U45 Preview 1: Balance: Two Handed Fighting Changes

[dunklezhan]

Casual player here, I have no Reaper experience really, doesn't appeal to me. I play in HE and EH. I think its likely I will therefore barely notice most of these changes but I have a bit of concern over the small number of max targets you can hit.

I play in a couple static groups, in one of them I'm the "tank", with 2 DPSers - an arti and a ranger. Right now whilst my kill count might be non existent in quests compared to 2 IPSing, fusilading/manyshotting ranged characters, I *can* hold aggro on a pack of mobs whilst they do their pewpew thing.

Glancing blows are a huge part of that success as a strategy: mobs often try to run past me to get to the ranged party members (even when they haven't tagged them from miles away instead of letting me get in first), but a few swings with an intimidate popped and enough mobs have been tagged by a hate-amplified glancing blow that they will tend to stick around. The ones I *don't* manage to hit tend to stick around for a few seconds after the intim pops but then go back on course. That seems WAI to me, and its nice that my skills actually *do* something without it having to be the absolute focus of the build & gear, unlike what's been done to stealth over the years.


Strikethrough though... I can only ever hit 2 or at most 3 targets. Sure they get a bigger hit now, fine, but what I expect from a THF build is for it to be able to grab and keep aggro on pack of mobs.

I can cope with change, its not like I would have a choice anyway - I understand that THF will have more DPS vs mobs who are close together and in front of you. That's all well and good. What I really don't understand is how Strikethrough does anything but diminish the basic core 'tank' expectation a player might have around grabbing aggro.

[Bloodskittle]

Anyways they still haven't addressed the biggest issue.... actually surviving hits...... so I guess we can continue to welcome our caster overlords.

For what its worth in terms of character survivability I think melee is actually in quite a good place on high reaper.
Tank builds are quite capable of tanking Doom Reapers on r10 if they're built to tank.
DPS can survive enough hits to realize they have chosen a bad time to engage.
If you can't do those things your build probably isn't ready for r10, which is completely fine its not meant to be easy.

[redoubt]

You do not need to stand still to effectively use Strikethrough. Unless you did not take the THF feats, which allow you to Strikethrough while moving.

How do you intend this to work with wolves and bears if they take the thf line?

[Steelstar]

How do you intend this to work with wolves and bears if they take the thf line?

From the OP:

• 
  
  • Druid's Wild Shape: Bear now allows you to Strikethrough as long as you are not in the Defensive Fighting stance. (This replaces its previous ability to use Glancing Blows). You can Strikethrough while moving in Bear Form.

Wolf and Bear Form Druids do not benefit from the THF line. Wolves cannot strikethrough under any circumstances. Bears can Strikethrough (including while moving).

[Fedora1]

Also, isn't it interesting that you have to be a ranger to be one of the best races, Aasimar Scourge? That was sold to you as a key part of the Ultimate Fan Bundle for the rloft expansion ($129 US), or for a pile of points later, and isn't available via VIP subscription? And now, since Rangers will suck at everything they're supposed to be good at, you'll probably want to remove the ranger level(s), which just happens to cost a lot of points?

Yeah, "interesting".

I was thinking the same thing in another thread but didn't comment. Also of note:

Sharn transport used to operate like a teleport spell, now they are increasing it to be the same as Bottle of Mist and Eveningstar Key. I know for a fact that MANY people bought Sharn for this little device alone - as was evidenced when the devs made it largely useless by include transport to Sharn via guild ships and then had to back pedal on it.

Inquisitive tree - store item now being nerfed and although this one should have been expected it still is another example of something you pay for and then it gets changed up.

[GeneralDiomedes]

I think the strike through cap might need to be raised.

The most fun I ever had as a THF was when there was this bug ages ago causing you to hit all mobs in the swing radius on every swing

[count_spicoli]

So many salty ranger fans. DoD was OP from inception and needs a decent nerf. They can't try and make THF the best AOE melee and leave DoD as is. Worth noting Tempest still gets more attacks per target at double the item effects and at a higher rate for crit damage. Max targets down and cooldown increase = good, but standing still and no special attacks (for all strike through) = bad. Also DoD needs to be a buff not an attack, that was always a silly limitation for the sole purpose of easier coding.

