You know the game is not balanced properly when...

[Hafeal]

No, fighters suck.

Pure Fighters have never been a "go to" class. Too meat and potatoes, perhaps.

No shield love for 8 years.
No Heavy Armor love for 8 years.
Outshone in TWF by Rangers and Rogues.
Outshone by Bards with the new SWF.
Poor Saves.
No spells.
No evasion.
No self-healing.
No sass.

The proverbial "pure" Gladiator is second class in DPS, in AC, HPs and Saves. The best thing the Fighter class has going for it these days is its decent viability for splashing - for which there are many a good build.

[burningwind]

truely imo dnd does not need balance, they just need to be useful...

the issue with ddo is that prestige class are tied to core class.. so if you want to progress through prestige you must stick to your core class. which force people to go pure, and thus demanding balance.

if we get prestige tree separate from core class, then perhaps everything will be so much better. i mean like sorc PM should be totally legit for traditional dnd sense. PM is not a prestige for wiz, it is a prestige class that require you to be able to arcane spell..

Alignment: Any nongood

Skills: Knowledge (religion) 8 ranks

Feats: Skill Focus (Knowledge[religion])

Spells: Able to cast command undead and vampiric touch as arcane spells.
Special: The candidate must have spent three or more days locked in a tomb with animate undead. This contact may be peaceful or violent. A character who is slain by the undead and later raised still meets the requirement, although the resulting level loss may delay compliance with other prerequisites.

p.s. back then a dev promise to do racial enhancement tree for every race....hopefully they did not forget that..

[RTN]

~ Holy Sword is over-performing. This is also my fault. My math did not take into account that Improved Critical is not working like the pen and paper version and is instead doubling the entire critical range. Varg (and some of the more math oriented players) discussed this, but by the time I could get hard numbers on the issue and figure out why my math was wrong it was really late in the update's cycle. Unfortunately critical threat range and multipliers really can't be dialed back without removing them entirely, and at the time there was a lot of forum concern that the Paladin changes still wouldn't be enough. So rather than pulling it at the last minute I let the changes go through. This is MY fault.

(The light damage is probably a bit too high for Knight of the Chalice but it doesn't scale in the same fashion.)

~ For Barbarians the Ravager heal is probably too strong and the overall extra damage is probably too good for TWF barbarians. We are seeing some impressive numbers from builds using TWF to take advantage of all the barbarian damage bonuses. This is my fault as well because, to be honest, I let myself be talked by the community into some over-buffing.


Note that even though we talk about some abilities over performing we have not planned any nerfs to Paladin or Barbarian other than the armor changes. We probably want to see how these builds perform in the harder Temple of Elemental Evil hard and elite modes before we talk about further balancing. One of the reasons we avoid frank discussions about power balancing is we don't want players to get stressed about potential nerfs when we aren't planning them.

Sev~

If these abilities are overpowered or over performing, then give them a gentle nerf. I'm fine with that as someone who has a paladin as my main character. People might yell a little, but overall balance is more important, imo, although I can see you wanting to wait until ToEE gets tested out at hard and elite.

Also, I'm glad to see you're making the endgame harder. I'm fine with a well constructed party making it through. I'm not so fine with people able to solo through it easily. There are multiple quests at endgame now where it is easier to solo them than go through them with a full party (scaling being part of the problem). I think that's not good for the game and am glad to see you trying to fix this.

Thanks again for all the responses and engagement with the community. Agree or disagree with your points, I really appreciate you letting us into your thought process and explaining so much to us. Greatly appreciated.

[IronClan]

Iron, check out my build -- your post couldn't be farther from what we are discussing.

Oh, and I will not get off my "Lich Form ledge"..

Again none of my comments are specific to your build, they are mostly directed at BigE's insistence that you tackling a problem one way, is an indicator that there's something wrong with the game. I agree that the average PM is not doing so hot in Boss DPS, but I believe that to be a case of overspecializing because they read on the forums that you need a 75+ Necro DC or you might as well re-roll.

