Changes Focused on Boosting Game Performance

[Tilomere]

Enhancement trees are full of proc abilities on short cooldowns for people to spam. DWS, the primary ranged one, has sniper shot deception proc, leg shot snare proc, head shot blind proc, aimed shot archer's focus proc, merciful shot execute proc, and thrill of the hunt damage proc, on top of archers focus mode proc.

This makes playing them proc-intensive on top of annoying, since you have to spam all these procs all the time, and clunky, because the support Falconry/inq tree and shiradi ED and healing spells add another dozen abilities on top. You could instead make passive non-proc multiselectors people could select instead:

DWS:
Sniper Shot: used to enhance sneak damage > passive multiselector sneak die
leg shot: used to survive vs melee damage > passive multiselector PRR
head shot: used to enhance damage by critting and CC > passive multiselector seeker and %HP
aimed shot: used to enhance damage with AF stacks and critting > passive multiselector standing still AF % damage increase
merciful shot: used to enhance damage vs low health and sneak targets > passive multiselector sneak die
thrill of the hunt: used to enhance damage > passive multiselector favored enemy damage

Falconry:
Bleed: dps effect > multiselector passive Melee/Ranged Power
Blind/Knockdown bird attacks > multiselector passive PRR/MRR
Coordinated Strike> armor pen > multiselector passive armor pen

Shiradi:
Pin > CC proc helpless >multiselector passive ranged damage and prr/mrr
Whistler > CC proc helpess > multiselector passive ranged damage and prr/mrr
Hunt's End > Crit attack with bonus damage > multiselector passive crit multiplier and Y% damage.

PS > get rid of AF stacks entirely, when AF is active and you have been standing still for Y seconds you do X% more damage.

[elvesunited]

Enhancement trees are full of proc abilities on short cooldowns for people to spam. DWS, the primary ranged one, has sniper shot deception proc, leg shot snare proc, head shot blind proc, aimed shot archer's focus proc, merciful shot execute proc, and thrill of the hunt damage proc, on top of archers focus mode proc.

This makes playing them proc-intensive on top of annoying, since you have to spam all these procs all the time, and clunky, because the support Falconry/inq tree and shiradi ED and healing spells add another dozen abilities on top. You could instead make passive non-proc multiselectors people could select instead:

DWS:
Sniper Shot: used to enhance sneak damage > passive multiselector sneak die
leg shot: used to survive vs melee damage > passive multiselector PRR
head shot: used to enhance damage by critting and CC > passive multiselector seeker and %HP
aimed shot: used to enhance damage with AF stacks and critting > passive multiselector standing still AF % damage increase
merciful shot: used to enhance damage vs low health and sneak targets > passive multiselector sneak die
thrill of the hunt: used to enhance damage > passive multiselector favored enemy damage

Falconry:
Bleed: dps effect > multiselector passive Melee/Ranged Power
Blind/Knockdown bird attacks > multiselector passive PRR/MRR
Coordinated Strike> armor pen > multiselector passive armor pen

Shiradi:
Pin > CC proc helpless >multiselector passive ranged damage and prr/mrr
Whistler > CC proc helpess > multiselector passive ranged damage and prr/mrr
Hunt's End > Crit attack with bonus damage > multiselector passive crit multiplier and Y% damage.

PS > get rid of AF stacks entirely, when AF is active and you have been standing still for Y seconds you do X% more damage.

If you look at the description of the lag they are trying to reduce, it's about proc effects being applied to enemies you strike.
I'm not sure that proc effects that apply to you when you strike an enemy counts.

For a lot of these the proc effect is far superior then a passive bonus. Leg shot is a 10 second 50% movement slowdown that effects bosses with a cooldown of 10 seconds. In some boss fights that is a crushingly powerful ability.

Archer's Focus stacks removal would be a nerf. Archers build up the focus. Move for a second and only lose part of the stack. In some fights they are able to maintain archer's focus power even though they move every few seconds.

[Singular]

Are you guys even aware of the non-damaging procs in combat? You know, you created all of those abilities which are like 1-5% to proc per hit, which often made TWF competitive? Vorpal, paralyze, lightning strike, energy drain, blind, deception turn around, stunning % on hit, vulnerability, curses, etc....

It doesn't seem like this was addressed in the notes, yet it is a vital part of combat...Was this change really discussed from all angles?

Minor point, but this sounds like it will make DR in epics much easier to overcome if your damage is multiplied together...

So . . . my twf's offhand weapon is essentially meaningless?