And one more I will cry for strike through or glancing blows or whatever option they end up with to be a stance I can turn off. I don't want to be forced into standing around doing nothing or having to completely screw myself by changing out weapons and losing sentience and the like just because a Vengeance Reaper is hanging out in a group of mobs.

Let me guess you only play caster or inquis. Where do you see rangers running around dominating content like sorcs and inquis's? Give me a break. Don t touch DOD

[chipotle47]

It seems clear by many of the responses that strikethrough will be negative. I love THF and already have a stick build ready to go that I'm playing high reaper with, in anticipation of the THF getting some love. I like the boost to stat and melee power from PTHF to compensate for the loss of single target dps.

However, as many have pointed out, how is going from having a chance of being able to hit multiple targets (4 or 6 or more), to being sure to hit 2 or maybe 3 targets help with your goal of wanting THF to be the king of AoE melee dps? It hurts tanks, It hurts off tanks, and it hurts AoE focused melee's.

It seems to me that the goal was to make sure THF is viable single target dps without being OP, and here is a carrot that will allow you to hit 1 or 2 other targets which shouldn't unbalance the game much.

I mean instead of what you are proposing, all you needed to do was add more melee power to the heroic THF line and have glancing blows have a higher chance of triggering on secondary targets, boom done, mission accomplished.

[J-mann]

For what its worth in terms of character survivability I think melee is actually in quite a good place on high reaper.
Tank builds are quite capable of tanking Doom Reapers on r10 if they're built to tank.
DPS can survive enough hits to realize they have chosen a bad time to engage.
If you can't do those things your build probably isn't ready for r10, which is completely fine its not meant to be easy.

The survivability gap between ranged and melee is flat out massive and blatant. I pretty much solo and occasionally pug and can easily handle 2 to 3 skills higher on a ranged toon. The statistical defense difference between ranged tons and melee tons is practically 0, despite the fact that being at range is a MASSIVE defensive advantage in this game. If you think that's fine because you like trinity play that's on you, this is not a trinity game nor should it be.

[palladin9479]

The survivability gap between ranged and melee is flat out massive and blatant. I pretty much solo and occasionally pug and can easily handle 2 to 3 skills higher on a ranged toon. The statistical defense difference between ranged tons and melee tons is practically 0, despite the fact that being at range is a MASSIVE defensive advantage in this game. If you think that's fine because you like trinity play that's on you, this is not a trinity game nor should it be.

Attacking at a distance gives the player +10,000 AC. It's a super secret hidden buff the developers don't want us to know about.

[Fedora1]

I still don't get why to always seems they ignore simple solutions to issues and go for totally revamping how things work.

Keeping it simple should the way to go. Inquis over performing? Reign them in a bit, monitor, adjust as necessary. Nope - nerf archer's focus, nerf IPS, AND adjust inquis.

THF not up to par? Okay, let glancing blows do more damage or be eligible for DS or something. Nope - total revamp of THF entirely into something completely different, meanwhile nerf DoD for good measure.

On and on....

[Lynnabel]

Nope - nerf archer's focus, nerf IPS

Friendly reminder that we've posted about this right here :) Lamannia notes are preview notes - which means they're subject to change. If you want to be sure you're staying 100% up to speed, be sure to take a look at the Lamannia dev tracker - it's separate from the regular dev tracker.

[capsela]

For what its worth in terms of character survivability I think melee is actually in quite a good place on high reaper.
Tank builds are quite capable of tanking Doom Reapers on r10 if they're built to tank.
DPS can survive enough hits to realize they have chosen a bad time to engage.
If you can't do those things your build probably isn't ready for r10, which is completely fine its not meant to be easy.

I got non-criticaled for >4000 with 200prr. A trash caster mob hitting for 12000. Lol.

Yeah, melee is in a great place right now. Completely fine...

[mamant91]

Can you give us some information regarding Great Axe and Maul running animation speed decrease? At least if it is a bug or WAI. Thanks.

[o2t4f]

I wasn't aware of this particular caveat and it didn't mention 'feat' in the post so it didn't occur to me...and makes me wonder why there was even a reason for it to begin with.