[Qhualor]

do I care if my Kensei Fighter is "da best"? no

can I build a powerful pure Kensei Fighter? yes

does Kensei need some work to be less "monky" to fit better in DDO? yes

[blerkington]

Hi,

This has been a very interesting thread.

Thanks to most of the contributors.

Take care

[Cruxader]

...the creator of the Pale Master Guide is building wizards with melee capacity to deal with red named mobs Melee wizard.

I already commented on how blanket immunities and bosses with hundreds of thousands of HPs are damaging specialists and favoring raw DPS only (LINK). This is just an example of how down the line we are.

I am recently playing a barbarian for the first time. This is not a class I enjoy playing, I really dislike just cleaving to death masses of mobs. Yes, it requires skill, but I couldn't help but notice how self contained the class is. It packs heals, it has some CC via destinies and it has raw DPS (the best kind of DPS in DDO) to clear trash and bosses alike.

Aside from flavor reasons, why play any of the "old" classes and not stick to the uber powerful new overlords? Paladin, barbarian and bard, when build properly, pack absolutely everything you need for 99% of the game. Other classes do not.

Is this where the game is heading? Are we going to be seeing more of this update after update? Where will it stop, when all classes are self contained to the point that you can beat solo any content at any difficulty and not be considered an achievement? And if this does not happen and some classes are not upgraded to this uber level, won't some styles be unfairly penalized?

Thoughts, comments?

You know the game *is balanced properly* when every single person says it its not balanced properly, but from a different perspective ;-)

[IronClan]

Part of the problem Sev is fighting here is that perception is > reality.

Layered Defense is old news... yet when combined with Evasion it's actually better defense on a DPS oriented build than PRR/MRR because you're getting about 15% less physical mitigation from having less PRR, but you are getting missed more often, and you're avoiding 95% of spell damage, where MRR might get you 35-50% mitigation. Layered Defense also comes with DPS as a free bonus (mountain stance, sneak attack in Ninja Spy etc.) But it doesn't matter, because Armor is the new shiny and Perception is always > Reality.

Lost in all this is that Armor SHOULD BE THE BEST DEFENSE.

Holy Sword is > Barbarian DPS because perception is > reality and it doesn't matter to the perception that the reality is Storms Eye BY ITSELF when it's up is more DPS added than +1 Enh +1 range and X1 multiplier. Forget that the Barb can reach a X10 Multiplier on 19-20 rolls, or get ANOTHER 20 average damage per hit from Vorpal capstone.

Coup De grace is OP because perception is > reality, when you make a mob helpless it dies moments later no matter WHAT you use, assuming you're doing respectable DPS. Who cares if you click one button and coup it to death or hit it twice with cleaves and kill it... It's just as dead, and swinging a weapon a few times has no cooldown and doesn't lock you into a T5 nor cost AP's... My Swash dropped CdG so it could take the stronger Spellsinger T5's. I haven't missed it, being able to cleave in my own pile of held mobs is WAY WAY more useful than being able to dispatch a Mob that is already basically dead every 15 seconds. Being able to alternate between Soundburst helpless mobs and mass hold while cleaving (mass hold for the mobs that pose more threat) Mobs are stobing to their death, it's like a sick game of red light green light that's going too fast for the Mobs to have a fair chance, and my Swash is the puppet master... You guys are complaining about Coup de grace? LOL

[Portalcat]

I know there is a sub-section of players that want even *more* difficulty in existing content. We have to make decisions about where to spend our time, and we think our time would be better spent making new challenging content with new Mythic treasures to reward those challenges than trying to back track and introduce difficulty where a lot of players don't want it.

