U27: The Sudden End of All Endgame DC Casting in DDO?

[Vargouille]

When you say " people say the game is too easy" and use it as an excuse not to adjust saves you either don't understand the game mechanics or you're being lazy.

I apologize if you or anyone got the impression that anyone on the DDO team has said we're not adjusting saving throws. I'm not sure where that impression came from but I have certainly not intended to express that. I am sorry we didn't get to more balance changes between the first and second Lamannia previews.

[Vanhooger]

QFT.

Spell resistance and mega-saves. Who is going to bother with that?. As if arcane casters
needed any more reasons to go Shiradi...

you missed the new shiny Epic resilience

[Jetrule]

I have never built a DC caster. I did max a cleric for turning undead. The result was I hit a point in game difficulty where turning undead was no longer possible. It seems DC casters are the same. A very specialized focus that will only work on some things to start with and then will stop working even on those things after a certain difficulty level. DC casters just have more room till what they specialize in becomes useless. At least dc casters can still hope the high save monsters roll a 1.

[Rys]

So, to be clear, your answer to the problem of saves being too high for DC
casters is to nerf PRR/MRR and to remove Mortal Fear from the game?

No sorry, I've been replying to someone else, not to the OP.

It's clear saves need tweaking. But I am not gonna engage in this, as I have clearly seen how it went with ToEE. All feedback given about the saves was a waste of time.

[knockcocker]

I apologize if you or anyone got the impression that anyone on the DDO team has said we're not adjusting saving throws. I'm not sure where that impression came from but I have certainly not intended to express that. I am sorry we didn't get to more balance changes between the first and second Lamannia previews.

Whilst I can see why you responded to that part of the post, I think it's more important to note the impact
the saves have on certain classes compared to others. DC casters already struggle - especially non-completionist
ones without all the tomes, slotted augments etc. etc. It's already easier to play Brb/Pal/Rog/Brd than it is a
DC caster. Failing to beat saves consistently is frustrating - especially if you're a triple completionist iwth the best
gear and the game and can't beat saves after extensive debuffing.

[Ape_Man]

You obviously don't hate casters. You just randomly made every mob Orange and Red named in the new raid with no shrines.

That is almost signature worthy

[Abcchef]

I apologize if you or anyone got the impression that anyone on the DDO team has said we're not adjusting saving throws. I'm not sure where that impression came from but I have certainly not intended to express that. I am sorry we didn't get to more balance changes between the first and second Lamannia previews.

very good to hear that adjustments may happen. The first post definitely led me to believe they were off the table.

[Ape_Man]

I apologize if you or anyone got the impression that anyone on the DDO team has said we're not adjusting saving throws. I'm not sure where that impression came from but I have certainly not intended to express that. I am sorry we didn't get to more balance changes between the first and second Lamannia previews.

Sorry if I'm coming off as a bit of a jerk about this (truth be told I'm a massive jerk in real life), I just care about this stuff. I still play multiple toons and want this to be fun for all of them.

Looking forward to the next preview.

[Ape_Man]

So, to be clear, your answer to the problem of saves being too high for DC
casters is to nerf PRR/MRR and to remove Mortal Fear from the game?

As an aside . . . I think an interesting mechanic for Reaper would be to have PRR/MRR have half it's effective value.

Mortal Fear . . . could use a haircut. Nerfing it completely would cause a rage, I personally think if nerfed it should simply be changed to not multiply with Helpless.

[Vanhooger]

As an aside . . . I think an interesting mechanic for Reaper would be to have PRR/MRR have half it's effective value.

Mortal Fear . . . could use a haircut. Nerfing it completely would cause a rage, I personally think if nerfed it should simply be changed to not multiply with Helpless.

I know it's off topic but if MF need a bit more of a nerf:

- Proc from 5% to 2%
- Cut hp of non bosses from 50% to 25%;
- Not working at all on orange named.

[Ape_Man]

I know it's off topic but if MF need a bit more of a nerf:

- Proc from 5% to 2%
- Cut hp of non bosses from 50% to 25%;
- Not working at all on orange named.

Too much of a nerf, nobody would have farmed for this if that's what it gave. You don't want to turn them into Nightmares.

[Vanhooger]

Too much of a nerf, nobody would have farmed for this if that's what it gave. You don't want to turn them into Nightmares.

I know but the problem is, I don't know how they're going to beat a mortal fear weapon once lvl 30 & new raid come out.

