Part 2 Feedback

[axel15810]

I'll be honest, I have more negative things to say than positive. I didn't like the quest that much. But I'll try and do it in a constructive manner.

I just got done solo-ing this part blind on legendary normal.

The main reason I didn't like the quest, and the main reason it felt so long is that it was an hour of the same lever finding mechanic. I want to see some other mechanic than just an hour of that. It got very repetitive and formulaic. The quest was the same mechanic over and over and over.

The find and then pull levers to advance is a fine mechanic, but the whole quest shouldn't just be that if the quest is going to be as long as this one is. We need some other kind of mechanic here. Especially considering the find and then pull lever mechanic was the dominant mechanic in part 1 of this quest chain as well.

I know there was a small jumping section and small traps throughout the quest, but it wasn't enough to break up the monotony.

As far as positives go, I did like some of the art design in the outside sections. The indiana jones boulder was a nice throwback.

I wish I could say something more positive, but I really didn't like this quest. I felt it lacked creativity. I know it's probably too late in the process to change the mechanics in the quest and we're probably stuck with the quest mechanics as is, but that's my feedback regardless. You atleast could split this part into 2 different quests, that would help some with the repetitiveness if we didn't have to play through all of it in one sitting.

Bugs I noticed -

- Metallic trap didn't do anything
- The 2 taken near the end of the quest seemed bugged. They were not interactable and neither was the door behind them.
- Killer bees did not show at all, whatever that was supposed to be.

[Blastyswa]

I'll be honest, I have more negative things to say than positive. I didn't like the quest that much. But I'll try and do it in a constructive manner.

I just got done solo-ing this part blind on legendary normal.

The main reason I didn't like the quest, and the main reason it felt so long is that it was an hour of the same lever finding mechanic. I want to see some other mechanic than just an hour of that. It got very repetitive and formulaic. The quest was the same mechanic over and over and over.

The find and then pull levers to advance is a fine mechanic, but the whole quest shouldn't just be that if the quest is going to be as long as this one is. We need some other kind of mechanic here. Especially considering the find and then pull lever mechanic was the dominant mechanic in part 1 of this quest chain as well.

I know there was a small jumping section and small traps throughout the quest, but it wasn't enough to break up the monotony.

As far as positives go, I did like some of the art design in the outside sections. The indiana jones boulder was a nice throwback.

I wish I could say something more positive, but I really didn't like this quest. I felt it lacked creativity. I know it's probably too late in the process to change the mechanics in the quest and we're probably stuck with the quest mechanics as is, but that's my feedback regardless. You atleast could split this part into 2 different quests, that would help some with the repetitiveness if we didn't have to play through all of it in one sitting.

Bugs I noticed -

- Metallic trap didn't do anything
- The 2 taken near the end of the quest seemed bugged. They were not interactable and neither was the door behind them.
- Killer bees did not show at all, whatever that was supposed to be.

I agree that I was very unimpressed with part 2; I didn't really like anything in the Slavers side of the update (Cannith crafting is nice) at all so far aside from the loot, but having to run these quests for that loot, especially given the durations needed to run the quests to get crafted loot, is going to be a pain. I solo zerged the quest on LE with lots of invisibility and avoiding mobs, and spending over an hour using my targetting key to find levers through doors and then pulling them over, and over, and over was not fun. I honestly think this quest should be split into 2 different quests, Secret of the Slavers Stockade pt. 1 and pt. 2; I was about done with the entire quest look and the quest mechanics by the time I got to the "Explore the Dungeon beneath" objective, and my reaction at that point was absolute disgust that I had just spent 30 minutes doing the first half of this insanely long quest.

Since, from what I've seen and experienced, there isn't really any splitting up or optimal shortcut routes to follow in this quest, it makes it much more annoying than ToEE or Haunted Halls; In those quests the party can split up to kill air prelate/DD water/pay fire at the same time or to get both crests simultaneously, but this quest is just follow the path while tapping rallying cry and any other speed boosts you may have. Splitting this quest into 2 30 minute+ quests would help, so that it's not just a 1 hour quest at maximum speed, and honestly just reworking a vast majority of it, because I agree that the lever thing was very dull.