[myliftkk_v2]

In Update 49 we are making significant changes to how melee and missile combat is calculated to address long-term community and development team concerns about game performance. If you're curious, we've included a long form explanation as to what these changes entail on the back end, but if you're interested in just the changes and the results, here's what we've found:

Before this change: Simulations of a raid group proccing on-hit effects use approx 99.965% processing per-instance and produce an effects queue, which causes combat processing lag for all players on the same server while the queue is processed.
After this change: Simulations of a raid group proccing on-hit effects use approx 50% available processing per-instance (still well within the green zone of server frames per second) and rarely if ever hit an effects queue.

An important thing to note when going into this is that when an effects queue happens, it does not only affect your instance, but every other instance on the server that your instance is being processed by. Server in this case does not refer to world, such as Ghallanda or Sarlona or Wayfinder, but the actual machines that process DDO and share the load of each instance between them.

This also alleviates a source of client lag (floaty text queue), so if you play with floaty text off to alleviate client strain, this will prevent that strain by removing pressure from the floaty text queue.

Background Information

We've dedicated a lot of time to investigating and alleviating specific sources of reproducible lag within DDO in recent months. One of the most frequent causes of lag happens when an Effects Queue forms. This means that players have applied a ton of on-hit effects to a monster and the game has reached a buffer and must clear its queue in order to continue processing new information.

You can see this happen in raid groups; the party jumps in, opens up with a ton of active attacks and on-hit effects, and the game begins to degrade in performance almost immediately. It is also worth noting that this kind of lag has two separate portions: Client Combat Lag (which can be alleviated by turning off Floaty Text in your settings) and Server Combat Lag. We are specifically targeting Server based lag with this change. Behind the scenes, the server crunches damage, effects, and debuffs in a big queue. We can measure how efficient the server is at processing this queue by measuring the server frames.

To begin researching and addressing the root causes we put together simulations of a standard raid group and their on-hit profiles. Simulations of a raid group attacking a single target quickly ran into the same kind of performance problems that have become prevalent in raid groups, so we knew we had a reliable test case. What we found was that the amount of damage dealt didn't matter, it was about the frequency that effects were being applied. It didn't matter if a simulation was against one target or many - if the effects queue was in trouble the rest of the instance had its performance significantly impacted. That means lag for not just you and your group but for other people on the server.

What's Changing

• Doublestrike and Doubleshot will no longer apply a full subsequent "attack" as part of your attack chain. Instead, when a player Doublestrikes or Doubleshots (for brevity, we will call this a multi-hit from now on, just remember that this applies for all melee and all ranged) the game will instead multiply the base amount of damage dealt (first number and sneak attack) by the amount of multi-hits generated. This means that a player who deals an average of 100 damage on their first hit will now deal 200, or 300 damage, or however many multi-hits multiplied by their base damage, when their multi-hit goes off.
• When a multi-hit happens, you'll see an icon of two swords next to your damage in the floaty text, similar to how Point Blank Shot provides its feedback.
• Abilities that apply additional ranged projectiles (Shuriken Expertise and Advanced Ninja Training) no longer apply multiple hits or projectiles. Instead, just as if they had been purely Doubleshot scalars, they will simply be additional chances to multi-hit.
• Effects that trigger on-hit will also have their damage multiplied comparatively. This means that if you deal 10 Law damage on each hit, on a doublestrike, it will deal 20.
• Repeating Crossbows and the Dual Crossbow style still fire 3 or 2 full projectiles (so you'll still see 3 numbers or 2 numbers, respectively) and are still affected by their Doubleshot penalties of 66% and 50%, respectively.
• A player's 100% effective Doublestrike cap still applies in this system.
• Offhand strikes will still be a separate "hit" and will roll their own damage from their own weapon and can still Doublestrike. However, we have removed the stat Offhand Doublestrike from the game. Your offhand now Doublestrikes at 50% of the Doublestrike of your mainhand. This means that if you have a 50% chance to produce an offhand strike, and 100% Doublestrike, your offhand will hit 50% of the time for 50% Doublestrike (so a 50% chance to deal double damage). Abilities and enhancements that used to provide Offhand Doublestrike no longer do so.
• Shields still cannot Doublestrike.
• Strikethrough attacks still proc their own Doublestrike roll individually per target struck.
• The main reasoning behind these changes (letting repeaters and offhand strikes still proc rather than fully condensing) is that we want to keep our damage numbers appropriate to the amount of animations that a player actually produces.

