Update 23 Second Look

[ddo.rsmo.pt]

Harper seems someone thought in a hurry, mixed stuff from half a dozen different trees, added melee power "'cause now we have to have melee power", and thought "There! It's done".
I can pin almost every enhancement to a class, so I guess Harper is the Half-Elf of Prestiges.
Minus the anime eyes.

Why do we need Harper tree? We have 80 AP to spend, which are usually already thin (I always multiclass, but even for pures, 1 race and 2 class trees is sometimes hard - which is understandable).

Suggestion: add 1 AP per epic level. That will be +10 when level caps at 30. Seems reasonable, I think.

Carry on.

[Gljosh]

The Harper Agent tree seems really, really powerful to me. Not just that it can give you a bunch of melee/ranged power, but +3 to all skills, +4 to all henchmen/summon/pet stats (combine that with augmented summons and the artificer/necro +6 to str/dex/con ones, and you're getting +14 to your pet's stats...will it make them viable in EE? Probably not, but it might help a bit), free eschew materials (trivial bonus for most people, but hey, more inventory slots because of no more spell comps! WHEE!), insightful attack/damage (eek, kind of makes the elven dex-to-damage ability pointless, doesn't it? just pump int instead and pick up insightful reflexes, and you get a ton of extra skill points to boot, and for like 6 points vs 19)...

Seems like a really potent tree. Almost too good in a lot of ways.

Or even a plus +20 if you have 3 druid past lives. I might be playing an arti again...

[BigErkyKid]

Using the libram of magic while in sacred stand does not work regardless of the armor you are wearing.

[BigErkyKid]

Regarding the PRR and MRR update, my greatest concern is that it is very low hanging fruit. Any build can easily achieve 50% mitigation. Thats around 100PRR. Passed that, there is no incentive to keep adding to it, except if it comes for free (which it does not, need to invest in the notoriously bad defender trees). The difference between 100 or 150 PRR is small (again, cake to get while blitzing) and it costs a lot of enhancement points. Yes, defender trees allow for some multiclassing now, but they remain meh trees even after this update. I would not recommend investing in them except for pure or mostly pure fighter or paladin builds.


Hence, this seems simply an udpate for builds that could not achieve good saves. Now you offer them this alternative. However, builds that were supposed to have an edge in defense do not gain in relative power from this update. On the contrary, other builds catch up with them in their only relative strenght while true heavy defense builds gain nothing.


Finally, given that any PRR has received a bump (any previous value now offers more mitigation), this could open the door for excellent pajama builds. Grabbing some monk stances, getting a PRR item and going earth stand can result in very powerful defenses. Who cares beyond 100PRR if you could be getting 50% physical mitigation on top of tons of dodge and shadow veil?


A paladin 14-6 monk centered and in cloth armor could end up being way more survivable than the pure paladin with points in the defender tree.
Given that such build is likely to have uber saves anyway, the lose of MRR means absolutely nothing.

To me, the obvious solution is to make PRR a non monotonic function. You could have first a part of increasing returns and then, beyond a given point, have decreasing returns. This would prevent the current perversion of the system.

[Free2Pay]

Just barely made it through Elite Enter the Kobold and but still made it nonetheless. But it was the tough with combination of fireshield, heal scrolls, renewal, cocoon and hire spamming heals, but in heavy armor so I'll give this heavy armor upgrade a PASS.

I just tried to repeat Elite Enter the Kobold today but this time I tried doing it both in Light Armor (Dragontouched armor, 38 reflex save with Evasion) and then with in Heavy armor with Light and Darkness shield (80 MRR). The experience was significantly different for different armors. Evasion is much much better. I didn't struggle much in Light Armor. But the moment I equipped heavy armor, I started having the difficulty I encountered during round 1. So 80 MRR is very much inferior to 38 reflex with evasion. MRR needs to x5 its current value if it is to match 38 reflex I suppose.