We've considered a Killer DM mode - something even harder than elite - where content always scaled to 6 people, champions have nastier effects, and monsters did more damage. The problem, outside of implementation time, we ran into is this; what could we possibly use to reward players for playing it? We don't want to add even more XP into the game. Higher level loot drops aren't really useful while leveling since it already out levels players on higher difficulties. No one is going to grind for power items if they will level past them quickly. Our data shows that such a difficulty would probably sit unused for a vast majority of the player base. As much as the idea intrigues me, I don't know if that's a good use of our time.

We believe that the best use of our time is to provide difficulty in newer content.

Sev~

Have you considered doing a difficulty pass on just EE Orchard?

It's level 30 content and none of the quests are harder than Breaking the Ranks nor What Goes Up, which were released when characters did a whole lot less damage and the max Necro DC was 66. A large part of why the endgame questing feels so easy right now is that's been a year since a quest that was hard relative to player power was released (Haunted Halls) and a year and a half since a whole chain that was hard was released (Storm Horns).



A difficulty pass on EE Orchard would limit the scope to just the chain that's supposed to be higher level than everything else, and would massively add to the amount of existing difficult endgame content.

[arkonas]

I know there is a sub-section of players that want even *more* difficulty in existing content. We have to make decisions about where to spend our time, and we think our time would be better spent making new challenging content with new Mythic treasures to reward those challenges than trying to back track and introduce difficulty where a lot of players don't want it.

We've considered a Killer DM mode - something even harder than elite - where content always scaled to 6 people, champions have nastier effects, and monsters did more damage. The problem, outside of implementation time, we ran into is this; what could we possibly use to reward players for playing it? We don't want to add even more XP into the game. Higher level loot drops aren't really useful while leveling since it already out levels players on higher difficulties. No one is going to grind for power items if they will level past them quickly. Our data shows that such a difficulty would probably sit unused for a vast majority of the player base. As much as the idea intrigues me, I don't know if that's a good use of our time.

We believe that the best use of our time is to provide difficulty in newer content.

Sev~

say you do the killer dm diffificulty why not just a little bit more xp maybe +1 to loot and what you said. no rewards but the challenge itself. people can do it if they want or run the other 3. that is how you can please everyone. people want the challenge will run that. people that want elite or epic elite will run that. casual will have casual,normal,hard,elite and whatever. so i see a win for everyone.

[Rykka]

http://whybother.themuds.org/classes/runesmith/


You were saying?

Nevermind that a classic Magic User from 30 years ago, could sport Bracers of Defence that gave all the AC adjustments of Plate Armor. I keep thinking that items with an Armor Bonus should be providing PRR/MRR equivalent to starter/unenchanted armor with the same AC bonus.

[HAL]

You know the game *is balanced properly* when every single person says it its not balanced properly, but from a different perspective ;-)

LOL, that's great. (And true.)

[Angelic-council]

There are more OP builds out there, even pure casters can be OP. Turbine just missed the opportunity to balance this game long time ago, it's too late now. They can't go back to 5 - 6 years ago and rebalance everything, same goes to bugs.

The only thing what turbine can do is to provide more difficult content in near future. Maybe make some small changes, but they are not in a position to balance this game completely. This was already said before - multiple times.. It's surely sad, why some skills are OP, why multi class is OP, why people can freely choose any EDs regardless of their class... many things can be said. But, let's admit, all of that is just nature of DDO. Yes, unbalanced. But we all still play it

[LavidDynch]

The problem seems to be: balancing one class at a time..

People are still moaning about Holy Sword, are you having a laugh?

Comparing Fighters, who hasn't had an update for 2 years, to the recently updated Paladin... ummm.. what exactly is your point again?

[AtomicMew]

The game is in a much better place. Previously the end game was limited to pretty much casters and ranged Evasion builds. That was all that was really considered for top end builds. Everything else was considered a niche build. Melee wasn't really viable, nor was armor.

Besides casters and ranged, Kensei fighters were top tier, with speed records to back it up. Monks were generally regarded as strong. A lot of caster hybrids (clonks and drunks) saw play too. Nowadays, there are only a handful of top tier builds: paladins, barbarians and maybe some other builds that aren't exactly WAI. The game is not in a better place. There is far less variety at the top as a direct result of the last two updates regarding paladins, armor changes and barbarians.