A major effect of this change is that you will see much spikier damage across the board. The multi-hit calculation takes the original roll into account when determining damage, which means that you'll see much higher highs and much lower lows. Attacks that crit will multiply that increased damage, so you'll see much higher numbers on those attacks. Attacks that miss will deal no damage, as before, but rather than a multi-hit giving a chance for a second strike to deal damage, they will still deal no damage, as the original strike has missed.

These changes eliminate the Floaty-text queue in practice. Players who are used to seeing damage numbers scroll by on a delay will see the system replaced with numbers that are current. This will make DPS easier to estimate from a series of hits, and there will simply be fewer numbers to add up and adjust.

The Crunchy Details

Curious as to what's actually happening when a player attacks? Currently, when a player Doublestrikes or Doubleshots, we actually handle those types of attacks through very different flows. Both melee and missile attacks use something that we call a detect-attack to deal their regular damage, but how they get there is very different. Right now, a player “Doublestrikes” when their attack scripts use their Doublestrike stat to determine if they fire off another detect-attack. A player “Doubleshots” when the Missile Attacker code gets to the part in the code where we determine how many "Missiles" are a part of the projectile. From there, the scripts use the number of missiles to determine how many times they use a detect-attack.

Now, when a player “attacks” (from the detect-attack callback or elsewhere) the determination to Doublestrike or Doubleshot is made within that single attack call. The appropriate stats are queried, even the weird ones like the Shuriken multi-throw feats, and the appropriate adjustments to the chances are made such as the Doubleshot penalty from using a repeater or dual crossbow. From there, we determine how many “extra attacks” you have rolled, and if you have any bonus “attacks,” we multiply the damage you would deal by that amount.

We also have to do some funky stuff to get the damage of procs to double or triple or quadruple, and that starts in the same place where we calculate the number of effective hits. The combat code saves the number of hits and passes it down the chain until it gets to the place where effects actually deal their damage. From there, the effect will understand how many times it needs to be multiplied.

So, for comparison: Before, a melee character swings with his weapon, and Doublestrikes, which would be two detect-attacks, two damage rolls, and two series of on-hit effect triggers. Under these changes, the player attacks, Doublestrikes, and double damage is dealt, but only one set of on-hit-effects trigger because, to the game, only one “attack” took place.

What this means in practice is that no matter how many projectiles a shuriken thrower uses, or a dual-crossbow player fires, the maximum rate of an on-hit effect is now directly linked to your actual attack speed, and therefore, is significantly reduced. This has the potential to greatly reduce the amount of actual “attacks” in DDO without greatly disrupting player behavior.

Summary

The end result of this change should be improved gameplay on the performance end. Furthermore, the numbers you see while dealing damage will more accurately reflect what's happening in the moment, and you should be able to make calculations more quickly. We hope that you'll give this a solid try on Lamannia and look forward to your feedback, both on the usability of this change and any change in performance therein.

Is there a reason you're simply not implementing fully scalable parallelization regarding effects as related to instances? It's pretty clear you've got a issue with having serialized processes across instances where there probably should not have been any. Probably, I'll guess, because no one considered they were going to need to scale in effects processing at some point in the future.

The solution of

1. Create less effects
2. ...
3. Profit

Is less than inspiring.

Especially where "effects" have been sold as the must have bits for success at the highest levels for a lot of builds. Are you really going to take the time to balance all of the affected effects in the game against this change? Lol, I don't imagine so.

Why isn't there an effects processor for every instance? Or at a very minimum, scaling effects processors that same way everything else in modern software scales wide. The fact that poor performance in one instance drags every instance down is a root design flaw that should be rooted out. This smacks of telling your customers, "Hey, you're doing too much business. We need you to do less business." instead of fixing the parts of your process that clearly aren't scaling or were erroneously never designed to scale in mind.

There's almost certainly a way to parallelize effect processing to handle the volume. If there isn't congratulations, you've found the only situation in the history of software where scaling parallelization isn't a possible, much less, ideal, solution.

[Hypermusic]

They never said this was the ONLY reason to why the game lags. It's said and explained what causes major lag in raids, where there are a lot of people proccing effects like crazy. There are other problems in the game that causes it aswell, that's simply not the focus of this specific problem.

[Xgya]

They never said this was the ONLY reason to why the game lags. It's said and explained what causes major lag in raids, where there are a lot of people proccing effects like crazy. There are other problems in the game that causes it aswell, that's simply not the focus of this specific problem.

To add, this kind of lag happens everywhere when it does happen, not just in the instance the people proc'ing the effects happens to be in.
It's supposed to have a rippling effect on all servers at once.