This was done on the same character with different gears. Remind me again why would I want to wear heavy armor??

[Maelodic]

Regarding the PRR and MRR update, my greatest concern is that it is very low hanging fruit. Any build can easily achieve 50% mitigation. Thats around 100PRR. Passed that, there is no incentive to keep adding to it, except if it comes for free (which it does not, need to invest in the notoriously bad defender trees). The difference between 100 or 150 PRR is small (again, cake to get while blitzing) and it costs a lot of enhancement points. Yes, defender trees allow for some multiclassing now, but they remain meh trees even after this update. I would not recommend investing in them except for pure or mostly pure fighter or paladin builds.


Hence, this seems simply an udpate for builds that could not achieve good saves. Now you offer them this alternative. However, builds that were supposed to have an edge in defense do not gain in relative power from this update. On the contrary, other builds catch up with them in their only relative strenght while true heavy defense builds gain nothing.


Finally, given that any PRR has received a bump (any previous value now offers more mitigation), this could open the door for excellent pajama builds. Grabbing some monk stances, getting a PRR item and going earth stand can result in very powerful defenses. Who cares beyond 100PRR if you could be getting 50% physical mitigation on top of tons of dodge and shadow veil?


A paladin 14-6 monk centered and in cloth armor could end up being way more survivable than the pure paladin with points in the defender tree.
Given that such build is likely to have uber saves anyway, the lose of MRR means absolutely nothing.

To me, the obvious solution is to make PRR a non monotonic function. You could have first a part of increasing returns and then, beyond a given point, have decreasing returns. This would prevent the current perversion of the system.

Heavy armor with a high amount of DR and PRR ends up being really, really powerful.
On epic elites with a Guardian heavy shadowscale armor (30-60 DR) I ended up taking roughly 6-10 damage a shot from melees and a similarly small amount of damage from the mages. It felt like Godmode- I could easily solo most content in the game.
PRR was roughly 250- MRR was 130. That much reduction was ridiculous- though my damage wasn't fantastic I could still just prance through the quest.

[Free2Pay]

If I were to equipped the best gears, why wouldn't I be in god mode - PRR or no? Do anyone expect lesser? Which is why I refrained from equipping anything from the Dojo and instead just use what I currently have on my copied toon.

People are advocating that you must have the best gears to handle Epic Elite; People are also advocating for the best gears to only drop in Epic Elite. I guess these people has found the answer to the Chicken and Egg puzzle - which came first?

[BigErkyKid]

Heavy armor with a high amount of DR and PRR ends up being really, really powerful.
On epic elites with a Guardian heavy shadowscale armor (30-60 DR) I ended up taking roughly 6-10 damage a shot from melees and a similarly small amount of damage from the mages. It felt like Godmode- I could easily solo most content in the game.
PRR was roughly 250- MRR was 130. That much reduction was ridiculous- though my damage wasn't fantastic I could still just prance through the quest.

Ok, so the new PRR is 100/(100+PRR) . With 100 PRR, which I can easily get blitzing on a monk, I have 50% damage reduction. EDITED.

You tell me you had 250PRR< which equals 72% reduction. Which means you were in unyielding, severely gimping your DPS. Can you sluggishly go through the quests taking little damage and dealing little damage in slow motion progression? Apparently the new pass allows this. But I don't think that this invalidates my point. Go with me through the following numbers.

For anyone in LD, the numbers are around 170 PRR when wearing heavy armor, that is 63% reduction. Even being conservative in my monk PRR, thats only 13% ahead. While the monk has, without overthinking gear, 15-20% dodge. In addition to 25% incorporeality.

EDITED: the difference is the 30 epic damage reduction.

Overall he gets more mitigation than the melee, for sure (so/so difficult to check numbers with DR). So the current system has pushed monk splashes ahead in mitigation together with the rest, perhaps closing a bit the relative gap but I am not so sure.

In addition, if you can make a reflex save it will always be better than MRR. Always.

