Armor Up - Developer Diary #2

[ToastyFred]

Actually we've gotten a lot of player feedback that the leveling from 20-28 is lackluster at best. Many players feel that the levels are meaningless, and advancement in the EDs is all that matters. We'd like to see the actual levels have more meaning.

Then give us actual Epic Monk Levels, Epic Fighter Levels, Epic Ranger Levels, etc. I absolutely HATE the Generic Epic Levels we get now. I think a lot of people agree with me.

[Wizza]

Melee's have to be in melee range, casters do not. There are trade offs to each build other than just raw damage. I play 13 alts, a pure cleric is my main, than a pure ranger AA, a pure wiz, a pure bard that is not yet converted to the NEW BARD stuff, than a slew of multimutts. Melees need a buff, casters not so much. That is why the numbers do not need to be even to be fair. Now what do the numbers need to be, to be fair? That's a different question. If you think casters need a numerically equal buff to melee you are not being honest with yourself.

I agree that melees need a buff. But this is not the right way. They should put the power into the destinies, and change them like they did with EA and US. They shouldn't get free 90 just for leveling, again.

Making Epic levels relevant just for a certain kind of characters is wrong. Period.

[Aelonwy]

I agree that melees need a buff. But this is not the right way. They should put the power into the destinies, and change them like they did with EA and US. They shouldn't get free 90 just for leveling, again.

Making Epic levels relevant just for a certain kind of characters is wrong. Period.

Thats why I said:

Give us a choice of +# melee or ranged or universal spell power per epic level, (amount to be determined) and then we are actually making a relevant build choice.

[Mosasi]

MP is a cool idea, but way over the top in terms of numbers. It's almost always better to start small, and add a little at a time then to start huge and chip away. The lackluster state of epic levels is due to a lack of choices to be made during those levels outside of ED's. As others have stated a better alternative would be to award X points per epic level that can be put into spell/ranged/melee categories which work in the same manner as MP has been described.

I would also point out that Blitz's main failing is that it can be sustained as long as it can, and that without it the other abilities offered in LD don't grant the same kind of power that say, Adrenaline from FotW does.

I'm undecided as to if ED's should be granting this MP business or not. An ED pass is really in order to address the lapse in time between the release of ED's and the current game. What's happening here is that you address a melee centered issue, and then casters get the shaft. So you address casters, and then ranged characters get the shaft. Then you address ranged characters, and now melee are shafted again. Bottom line for me is that I am hesitant to add more power to ED's. Put power into the levels as a per character per build per life choice, and follow up that concept with an ED pass to address the issues such as Blitz/Fury being awesome, and Shiradi being lame separately.

You are essentially taking two problems: Lack of choices during Epic Levels and Unbalanced ED Power then breeding them into what will become a single new problem: Epic levels offer a stupid power increase, and break the game. Others have said it; You are looking at the peak of potential in ED's and raising everyone else up to it. Instead try to find a middle ground between the current painfully bottomless pit of off-destinies and peaks of well basically LD/FotW.

MP is a cool idea, but needs more time on the drawing board before its implemented as is will break the game, not balance it. It should also be mentioned that you aren't actually giving us more choices with the current idea, you are making the choice for us - which is your reasoning for "giving us more choices".... The logic used there is mind boggling.

More choice = we, the players, choose how to utilize our "Combat Power" (as others have called it). <-- Good (With some caps/limitations to prevent an intense and sudden power creep)

More of the same = You, the devs, assign "Melee Power" to epic levels and ED cores for us and call it a day forgetting about casters/ranged dps/whoever I forgot to mention

The latter "more of the same" choice is bad.

[jalont]

You are making them relevant only to certain classes and not TO EVERYONE, which should be the case. THIS is what is wrong. Move that Melee Power somewhere else (hint: Epic destinies having a bigger MP bonus, 100 instead of 60 for instance).

You keep saying this, but I still don't know what you mean. This is an attempt to balance MELEE builds against each other where one certain aspect is overpowered, Master's Blitz. They should just nerf blitz, but they aren't, they're buffing other melee builds. All melee builds will benefit from this. You keep saying it's only relevant to certain classes and I don't understand. Perhaps be more blunt? Are you saying that caster and ranged should be buffed too? Because if so, I disagree.

[Bridge_Dweller]

Lets see, it gets:
20% offhand proc

This is great, no dispute

25% offhand DS

The Capstone is wonderful, but requires 20 ranger and limits some of your build options.

