to be effective." (The latter being your version of the bad result of not requiring high saves and evasion.)

One of the near-universal issues brought up in this thread is that meleeing is too punitive in EE, giving range an imbalanced advantage. I don't see why addressing that issue would destroy the game.

Hi Ellis,

I don't have that vision you refer to, maybe you misunderstood my post or I didn't explain myself properly
Regarding you second paragraph, I agree completely, again there must have been some misunderstanding.

[SirValentine]

The Reconstruct spell / SLA now receives half benefit from spell power.

It it's good enough for Heal, it's good enough for Reconstruct! Make it so! (Or un-nerf Heal.)

-move Evasion to monk 9

No thank you. I don't play a Monk splash. I only played a (pure) Monk once. But this is wrong. Nerf every DDO-created enhancement and ED, but when you start messing with base class abilities, you've crossed the line. This is DDO, not generic-MMO.

-nerf 10k stars to throwers only or make it a universal feat

I'm not sure why a throwing stars feat EVER applied to bows in the first place. Anyone have any insight?

-crit multiplier to fire stance

This suggestion seems almost universal, and I have yet to hear a good argument against it. Many others have said, right now Earth is superior both offensively and defensively.

Paladin
-The saves bonus from Divine Grace cannot exceed your paladin levels.

The FvS/Sorc spell point bonus manages to partially apply only for multiclass, while pure get the full benefit regardless of level.

Likewise, I see no reason to limit a pure 20 Paladin to only +20 if their Charisma bonus is higher. Such a change, if implemented, should ONLY apply to Paladin multiclasses, not pure Paladins.

[Shmuel]

I see a MAJOR balance problem. Here it is:

Far too much development time is spent on adjusting/tweaking character builds and abilities and far too little time is spent on developing new content. It is completely out of whack and killing the game.

Leave the rules as they are and focus exclusively on making new content.I am not the only one who is sick of having to readjust my build every other update, only to find that once I do have nothing new to play.

If you want some suggestions here are mine:

Epic-ify Titan, Hound, Vision of Destruction, and Abbott. If you have time later, do the same for the orchard and restless isles quests and for the vale and shroud. (Shroud could simply add a 4th tier to existing greensteel items without needing to completely revamp the entire greensteel system.) Even if it is just increasing the cr to an appropriate level and revamping the loot, it will be a simple way of having more endgame raids.

Stop modifying existing systems. Character progression, class balance, enhancements, feats, epic destinies all have some issues and are not perfect. They will never be perfect. They are, for the moment, in MUCH better shape then the game as a whole and content development has been. U21 showed us you can still create great content, please get back to it and let this rebalancing stuff die. For the record, I say this even as my favorite toon, my bard, rots in useless hell because bards have been so terribly underpowered as epic levels advanced. BUT LET IT LIE! Make some new content. Or revamp old content to level 30.

[Recared]

I don't agree with your vision that the game is only good if it requires high saves and evasion. I see no qualitative difference between "you have to have top saves and evasion to be effective" and "you have to have top dps to be effective." (The latter being your version of the bad result of not requiring high saves and evasion.)

One of the near-universal issues brought up in this thread is that meleeing is too punitive in EE, giving range an imbalanced advantage. I don't see why addressing that issue would destroy the game.

Hmmm what I meant to say is that is saves and evasion are irrelevant in EE, nobody will build for that, with the implications that has (in my opinion, bad).

It is fine and good that there are challenging features in the game as long as there is a way to overcome them. Incoming damage in EE for melees is extremely unmanageable, that's a challenging feature that can be addressed. But eliminating completely a challenging feature for the hardest content (where it matters) is a mistake in my opinion.

Gyga

[elvesunited]

The ranger gets twf feats, not the arcane archer. The AA is a PRE which is also available to elves and half elves. AAs can be any class.

Word games, you know what I meant.

Whether or not you dedicate any additional feats to melee combat is completely up to you. There is no feat shortage with rangers, that is one of the great things about the class. You can do both: melee and ranged. But repeat after me, you are not a specialist in either.

But the ranger can be a specialist if you choose to be one. That's like saying a Druid elementalist can't specialize as a spellcaster because he has the ability to turn into a wolf.

I am always very interested to hear from people building rangers who think that with all of the feat choices available to them there is no room for one or two basic melee feats. What are these other feats that are more important to you?