EDIT 2: Regardless of the monk splash example, my point is that nowadays ANY build can get PRR 100. And that beyond 100 the gain is small. So basically more tanky builds have received MRR whereas other builds can keep all the offense and it this.

[Vargouille]

Regarding the PRR and MRR update, my greatest concern is that it is very low hanging fruit. Any build can easily achieve 50% mitigation. Thats around 100PRR. Passed that, there is no incentive to keep adding to it, except if it comes for free (which it does not, need to invest in the notoriously bad defender trees). The difference between 100 or 150 PRR is small (again, cake to get while blitzing) and it costs a lot of enhancement points. Yes, defender trees allow for some multiclassing now, but they remain meh trees even after this update. I would not recommend investing in them except for pure or mostly pure fighter or paladin builds.

A clarifying example where something is dealing 200 damage before PRR:

  0 PRR: 200 Damage   
 50 PRR: 133 Damage  (+50 PRR: -33% damage)
100 PRR: 100 Damage  (+50 PRR: -25% damage)
150 PRR:  80  Damage (+50 PRR: -20% damage)
200 PRR:  67  Damage (+50 PRR: -17% damage)

This is of course subjective, but if you think getting from 50->100 is worth the -25% reduction, it's hard to see why -20% for the next step is "no incentive". Yes, it's 5% worse, but does that mean 100 is the magic cutoff, and more is worthless?

We'd like to think this is more subjective for each player and each build, and while some characters may decide that getting another Sheltering item for some more PRR isn't worth it, other builds will (almost regardless of where they currently are on the PRR scale). At some point you may not want another -10% reduction, opting for +4 Strength instead (or any other possible benefit for a particular item slot / AP / Destiny choice), but that's going to be a very individualized choice. There's no magic amount of PRR that's right to scrabble to get and then the next point of PRR is far worse; that's inherent to the design of the system.

[Oxarhamar]

they shelves the sentient weapon idea (the one that has it's own exp system) for later. maybe that is why they don;t want to introduce any new weapons as they will pick that idea up and flesh it out when they are ready for it?

I'd still wager they did not bring any weapons in U23 because, they did not want to kill thunder forged .

[Xianio]

Was Vanguard cut for this patch? - found the answer, nvm

[PermaBanned]

I'd still wager they did not bring any weapons in U23 because, they did not want to kill thunder forged .

Which is a sad sort of funny, because it wouldnt be an Epic Ardency or Devastation that kills Thunderforged - they'll do that on their own when they decide things like Mortal Fear are OP and nerf them like Nightmares

[BigErkyKid]

A clarifying example where something is dealing 200 damage before PRR:

  0 PRR: 200 Damage   
 50 PRR: 133 Damage  (+50 PRR: -33% damage)
100 PRR: 100 Damage  (+50 PRR: -25% damage)
150 PRR:  80  Damage (+50 PRR: -20% damage)
200 PRR:  67  Damage (+50 PRR: -17% damage)

This is of course subjective, but if you think getting from 50->100 is worth the -25% reduction, it's hard to see why -20% for the next step is "no incentive". Yes, it's 5% worse, but does that mean 100 is the magic cutoff any everything else is worthless?

We'd like to think this is more subjective for each player and each build, and while some characters may decide that getting another Sheltering item for some more PRR isn't worth it, other builds will (almost regardless of where they currently are on the PRR scale). At some point you may not want another -10% reduction, opting for +4 Strength instead (or any other possible benefit for a particular item slot / AP / Destiny choice), but that's going to be a very individualized choice. There's no magic amount of PRR that's right to scrabble to get and then the next point of PRR is far worse; that's inherent to the design of the system.

Thanks for the answer. I think I didn't explain what I meant clearly enough.

In this update you are planning on doing two things:

1. Giving armor more PRR.

2. Increasing the damage mitigation per PRR point.

My point is that doing 2. reduces the effectiviness of 1. in terms of getting armor closer to outfit builds.