Only bug I noticed was that the boulder didn't do anything; I wanted to see how much damage it would deal for future reference, so I just stood there and let it hit me on LE; except, it just rolled through me without dealing damage, so that was anticlimactic. The traps were also very ignorable, hitting basically no damage on LE, and every boss fight was the exact same thing; walk up to the enemy boss, start hitting him while ignoring mobs, continue this process for 30 seconds, loot and keep zerging through the quest trying to get out. I would really love to see some boss fights come out eventually with mechanics that actually require tactics; preferably, I should wipe the quest on the boss fight a time or two before finally figuring out a tactic that has a decent success rate.

[slarden]

I agree that I was very unimpressed with part 2; I didn't really like anything in the Slavers side of the update (Cannith crafting is nice) at all so far aside from the loot, but having to run these quests for that loot, especially given the durations needed to run the quests to get crafted loot, is going to be a pain. I solo zerged the quest on LE with lots of invisibility and avoiding mobs, and spending over an hour using my targetting key to find levers through doors and then pulling them over, and over, and over was not fun. I honestly think this quest should be split into 2 different quests, Secret of the Slavers Stockade pt. 1 and pt. 2; I was about done with the entire quest look and the quest mechanics by the time I got to the "Explore the Dungeon beneath" objective, and my reaction at that point was absolute disgust that I had just spent 30 minutes doing the first half of this insanely long quest.

Since, from what I've seen and experienced, there isn't really any splitting up or optimal shortcut routes to follow in this quest, it makes it much more annoying than ToEE or Haunted Halls; In those quests the party can split up to kill air prelate/DD water/pay fire at the same time or to get both crests simultaneously, but this quest is just follow the path while tapping rallying cry and any other speed boosts you may have. Splitting this quest into 2 30 minute+ quests would help, so that it's not just a 1 hour quest at maximum speed, and honestly just reworking a vast majority of it, because I agree that the lever thing was very dull.

Only bug I noticed was that the boulder didn't do anything; I wanted to see how much damage it would deal for future reference, so I just stood there and let it hit me on LE; except, it just rolled through me without dealing damage, so that was anticlimactic. The traps were also very ignorable, hitting basically no damage on LE, and every boss fight was the exact same thing; walk up to the enemy boss, start hitting him while ignoring mobs, continue this process for 30 seconds, loot and keep zerging through the quest trying to get out. I would really love to see some boss fights come out eventually with mechanics that actually require tactics; preferably, I should wipe the quest on the boss fight a time or two before finally figuring out a tactic that has a decent success rate.

I think in general there is a problem in the game with builds like yours not being challenged because it's focused on maximum defense.

Your build is a good one to look at for the devs to figure out how to address this problem:

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...=1#post5853665

Personally I think high defenses should come at the cost of more dps loss and movement speed loss. As people already mentioned high defenses are often selected to make zerging easier. The devs need to address this in a way that doesn't make higher difficulties unplayable for an assassin or monk melee in wind stance by simply throwing more damage at players.

The game will get very boring if the game becomes limited to a handful of high-defense builds.

[acdcrocks]

I'll be honest, I have more negative things to say than positive. I didn't like the quest that much. But I'll try and do it in a constructive manner.

I just got done solo-ing this part blind on legendary normal.

The main reason I didn't like the quest, and the main reason it felt so long is that it was an hour of the same lever finding mechanic. I want to see some other mechanic than just an hour of that. It got very repetitive and formulaic. The quest was the same mechanic over and over and over.

The find and then pull levers to advance is a fine mechanic, but the whole quest shouldn't just be that if the quest is going to be as long as this one is. We need some other kind of mechanic here. Especially considering the find and then pull lever mechanic was the dominant mechanic in part 1 of this quest chain as well.

I know there was a small jumping section and small traps throughout the quest, but it wasn't enough to break up the monotony.

As far as positives go, I did like some of the art design in the outside sections. The indiana jones boulder was a nice throwback.