Dodge, Improved Crit, precision, point blank, quicken, Toughness, Mobility, Spring Attack( for the dodge )
Just because someone is an archer doesn't mean you don't want to invest in some defensive feats.

Here is a very simple recipe for an AA ranger who is running in shiradi to safely melee even in EE content; use Pin, or Otto's Whistler, then go nuts on your helpless victim with your melee weapons for the duration of the CC effect.

As someone who has used Pin and Otto's. They actually have the pin or dance effect once in a blue moon. Pin doesn't even effect attacking just movement. That's not a big window for a character with limited durability to switch weapons, jump in and do melee damage. ( Besides my ranger archer character's ranged DPS is better than his melee DPS )

Whether or not you dedicate any additional feats to melee combat is completely up to you. There is no feat shortage with rangers, that is one of the great things about the class. You can do both: melee and ranged. But repeat after me, you are not a specialist in either.

But the ranger can be a specialist if you choose to be one. That's like saying a Paladin must use a shield. The character class is a starting point. Then with your choices you can either specialize or not specialize to whatever you desire.

I don't know whether it's just me, but there seems to be an absolute flood of people on the forums with no idea how to play the ranger class, who rather than learning how to do it, have engaged in this epic session of whining about how weak their class is. It is just incredible

I've got got both an arcane archer ranger and a tempest ranger character. I like the ranger class. And having played both ( and originally with the tempest having tried to be a true combat style hybrid ), I prefer to specialize in one form of combat. With the archer it's ranged combat. With the tempest it's melee combat.

[nibel]

Which, as I said, is unrelated to wearing robes or not. Any body slot item, be it Full Plate or Robes, has it's Dodge cap directly from it's Max Dex Bonus. Robes have no Max Dex Bonus, therefore, robes have no Dodge cap. I'm talking about equipment. The fact that characters have an overall Dodge cap is not relevant.

If you actually have any evidence of your claim that robes have some kind of built-in Dodge cap, I'd still like to see it.

Now, that is just discussing semantics. You got the point I was making.

[Levonestral]

Funny, I'm kind of on the fence about this one.

On one hand, I really don't want to see my favorite characters broken or heavily nerfed because I really love blowing through EE content on them and listening to the mobs cry while I pummel them to pieces

Blitz, for me, is amazing fun. Zerging through EE quests, killing everything in sight and laughing on my way through. I love it, I really do. Nothing compares. Many players though use Blitz on a regular basis, but struggle to maintain it. Is it really fair to them to have it further nerfed making it impossible for them to even consider it anymore? Doesn't see quite right to me.

The problem being raised is that many people feel there are only certain builds that are "effective" in EE content. Although this isn't exactly true, many builds I've seen (including many of my own) although aren't "the best", they certainly are viable with teamwork. I would prefer to see things help out these builds so that everyone can feel like they are contributing more to a party instead of nerfing others.

Now, that said; I fully agree that the reason many of these "OP" builds came into existence is because of the insanity Turbine has created in many EE mobs. Insane amount of HP bags of meat sitting there ready to beat you into pieces should you come face to face with them for too long. The result? Ranged DPS using high bursts to take them down or high melee self healing DPS with full stacked Blitz counters. Turbine created this problem, not the players. We're only trying to deal with the problems they've introduced the best we can.

So, would I want to see my favorite builds nerfed, heck no; If Turbine wants to adjust the mobs down to match the nerf's, then things might not be too bad. Forcing us to slog away at these meat-bag mobs with newly watered down builds certainly doesn't make for a fun game.

Please tread carefully; balance, although in theory sounds good, can a be tricky and messy mistress that could possibly haunt you in the long term. Please, don't make any rash decisions without considering everything (and everyone!) involved not just those "OP" builds and high end players. There are many others out there who play this game also.

[EllisDee37]

I have always had the assumption that nerfing blitz/furyshot/whatever would go hand in hand with nerfing mob hp and damage in EE. (EH seems about right.) If they actually nerfed the OP abilities but didn't adjust EE, that would be a tragic mistake.

[Thar]

Honestly, I think you're going about this the wrong way. The issue is not that some classes are so powerful and others are not, it's that you're creating content that require to adopt the most suitable class.

Was heavy dps like fighters and barbarians over powered back in the shroud days when level 20 was max? Or cc casters? Why was Monks and Rangers not the vogue?