5% mainhand DS

Same as capstone but requires 18 ranger

Haste Boost

At twice the price for a fighter.

Reflex

3 points?

Improved Evasion

It’s not terrible, but that being the highlight of the tier 5 abilities kinda proves my “weak tree” point.

4 damage

Damage is nice, but 4 points ain’t amazing.

some decent special attacks

I’m sorry, they’re all weaksauce

[Rull]

Actually we've gotten a lot of player feedback that the leveling from 20-28 is lackluster at best. Many players feel that the levels are meaningless, and advancement in the EDs is all that matters. We'd like to see the actual levels have more meaning.

Although this is a good observation, i doubt your approach will have the full desired effect. Across the board pumping of power with no choice whatsoever doesn't increase the perceived power as much even though it increases the actual power.

Consider this, character strength increases quite strongly from 20 to 28, but that is because of being able to equip items with a higher ML. Yet players still don't feel this as their characters being more powerful.

Feats, class abilities, unlocking stuff in trees, that makes you feel much more powerful than just dmg = dmg * 1.1

[Scrabbler]

Actually we've gotten a lot of player feedback that the leveling from 20-28 is lackluster at best. Many players feel that the levels are meaningless, and advancement in the EDs is all that matters.

1. It's unfortunate that it took feedback to discover that, because it was obvious from a quick glance at the original Epic Destiny proposal. The devs at the time were informed of that upcoming result.

2. The problem with making character level more important is that it imposes a further limitation on what dungeons people can enter and who they can group with. (You might need to take other approaches to try fixing that, such as making the nominal and actual difficulty of Epic Elite more in sync. That is, currently a level 28 guy who sets a level 22 quest to EE will probably find it way harder than a level 26 quest on EN, but the EE one gives him a big XP penalty)

A radical solution to strongly consider: Allow players to temporarily reduce their Epic level, such as from 28 to 25, for just an hour or two.

Strength based melee is already way ahead of Dexterity based melee builds such as Tempest and Assassin, to the point where the best Tempest builds are Strength based. This would only exaggerate that. We'd rather make Dexterity based melee builds more viable.

The #1 thing needed to help non-Strength melee characters is to fix the requirements for Overwhelming Critical to not include feats with a Strength prerequisite (like Great Cleave). (Maybe add alternative requirements like Precision or Combat Archery)

By the way, Tempest has never been "Dexterity based melee". The benefit of Ranger melee is that it's the only way to qualify for GTWF without needing any Dexterity points. If you wonder why Tempest is weak, start by asking why the only good Tempest tier5 is Evasion, and not anything to do with weapons. Then look at all the t4-t5 enhancements based on long (sixty second) cooldowns...

Fun fact: Shintao tier 1 does more to help TWF combat than Tempest tier 5.

[Trillea]

The #1 thing needed to help non-Strength melee characters is to fix the requirements for Overwhelming Critical to not include feats with a Strength prerequisite (like Great Cleave). (Maybe add alternative requirements like Precision or Combat Archery)

Overwhelming Crit is losing its feat prereqs completely per one of the Dev posts.

[Mryal]

1. It's unfortunate that it took feedback to discover that, because it was obvious from a quick glance at the original Epic Destiny proposal. The devs at the time were informed of that upcoming result.

2. The problem with making character level more important is that it imposes a further limitation on what dungeons people can enter and who they can group with.


The #1 thing needed to help non-Strength melee characters is to fix the requirements for Overwhelming Critical to not include Cleave and Great Cleave.

Does it really limits anything? eberron content and underdark chains 1-3 can be done on EE with a off destiny party with ease, the real issue is the 25+ stuff, wich with the heart seeds change you dont have any reason to run over lvl content anymore.
My feel with epic lvls when ETring is : some lvls give considerable jumps due to gear, other lvls are just a click accept and whatever because they literally give nothing.This is not true for heroic lvls, all heroic lvls give you something, even extra AP is something considerable.

Happy to see that more people are realizing that changing other EDs to give melee power wont make people go away from LD.Again i say, those changes will only make more people go into LD, not away from it.

[Ebondevil]

Will Melee/Ranged Power effect Sneak Attack Damage?

[Aelonwy]

Overwhelming Crit is losing its feat prereqs completely per one of the Dev posts.