I wish I could say something more positive, but I really didn't like this quest. I felt it lacked creativity. I know it's probably too late in the process to change the mechanics in the quest and we're probably stuck with the quest mechanics as is, but that's my feedback regardless. You atleast could split this part into 2 different quests, that would help some with the repetitiveness if we didn't have to play through all of it in one sitting.

Bugs I noticed -

- Metallic trap didn't do anything
- The 2 taken near the end of the quest seemed bugged. They were not interactable and neither was the door behind them.
- Killer bees did not show at all, whatever that was supposed to be.

Totally agree on the lever pulling part. Very boring and monotonous to be just pulling levers and repeating the same mechanic OVER and OVER again. Especially considering how long this one is (took me a little over an hour on a somewhat undergeared thrower in LE). One thing i will say however, is that it IS still lamannia, and U32 won't be released until september 13th iirc. So we still have time to possibly remove some of the lever pulling stuff and add in some new mechanic. Whatever that may be.

Overall i actually found pt 1 to be the most boring, part 2 to be ok, and part 3 to be actually really cool. Again i do hope that they do something to make pts 1 and 2 slightly more fun and interesting.

[Blastyswa]

I think in general there is a problem in the game with builds like yours not being challenged because it's focused on maximum defense.

Your build is a good one to look at for the devs to figure out how to address this problem:

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...=1#post5853665

Personally I think high defenses should come at the cost of more dps loss and movement speed loss. As people already mentioned high defenses are often selected to make zerging easier. The devs need to address this in a way that doesn't make higher difficulties unplayable for an assassin or monk melee in wind stance by simply throwing more damage at players.

The game will get very boring if the game becomes limited to a handful of high-defense builds.

Actually, I ran this content using the Shiradi variation of my build with energy burst instead of the Sentinel version, although I didn't mention that in my first post so I get the confusion; However, even with only 2000 HP, incoming damage was just too low to even break through my temporary hit points. I was hoping that I'd get partially through the first quest with Shiradi before wiping and having to come back in Sentinel, but that didn't end up happening; the added defense was not needed. I could try rerunning the quests on one of my other characters, but I'd be running the content significantly slower because I wouldn't be able to get red DA and then burst spam 20+ enemies to death at once, and I doubt I would see any noticeable decrease in survivability; perhaps if I full zerged on a build with no AoE things would get hairy, but no worse than doing the same thing in ToEE, which was 7 updates ago. I could handle the quest being centered around pulling levers a lot if it was also challenging content, but the current difficulty of the quest feels like a step back; I'd love to see normal builds be in danger just attempting the quest, and min/maxed 3000 HP 300 hamp 200 PRR monster build's should be in real danger of dying if they attempt to go full red DA zerg instead of approaching the quest at a more slow and steady pace.

Overall I agree that this content is much easier on a heavily optimized high-defense build, but a lot of my issues with the content involve the mechanics of quest progression, the repetition, and the general lack of danger that applies even on other builds. I have not tested less defensive builds yet though, so tonight I'll have to try copying a tree or thrower over and see if the enemies become dangerous.

[BigErkyKid]

Overall I agree that this content is much easier on a heavily optimized high-defense build, but a lot of my issues with the content involve the mechanics of quest progression, the repetition, and the general lack of danger that applies even on other builds. I have not tested less defensive builds yet though, so tonight I'll have to try copying a tree or thrower over and see if the enemies become dangerous.

I am sorry, not trying to antagonize you, but an ES warlock is the easiest "easy button" in the game. I am playing a gimpy melee version of it, and even in Shiradi and CHA based I rolf stomp demon assault, curse the sky, and any of the legendary quests in the game. Raids are different but either way just making the point, and this is not a raid.

The problem the devs face is probably how build a quest that is challenging but not impossible for not grossly imbalanced builds. You rolf stomp it, but how about an assassin? How do builds without massive AoE deal with these quests?

We have people reporting that doing it on shuriken throwers is also simple, with the exception of some MRR intensive damage.

Again is a problem of builds. In the same way that fighters would be balanced right now if there wasn't easy heals blade forged.

[slarden]

Overall I agree that this content is much easier on a heavily optimized high-defense build, but a lot of my issues with the content involve the mechanics of quest progression, the repetition, and the general lack of danger that applies even on other builds. I have not tested less defensive builds yet though, so tonight I'll have to try copying a tree or thrower over and see if the enemies become dangerous.