I tell you why, you have created a game of HPbags, inflated saves and mechanics where you can avoid lots of damage through evasion or ranged but there are little to mitigate damage in melee. Simply put, critters always hit, spells always takes and there's not enough DR or PRR to make a non evasion heavy dps viable unless they cheese blitz. And if they're not blitzing they better be avoiding damage by stunning, knocking down, evasion and or ranged.

Thus you get Monkchers, Rangers, Shiradi spammers. Because CC is not that viable and useful and unless you can conserve your resources you're going to bleed through your maximized spells in no time. That's again because of HPbag critters.

Look at the current upper end content and ask yourself if it favors melee or evasion and ranged? To 'nerf' the few viable options in order to balance classes will only make everything weaker across the board while the real issue remains. The content have gone off the rails. A EN Giant in a quest with 55k HP? That keep knocking you back? Of course I will use a blitzer or a ranged with manyarrow fury. Or a Shiradi caster or something using all the heavy draconic spell damage. That favor the classes that can put most spell power or ranged or whatever into such a silly idiotic encounter.

Or the red named battle ragers in the Shadow raid. I mean seriously; what kind of absurd encounter is that? Of course I will range with maximum SP and since there's no end to spawns I don't want to be anything but a Shiradi caster because I don't feel to sludge against the flow of trash with a limited SP pool and I'm sure healers don't want to SP sponge a fragile heavy hitter.

You created this; not by making blitzing good or Shiradi resources saving fun. Not by allowing manyarrow to be fueled by adrenaline - but by making lazy encounters using the worst mechanics (lots of HP and no way to use tactics on them). Thus your reaction is now to change the reaction so maybe you can balance the critter imbalance.

Here's a miuch better idea. Start working on mechanics. Make smarter critter encounters and where tactical feats are more useful than brute force. Allow people to think outside DPS and figure out how to reduce the overall effectiveness of Shiradi in all cases. Be smart and don't be afraid of making it fun. Right now it's all DPS.

Think about it; how many red named regular critters do you have right now? Look at haunted hall. TONS. Look at the raids, TONS. Players reactions will therefore always be to find the most effective way to deal with those kind of lazy mechanics. if you increase HP we will go or the most cost effective way to DPS that. If you go for resource wasting encounters we will try to find the most resource saving.

Then finally it's about fun. Some stuff is just not fun. Others are. Fun is the essence of playing a game. If you nerf everything to a gray mass of sameness you remove fun. You remove incentive to do something and you will make people look for content that allow fun. I don't want to play the equivalent of 'caster'. I want to play a draconic earth sorc.

excellent post.

although i will say that tank pre's need to be cheaper or pack some built in intim bonus, bards need a serious look at, and dc casting needs to be viable in all gameplay to some effect as he states above. if you limit 90% of the spells/feats/tactics then of course the players will navigate to the only remaining options that make it work. This isn't one of the other crappy mmo's that it seems ok to die 20 x a quest. That isn't the Dnd mindset.

oh and the shadow raid needs to have 2-3 puzzles removed. seriously... took an hour to do the mirror puzzles...

[Daze]

Wow ... 23 pages of walls of text posts to say something that takes a few lines.



All balanced means is every class/race should be just as playable as every other class/race:

Fix Bards

Fix Barbarian rage to be cast through ... give it a cost or some prereqs etc. that's fine.

Fix the thrower crit range ... it's almost the only thing that makes a halfling useful .... that and as sacrifices to the loot gods.

Fix melee in general ... how is it that a fighter in fullplate is squishy to trash mobs?



Done

[Feralthyrtiaq]

You MUST consider the fact that not every player will have the hand/eye coordination, manual dexterity and mental capacity for tactics and decision making to get 100% of a perfectly built/tomed/geared/macroed FoTM's DPS capabilities.

If one could imagine a bell-curve distribution of % of Player base on Y and % of a builds DPS potential on the X then it would show a very low % of players (due to variable factors mentioned above would) excel with a build getting close to if not 100% of a FoTM and correspondingly low % would get rubbish DPS out of the same build.

Also, this fictional example would show the vast majority of the populace are only getting around 60-70% of a builds potential.

It's also in a vacuum....and really has nothing at all to do with anything due to individual subjective fun factor.

IF YOU REALLY WANT BALANCE.....Fix the content to be in line with 60%-70% of your player base and leave room for some to shine and some to fail because not everyone HAS to get a Ribbon/Medal.

[Hathorian]

Lovely. Another round of sledgehammer nerfs are on the way.

Please don't nerf my characters!!!!