To give some numbers:

Build A) Monk in earth stand with 100 PRR while blitzing.

Build B) Paladin with 170 PRR while blitzing.

Under the old PRR, build A) gets a reduction of 41% and build B) 53%. Build B gets 53/41 = 1.29 the mitigation of the monk.

Now build A) gets 50% while build B) gets 63%. Now build B gets 1.26 the mitigation of the monk.

So in relative terms, after your change, the monk is catching up in mitigation! This is something that you explicitely mentioned you wanted to address, but your changes actually achieved the opposite.

The one concern with these numbers is that heavy armors have in end game (cap) the option to get DR30. But this is independent of the PRR system, which is what you reformed, and additionally a concern that only appears at cap.

I hope now it is more clear what I meant.

Cheers

[poltt48]

A clarifying example where something is dealing 200 damage before PRR:

  0 PRR: 200 Damage   
 50 PRR: 133 Damage  (+50 PRR: -33% damage)
100 PRR: 100 Damage  (+50 PRR: -25% damage)
150 PRR:  80  Damage (+50 PRR: -20% damage)
200 PRR:  67  Damage (+50 PRR: -17% damage)

This is of course subjective, but if you think getting from 50->100 is worth the -25% reduction, it's hard to see why -20% for the next step is "no incentive". Yes, it's 5% worse, but does that mean 100 is the magic cutoff, and more is worthless?

We'd like to think this is more subjective for each player and each build, and while some characters may decide that getting another Sheltering item for some more PRR isn't worth it, other builds will (almost regardless of where they currently are on the PRR scale). At some point you may not want another -10% reduction, opting for +4 Strength instead (or any other possible benefit for a particular item slot / AP / Destiny choice), but that's going to be a very individualized choice. There's no magic amount of PRR that's right to scrabble to get and then the next point of PRR is far worse; that's inherent to the design of the system.

Where are you getting these numbers from? I have 173 prr on my cleric on lamnia right now and only reduces damage 61%. On my pally he has 235 prr and only reducing damage by 69%.

[Chaimberland]

Heavy armor with a high amount of DR and PRR ends up being really, really powerful.
On epic elites with a Guardian heavy shadowscale armor (30-60 DR) I ended up taking roughly 6-10 damage a shot from melees and a similarly small amount of damage from the mages. It felt like Godmode- I could easily solo most content in the game.
PRR was roughly 250- MRR was 130. That much reduction was ridiculous- though my damage wasn't fantastic I could still just prance through the quest.

Just wondering how hard was it to get 250 PRR? I mean, would this be considered the norm at high levels or only if you built specifically for max PRR? I'm just kind of wondering what the percentage of people would actually have that high of a PRR. If you really have to build and invest to reach that number then I would think there would be a low amount of people actually obtaining 250 PRR so it really wouldn't be much of an issue. But if getting that 250 PRR was an easy thing to do then I could see a real problem.

[Maelodic]

Just wondering how hard was it to get 250 PRR? I mean, would this be considered the norm at high levels or only if you built specifically for max PRR? I'm just kind of wondering what the percentage of people would actually have that high of a PRR. If you really have to build and invest to reach that number then I would think there would be a low amount of people actually obtaining 250 PRR so it really wouldn't be much of an issue. But if getting that 250 PRR was an easy thing to do then I could see a real problem.

You basically just need a tower shield and the shield feats/LSM twist but uhh
Eth did an example of something less dedicated to defenses and got hit for a tad more but still was basically invulnerable as well using THF.

[Vargouille]

Where are you getting these numbers from? I have 173 prr on my cleric on lamnia right now and only reduces damage 61%. On my pally he has 235 prr and only reducing damage by 69%.

To clarify that chart, the -25% numbers are only relative to the previous line, not total. It shouldn't be summing up to a new total mitigation.