Yes, but if that involves more damage it continues the recent trend of favoring heavily defensive builds. What are your thoughts?

I would like to see see debuffs that reduce PRR and MRR to 0 for all characters. I would like to see a debuff that lowers player hp to 700 unless they are already below that. Things like that.

I am ok with "danger" that all builds face equally. I am not ok with setting enemy damage at what a tanky build considers dangerous for others but safe for them and calling it a day. That approach just becomes a gate that locks out builds that are otherwise viable.

[BigErkyKid]

Yes, but if that involves more damage it continues the recent trend of favoring heavily defensive builds. What are your thoughts?

I would like to see see debuffs that reduce PRR and MRR to 0 for all characters. I would like to see a debuff that lowers player hp to 700 unless they are already below that. Things like that.

I don't like that solution. If you allow for some builds to pull ahead so much, then arbitrarily taking away all benefits is just a cheap way out. Kind of what the LE raids were at release.

The obvious answer is to force people to make significant trade offs. If you play a CON based warlock in the uber defensive destiny, you should expect your DPS to be extremely low. That's not the case right now.

There are two "easy buttons" in the game, I think, right now. The first is warlock, since you can build a super defensive warlock and yet have enough DPS to contribute in any quest in the game.

The second is going ranged. It is not such an easy button, because ranged toons do have vulnerabilities, but it is obvious to everyone that kiting is the best defense in the game in 99% of the encounters.

In general the answer for me is not to let some builds be so much better than others. It is not skill in building or playing, no matter how hard you try to build a bard, you will NEVER be as powerful as a warlock. Period.

This "forces" players often to roll some of these FOTM because otherwise it is hard to get your gear in time before its just outdated. Same with XP, unless you love playing and again the same quests for loot or XP, it is so much easier to get it done fast with an OP build and then play whatever you want with the build of your choice.

[Blastyswa]

I am sorry, not trying to antagonize you, but an ES warlock is the easiest "easy button" in the game. I am playing a gimpy melee version of it, and even in Shiradi and CHA based I rolf stomp demon assault, curse the sky, and any of the legendary quests in the game. Raids are different but either way just making the point, and this is not a raid.

The problem the devs face is probably how build a quest that is challenging but not impossible for not grossly imbalanced builds. You rolf stomp it, but how about an assassin? How do builds without massive AoE deal with these quests?

We have people reporting that doing it on shuriken throwers is also simple, with the exception of some MRR intensive damage.

Again is a problem of builds. In the same way that fighters would be balanced right now if there wasn't easy heals blade forged.

I'm not antagonized by the way, because I completely agree wih you. I absolutely agree that warlock is incredibly broken and overpowered. I actually was playing around on assassins and pure fighters after finishing my main characters past lives, and was enjoying the builds well enough. My problem was that I would come into a quest in Legendary Dreadnought with 2,000 HP on a pure rogue and be outputting the maximum DPS I could, with every past life and most of the gear in the game on my build's side, where a first-life warlock with 1000 hp +1000 temporary and wearing random loot would mop the floor with my build, going superior on kills and being equally, if not more, unkillable.

I think warlock should be nerfed into the ground, and I actually originally built my build hoping it would get people on my server complaining more; I'd seen so many Sentinel warlocks running around with 1,600 HP and no DPS that were using no gear and terrible builds that I wanted to make a real warlock to show how broken the class is, and thus my 3,000 HP (5,000 with temp) high DPS build was born. Personally, I think that sentinel should have the defense remain the same, offense be reduced (actual DPS penalties for playing in sentinel) but something like the aggro-magnet buffs in challenges where enemies are automatically aggroed to you, to add additional support meaning to playing in Sentinel.

Warlock's big advantage at the moment is that the DPS is so high without destinies, along with the defense being so great (My own build sits on 2000 real/4000 temp HP while not in Sentinel) that going into Sentinel is a huge defense boost while still maintaining high damage, as opposed to fighter/paly/godhelpthemsorc build's that sacrifice significant DPS by going into Sentinel.

