We’ve read the forum posts and tallied the surveys, and want to echo back what we’ve heard from you guys along with some of our thoughts on some specific points. There’s definitely even more feedback we’ve got notes on than just the stuff we’re listing here, but this highlights the most common and passionate feedback.
A compilation of some main points we’ve gathered from your feedback
The presumption is that most comments are about Epic Elite, as explicitly mentioned by many players.
For most characters, it’s hard to stay alive unless you avoid damage entirely.
• Melee monsters hit very hard. This pushes towards playing ranged characters to avoid monster melee damage.
• The most dangerous ranged enemies tend to be casters using spells that can be avoided with Reflex saving throws, which makes Evasion the best way to mitigate ranged damage.
What’s going on with monsters?
• Damage per hit from melee monsters is very high, even if you are building to mitigate it.
o It may be OK to hit this hard against robe-wearing arcane casters, but characters should be able to greatly reduce this damage with medium or heavy armor, appropriate feats, enhancements, destiny choices, and other itemization.
• Some other statistics may need looking at for Monsters, including hit points, saving throws, and the DCs of monster abilities.
On Balance Changes
There’s a wide variety of general opinions, including everything from “buff everything”, “nerf everything”, to “balance nothing”, “have a vision at Turbine and do the right thing!”, each of these repeated by multiple people. The best course probably involves some elements of all of these comments, both buffing and nerfing, possibly including nerfing monsters.
Many players have urged caution with any changes, specifically to minimize collateral damage. As an example, if changes are made to nerf monkcher Furyshotters, don’t break monks, rangers, other Fury of the Wild characters, and all ranged characters at the same time. Favor the scalpel over the sledgehammer.
Some quotes:
• “Characters should have to make tradeoffs. At the moment this isn't happening; some classes are able to have top notch dps and defense.”
• “DDO's greatest differentiating strength is the depth and robustness of character creation and development. The current situation effectively renders that moot, leaving DDO without a competitive advantage.”
• “This is a fantasy game, I log on to feel awesome.”
• “I'd like to see balance change once, to something good enough that most players are satisfied with it, and then stay that way for the duration. That would be perfect. But, you know... many small corrections as the need arises might be good enough.”
On Diversity
A few seemed concerned that balance meant making everything the same. That’s not the goal, and the diversity of different build options represents one of the greatest strengths of DDO. The major reason we would want to balance anything would be to make more builds feel viable and fun to play, even in the most difficult quests.
On Synergy
Many players noted that “overpowered” builds combine amazing synergies that may or may not have been intended. There are occasional combinations that produce unanticipated results, but generally speaking we aim to provide some synergies in character building. It’s OK for certain combos to be more than the sum of their parts, as long as there are lots of different synergies that don’t end up too far apart from each other in terms of fun and viability.
Survival & Defense
We’re thinking about the possibility of making some changes to how armor and shields work, with the goal of making medium and heavy armor more viable forms of defense in epic content. These discussions are at the most preliminary stages, but we’re aware there are issues here.
Multiclassing (ignoring Enhancements)
This could be another entire discussion. But many players thought it was crazy that multiclassing wasn’t the forefront of the discussion, so let’s talk about it.
We like being D&D. We are unlikely to significantly alter or remove core feats or abilities from classes or races.
Evasion is probably the biggest single draw for taking 2 Rogue or Monk levels. However, we may think about how common Reflex saving throws are vs. other saving throws, and other no-save effects that feel fair for monsters and players both. This would be a long-reaching goal, and would need to be made in concert with other changes, such as making sure that players aren’t simply dying, if Evasion was the only thing keeping most characters alive.
Multiclassing and Enhancement Trees
The enhancement pass in Update 19 certainly affected multiclassing. As a matter of learning from history, here’s some reasons why, which we were mostly aware of at the time:
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Frontloading and Minimizing changes to characters: Many popular & powerful abilities are “front-loaded”; they are on low tiers in the enhancement trees. This was very consciously done so that most characters could still get most of what they desired without much hassle. We knew this would incentivize multiclassing, but decided that was an acceptable cost. Even with this, during the enhancement pass there was a great deal of outcry. This is something we could make incremental changes to affect, but each change would probably make some subset of players upset, and we’re in no hurry to revamp everything and move everything around. (Giant tangential discussion for another time or place: “Class” enhancement trees aren’t a simple solution to this.)