[rabidfox]

To add, this kind of lag happens everywhere when it does happen, not just in the instance the people proc'ing the effects happens to be in.
It's supposed to have a rippling effect on all servers at once.

Yeah, that this lag source is server wide is way bigger deal than a lot of other sources of lag. It's always going to be a game of whack'o'mole for all the various lag sources, but at least this round of it seems like it'll be a big deal for helping one nasty source of it.

[SpartanKiller13]

So . . . my twf's offhand weapon is essentially meaningless?

Nah, just grab a damage one instead of only using off-hand for debuffs. You'll have more off-hand Doublestrike at every level (except low 20's on pure Ranger builds).

Offhand TWF will now able to contribute more meaningful DPS instead of just being there to apply procs.

[salmag]

So, basically, you cannot run with, say, a paralyzer in your main hand and a vorpal or banisher in your off-hand.

Or I should say you can run with that combination, however the vorpal or banisher effect will not proc.

Is that a correct assessment?

Please advise.

[Lynnabel]

So, basically, you cannot run with, say, a paralyzer in your main hand and a vorpal or banisher in your off-hand.

Or I should say you can run with that combination, however the vorpal or banisher effect will not proc.

Is that a correct assessment?

Please advise.

No, your offhand will still strike independently, dealing its own damage and applying its own effects, using your Offhand Strike Chance just as it did before. Please see this part of the OP for more information:

Offhand strikes will still be a separate "hit" and will roll their own damage from their own weapon and can still Doublestrike. However, we have removed the stat Offhand Doublestrike from the game. Your offhand now Doublestrikes at 50% of the Doublestrike of your mainhand. This means that if you have a 50% chance to produce an offhand strike, and 100% Doublestrike, your offhand will hit 50% of the time for 50% Doublestrike (so a 50% chance to deal double damage). Abilities and enhancements that used to provide Offhand Doublestrike no longer do so.[/B]

[salmag]

No, your offhand will still strike independently, dealing its own damage and applying its own effects, using your Offhand Strike Chance just as it did before. Please see this part of the OP for more information:

So it's just striking with less of a chance.

And thank you for the fast reply, Lynnabel.

[Zoveride]

Nah, just grab a damage one instead of only using off-hand for debuffs. You'll have more off-hand Doublestrike at every level (except low 20's on pure Ranger builds).

Offhand TWF will now able to contribute more meaningful DPS instead of just being there to apply procs.

How will Offhand TWF contribute more meaningful DPS on a Tempest?

Capstone - Dervish: +25% chance to doublestrike with your off-hand while dual wielding
Tier 5 - Dual Perfection: Your off hand weapon now adds your full attribute damage modifier.

I appreciate your insight as this will help improve my build. Thanks.

[Xgya]

How will Offhand TWF contribute more meaningful DPS on a Tempest?

Capstone - Dervish: +25% chance to doublestrike with your off-hand while dual wielding
Tier 5 - Dual Perfection: Your off hand weapon now adds your full attribute damage modifier.

I appreciate your insight as this will help improve my build. Thanks.

No more off-hand doublestrike.
Same off-hand single strike chance as before.

If you had 100% off-hand doublestrike before, you're losing about 25% of your second weapon's damage.
It should still be a pretty decent part of your overall DPS.

So it's just striking with less of a chance.

And thank you for the fast reply, Lynnabel.

It has the same chance of striking as before. (80% if you have GTWF)
What it partially loses is its chance to doublestrike, which is different.

[Discpsycho]

No more off-hand doublestrike.
Same off-hand single strike chance as before.

If you had 100% off-hand doublestrike before, you're losing about 25% of your second weapon's damage.
It should still be a pretty decent part of your overall DPS.

AFAIK, the maximum offhand doublestrike chance is currently 46%: 25% Tempest, 6% Scourge PL, 5% Vistani, 10% PTWF (source).

Under the new system, offhand doublestrike will be half of mainhand doublestrike. Getting above 50% doublestrike at cap is trivial as a Tempest, which means you're getting back the 25% that's being dropped from the core. Above 50% doublestrike you're looking at a net increase in damage. In other words, and as has been said by other folks in this same thread, this is only a nerf for Tempests in low epics.

[Artos_Fabril]

No more off-hand doublestrike.
Same off-hand single strike chance as before.

If you had 100% off-hand doublestrike before, you're losing about 25% of your second weapon's damage.
It should still be a pretty decent part of your overall DPS.