There are a variety of quest levels and difficulties and different builds are stronger or weaker at different levels. The same build options are available for all players. If someone isn't happy with their build they can always improve or change it, the same as everyone else.

[Hathorian]

Wow ... 23 pages of walls of text posts to say something that takes a few lines.



All balanced means is every class/race should be just as playable as every other class/race:

Fix Bards

Fix Barbarian rage to be cast through ... give it a cost or some prereqs etc. that's fine.

Fix the thrower crit range ... it's almost the only thing that makes a halfling useful .... that and as sacrifices to the loot gods.

Fix melee in general ... how is it that a fighter in fullplate is squishy to trash mobs?



Done

^. yes.

No need to nerf 1000s of people to quell the whining of the few.

[EllisDee37]

Fix Barbarian rage to be cast through ... give it a cost or some prereqs etc. that's fine.

This has merit.

Maybe let them cast spells/scrolls/wands while raged but make the rage penalty for casting that animations and cooldowns are 2x or 3x as long. Sort of a tenser's on steroids. (It's the slowed animations that would give the penalty some teeth.)

[LOOON375]

With regard to an easy fix, would be to make some tier one and two abilities tier three and tier four abilities.

Take the monk destiny tree for example: I believe the bonus to reflex saves is a tier 4 ability. While in every other tree, that's a tier one or tier two (shadowdancer) ability.

The tier one ability of 1.5 (W) unarmed damage bonus could/should be tier three or four. IMHO

[Qhualor]

This has merit.

Maybe let them cast spells/scrolls/wands while raged but make the rage penalty for casting that animations and cooldowns are 2x or 3x as long. Sort of a tenser's on steroids. (It's the slowed animations that would give the penalty some teeth.)

I don't want my barbarians broken. Thanks.

[SirValentine]

Now, that is just discussing semantics. You got the point I was making.

It's not. I got the point you were making and was disagreeing with it. Did you get the point _I_ am making?

If you want the PRR system to work analogous to the Dodge system, Heavy Armor should have no PRR cap, just as robes/outfits have no Dodge cap.

[Hathorian]

The state of balance in the game is terrible.

The solution is simple but a lot of work.

First, nerf the hell out of Furyshot and Blitz and Shiradi, with the goal of reducing their effectiveness to at most 105% of the effectiveness of other characters.
Secondly, rebalance all of the quests that were designed under the assumption that players are using broken builds. If optimal group DPS falls from 50000 party-wide to 20000, then mobs need to lose 60% of their HP.
Third, there'll be a couple of people that whine over the nerf (despite the fact that their characters are still capable of completing quests in about the same amount of time and with the same overall difficulty). Grease the door, so that it DOES hit them on the way out. Hard. These people are poison - let them go and ruin a competing MMO.
Finally, offer some form of respec options to players whose characters are significantly broken by the change, ideally including the option to 'respec' now-useless Ranger past lives into different passive past life feats.

I disagree with your post and would also like to point out that it is very antisocial. I don't see the problem if some builds do more damage than others. There are a variety of quest levels and difficulties, different builds are stronger or weaker in different levels, quests, encounters, and everyone has the same build options as everyone else. The last thing we need is more sledgehammer nerfs from the Devs. That would lead to a lot of people quitting the game and a loss of revenue for Turbine. What they need to do, as other posters have mentioned, is change the content a little rather than nerf the players.

[Bolo_Grubb]

Biggest thought -- be careful if you guys are going to make changes.

+1
This is the only post I read before writing my response.

I am not so concerned with balance as I am with having viable options.

Armor class is part of the issue as I see it. There is very little reason for wearing heavy armor and using a tower shield with the way things are right now.

I do think there are great options when it comes to weapon types. Sure some still stand out as the best, but you see players using a wider variety of weapons now then a few years ago. That is a good thing.

Always remember that a big reason many of us were drawn to DDO is because of how close it is to PnP. In PnP you needed a variety of classes and abilities to accomplish a quest. Do not balance things so that everyone ends up playing the same character.

[SirValentine]

I don't see the problem if some builds do more damage than others. There are a variety of quest levels and difficulties, different builds are stronger or weaker in different levels, quests, encounters, and everyone has the same build options as everyone else.

Nobody disagrees with that. Nobody expects perfect balance. And nobody wants everyone to be exactly the same.

But saying builds can perform differently is not the same as saying it's good to have a few builds vastly outperforming most others.