Devs . . . 84 DC necro versus CR55 Kobolds

[slarden]

I gave up on DC casting the second the devs asked what percentage of the time spells should work.

[FranOhmsford]

I gave up on DC casting the second the devs asked what percentage of the time spells should work.

good point.

Because the problem is that there's so much of a gap between players - Gear, Past Lives, Ability to spend real money on Store Mana Pots.

And for me the likes of Energy Drain and Mind Fog and having to rely on the melee debuffing mobs saves should be for the Caster Players who haven't got everything NOT for those who HAVE!

A Max DC Completionist Caster should have at absolute least an 80% Chance vs Legendary Elite Trash Mobs BEFORE any debuffs!

[FranOhmsford]

Oh and the +6 to all Saves at 100% Health: I've never liked this idea!

What has always been players biggest gripe about Instakills? Kill Stealing. Wizards waiting for the melee to get a mob down then instakilling it before the melee can finish it off!

This system just gives Casters an Excuse for this type of gameplay!


What I'd prefer:

+0 to mob Saves at 100% HP
+2 to mob Saves at 75% HP
+4 to mob Saves at 50% HP
+6 to mob Saves at 25% HP

To Simulate Adrenaline kicking in!

This also doesn't inherently punish the CC Caster far above the Instakill Caster as the other way does!
The CC Caster doesn't want to be waiting until the mob is at 50% to get his spells off - The Instakill Caster is quite happy to wait to make his spells more likely to kill even if the mob Saves!

[patang01]

What the heck is up with these saves? Seriously, did the person who designed this new content ever play anything besides a melee or a Warlock?

0% landed without prepping. 0% on FREEEKING KOBOLDS!!!!!!

I was looking forward to play an air savant again - even reincarnated my second Warlock back into Savant, but after comparing the play on Lam between my one Warlock and my reincarnated Savant, I know in my heart that I will hate my Warlock.
.
This was ToEE on EH, yes EH and almost all spells were saved against on fricken EH. I saw that save pop up on almost all spells with probably a 50% save rate.

Compared to my Warlock that chewed through critters with barely any resources wasted,

Safe to say there's something really silly going on. I gave up insta killing stuff a long time ago and now it feels counterproductive to even bother with regular spell casting.

[noinfo]

You are putting a lot of stuff in one bag.
There are so many more details that you are ignoring.
I was one of those people that was talking about OPness of instakills. Still, I did not say 5% chance of success was good. Reducing the saves is better than increasing overall power because power affects every other content as well. Reducing the saves so much that casters have a 95% chance of succeeding without debufs is too much. Also, having every type of monster have same save is too unbalanced because a caster either fails all of them or succeeds in all of them.

There is a middle ground...

The middle ground is for the middle performers, those who do not have everything yet, those classes who have dc spells but do not get the bonuses, these are the ones who will never get used because some people think 1 kill every 8 seconds without a debuff is op. Sorry its not and I will never agree with it.

This is compounded by the lack of effect on orange named and even less on red.

[Andoris]

yes.


yes.

"Are you also in favor of decreasing character defenses so that 1 caster monster is more dangerous than 10 trash and 1 brute is more dangerous than 5 trash making CC and instakills relevant even if they kill 1 dangerous monster instead of 10 average?"
yes.

"Are you also in favor of decreasing monster damage and saves in content where it's usual for non-exceptional monsters to one-shot you?"
yes.

Great! So if you for across the board power reductions (which is a cause I can get behind), how about we start with the real offenders -- once we convince the devs to Nerf the vastly over performing classes, then I will stand shoulder to shoulder with you in balancing DC casters with the new "normal".

Until then though, would you mind not starting your crusade with the weak gimpy kid in the corner. There are much bigger fish to fry.

[Wipey]

nope, **** it, pointless either way

[Faltout]

Until then though, would you mind not starting your crusade with the weak gimpy kid in the corner. There are much bigger fish to fry.

Heh, the problem though is that player power is blown out of proportion. If you wait till the worst offender gets nerfed to mention the others, the power will keep growing in a faster rate than you nerf it. So I mention all the offenders.

Not that it matters really. Seeing the new random loot I have no idea where the devs are taking the game so I can help them with insight. Noone asked the devs for such bonuses so I can at least blame the community. They came up with them all by themselves so I can only assume they want to destroy the game eventually. Just when you think players could not come up with worse ideas to implement, the devs implement even worse.