Based just on my own play experience in normal questing though, and not experience with these new packs, the builds that perform well in content are the well thought out mixed class builds, and not the pure or non-innovative builds. Warlock is the exception to this. In general though, I get higher performance out of my 7/7/6 druid/warlock/barbarian tree build, or my 8/6/6 monk/fighter/ranger thrower build, or my 9/6/5 druid/fighter/ranger wolf build, than I do out of my pure 20 wizard, 17/3 Druid/Fighter caster build, or my pure sorcs. I personally like that aspect of DDO, because it means that to do exceptionally well in content means actually putting time into a build; a pure ranger is typically going to be inferior to a monkcher type build that takes advantage of synergies with other classes, and that's what separates DDO from being a WoW clone.

Personally though, I don't think the issue is so much warlocks as it is quests being designed for warlocks. In each of these new quests in u32, rounding a corner would typically bring me into LOS of 5-6 enemies at least, standing in close proximity to each other; for an assassin, this would mean assassinating one, possibly more depending on how stealthy you are, and engaging anything that ends up aggroing on you one at a time. For warlocks, this means stepping into the middle of them and using a 360 degree attack. I think that if more fights were designed with singular instakillable high HP mobs (And not even rednamed fights, just typical mob fights) that would lend itself more to builds like assassins that can one shot that enemy, or builds with less AoE damage; the downside of warlocks is that if the enemy is significantly above about 10k HP, it takes either many burst cycles to kill them, or you have to mix in higher SP spells like 5 stacking arcane pulse or casting ruins.

The current issue's with warlocks is because they have such potential for taking out enemies at once; throwers also have this advantage with IPS, as do cleave trees and DoD wolves. I think the dev's best solution for the unbalance in builds is to stop building every quest to cater to those builds, because that just keeps them unbalanced; make more quests where 10-20 fights are single, insta-killable orange-nameds with 40k+ HP, preferably with spell resistance and high will saves to counter PW:K or Hurl, and warlocks would become much less popular in that content thanks to the content no longer catering so much to warlocks.

[Blastyswa]

Yes, but if that involves more damage it continues the recent trend of favoring heavily defensive builds. What are your thoughts?

I would like to see see debuffs that reduce PRR and MRR to 0 for all characters. I would like to see a debuff that lowers player hp to 700 unless they are already below that. Things like that.

I am ok with "danger" that all builds face equally. I am not ok with setting enemy damage at what a tanky build considers dangerous for others but safe for them and calling it a day. That approach just becomes a gate that locks out builds that are otherwise viable.

I definitely don't want addition damage to be the only way to add challenge; some thing's I would consider would be debuffs like brittleskin from ToEE, where PRR is progressively reduced, but don't let it go below 0.

Additionally, healing curses, abilities that can instantly strip all temporary HP, rapid constitution damage, hamp debuffs that can be removed with pots, more CC abilities, abilities that will kill you if left unattended (Similar to archer damage constantly increasing in MoD if you don't put them down), environmental effects that are actually dangerous (I don't just mean lava that's negated by ship buffs), self-destruction mobs (Have them turn red or something, 3 seconds later massive damage explosion that kills themselves and deals something like 5000 fire damage to all nearby targets, would add to the value of wings), boosting enemies (specific targets that hang back from the rest of their group, at caster/archer range, and provide heavy duty buffs similar to phase 2 shroud lieutenant buffs as long as they remain alive), healing enemies that actually heal significant amounts, or any other effects that the devs can come up with.

I personally don't like the idea of making danger equal for all build's, simply because all builds are different. Warlocks are a class of their own with the ability to have insane defense and offense at the same time, but most builds take more of an offense hit by focusing hard on defense, and I've also never been a big fan of capping benefits of TR's/Tome's because of the significant cost of them; I've always been in favor of having MRR past lives (Deep gnome/Warlock) and Mysterious Remnant MRR Tomes (+2 MRR) bypass the 50/100 cloth/light armor maximums, so that build's with all of those bonuses could have 70/120 MRR instead, because with the time investment for those bonuses I don't think they should be arbitrarily limited.