This still leaves us with bears losing single target glancing blows and receiving nothing to compensate for the their removal.

Multi-target is a different story, it is nice that bears get strikethrough while moving now, they previously had no glancing blows while moving. Standing still bears used to get 2/4 glancing while GTHF characters received 3/4. The new ratios are similar with fully feated bears getting 65% strikethrough vs a fully feated THF character receiving 100%.


So the changes effects on bears are:

Single Target - Obvious damage loss, no question
Small Groups - Likely damage increase
Large Groups - Likely damage loss


Pretty much the same results as what an actual THF character receives except the bear takes a much clearer loss against single targets.

Isn't going from 1.5x mod to 2x mod good enough to compensate glancing blow damage loss on single targets or did I understand something wrong? That was one of the things I was going to test but didn't have enough time before the server was put down.

From what I understood, I would think it would compensate glancing blow loss for single target damage.

For large groups, considering strikethrough damage is full damage, it takes over 4 targets for the change to become a damage loss I believe.

For dance of death though, it does certainly look like a straight nerf. Even if they implement the ability to strikethrough while moving for the duration. Again, didn't have the chance to test it. But if it works as it seems, and they didn't intend to nerf, then maybe they will need to increase the uptime.

[Lynnabel]

For dance of death though, it does certainly look like a straight nerf. Even if they implement the ability to strikethrough while moving for the duration.

I just jumped into client to implement this and it looks like it already does allow strikethrough while moving. Huh.

[Lynnabel]

Did the idea of removing Strike-through or not messing with DoD even get brought up? Or instead are you guys just tweaking and modifying the already created components? Writing new functions, algorithms and models this late in a development cycle is a recipe for an unstable production release.

Of course :P However, Strikethrough is a functional rebuild of the now-depreciated Combat_BaseAttack_MaxTargets system, which necessitated a redesign of every ability that used it. Luckily, this only ended up being about 3 abilities (5 total effects if you'd like more details).

I don't really know what you're asking for, here - if you'd like us to not write new things or iterate, you're asking us to just ship what was on Lamannia, which seems like the opposite of what you're advocating for. New stuff isn't actually that difficult to implement in DDO - in fact, sometimes modifying legacy code is a lot more complex :P

We know Lamannia is your UAT/PreProd because you only open it immediately prior to a Production release instead of having it refreshed every couple of weeks with the latest build going to QA. If the Lamannia preview was several months long consisting of every iterative change set then we would take it as a QA environment where feedback was used to drive the Dev process, instead of a UAT environment where changes were finalized.

Staging a Lamannia is a lot of work on our end for a lot of people and disrupts our ability to quickly iterate on major designs when things are still in early stages of development when things tend to change rapidly. That being said, player feedback and testing is valuable to us, which is why we try our best to put out at least one preview per major update.

[palladin9479]

Isn't going from 1.5x mod to 2x mod good enough to compensate glancing blow damage loss on single targets or did I understand something wrong? That was one of the things I was going to test but didn't have enough time before the server was put down.

Depends on level range and build. Generally it's a 10~20% nerf to single target damage, an increase when your standing still and fighting exactly two targets, a bit of a nerf against three targets and a massive nerf to four or more targets. Honestly it's unnecessary and just adds complexity to a simple issue. Glancing Blows was weak because it didn't scale with Crits and Double Strikes. They could of just fixed that or added some alacrity to the fighting style and it would of brought it in line with other fighting styles.

[Lynnabel]

Glancing Blows was weak because it didn't scale with Crits

What's actually super weird - and I didn't know this until I overheard some other designers doing a deep dive on Glancing Blows - is that if a Crit delivers a Glancing Blow, that Glancing Blow actually does scale and become proportionally stronger. Wild, right? I've played a lot of Greataxe Fighter/Paladins and only just now learned that this week.

[Fedora1]

Friendly reminder that we've posted about this right here

Thank you. I've been watching all of these threads using the "subscribed threads" link so haven't been watching for new ones.

Lamannia notes are preview notes - which means they're subject to change.

Historically speaking, over 90% of what gets previewed on Lam is what goes live, hopefully based on Sev's post you linked above, this time will be different. I am really concerned about this update - it has the potential for so much win, but seeing the preview notes has me worried.