+20 greataxe of banishing with no Save? Dunno

All the red named in the new raid is probably to counter they're own fault, MF.

[Ape_Man]

I know but the problem is, I don't know how they're going to beat a mortal fear weapon once lvl 30 & new raid come out.

+20 greataxe of banishing with no Save? Dunno

Intangibles, weapons that do other stuff.

Redname weapons, bunch of slots, etc. You're never gonna replace the Mortal Fear weapon for a trash killer but you can't nerf it to worthless or you kill those raids.

[Portalcat]

I should correct myself, because there's two other significant things we're considering right now:

• Right now Update 27 monsters are benefiting from Epic Resilience, unlike Update 25. This is up for consideration to change or ignore for this update (some of this is pending time).
• Many monsters in Update 27 have Spell Resistance, which we also need to review and balance, and wasn't a signficant factor in Update 25.

Epic resilience is +6, and +4 when mobs are slightly damaged?

Frankly a 3-5 point difference is what I would typically tell people is enough to see a large and pronounced difference in the efficiency of two DC casters. The key is that all these failure probabilities multiply out when using multi-target spells with high spell point costs and long cooldowns (Wail of the Banshee, Circle of Death, Mass Hold Monster) and the result (dead mobs versus EE mob charging and swinging at you) is highly polarized.



Spell resistance is something that typically has been ignored in most content by min/maxers because it's so rarely a factor. Bumping it is doable at the cost of 1-3 DC depending on how much we need to do so.





The general problem with U27 saves seems to be "way too much, too fast". The Shavarath effect is +4 overall and then +8 more to saves against enchant. Epic resilience is typically +4-6. The spell resistance checks mean trading off a couple points of DC, so another +2ish effectively.

No wonder nobody can dance anything in these quests - we started at the baseline of ToEE and then added ~18-20 to the required DCs. If you take a caster that hit most of the time in U25, they would mathematically now hit 0% of the time, which is exactly what's happening. Heck, it's a bigger increase in saves in one update than DCs have increased in total since the enhancement pass 2 years ago.



Fort saves then have +10-12 difference which is itself extreme. It's assumed that necro spells will fail some meaningful percentage of the time to begin with, and that in fact negleveling first is a significant part of making it effective way to kill mobs. KookieKobold mentioned in the Lamannia chat last night that the dretches are a mob type that has specifically high fort saves, and I assume that many of the mob types in Shavarath do, which would go a long way to explaining why people cannot land their necro spells; add +10-12 to something you already would have had to enervate + power drain and it becomes unworkable. Normally a DC caster might just hold/dance mobs that were too difficult to instakill, but that route is blocked.






Part of the frustration in all this surely stems from the fact that this content is not that hard on generic DPS builds. DC casting was 10-15 points of DC weaker when the U19 enhancement pass dropped - but it was still good enough to be valuable in endgame content because regular DPS options were also weaker. The tradeoff to playing a DC caster was that you had poor boss DPS.

With the many passes to melee classes, they do much better now. The extra 10-15 points of DC has mostly allowed DC casting to keep up; it's was the difference between being buffed and getting incremental loot improvements in new content. Boss DPS on DC casters certainly hasn't improved at all. So, when you suddenly put out content with effects that dramatically increase the difficulty of DC casting - you really created a night and day difference here.



A general solution that was proposed by my raid group on Lamannia (which smashed the EE raid on the first try with a group of nearly all melees) was that relative to where we are now, we should be lowering mob saves while increasing their damage output substantially.

[cave_diver]

Intangibles, weapons that do other stuff.

Redname weapons, bunch of slots, etc. You're never gonna replace the Mortal Fear weapon for a trash killer but you can't nerf it to worthless or you kill those raids.

Heh....never stopped them before....

Last one i remember was the Nightmare nerf to the CITW B-sword.

[noinfo]

I should correct myself, because there's two other significant things we're considering right now:

• Right now Update 27 monsters are benefiting from Epic Resilience, unlike Update 25. This is up for consideration to change or ignore for this update (some of this is pending time).
• Many monsters in Update 27 have Spell Resistance, which we also need to review and balance, and wasn't a signficant factor in Update 25.

Player feedback on Update 25 monster saves is not out of line with what we expect (nor is actual gameplay). As others noted in other threads, saving throws changed signficantly during Update 25 development and Lamannia review.