A simpler way to think of it is that every 100 PRR changes how much incoming damage is divided:

0 PRR => Divide by 1 (don't change it).
100 PRR: Divide by 2 (50% damage taken compared to 0)
200 PRR: Divide by 3 (33% damage taken compared to 0, or 67% reduced)
300 PRR: Divide by 4 (25% damage taken compared to 0, 75% reduced)

But going from 200->300 is reducing damage a lot more than 8% (If you were reducing 600->200 damage with 200 PRR, that 200 damage goes down to 150 damage for reaching 300 PRR -- or a 25% reduced damage for going from 200->300).

[Cetus]

To clarify that chart, the -25% numbers are only relative to the previous line, not total. It shouldn't be summing up to a new total mitigation.

A simpler way to think of it is that every 100 PRR changes how much incoming damage is divined.

0 PRR => Divide by 1 (don't change it).
100 PRR: Divide by 2 (50% damage taken compared to 0)
200 PRR: Divide by 3 (33% damage taken compared to 0, or 67% reduced)
300 PRR: Divide by 4 (25% damage taken compared to 0, 75% reduced)

But going from 200->300 is reducing damage a lot more than 8% (If you were reducing 600->200 with 200 PRR, that 200 damage goes down to 150 damage for getting 300 PRR -- or a 25% reduced damage for going from 200->300).

This is horrifying logic varg - this is a hell of a way to cover up the diminishing returns that actually exist.

So, if I have 200 PRR - I'll absorb 400 out of a 600 point attack.

If I have 300 PRR - I'll absorb 450 out of a 600 point attack.

I absorbed an additional 50 points of damage out of the original 600 point attack for moving up 100 PRR - 50/600 = 8%

Lets back up completely:

If i have 100 PRR - I'll cut 50% of the orignal 600 point hit = 300 damage

200 PRR = 66% cut, or a 16% bonus = 200 damage

300 PRR = 75% cut, or an 8% bonus = 150 damage

So for the first 3 blocks of 100 PRR, I'm reducing my incoming damage by 50%, then an additional 16%, then an additional 8% off the original hit. You can't just ratio the final result between two different PRRs like you did between 200 and 300 PRR and then say that the additional 100 PRR gives 25% reduction - this is so misleading.

[BigErkyKid]

You can't just ratio the final result between two different PRRs like you did between 200 and 300 PRR and then say that the additional 100 PRR gives 25% reduction - this is so misleading.

I don't think it matters much, at the end of the day we all know what the damage reduction gain is. I don't think players can get it wrong.

My point was that the way it has been implemented is against the original idea. By boosting so much PRR on the lower end, now the ratio of mitigation of a pajama build (or anyone putting on an armor) vs tanky builds is worse than it was before.

PS - Btw blitz is stacking when using robes. So I get over 100 PRR in blitz in my monk /paladin splash.

[maddmatt70]

This is horrifying logic varg - this is a hell of a way to cover up the diminishing returns that actually exist.

So, if I have 200 PRR - I'll absorb 400 out of a 600 point attack.

If I have 300 PRR - I'll absorb 450 out of a 600 point attack.

I absorbed an additional 50 points of damage out of the original 600 point attack for moving up 100 PRR - 50/600 = 8%

Lets back up completely:

If i have 100 PRR - I'll cut 50% of the orignal 600 point hit = 300 damage

200 PRR = 66% cut, or a 16% bonus = 200 damage

300 PRR = 75% cut, or an 8% bonus = 150 damage

So for the first 3 blocks of 100 PRR, I'm reducing my incoming damage by 50%, then an additional 16%, then an additional 8% off the original hit. You can't just ratio the final result between two different PRRs like you did between 200 and 300 PRR and then say that the additional 100 PRR gives 25% reduction - this is so misleading.

That is my take on PRR and MRR - really the whole thing thing favors non shield characters and even still non heavy armor wearers because you can still get a high MRR and PRR if you are wearing light or no armor or at least up to the point where diminishing returns take over. The devs should probably rethink their scale slightly on these.