[Cordovan]

We have lowered saving throws for many of the mobs in the new content. These changes did not make it into today's Lamannia update, though.

[Basura_Grande]

We have lowered saving throws for many of the mobs in the new content. These changes did not make it into today's Lamannia update, though.

Thank you. Can you give us some idea how often maxed out toons can expect to actually land spells after putting in 20+ PLs and building our toons right?

[Wizza]

We have lowered saving throws for many of the mobs in the new content. These changes did not make it into today's Lamannia update, though.

Every, single, time. I read this sentence about 30 times per Lamannia update.

[Lycurgus]

We have lowered saving throws for many of the mobs in the new content. These changes did not make it into today's Lamannia update, though.

That's great, but it fails to address the issues with casters in general.

1. DC casting is irrelevant in the current hack and slash version of the game. Two things matter: DPS and survivability, in that order. It doesn't matter if you can provide CC when melee already have mobs at 10% health by the time you're finished casting a spell, much less a debuff AND a spell. It doesn't matter if you can instakill a few mobs every 30 seconds when a cleaving barbarian has killed quadruple that number in less time simply spamming cleaves. It doesn't matter if your evocation is high enough that you don't constantly see "evade" when the damage you do is STILL a fraction of that done by melee and is dependent upon a finite supply of spell points to achieve that marginal damage.

To rub salt in the wound, a truly maxed out DC caster has to make major concessions in terms of survivability and is then borderline useless in raids full of rednamed trash mobs.

2. Since DPS is the name of the game, you would expect that at least some classes that sacrifice survivability would be proverbial glass cannons. That isn't the case, though, you've given us glass pea-shooters. Caster DPS is negligible compared to virtually any melee, while relying upon a finite resource. Look at the kobold test times in the dojo right now: the very best caster times are 3-4 times as long as melee and require using mnemonics to sustain a constant rotation.

You could triple the damage from casters and utterly eliminate the spell point cost of metamagics and only then would casters approach the dps of melee in the current state of the game.

Take a look in the achievements section. Some of the best completion times for raids are generally in raid groups that don't include a single arcane or divine.

The current dev team has genuinely fubar-ed casters and dropping the saves on a few mobs in the latest content is an utterly inadequate response.

[slarden]

1. DC casting is irrelevant in the current hack and slash version of the game. Two things matter: DPS and survivability, in that order. It doesn't matter if you can provide CC when melee already have mobs at 10% health by the time you're finished casting a spell, much less a debuff AND a spell.

This is why I rerolled all my DC casters. As bad as DC casters have been the question Turbine asked was "what percentage of time should DC work" rather than "why isn't DC casting working".

To me this kind of shows the bias that they expect DC casting to have an unacceptable failure rate and furthermore they don't view the current state of DC casting as overly problematic.

If you really like true DC casting try a druid. They got some really great SLAs buffed and you can get earthquake to overcome saves 15-20 higher than an enchanter or necromancer can reach.

[noinfo]

We have lowered saving throws for many of the mobs in the new content. These changes did not make it into today's Lamannia update, though.

Its really not just the "New Content"

How about this as a challenge:

The devs and you go and play a DC caster on the DEV server and see what its like at the moment across the board. See what its like with the plan that we should only be able to target "weak saves"

Really until there is some experience of the Dev side of this or a Dev really gets behind it we are going to remain in the situation we are in now. You can look at the numbers and think ok this sounds reasonable all you like but it needs to be experienced in game to truly share the frustration..

Then after you have experienced the pain of what should be the top DC casters try landing spells on classes that are not innately the best and see why they don't even bother. I know this sounds like a lot of venting and whining but this should be a vibrant part of the game.

The DC Necro master (fully specced) should be picking off that single mob even in EE/strong save at will when off CD
The cleric should be able to have at least the weak willed mobs sitting on their backsides

The middle ground and debuffs should be for those with middle level gear non speciality areas. Let those who spec for an area excel in it

If you and the devs think you have it right as is, please in one of your live streams show us how it should be done, because we are all getting it wrong.

[Lycurgus]

If you really like true DC casting try a druid. They got some really great SLAs buffed and you can get earthquake to overcome saves 15-20 higher than an enchanter or necromancer can reach.

Again, truly irrelevant. Triple caster past-lives, heroic completionist, epic completionist, 9 divine epic lives, druid dps is horrible compared to the current melee juggernauts. I've done 9 druid lives across 3 toons. The dps amounts to "who cares."

