DDOCast 394 - DDO Debates: The Big Important Stuff

[Hafeal]

FYI, failing a puzzle in Abbott is not a raid fail. If you go back to the main platform and beat him down he will throw the doors back up if you haven't completed all 3 puzzles. It's just that most groups choose to start over.

*sheepish grin* Uh, yeah, sorry about that. Abbott rant has got me frothing apparently.

*cough* alrighty, back to our regularly scheduled programming ...

[Hafeal]

Is there something you find lacking within those discussions?

ex:
307 - new player tips
320 - TR tips
313 - playing solo
330 - maximizing premium/F2P
332 - elevating your game play
337, 338, 340 - PUGs
342 - staying alive
353 - new player integration
359 - zerging
372 - hotbars

And btw, I have not ignored your question. I will need to go back and listen, again. I thought the episodes were good. Some could bear repeating. Sometimes I wish guests could have been swapped. But I am generally walking my dogs when I listen, so, I don't make notes. I will say there have been times where I learned something new or "re-learned" something I had forgotten (not having run a certain class for a long time, for example).

I will try to be more concrete with some examples after some reflection.

[FranOhmsford]

I rarely post anymore on these forums (noone reads the posts anyways) - but this made me go like ***???

I mean there is a huge gap between hard and elite (especially on epic that gap is huge) - but between normal and hard??? They feel like the exact same thing, except that on hard some mobs have a fancy crown above their head (not that they would be tougher because of it - they only get the hard buffs - not the elite ones). So: No to champions on normal - I mean the normal champion buffs would need to be even weaker than the ones champions on hard get - and those are already barely noticeable.

Just my opinion, I know - but just NO

IF you want to tweak anything, than make hard harder so that we actually get a difficulty that is harder than sleepwalking but not as tough as elite (talking especially with non-optimal builds for soloists in mind)

Look...I rarely run anything less than Elite in Heroics - I can cope with Elite Solo so Hard and Normal are cake walks for me in low end Heroics {not so much once past Lvl 15 where I'm not quite Elite Solo capable yet and certainly not in Epics where I run almost entirely EN!}

For someone who's capable of running EEs low end Heroic and even mid to high Heroic Normal and Hard will feel very similar - Both ridiculously easy!

HOWEVER: For a Newbie the gap between the two has widened immensely thanks to Champions!
The gap between Hard and Elite {Which has always been a chasm...So much so that a player can find Hard easy while not being capable in Elites} has barely widened at all!

I'm not saying to fill Normal with Champions but maybe the odd one every two quests so the Newbie gets the chance to figure them out on a lesser difficulty?

Finally considering REAPER difficulty - I think you all got that completely wrong - we don't need a difficulty that is "just a bit harder than elite" - with or without rewards - nope.
We need a REAPER difficulty that replaces the old epic difficulty => only runable by capped or nearly capped toons, vastly harder than EE, CR 35, with all new epic gear (probably with a system similar to shard/seal/scroll) and finally only repeatable once a day (no bypass timers!!!!) => THAT's what would help revive the endgame scene - without that I don't really see a future for DDO - just my opinion though

The problem is that this doesn't seem to be what the Devs have got in mind for Reaper - It seems Reaper is going to be simply a difficulty above Elite for ALL quests in game rather than a specifically End-Game difficulty.

In fact I've stated multiple times that this game needs a "Mythic" End-Game difficulty starting at Base Level 35 with ONLY capped toons allowed to enter {OK I'll drop that requirement to Lvl 28}.

However - Why can't we have BOTH?
Reaper for Completionists and Multi-TRs who want to run Heroics and not be bored.
AND
Mythic - True End-Game similar to pre-MotU Epics for those who don't want to just keep TRing.

[IronClan]

Every raid can be failed by a 28s in full EDs. Each and every one. Being 28 and in full ED just gives you huge room for margin of error. Now how likely is it? Not likely.

We're talking about EE MoD where we didn't bring enough DPS and CC (AKA we didn't make sure the math worked) versus a level 17 Raid where everyone in it has done Abbot many times, and only skill and communication and reactions in FRONT OF THE SCREEN matter, NOT math.

Because:

• tiles can't be over powered by gear and levels (math)
• asteroids requires actual player skill and diligence and can't be over powered
• The wander got encased: team work and coordinating someone as backup, and making sure those with boulders stopped DPS'ing to break encasement
• multiple inferno's in a row, testing players ability to get to the ice island (or more lately the Abbots foot in time, and not slide off. Which is a relative late comer of a meta tactic that not everyone knows) or very well timed remove curse pot followed by self healing. These are all about player skill and not math problems that can be meta gamed/geared past and leveled past to triviality.