If we ever reach a point where no player complains about monsters being too powerful, then monsters are likely too weak. As an example to be seen in non-DC related areas for Update 27 feedback, players do reasonably point out when monsters are too weak or gameplay isn't challenging, yet we've also seen feedback asking for Update 27 to be made easier in some of the same areas. Monster balance and quest balance isn't a place where we reasonably expect to make all players happy all the time, as much as we would love to do that.

The difference between dc casting in heroic and epic is night and day.
vs orange named which you can instakill in heroic and red named which have huge hp inflation you have a character type that has had significant proxy nerfing.

The devs suggestions to add crit multipliers was an acknowledgement but one in the wrong direction. Some small effects from DC casting needs to be able to hit reds and have even more effect on orange and this is after everything gets a better pass with saves.

Have higher level spells scale or have some benefit, to use instead of low level sp efficient ones.

Possibly having spell crit bonus based on the level of the spell, such as +9% for level 9 spells
and scaled spell power like warlock for higher level spells or crit multipliers based on the level of the spell. (maybe only scaled here in epics)

[RobbinB]

Too much of a nerf, nobody would have farmed for this if that's what it gave. You don't want to turn them into Nightmares.

Well, that is the million dollar question. What is an appropriate level of nerf that still makes mortal fear a valuable tier 3 (perhaps still the most valuable) but reduces or eliminates it being ridiculously overpowered?

Turbine has a history of:
--introducing (what are seemingly) obvious overpowered items (eg. original on crit nightmare as regular loot)
--not listening to feedback that makes it clear something is overpowered, making it real tough to nerf at a later date since peeps spent either considerable time or money making/acquiring it
--overnerfing anything once they finally do make some sort of change (eg nightmares, stat-damagers)

Also, are there any examples where turbine has said "Hey, this is obviously way overpowered. We are going to make a minor tweak and then re-evaluate. We will probably nerf further later but we want to assess this minor change first."

In the case of mortal fear it could be something like reduce proc rate to 3% with 40% hp drop and slight increase in "fear" damage, then make further tweaks if needed a couple months later.

[fmalfeas]

Fort saves then have +10-12 difference which is itself extreme. It's assumed that necro spells will fail some meaningful percentage of the time to begin with, and that in fact negleveling first is a significant part of making it effective way to kill mobs. KookieKobold mentioned in the Lamannia chat last night that the dretches are a mob type that has specifically high fort saves, and I assume that many of the mob types in Shavarath do, which would go a long way to explaining why people cannot land their necro spells; add +10-12 to something you already would have had to enervate + power drain and it becomes unworkable. Normally a DC caster might just hold/dance mobs that were too difficult to instakill, but that route is blocked.

Don't forget that when enchantment and fort are blocked, the options become reflex, or necro-will. But...necro-will is Fear effects, which are still defended against by Shav effects, and a high save to begin with. So, we've got reflex. That's nukes, and...web? grease? Both of which, btw, are obliterated by AoE fire spells, which both demons and devils love to use frequently.

[slarden]

I'll say: Nerf mortal fear, it's game breaking.

I am not looking to nerf mortal fear, I spent alot of raids to get those. If they are looking to add a 5th difficulty that is higher than EE, they should buff casters.

We shouldn't be having to argue to keep DC casters viable every time new content is released. We had the same issue with TOEE on Lamannia. The devs need to understand the builds that aren't challenged are high PRR weapon-based builds - ranged and melee.

[Ape_Man]

Don't forget that when enchantment and fort are blocked, the options become reflex, or necro-will. But...necro-will is Fear effects, which are still defended against by Shav effects, and a high save to begin with. So, we've got reflex. That's nukes, and...web? grease? Both of which, btw, are obliterated by AoE fire spells, which both demons and devils love to use frequently.

I look at it this way, there should be 4ish types of mobs, with the below save layout . . .

Standard: these are standard

"Archers": higher reflex, lower fort

"Casters": Lower fort, higher will

"Brutes: Higher fort, lower will

In my perfect world the devs would know what the DCs casters would have and adjust the content accordingly.

Just talking fort saves for a sec, a top necro DC is 77-78. In my opinion that should land 80% of the time on a "standard" mob. The "caster" or "archer" should fail more often, the "brute" like a Hezrou or ogre/troll should make the save more often.

I don't expect to finger and end-game brute without debuffing even on a maxed toon, but my will based attacks should land. I also should be able to land the kill on that brute if I spend a full energy drain as that's over 100 SP per kill.

As it is now all the saves are too high, nothing lands. Let's see what we have different in round 3.