For an example, I'll compare my own build to an alternate version where it focuses all out on charisma. My build sits at 3000 HP with 62 charisma if I fully buff in Sentinel and take +4 charisma from the tree, while an all out charisma version in shiradi would likely sit at around 65-70 charisma and 1500 HP, gaining a decent DPS increase at the cost of 50% HP. In your provided situation, my own build, which has +10 PRR over the charisma version thanks to the Sentinel core, loses all of it's PRR to become equivalent PRR wise to the Shiradi version, as well as losing 2300 HP compared to Shiradi's 800 HP loss. Now my build has equal defenses to the Shiradi counterpart, but less DPS; this is because my build built more towards survivability than the Shiradi version, so why should it suffer greater losses because of that?

I would love an enemy ability that adds debuffs reducing player PRR/MRR and HP. However, instead of making it an all or nothing "Your PRR/MRR is now 0, your HP is now 700", I would prefer something like "Every 3 seconds you lose 3 PRR/MRR and 30 HP, continuing until your PRR/MRR is 0 and your HP is 700". This would mean that, in an extended conflict, both build's would eventually be on equal footing in terms of PRR/MRR and HP; the difference being that the Sentinel version would take significantly longer to be reduced to those minimum values, giving it higher defense than the Shiradi version for a longer period of time.

I personally would like it if Sentinel were changed to decrease player DPS, at the gain of lots of aggro generation and high defenses; this, especially if supplemented by party DPS buffs or enemy debuffs, would make Sentinel a powerful way for tank build's to contribute to a party more than any single DPS build could, but would remove the appeal of using it on warlock's while maintaining high DPS or using it on rangers and sorcs just to survive.

[Blastyswa]

I don't like that solution. If you allow for some builds to pull ahead so much, then arbitrarily taking away all benefits is just a cheap way out. Kind of what the LE raids were at release.

Agreed.

The obvious answer is to force people to make significant trade offs. If you play a CON based warlock in the uber defensive destiny, you should expect your DPS to be extremely low. That's not the case right now.

I agree, although in this situation I think the uber defensive destiny should be changed into the "Uber defense and aggro generation destiny". The issue also largely lies with warlocks, not the destiny itself, thanks to warlocks innate high AoE damage without support from destinies; I haven't seen many people posting build's of 7 minute LE Curse the Sky runs on a pure Sentinel fighter.

There are two "easy buttons" in the game, I think, right now. The first is warlock, since you can build a super defensive warlock and yet have enough DPS to contribute in any quest in the game.

The second is going ranged. It is not such an easy button, because ranged toons do have vulnerabilities, but it is obvious to everyone that kiting is the best defense in the game in 99% of the encounters.

Agreed, especially on warlock. Personally, I view warlock as an easy button that needs to be fixed; sure staying at range is good in most situations, but on a monk with 1,200 HP/150 PRR lobbing shuri's I still tend to die fairly often in LE content, in particular the raid bosses/lieutenants, when multiple enemies engage me at range at the same time or when I'm trying to stay at range while sorjek is aggroed on me, while simultaneously keeping close to the wall so I don't get knocked off.

In general the answer for me is not to let some builds be so much better than others. It is not skill in building or playing, no matter how hard you try to build a bard, you will NEVER be as powerful as a warlock. Period.

Warlock really is the issue in my opinion. I think that my 8/6/6 monk/fighter/ranger with ToEE and good gear performing better than a pure 20 monk thrower or pure 20 ranger bowman is a result of proper building (I put quite a bit of time into optimizing that build) and playing (Getting good at lining up IPS, figuring out to switch to Archer's Focus on boss fights, ki management with shadow veil and 10k), but a pure 20 warlock build requires little building (The first few warlocks I played could do anything in the game easily and I didn't even map out my feat progression; I'm pretty sure I took spell penetration feats on my first warlock, and then the only spell penetration spells I used were power words) or playing (step forward, burst, repeat; there is more skill involved in tanking tactics and the like of course, but for a majority of quests that's the basic plan).