[dredre9987]

Oh and the +6 to all Saves at 100% Health: I've never liked this idea!

What has always been players biggest gripe about Instakills? Kill Stealing. Wizards waiting for the melee to get a mob down then instakilling it before the melee can finish it off!

This system just gives Casters an Excuse for this type of gameplay!


What I'd prefer:

+0 to mob Saves at 100% HP
+2 to mob Saves at 75% HP
+4 to mob Saves at 50% HP
+6 to mob Saves at 25% HP

To Simulate Adrenaline kicking in!

This also doesn't inherently punish the CC Caster far above the Instakill Caster as the other way does!
The CC Caster doesn't want to be waiting until the mob is at 50% to get his spells off - The Instakill Caster is quite happy to wait to make his spells more likely to kill even if the mob Saves!

Ok what the hell does kill stealing have to do with anything? XP isn't based on kills. Neither is plat gain...Your opinions seem to have no basis in fact.


DC casting has been an issue since DDO first launched ( P2P ). Time and again DC casters got pushed to the top and what happened? Everyone wanted a DC caster to mass hold everything. Or DC caster to kite trash...Or a DC caster could walk through a quest obliterating everything...


There is a balance...95% success is too much without having to debuff...Then again 5% is too low with having to debuff...Dev's please find the middle ground.

[Thrudh]

When fully maxed out casters are useless against the weakest of trash what is point anymore.

Do you guys really think massive over-exaggeration is actually going to help?

This whole thread has almost zero specific feedback and so much hyperbole, it's likely to be ignored.

Which quests is it "impossible" to mass-hold or instant-kill? All epic elite quests? Epic Gianthold? Epic 3 Barrel-Cove? Epic Storm-horns? The new Amrath quests? TOEE? eNecro?

What does "impossible" mean? 50% failure rate? 90% failure rate? All mobs? or just some mobs? Any de-buffs used?

What is your definition of "weakest of trash"?

[Thrudh]

1. DC casting is irrelevant in the current hack and slash version of the game. Two things matter: DPS and survivability, in that order. It doesn't matter if you can provide CC when melee already have mobs at 10% health by the time you're finished casting a spell, much less a debuff AND a spell. It doesn't matter if you can instakill a few mobs every 30 seconds when a cleaving barbarian has killed quadruple that number in less time simply spamming cleaves. It doesn't matter if your evocation is high enough that you don't constantly see "evade" when the damage you do is STILL a fraction of that done by melee and is dependent upon a finite supply of spell points to achieve that marginal damage.

This is decent feedback. So increase caster power? Or lower melee power? Or create quests with mobs that can withstand current melee power for a long enough time that CC becomes useful again?

[Lycurgus]

There is a balance...95% success is too much without having to debuff...Then again 5% is too low with having to debuff...Dev's please find the middle ground.

Nope. If I've devoted the time and effort for triple completionist, taken feats to max dc and feats to max spell pen, slotted dc and spell pen as twists, maxed raid gear, I don't want to debuff. Sorry, but what melee has to devote so many resources to DPS?

If you're in to CC, by the time you've debuffed, the melee have killed everything.

If you're into instakill, by the time you've debuffed, you might slip in a finger, but you're probably ****ing off a melee who had the mob at 10%.

If you're into DPS, you can cast a delayed blast fireball and pretend the barbarian's crit was really your spell.

The middle ground is that players who prefer playing casters will leave for other games. I'm personally waiting for EQN and Pantheon. It will be nice to play an old school mmorpg.

[Basura_Grande]

Do you guys really think massive over-exaggeration is actually going to help?

This whole thread has almost zero specific feedback and so much hyperbole, it's likely to be ignored.

Which quests is it "impossible" to mass-hold or instant-kill? All epic elite quests? Epic Gianthold? Epic 3 Barrel-Cove? Epic Storm-horns? The new Amrath quests? TOEE? eNecro?

What does "impossible" mean? 50% failure rate? 90% failure rate? All mobs? or just some mobs? Any de-buffs used?

What is your definition of "weakest of trash"?

what part of ZERO percent success rate against a KOBOLD is hard for you to understand?

We're talking about the newest stuff, why would you even bring up old content? Necro's fine against trash up through and including EE Stormhorns. After that it just get progressively worse each update.

Anyone who actually plays casters in all content and actually had an informed opinion knows this.