The root of powercreep

[FestusHood]

I recently saw Severlin mention in a thread that he wasn't aware that the expanded critical range from the Paladin holy sword spell would be doubled by the feat Improved Critical. I remember having a kensei back before the enhancement pass, and i can confirm that at that time, the +1 critical range was definitely NOT doubled in effect by the improved critical feat.

When the enhancement pass came, many of the trees gained competence bonuses to the critical profiles of weapons they used. All of these become doubled when the improved critical feat is applied to them. The barbarian critical rage enhancement is not a competence bonus, and this doubling effect does not happen, at least with melee weapons.

I"m not a technical person, so my best guess is that the older enhancements, and the barb one apply the bonus to the character, whereas the competence bonuses apply it to the weapon. It has to do with where the bonus lies in the formula to determine the overall critical profile of the weapon.

So here is my idea. Let's fix it so that it doesn't do this anymore. Fix it for all the effects that are doubled by improved crit. I suspect the designers of these effects never intended for them to be quite as powerful as they turned out to be.

Any thoughts about this?

[maddong]

Sounds good to me.

[Enoach]

This sounds good to me.

Enhancements, Spells and ED abilities that are intended to increase the critical Range but not be included in the Improved Critical Feat calculation should be corrected. If that means not being a competence bonus but something else then I'm ok with this myself.

[die]

Holy sword would be worthless then. My crit range on my ax is 20 Improve crit gives 19-20 holy sword takes it to 17-20 that is Good

in my opinion. If they change it, pallys will be a dead class all over again. I can't believe all the people who have been crying about

pallys, Ill bet every one of you get your asses healed by one all the time. My lay on hands gets used on others more than my self.

now we do a tad bit more DPS WOW ..

lets change how over powered casters are spamming Finger of death and wail.. lets give them 3

minute cool downs on there death spells? Sounds good to me! Lets change Bard freezing thingy, I play with a guy who has a 70+ DC and EE IS trivial we just tear through that stuff.. and that is far more game breaking than pally dps which is still less than my barb..And another thing.. So lets just say they are not meant to stack, then pallys cant have improved crit on a weapon until there 4th lv spell slots? thats lame... Oh I get it.. sure take Improved crit, then when you get holy sword pay for a feat change.. GOT IT.. CLEAVER

[Monkey-Boy]

We need some of the OP stuff nerfed, nerf away.

[blerkington]

Hi,

My first thought on this topic is an unkind one, unfortunately. Not understanding the rules of the game and the mathematical consequences of introducing something like holy weapon is a real indictment of our development team.

Going on after that to say that you think that the game is fairly well balanced overall is possibly even worse. The bar for success is very low in most content right now, but the fact that very suboptimal builds can complete most of it doesn't mean the game is balanced, it just means that it's easy enough for almost everyone.

Thanks.

[changelingamuck]

Holy sword would be worthless then. My crit range on my ax is 20 Improve crit gives 19-20 holy sword takes it to 17-20 that is Good

in my opinion. If they change it, pallys will be a dead class all over again. I can't believe all the people who have been crying about

pallys, Ill bet every one of you get your asses healed by one all the time. My lay on hands gets used on others more than my self.

How is the fact that paladins heal others relevant to whether or not their melee dps is higher than intended or unbalanced? If anything, I wouldn't call attention to the fact that they have healing capabilities if you're trying to ward off a nerf since that's a separate advantage of the class. I don't think trying to get people to feel like they owe you something for healing them on your paladin is really addressing the question of whether crit range multiplication should be changed...

I mean, I wouldn't go into a thread about turning off the environmental lighting effect of the FvS archon in order to prevent lag and say "How dare you! We favored souls healed all you people!" It's irrelevant. It's not like I was earning rights to whatever class advantages we had by tossing mass heals... I'm so confused.

pally dps which is still less than my barb..

The average barbarian should have better melee dps against everything but undead and evil/chaotic outsiders compared to the average paladin. Dps is intended to be the barbarian's thing. While paladins' intended things are dps, tanking/prr/mrr/AC, limited spell-casting, self-healing, and whatever else.