People might fail a EE MoD or DoJ at 28, because of math... player skill is only a minor factor. MoD has way too many safe spots (compass points of the Dais where Inferno doesn't quite reach) so that inferno is no longer the fear and excitement inducing factor that is was in heroic Abbot, and no one even bothers wanding an ice island. And the Tells (bombardment warnings whatever you want to call them) at the end fight of DoJ are largely simple jump to one side (Worm breath) reactions or "get to the safe spots" (comet fall nuke which seems to kill the entire room no matter where you go unless it's one of the safe terrain locations in the lava or under the overhang).

Abbot with some added LOB mechanics? LOB is just a melee version of Abbot, but none the less despite not having anywhere near the skilled puzzle challenges that was a fun and well designed beat down. So add LOB melee to Abbot's Inferno, encasement and dis-junction? Well that would have been devilish for EPic Abbot, sadly we got a dumbed down arena beat down that is 100% beatable through meta gaming and bringing enough math. MoD is more beatable through meta tactics than the heroic level 17 precursor... sad. When I say 28 can fail it, I mean they can fail it because of skill, not because they didn't bring enough math.

[IronClan]

However - Why can't we have BOTH?
Reaper for Completionists and Multi-TRs who want to run Heroics and not be bored.
AND
Mythic - True End-Game similar to pre-MotU Epics for those who don't want to just keep TRing.

I think they should just do mythic (Endgame level 30 version of Old "epic") and bite the bullet and make EE harder (use Champ's 1.0). make Heroic ELite a LITTLE harder and take champs out of Heroic Hard and give the same BB bonus for a heroic hard streak as a heroic elite streak. (yes I know this seems painfully pandering, but it's a compromise, and truth is: heroic hard and heroic elite are both trivial right now even if one is more trivial than the other does it really matter?)

Compromise.

The more I think about Reaper the worse an idea it seems to be to further divide a small player base into a 5th setting...

In fact when I contemplate this it increasingly sounds more and more like a straw that broke the camels back scenario.

[pjstechie]

We're talking about EE MoD where we didn't bring enough DPS and CC (AKA we didn't make sure the math worked) versus a level 17 Raid where everyone in it has done Abbot many times, and only skill and communication and reactions in FRONT OF THE SCREEN matter, NOT math.

Because:

• tiles can't be over powered by gear and levels (math)
• asteroids requires actual player skill and diligence and can't be over powered
• The wander got encased: team work and coordinating someone as backup, and making sure those with boulders stopped DPS'ing to break encasement
• multiple inferno's in a row, testing players ability to get to the ice island (or more lately the Abbots foot in time, and not slide off. Which is a relative late comer of a meta tactic that not everyone knows) or very well timed remove curse pot followed by self healing. These are all about player skill and not math problems that can be meta gamed/geared past and leveled past to triviality.

For me this hits the nail on the head. This is good raid design. Tactics, player skill, coordination. These are encouraged by good raid design and a well designed raid will still challenge those even in an over level group.

My only complaint with the abbot puzzles is how quickly the ice water kills you and that if you miss a tile you die - I always wanted a possibility of surviving falling and getting a chance to try again. I like margin of error in my raids. Raids should fail because you got overrun, failed to adjust and such things. Penalties for a misstep should be death not start over. Start over should be the penalty for many missteps and miscues.

Speaking of which, part of the problem with the low margin for error with Titan is you would then need to run the preraid again...

[IronClan]

For me this hits the nail on the head. This is good raid design. Tactics, player skill, coordination. These are encouraged by good raid design and a well designed raid will still challenge those even in an over level group.

My only complaint with the abbot puzzles is how quickly the ice water kills you and that if you miss a tile you die - I always wanted a possibility of surviving falling and getting a chance to try again. I like margin of error in my raids. Raids should fail because you got overrun, failed to adjust and such things. Penalties for a misstep should be death not start over. Start over should be the penalty for many missteps and miscues.

Speaking of which, part of the problem with the low margin for error with Titan is you would then need to run the preraid again...

I agree it sucks to have a binary condition cause re-running the pre-raid. Part of the problem there however is breaking a raid up into more "consumer friendly" chunks. SO we think of it as the "pre raid" and a chore. Imagine if they had made LOB and MA more lengthy by putting their particular part of the explorer area INTO the raids themselves... All of a sudden no ones b*tching about having to run through the explorer area any more because in their minds it's now actually part of the raid (do people complain about Fire and Ice in Tempest Spine? Nope it's part of the raid... the Dev team can't win in these scenarios... make the Raid longer and people complain, make it shorter and it becomes abusable (20 EN's a night) make the short end fight have a tight failure condition like Titan and suddenly "bah we have to do the chore of the pre-raid"... put them together and "bah this raid takes too long, I'm 40 and have a life this isn't WoW"... In other words they kinda can't win for losing some times. IMO those raids could and probably should be all one part, VON5-6 should be VON5, but are broken into pre raid and beat down due to the length not being very target demographic friendly (mostly IMO that is the reason).