This "forces" players often to roll some of these FOTM because otherwise it is hard to get your gear in time before its just outdated. Same with XP, unless you love playing and again the same quests for loot or XP, it is so much easier to get it done fast with an OP build and then play whatever you want with the build of your choice.

Agreed. For a vast majority of EPL's on my main character, and on a few alts, I went pure 20 warlock because the simple efficiency of tearing through EN x2's is hard to match except maybe on a build with sprint boost that maintains solid DPS. I'm ok with warlock being the king of ENx2's, but it also being the king of tank builds, decent at DPS builds (Let's be honest, throwers and trees are superior), and the king of zerging even LE quests makes it too powerful.

[slarden]

I'm not antagonized by the way, because I completely agree wih you. I absolutely agree that warlock is incredibly broken and overpowered. I actually was playing around on assassins and pure fighters after finishing my main characters past lives, and was enjoying the builds well enough. My problem was that I would come into a quest in Legendary Dreadnought with 2,000 HP on a pure rogue and be outputting the maximum DPS I could, with every past life and most of the gear in the game on my build's side, where a first-life warlock with 1000 hp +1000 temporary and wearing random loot would mop the floor with my build, going superior on kills and being equally, if not more, unkillable.

I think warlock should be nerfed into the ground, and I actually originally built my build hoping it would get people on my server complaining more; I'd seen so many Sentinel warlocks running around with 1,600 HP and no DPS that were using no gear and terrible builds that I wanted to make a real warlock to show how broken the class is, and thus my 3,000 HP (5,000 with temp) high DPS build was born. Personally, I think that sentinel should have the defense remain the same, offense be reduced (actual DPS penalties for playing in sentinel) but something like the aggro-magnet buffs in challenges where enemies are automatically aggroed to you, to add additional support meaning to playing in Sentinel.

Warlock's big advantage at the moment is that the DPS is so high without destinies, along with the defense being so great (My own build sits on 2000 real/4000 temp HP while not in Sentinel) that going into Sentinel is a huge defense boost while still maintaining high damage, as opposed to fighter/paly/godhelpthemsorc build's that sacrifice significant DPS by going into Sentinel.

Based just on my own play experience in normal questing though, and not experience with these new packs, the builds that perform well in content are the well thought out mixed class builds, and not the pure or non-innovative builds. Warlock is the exception to this. In general though, I get higher performance out of my 7/7/6 druid/warlock/barbarian tree build, or my 8/6/6 monk/fighter/ranger thrower build, or my 9/6/5 druid/fighter/ranger wolf build, than I do out of my pure 20 wizard, 17/3 Druid/Fighter caster build, or my pure sorcs. I personally like that aspect of DDO, because it means that to do exceptionally well in content means actually putting time into a build; a pure ranger is typically going to be inferior to a monkcher type build that takes advantage of synergies with other classes, and that's what separates DDO from being a WoW clone.

Personally though, I don't think the issue is so much warlocks as it is quests being designed for warlocks. In each of these new quests in u32, rounding a corner would typically bring me into LOS of 5-6 enemies at least, standing in close proximity to each other; for an assassin, this would mean assassinating one, possibly more depending on how stealthy you are, and engaging anything that ends up aggroing on you one at a time. For warlocks, this means stepping into the middle of them and using a 360 degree attack. I think that if more fights were designed with singular instakillable high HP mobs (And not even rednamed fights, just typical mob fights) that would lend itself more to builds like assassins that can one shot that enemy, or builds with less AoE damage; the downside of warlocks is that if the enemy is significantly above about 10k HP, it takes either many burst cycles to kill them, or you have to mix in higher SP spells like 5 stacking arcane pulse or casting ruins.

The current issue's with warlocks is because they have such potential for taking out enemies at once; throwers also have this advantage with IPS, as do cleave trees and DoD wolves. I think the dev's best solution for the unbalance in builds is to stop building every quest to cater to those builds, because that just keeps them unbalanced; make more quests where 10-20 fights are single, insta-killable orange-nameds with 40k+ HP, preferably with spell resistance and high will saves to counter PW:K or Hurl, and warlocks would become much less popular in that content thanks to the content no longer catering so much to warlocks.