[FestusHood]

Holy sword would be worthless then. My crit range on my ax is 20 Improve crit gives 19-20 holy sword takes it to 17-20 that is Good

in my opinion. If they change it, pallys will be a dead class all over again. I can't believe all the people who have been crying about

pallys, Ill bet every one of you get your asses healed by one all the time. My lay on hands gets used on others more than my self.

now we do a tad bit more DPS WOW ..

lets change how over powered casters are spamming Finger of death and wail.. lets give them 3

minute cool downs on there death spells? Sounds good to me! Lets change Bard freezing thingy, I play with a guy who has a 70+ DC and EE IS trivial we just tear through that stuff.. and that is far more game breaking than pally dps which is still less than my barb..And another thing.. So lets just say they are not meant to stack, then pallys cant have improved crit on a weapon until there 4th lv spell slots? thats lame... Oh I get it.. sure take Improved crit, then when you get holy sword pay for a feat change.. GOT IT.. CLEAVER

This isn't specifically about pallies. I only mentioned pallies because that was the context in which i saw the Severlin quote. Every melee is taking advantage of this, with the exception of barbarians, and if they are in divine crusader, then they are too.

What i actually had more in mind was my fighter/bard mix. It uses a foresters brush hook. In divine crusader, it has an 11-20 x4 critical profile. That's insane. That means that every 20 swings, it's basically getting the equivalent of 30 extra hits. If you are critting 50% of the time, they shouldn't even be called critical hits. They should just be called normal hits, and maybe the non crits should be called flaccid hits or something. They could be accompanied by a 'doink' sound like you might hear in an old cartoon.

I'm not sure what you are going on about with the stacking. It would still stack with the feat improved crit. Your axe in your example would be 18-20 x 4.

I can remember the debates in the olden days about khopesh being unbalanced weapons with their mighty 19-20 x3 crit profile. Back then, a kensei could get that up to 16-20 x3 with the improved crit feat. That was as far as it could go. There really were very few named weapons which had special critical profiles. It's the combination of adding many weapons with escalated crit profiles along with many enhancements which further escalate this.

Just my personal take on the holy sword spell, they could drop the threat range enhancement entirely, keep the extra +1 multiplier to differentiate it from what kensei does. Then they could go ahead an add the +(1w) back in if they felt it was underpowered.

[Gljosh]

Interesting take using the addition and then multiply format of some abilities. Most melee classes have a bonus to crit range (and sometimes a bonus to crit damage) that makes some increased threat range weapons very strong. I have seen some builds get down to 11~20 for a crit range, I can pretty easily get down to 15~20 (roughly 30% crit chance), 13~20 with a better weapon (roughly 40% crit chance). Now compare that to a caster 22% from a lore item, 2% from Insight bonus, 2% Artifact Bonus, 6% from enhancements (easily can be more), and 8% from Mental Toughness Feast so roughly 40% spell crit chance. It seems like every character can have a very high crit chance, add in multiple hit spells or doublestrike/shot and most character can crit very easily. Then add in damage bonus with "damage", enhanced crit multipliers, and "on crit" effects. Players are very powerful, mix in the low hanging fruits and broken builds stir for a bit and BANG solo EE speed runs.

[Ralmeth]

I don't know, I find it fun to get big crits, so I'm not really for this. Though I won't complain too much either way.

[psykopeta]

the root of powercreep are enhancement and ED, remove all and done

[dkyle]

This isn't specifically about pallies. I only mentioned pallies because that was the context in which i saw the Severlin quote. Every melee is taking advantage of this, with the exception of barbarians, and if they are in divine crusader, then they are too.

What i actually had more in mind was my fighter/bard mix. It uses a foresters brush hook. In divine crusader, it has an 11-20 x4 critical profile. That's insane. That means that every 20 swings, it's basically getting the equivalent of 30 extra hits. If you are critting 50% of the time, they shouldn't even be called critical hits. They should just be called normal hits, and maybe the non crits should be called flaccid hits or something. They could be accompanied by a 'doink' sound like you might hear in an old cartoon.