Relevant posts:

Actually we already discussed the Overwhelming Critical issue with the Player's Council. We are removing both the Strength requirement and the Great Cleave requirement from that feat.

Sev~

Overwhelming Critical will have no feat requirements at all. *snip paladin stuff*

Sev~

[Forzah]

They should be fair.

You wanna give melees 90% free damage and casters 10 Spell power? No. This is why this whole thing is pointless. Either they come up with something that is fair for every class and thus making Epic levels relevant in a fair amount for everyone or they don't. There is no middle ground here. There is no "we will give free 90% damage to someone and 1% damage to someone else".

As far as I'm concerned casters receive the same 90% melee damage bonus, so how are they treated differently?

[Mryal]

They should just nerf blitz

Yes, a thousand times yes.That would make everything more simple, we wouldnt need to have this discussion.We'd only have to amuse ourselves with the lament of people after they realize that their build/playstyle sucked, and it was master blitz carrying em all the time trought every quest.

Instead we are passing on power creep to everyone and pointing out that non melee should get that power creep too because honestly in this case, it makes sense.Then in the end everything becomes a lot easier and we're back to pointing out how the game became easier and how it was better before epic lvls.Wich then leads into harder quests, and we're back here asking for power creep again.What a vicious cycle.

Blitz is a design failure, always has been, when the original Ed design team made it we all know they didnt have in mind that people would spam tactical feats 50 times before starting the quest then have the whole party leave kills for em so they keep the epic moment going for the whole quest, while all, repeating ALL other EDs have epic moments that last at most a minute.None of those changes will change it even, blitz will still keep going for a whole quest, while all other epic moments still last a minute or less.Seriously, when one thing is wrong, you fix that thing ,you dont fix all other things so they are wrong aswell.

[Mryal]

As far as I'm concerned casters receive the same 90% melee damage bonus, so how are they treated differently?

I think what they are trying to say is melee power doesnt affects Magic Missiles or Force Missiles

[Atremus]

Sev,

Can you also add RP (ranged power) and SP (epic spell power) to each epic level as well? This will make epic levels, actually have epic meaning....

[BananaHat]

Actually we've gotten a lot of player feedback that the leveling from 20-28 is lackluster at best. Many players feel that the levels are meaningless, and advancement in the EDs is all that matters. We'd like to see the actual levels have more meaning.

I'll agree that a fully leveled ED character at 20 is better than a 28 with no destiny. The feats are the big draw of those epic levels. That being said, if you are thinking of arbitrarily adding melee power to all epic levels, just make it a selector between 10 melee power, 10 ranged power, and 10 universal spell power for each epic level. That way everyone gets nice epic level scaling.

[Alternative]

Strength based melee is already way ahead of Dexterity based melee builds such as Tempest and Assassin, to the point where the best Tempest builds are Strength based. This would only exaggerate that. We'd rather make Dexterity based melee builds more viable.

How is STR based ahead? I'm afraid you have a rather outdated info on that. Once you drop the OC requrements there will be no reason to go STR based, with the proposed melee power changes the couple extra damage points from higher STR will be even more meaningless. There are 11 dex bracers and 4 dex necklace, a lot of builds take +3 ex from shadow dodge, so I'm not sure STR is even still ahead, on top of that the nerf to divine grace will make player want more dex for more reflex save.

Elven/Ninja Spy dex to damage enhancements still don't work with ranged weapons, so you're going to end up with dex based melees and str based archers.

[Bingobong]

2. The problem with making character level more important is that it imposes a further limitation on what dungeons people can enter and who they can group with. (You might need to take other approaches to try fixing that, such as making the nominal and actual difficulty of Epic Elite more in sync. That is, currently a level 28 guy who sets a level 22 quest to EE will probably find it way harder than a level 26 quest on EN, but the EE one gives him a big XP penalty)

A radical solution to strongly consider: Allow players to temporarily reduce their Epic level, such as from 28 to 25, for just an hour or two.

As far as I can tell, level based XP penalty does not apply to epic level quests. It still applies to adventure areas, but not to epic level quests. I think the only exception are events that haven't been updated like Cove. I've ran a lot of epic quests grouped with lvl 28s on my lvl 20 and have gotten full XP. Likewise, my lvl 26 gets full xp running a lvl 20 epic quest.

[Mryal]

How is STR based ahead?

Divine Might.Primal Scream.Rage spell.Thought 'Divine Might' alredy answers that on its own.