All they really need to do to fix warlock is make more of the damage (or maybe even all) subject to a save instead of just the pact damage. While I've commented before I think your build is very optimized for LShroud, it's certainly not high dps. You've maxed survivability which is good, but when dumping main stat I don't think a 13% max dps loss is enough. I am not sure what your dps loss is from destiny, but not having either the extra burst/spellpower (EA) or procs (Shiradi), but that is additional loss.

From what I've seen it's not really just warlock, alot of builds are getting really high defenses with minimal to no dps sacrifice.

[Blastyswa]

From what I've seen it's not really just warlock, alot of builds are getting really high defenses with minimal to no dps sacrifice.

I agree with changing more damage to save based on warlock. I'm just wondering though what build's you're thinking of and how much loss other than warlock? For example, when I play my first life thrower toon in Fury of the Wild with level ups in constitution and in mountain stance, I can be at about 2,000 HP; my actual DPS tradeoff is that I'm losing 13 dexterity from level ups and wind stance (6-7 damage), gaining 1 extra multiplier on 19-20, gaining 6-7 Dire Charge DC (My Constitution is my highest stat) and gaining 180 additional HP. I tend to make tradeoffs like that on many builds, including my Thief Acrobat, my Tree build, and my sorcerer; the DPS loss tends to be very low, time to kill having basically no variance, and I usually gain 100-200 HP by having a little more emphasis on HP.

[BigErkyKid]

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The current issue's with warlocks is because they have such potential for taking out enemies at once; throwers also have this advantage with IPS, as do cleave trees and DoD wolves. I think the dev's best solution for the unbalance in builds is to stop building every quest to cater to those builds, because that just keeps them unbalanced; make more quests where 10-20 fights are single, insta-killable orange-nameds with 40k+ HP, preferably with spell resistance and high will saves to counter PW:K or Hurl, and warlocks would become much less popular in that content thanks to the content no longer catering so much to warlocks.

That's quite an insightful post and I agree with most of it.

First, warlock represents all the mistakes of casters, on steroids, since they took away mana management, gave insane defenses, and no DC- no immunities DPS. If you asked me for the worst design possible I d go with this paired with a healing SLA (which ES had...).

Casters throwing fireballs was a typical example of OP in the way that you describe. When mobs can be taken out with a few burst attacks then that outclasses all other builds. It also makes it hard for mobs to pose a challenge, since they cannot get in much damage before dying. Once they don't die within the burst, those builds lose a lot of appeal. As an example your warlock in the video you did of part one shroud. Those burst damage builds also tend to ruin fun for others, by the way.

If mobs have more HPs But remain vulnerable to DC abilities then a lot of builds come back. Even my Maxx wisdom melee monk did well in those situations. With high attack speed and a lot of extra damage on helpless I dare say I'd probably out dps a bursting warlock. But this is not the design we are seeing. We have a million mobs with lowish hp. This is bad against builds without the massive aoe and without awesome self heals.

A lot of builds and dc abilities would truly shine when facing smaller amounts of more dangerous mobs. Sadly the game is moving in the direction of trash disposal and then massive hps bosses. Neither of which favor particularly more ability based builds atm. Apparently this is also the case for slavers.

[axel15810]

This is a thread about giving feedback on the new quest chain. If you want to talk balancing warlocks fine but take that conversation into a new thread please.

[BigErkyKid]

This is a thread about giving feedback on the new quest chain. If you want to talk balancing warlocks fine but take that conversation into a new thread please.

For once I did not start the derail :P

The point is that it is hard to make content that is appropriately challenging if there are builds like warlock floating around.

So on the one hand I saw a player reporting that an end fight was too hard on heroic even when over level, and on the other people saying they rolfstomp on their warlock.

[Blastyswa]

For once I did not start the derail :P

The point is that it is hard to make content that is appropriately challenging if there are builds like warlock floating around.

So on the one hand I saw a player reporting that an end fight was too hard on heroic even when over level, and on the other people saying they rolfstomp on their warlock.

Yea, sorry OP for the derail, that's on me. I do still think the point stands though that an issue I have with part 2, as well as the rest of the quests, is that they cater too much to warlocks, which is how the derailment started .