~ The base values for armor are a little too high. When we changed the formula to 100/(100 + Rating) we changed most of the sources, but didn't change the base armor values from 45/30/15. This will be rectified in the next update when they are changed to 30/20/10.

~ Holy Sword is over-performing. This is also my fault. My math did not take into account that Improved Critical is not working like the pen and paper version and is instead doubling the entire critical range. Varg (and some of the more math oriented players) discussed this, but by the time I could get hard numbers on the issue and figure out why my math was wrong it was really late in the update's cycle. Unfortunately critical threat range and multipliers really can't be dialed back without removing them entirely, and at the time there was a lot of forum concern that the Paladin changes still wouldn't be enough. So rather than pulling it at the last minute I let the changes go through. This is MY fault.

(The light damage is probably a bit too high for Knight of the Chalice but it doesn't scale in the same fashion.)

~ For Barbarians the Ravager heal is probably too strong and the overall extra damage is probably too good for TWF barbarians. We are seeing some impressive numbers from builds using TWF to take advantage of all the barbarian damage bonuses. This is my fault as well because, to be honest, I let myself be talked by the community into some over-buffing.

Here, it feels like you are blaming the community for over-buffing barbs, yet with all the cries that the armor changes and paladins changes were too powerful, you didn't scale these things back. It seems like you listened to the wrong people at the wrong times in both cases.

[Marten]

...

~ Swashbuckler does not seem to be overperforming in our tests. The DPS is strong, but it is mostly single target and it is in a good place for us. We understand that Coup de Grace has a high DC. Using Perform as a DC has been a bard thing for a while and even though it makes the DC very high it seems fine since it is single target, has a 15 second cooldown, and requires the enemy to be helpless. Yes, we know its easy to compare to Assassinate, but we want Rogues to have their own advantages and not just copy the Bard enhancements. We are watching Coup de Grace for potential issues, of course, but we think it will be fine.

As for future plans, we have gone over our plans several times. We are working on a Rogue pass, we have Ranged Power coming, and we have a Ranger pass coming at some point. We are looking at Warlock of course, and we want to get the third trees for Favored Soul and Druid in this year. When we do the Druid tree we will also fix up forms so they can get good DPS without exploiting other systems. Fighter is in good shape as it just got Vanguard and an update to Stalwart Defender, but at some point we want to touch up Kensai.

(We are fairly happy with the performance of casters.)

Sev~

What about monks, you know, the class everyone hated because of splash builds until the armor-up fixes? Is being a pure monk going to be viable again? You say with the Druid pass you will "fix up forms so they can get good DPS without exploiting other systems" at which point those of us that are dedicated to playing the monk class will be going back to pure as the Drunk Fighter build is basically the only way I have found to enjoy the game with some monk flavor. I am not a fan of the tail and fur, but it beats being 2 to 3 shotted in a fight! Yes, after 9 years of diehard pure class builds, I broke down and made an exploit build because I am tired of being a paper-cannon who keeps getting all my "cool toys" nerfed to the dirt. So, what about monk at endgame? What about level 30 "pure-class" capstones that make that an option again?!

That's funny. Because it's single target, it's ok for it to have 90+ DC. Well, then let's give such a boost to Stunning Blow for example. It's single target as well. Oh and look, it's not even an insta-kill. So yeah, you should. /facepalm And no, it doesn't require the enemy to be helpless, or rather it affects not only helpless targets (Fascinated, Sleeping, Dancing, Dazed, Tripped, Mesmerized, Paralyzed, Petrified, or Stunned) and i browse bard's spells and their enhancements and i see a multitude ways for them to make a mob susceptible to that insta-kill, some of which are AoE spells, and of course we have fascinate with its also extremely high DC. And then add other party members, who can also prepare mobs for the bard's insta-kill.