Double the Swashbuckler crit bonus is clearly intended, though, so your argument re: Paladins doesn't apply the same way. It's certainly not a coincidence that every affected base weapon arrives at the same crit profile (besides light pick, which gets a mostly equivalent one).

The effect on unusual crit profile named weapons might not be intended, but those aren't top DPS for swashbucklers anymore anyway, by my understanding (Thunderforged weapons are), so any problem here isn't all that significant.

[FestusHood]

Double the Swashbuckler crit bonus is clearly intended, though, so your argument re: Paladins doesn't apply the same way. It's certainly not a coincidence that every affected base weapon arrives at the same crit profile (besides light pick, which gets a mostly equivalent one).

The effect on unusual crit profile named weapons might not be intended, but those aren't top DPS for swashbucklers anymore anyway, by my understanding (Thunderforged weapons are), so any problem here isn't all that significant.

The problem is, as i see it, that all melees are doing too much damage. The massive inflation of critical profiles that has taken place since the enhancement pass is a big part of the reason.

Let me give you another side effect which i've noticed with my swashbuckling character. Guardbreaking. This effect has existed on Cove bucklers since they came out. Back before motu, i tried messing around with it, and thought it was a neat novelty effect. The thing was, it didn't induce helpless state, and it broke on the next hit. So at most all it could do was maybe get you a free hit. Even on a character using a rapier, which topped out at 30% crit rate, it didn't seem that useful to me.

Now enter my bard thing, with a 50% crit rate coupled with 30% alacrity on attacks. It's not uncommon for the guardbreaking effect to keep a mob in a perpetual stupor all the way until it's dead. It went from a novelty to an amazing ability.

[FestusHood]

I don't know, I find it fun to get big crits, so I'm not really for this. Though I won't complain too much either way.

I'm not so much against the big crits, as long as they are appropriately rare. It's the high frequency of crits that i think are the problem.

[Lonnbeimnech]

Doing this will just get everyone to throw away their falchions, scimitars and rapiers and start using great axes and heavy picks. The dps will be very much the same, just with more spikes, and more 'come on 20!'.

[Alternative]

remove destinies, seriously

imagine the game without blitz, shiradi, furyshot

[unbongwah]

The root of powercreep is players complaining about how their characters can't do that thing as well as some other players' characters do that thing. So the first set of players gets the buffs they want just to shut them up, but then the second group of players is all like, WHY AREN'T WE THE BEST AT THAT THING ANYMORE?! WE LOVED BEING THE BEST!! so then they get buffs too. Round `n round it goes...therefore, get rid of all the players, you get rid of powercreep.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

[CThruTheEgo]

I recently saw Severlin mention in a thread that he wasn't aware that the expanded critical range from the Paladin holy sword spell would be doubled by the feat Improved Critical.

Just for the sake of accuracy and transparency, can we get a link for that quote?

The root of powercreep is players complaining about how their characters can't do that thing as well as some other players' characters do that thing. So the first set of players gets the buffs they want just to shut them up, but then the second group of players is all like, WHY AREN'T WE THE BEST AT THAT THING ANYMORE?! WE LOVED BEING THE BEST!! so then they get buffs too. Round `n round it goes...therefore, get rid of all the players, you get rid of powercreep.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

/thread

[FestusHood]

Just for the sake of accuracy and transparency, can we get a link for that quote?

Post #203

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...11#post5560132

I am wondering if the devs at the time of the enhancement pass were aware that the crit range enhancements they were putting in would be doubled? I can't be the only person who thought "this must be a bug, it will probably be fixed", when this was first revealed to be the case.

Note that i'm not in any way trying to chide the dev's or Sev in particular for this, even if they weren't aware it would work the way it does. I do however think that the double expanded crit range mods were far and away the most decisive leap in (offensive) power creep that started this whole "killer dm mode" ball rolling.

People say it was destines. It wasn't. Those were here back when people still thought epic elite was hard. Even the old masters blitz, which was ridiculously overpowered didn't make people ask for a new difficulty level.

[Uska]

Thread title is misleading holy sword isn't the root of power creep it's just another source of it the true root is the enhancement system followed closely by the ED's and enhanced by the Monty Haul loot in items and tomes