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Number of enhancement trees: A major part of the original design (intended to present choice as well as help balance multiclass builds vs. pure builds) was the limit of 3 enhancement trees. Yes, you could still make a Henshin Mystic + Thief Acrobat, but you’d have to make meaningful choices and give things up to get them. Multiclassing is still clearly an increase in power (you get the “best” 3 trees out of 6-9, instead of just 3), but not as much as it is with 6 class trees. Essentially, we changed this due to feedback at the time, knowing it would help lead to the rise of multiclass characters. This is one of those places where we had a vision but it simply wasn’t accepted by the community at-large (which is not to place the blame on anyone.) We try to strike a balance between design considerations and the desires of the people who play our game, so we changed this to 6 class trees.
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Class Level Requirements: The U18 Enhancements largely required 6/12/18 class levels to get “the good stuff”. Both internally amongst the design team and publicly amongst the players, during the Enhancement pass a great variety of class level restrictions were proposed for the 5-tier trees we have now. These included some very strong calls for 1/3/6/12/28 (similar to the old system), all the way down to not requiring any class levels at all (essentially just requiring access to the tree). I’ll take personal responsibility for fighting for the 1/2/3/4/5 system we have today, which was for the goal of meaningful choices along with interesting possible builds. Instead of nearly every build being 20 or 18/2 or maybe 12/6/2, there’s a much wider variety of builds that players consider and actually take. Along with the third Core enhancement requiring level 6, there’s at least some real reasons to want anywhere from 1-6 class levels at least. And there are definitely some builds that splash 2/3/4 levels for specific enhancements and synergies. While these synergies do provide extra power, they also provide a much wider array of possible choices while still being choices (compared to only requiring 1 level of a class to access the entire tree). There’s still some debate that perhaps 1/2/3/4/5 is too generous, but this isn’t something we’d change lightly.
Frequency and Speed of Changes
In the forums, many players agreed that if something was going to be changed, it should be changed right away. However, there were some interesting notes, such as: “sometimes it takes a long long time before the synergy of certain things gets ‘popular’ and then is perceived as ‘overpowered’. Many months sometimes. Just because people discover a synergy straight away doesn't mean it should automatically be nerfed.” Also, the survey responses suggested that we should try to avoid any kind of immediate kneejerk reactions.
As a contemporary note: When something is nerfed for Divine Crusader on Lamannia, or between Lamannia and live launch of the patch, this is sometimes an example of this in action. With our efforts to try to get features in front of players on Lamannia sooner, you are likely to see more changes, including ‘nerfs’. (It’s difficult for designers to even think of changes as nerfs, for a feature that has never been live. Internally here at Turbine, a design may change many times before players even seen it, the power level going up and down all the time.)
What’s specific items do players consider overpowered?
Major caveat: Anything considered overpowered by some is also loved by others. We’re aware of this. Anything on this list is also NOT automatically going to be nerfed or changed in any particular way, but these are things we may take a closer look at. There’s quite a few other possibilities we might look at, but these were near the top of the list for discussions.
• Ranged Fury of the Wild
• Monks using 10K Stars and manyshot (monkchers)
• Bladeforged Reconstruct
Survey
We always appreciate the passionate and detailed feedback you guys provide us, both as forum posts and as survey results. We’re still trying to improve how we construct surveys in the future, including adding N/A options. It was not our intent to only include information from players who were extremely knowledgeable with all classes and epic destines; we could have pointed out that it was fine to leave some answers blank (which many people did).
Here’s an overview of some of the survey results. Reminder that higher values indicate more power.
Thanks for the great feedback! We’ll be reading along and looking for your ideas and opinions.