Oh, don't get me started on this bard issue, I have a rule not to engage in negative feedback on a class I do not play, but at the very same time I was discussing the fate of Quivering Palm* I received a PM from another build tester about how they were making Bards the new uber insta-kill class. I could only shake my head then and can only shake my head now. Where was this kind of logic Sev when they killed QP?! Ya, they gave me the ability to smash my button over and over and over and over and over and over until it works... I can't tell you how "FUN" that is. I don't have QP on my current build as you made it worthless, but I did give it the good ole college try and with the other 7 to 10 buttons I have to smash as a monk every tenth of a second to make my DPS useful, it just made playing a PITA.

When you "fix" Druid, I hope you take a look at Monk as a pure class again. I'm running out of positive vibe.


*Some history:
When I got involved
Then I engaged the Devs with Facts!
Skipping 4 pages of Teh_Troll

Then the very next patch after thinking all was settled, QP got nerfed again. That was almost year ago. This was my last post on the issue other than pointing out that it seems to still not be WAI and I stopped using it.

[Blackheartox]

I know there is a sub-section of players that want even *more* difficulty in existing content. We have to make decisions about where to spend our time, and we think our time would be better spent making new challenging content with new Mythic treasures to reward those challenges than trying to back track and introduce difficulty where a lot of players don't want it.

We've considered a Killer DM mode - something even harder than elite - where content always scaled to 6 people, champions have nastier effects, and monsters did more damage. The problem, outside of implementation time, we ran into is this; what could we possibly use to reward players for playing it? We don't want to add even more XP into the game. Higher level loot drops aren't really useful while leveling since it already out levels players on higher difficulties. No one is going to grind for power items if they will level past them quickly. Our data shows that such a difficulty would probably sit unused for a vast majority of the player base. As much as the idea intrigues me, I don't know if that's a good use of our time.

We believe that the best use of our time is to provide difficulty in newer content.

Sev~

It is rather simple sev, just add a achihvments section with little rewards.
Same thing as mm, but this one gives for example special cosmetics or special pets or maybe add special weapon glamours, some tp or astral rewards.
As a system the ahievments section book idea is wonderful and i honestly think that most of us end game players wont complain if you add something like that.
I can show off my lob mini pet for soloing ee lob in a specific time frame and it wont add me any specific power beside little braging rights what the point is of harder difficulty in 99% games for elite players

[Robai]

...
We believe that the best use of our time is to provide difficulty in newer content.

Sev~

If Devs spend time on increasing BtC bank space then nobody would complain for sure:

• New content (or new difficulty) would always be worth the grind
• Everyone would enjoy more BtC space
• Not to mention profit
• All the talks about the balance etc. is funny since it's such a tiny problem compared to BtC bankable space

[Angelic-council]

The problem seems to be: balancing one class at a time..

People are still moaning about Holy Sword, are you having a laugh?

Comparing Fighters, who hasn't had an update for 2 years, to the recently updated Paladin... ummm.. what exactly is your point again?

Part of it, yes: Turbine doing it very slowly, one at a time. But that's not even 20% of the entire problem. If I play my DC FvS caster aggressively, I can easily out kill any ranged/melee OP builds. All thanks to the EDs/Epic feats.

[BigErkyKid]

Again none of my comments are specific to your build, they are mostly directed at BigE's insistence that you tackling a problem one way, is an indicator that there's something wrong with the game. I agree that the average PM is not doing so hot in Boss DPS, but I believe that to be a case of overspecializing because they read on the forums that you need a 75+ Necro DC or you might as well re-roll.

Or it could be that they really are a weaker overall archetype right now. It takes enormous investment to get enough DCs for most content (and how fun is to have to debuff mobs constantly?) and yet someone with a barb, paladin or bard will outclass you with only moderate gear against bosses.

Trash in a lot of quests can just be out runed and then rubber banded anyway.

I don't know how I got your aggro, but you sure are persistent. Is this thread red DA for some people or what?