If you were at 100% offhand doublestrike... where did you get the extra ~54% offhand doublestrike from?
If you have less than 50% doublestrike on live, the change to how offhand doublestrike is calulated will reduce your damage by some %. If you're at 100% mainhand doublestrike, you'll see about 75% reduction in non-damage procs due to the change in DS from generating additional hits to multiplying damage, which will reflect in reduced damage dealt and increased damage taken from the reduction in vulnerability and CC procs (Vorpal, Fetters, Trip, Stun, etc).

In other words, and as has been said by other folks in this same thread, this is only a nerf for Tempests in low epics.

until you account for vulnerability stacks, vorpals, and combat tricks.

[ValariusK]

I was looking at my rogue last night. Every attack I'm doing an (eternal holy burst from Titania's, trivial damage), (poisoned weapon effect from assassin enhancement trivial damage), shadow form strength damage proc,
from pain vorpal proc, improved deception proc, fetters proc
from sufferring piercing proc (trivial damage), constricting proc, wounding proc
And I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two elemental 8d6 (trivial damage procs)
on vorpal shadow envelopment vulnerability proc
and of course, sneak attacks with yet more procs associated.
And I'm hitting with mainhand, mainhand doublestrike (close to 100%), offhand (always), and offhand DS (I believe I have like 26% offhand DS)

Have you considered paring down some of the trivial procs that nobody really builds on?

For instance, change the poisoned weapons proc thing in the enhancement tree. Just make it +N damage
Venomed Blades: Poison Stance: On hit: 1d4/1d6/1d8 poison damage with weapon attacks. This damage scales with 200% Melee Power.
AP Cost: 1 Ranks: 3 Progression: 5 No requirements
Becomes +2/+3/+4 to damage. Dump the stance too and the scaling, it's just generic damage. Flavor it as, your immense study of anatomy and xenobiology allows you to land more damaging strikes on all manner of foes. The 'venom' is whatever it needs to be from a roleplaying perspective, and you don't have to break it out as a separate proc.

The 8d6 -10d6 procs on endgame weapons are really just adding processing load for very little damage. Consider redoing those.

[KoobTheProud]

Just FYI for all those who do not play many or any other MMO's: this type of fix, to eliminate many attacks or effects in the queue to allow the queue to keep up is a fairly common fix at this point.

EQ2 had a real lag problem in groups and raids along about 2015. Their first fix and the one that got the problem largely solved was to take multi-attacks from a weapon out of the equation. The way the old system worked was a multi-strike of 1000% (yes, after 11 years of layering on systems you could get there) produced 10 additional swings of the weapon on each attack. Each additional swing proc'd a chance at all the effects the character build had in it. When soloing this didn't cause a huge problem because the attacks queue could handle just about anything a single character could produce. When grouping things got slow. In raids things could come to a standstill at times, much like in DDO at the moment. This affected all players on that shard, much like DDO at the moment.

The solution was to combine all the attacks that multi-attack gave into a single attack at the sum of the base plus the extra rolled attacks. All procs were increased slightly at the base-line and rolled once for each of the swings the character made. This reduced the overall chance of a proc occurring substantially. The devs at the time said that some of the procs were too powerful and that users with high multi-attack had been getting too much benefit from a proc that had been originally designed to proc once on each attack and had over the years morphed into a bunch of independent rolls on each attack due to the way that multi-attack worked. Procs in recent updates had been dropped dramatically because of the number of builds that could produce them at will - not working as intended. When the procs were increased slightly across the board the effect was actually positive for some builds that did not have a lot of multi-strike as well as a nerf to the builds that could proc the thing whenever they wanted it before and now got it at a much lower rate.

The overall effect from the change was that lag was substantially reduced in EQ2.

Hopefully we will get a similar benefit.

[Tilomere]

Have you considered paring down some of the trivial procs that nobody really builds on?

They did it with Sense Weakness. Seems like there were just too many to recode in the time frame they wanted.

[dkyle]

Just FYI for all those who do not play many or any other MMO's: this type of fix, to eliminate many attacks or effects in the queue to allow the queue to keep up is a fairly common fix at this point.

Don't know about EQ2 specifically, but other MMOs I've played don't have anywhere near the amount, or significance, of non-damaging effects on weapon attacks that DDO has. It's part of the charm and uniqueness of DDO, so it's a real shame to see them nerfed for non-balance reasons.


Have we gotten an answer for why multiplying effect stacks, and number of saves required, hasn't been included? That wouldn't fix all of them, but it's at least something.

[Carpone]

Have we gotten an answer for why multiplying effect stacks, and number of saves required, hasn't been included? That wouldn't fix all of them, but it's at least something.

They've already moved on to Saltmarsh and the ED revamp.