But the other problem is that if you increase the margin with the mostly static "practice makes perfect" meta gaming vulnerable content you often make the difference between hard but doable, into: not hard and near 100% completion ratio as long as you have a couple people who know how.

The difference between Titan and Von5-6 for example... a party of 28's (without factoring bugs or cheesing with Ruin, which change and evolve over time) is that we are literally never any more going to fail a VON5 or 6... without outside factors like lag, never... I can't recall a single EE failure of VON6 post 25 cap in my 200+ runs for eSoS shard. YEARS ago, in 2010 and 11, sure. When the Cap was 20 and 25 sure we failed then, back then the damage was still high enough that dedicated healing was needed and somewhere along the line our self healing obviated that and completions became a 100% expectancy. On the other hand I have failed Titans in the last couple years, ignoring runs that were lost due to the Titan wrecking pillars on his own (something he's started doing a lot of recently).

Meta gaming is the worse enemy of replay-ability and also of challenge... and the least "practicable" raid in the game is Abbot to me that means it's one of the most cleverly designed.

In Titan the pillars are perhaps too tight a margin for error. I wont argue with that. I will say that just a little less tight and the likelihood of completions skyrockets into the land of (every other Raid in the game) almost complete certainty. If the group doesn't outright suck and has at least a couple people who know what to do. With the tight margin for error skill plays a bigger part, and yes dumb luck also can have a higher impact. But too many pillars just increases the small chance of failure into a "you have to really screw it up" chance of failure.

This reminds me of the "blind tiling" in MoD... the Developer thought players were going to follow the guy with the goggles so the phylactery beat downs would take much longer to start, BUT because the water is so survivable we messed all over his best laid plan, and we blind tile... The water in MoD gives too wide a margin for error and thus is it a abused as the exploitable meta tactic that reduces completion times dramatically.

Give Titan too many Pillars and we blind pillar (so to speak), at least until we start nearing only having 2 or 3 extra's we prep and and drop quickly with moderate effort to get things lined up, but maybe not the precise "sweat each one out" tension that we have when it's 8 pillars and 6 hits... Sooner or later we get good at "blind pillaring" and the margin for error being too wide makes a tense sweaty end fight into a formality to get through.

To me this is the main problem with DDO as a whole and raiding in particular... meta gaming, I can do an Abbot tonight with the thelanis late night Abbot gang and sure we might power through it because we all know ALL the tricks (including how to brute force ice, how to get both sets of goggles on one player, the safe spot on the abbot statues foot etc.) it took most of the games history to figure out these little tricks that turn a hard to meta tactic raid into a little more meta-able. We still might fail in tiles, then catch 2 or 3 well timed infernos in a row that no one was ready for and fail... failing a level 17 raid with 28's who do Abbot because we enjoy doing abbot suggests that this raid is very unique among DDO's raids... it's one of the only ones that remains challenging and is not a certain completion every time. And not because it's buggy, but because the mechanics of the raid are overcome with skill and coordination and not math and player fore knowledge of what is about to happen.

Anyway great discussion, I love this subject.

[Acoustical]

Finally considering REAPER difficulty - I think you all got that completely wrong - we don't need a difficulty that is "just a bit harder than elite" - with or without rewards - nope.
We need a REAPER difficulty that replaces the old epic difficulty => only runable by capped or nearly capped toons, vastly harder than EE, CR 35, with all new epic gear (probably with a system similar to shard/seal/scroll) and finally only repeatable once a day (no bypass timers!!!!) => THAT's what would help revive the endgame scene - without that I don't really see a future for DDO - just my opinion though

I agree with this fella!

[IronClan]

I agree with this fella!

I agree as well the more I think about this the worse an idea splitting us up into 5 difficulty settings seems. On the other hand an End game only difficulty does exactly the opposite... it combines people at endgame, and ramps up the challenge level.

[Renvar]

Great show, Sham. Really enjoyed this one. You guys were talking about raids, as I recall and what the next raid could be.

I was wondering what is going on with Tiamat. It seemed like the Mask of Deception quest was stuck in there as an introduction into the WoTC wide plot line about Tiamat trying to return to Faerun.

We never got any follow on for this. Is there a quest pack coming? I'd think a raid with Tiamat as a Raid Boss would be awesome. She'd be large, but mobile with multiple heads attacking simultaneously. It would be interesting if each head had a different aggro calculation. And some might attack low and be melee-able and some might stay high casting spells and using breath weapons and only be accessible via ranged/spells. It just seems like a good raid boss and seemed the direction they were going.

Any word on why the Mask of Deception quest was stuck in there if not to follow on with a quest series/raid?