U50 Preview 1: Endgame Itemization Adjustments

[CeltEireson]

One issue I find with Epic levels and their gear progress is that there is basically nothing to wear from 15 > 29. Sharn gear is basically the best stuff available once you hit level 15. We need more options. We have a few weapons from Loth, but not armors.

The reason for that is more to do with the set bonuses - if it wasn't for those there is some gear in newer quests at level 21+ that is useful but you can't use because you can't fit it and the Sharn set stuff, particularly with regards to armour. Set bonuses should never have been as strong as they are, and probably weren't needed at all, just more power inflation.

Also there's a lot of quest items in the range 21-28 that need revamped in line with the new power levels and haven't been touched since they were introduced.

[Seph1roth5]

They said in the U51 stuff (the stuff you are referencing) that mob health at lower levels would be reduced then, by up to around 50%.

There is no need to nerf lvl 21 content, when nothing is happening to us in the lvl 21 range yet.

Don't remember anything in u51 about mob HP being reduced, but devs specifically said in discord that HP wasn't touched at all this lam build.

[Stravix]

Don't remember anything in u51 about mob HP being reduced, but devs specifically said in discord that HP wasn't touched at all this lam build.

Howdy folks! We've been hard at work reading and absorbing all of the feedback you have given us over the last week, and we wanted to share more about what we have been discussing. The following was put together by the folks working on these systems as a group, and I'm just posting their work, really:



4: Monster and content difficulty

This debut on Lamannia didn't make it explicit enough that we are making big changes to the difficulty of monsters built for older Epic content quests. We're going to make sure monster stats take these changes into account. For comparison, switching a monster in older Epics to our new formulas often results in a loss of Maximum HP anywhere from 25 - 50%, depending on the individual monster's quirks. We will have more information about our monster adjustments in the next Epic Destiny Preview.


Well, that's all we have for right now, although we still want to hear from you about how you feel about this overhaul. Please feel welcome to share your feedback with us!

Please see Cordo's post

[Toph_Prime]

Can we do something about bank space before hundreds of items are suddenly relevant again?

[neain2008]

Please see Cordo's post

Ahh, the post that by clicking on your quote, I can see is on page 11 out of 15. Not somewhere easily found. I seem to have overlooked that somehow.

Edit: sorry for being quite so salty. You did end up addressing what's worrying me. Now I hope they stay on that path after u50

[Stravix]

Ahh, the post that by clicking on your quote, I can see is on page 11 out of 15. Not somewhere easily found. I seem to have overlooked that somehow.

Edit: sorry for being quite so salty. You did end up addressing what's worrying me. Now I hope they stay on that path after u50

You are good, I wish that was posted as an update to the main post myself.

[Chacka_DDO]

this sounds confusing & headache inducing. Gear tetris is bad enough, this would be like gear tetris with an added level of algebra

Not at all, the items would be not much different from now the only difference is that you are allowed to use your level 30 item in level 1 but if you equip it in character level 1 it only gives you 1 strength and not 13 (with the new rules).
Then you don't need a heroic version of the items and a legendary version, you only need the legendary version.
This means you need half the current item space and your character is never under-equipped for his current character level.
Actually, it has only benefits for players and it is basically even less complicated because every character no matter his character level is allowed to use any item

[Chacka_DDO]

Can we do something about bank space before hundreds of items are suddenly relevant again?

In German, one call that a "Luxusproblem" (e.g. if your wallet is too small for your money).

[xBunny]

There is no need to nerf lvl 21 content, when nothing is happening to us in the lvl 21 range yet.

We don't get full ED power at epic levels start, so there is definitely something happening at level 21.

[Arctigis]

Please see Cordo's post

Multi quote not working for me.

Anyway, this specifically says 'older epic content'. This means the stuff that was Epic before
MotU I think i.e. House D, House P. With ED(U51) pass all 20+ content will need re-scaling.
U50 needs some re-scaling in 26+ epic and all legendary. Preview 1 was only - saves and
removal of T2 Legendary buff in Sharn+. There are also L26+ Raid loot items which are
getting re-scaled - this needs to be taken into account too IMO.

[Merrillman]

Hi all! Happy Friday!

This has been a pretty wild series of previews but we wanted to take some time here and check in on a few things. These are in no particular order:

1: We are pretty confident that our changes are fair for DC casters but are not meeting the mark for those who actually deal damage - either via melee or ranged or by spellcasting. Melee/Ranged players specifically are also fighting against an old problem made new again, namely that our AC formulas climb much higher than our accuracy does. With that in mind, here's our tentative solution (although this is subject to change):

a: We're going to apply a blanket debuff to monsters at cap that takes a chunk out of their AC.
b: We're exploring ways to safely globally adjust monster HP at cap downwards.

Both of these exact solutions have numbers we're still noodling on, so please forgive us if we don't give you exact numbers until we're 100% confident on our end. We've gotten a ton of great feedback on the adjustments on the player end that we're still cataloging, and we're incredibly thankful that so many people took the time to test out their current loadout on Lamannia.

2: We're also going to adjust certain specific quests in Epic (such as Tower of Frost and the White Plume Mountain auxiliary dungeons) by drastically pulling down their scaling.

3: Now that all items are on a set scaling curve, we can also start doing something that I've been personally excited for: namely, doing across-the-board individual stat adjustments. What this means is that we're going to try adjusting the actual ratio of item power level to statistics, effectively adjusting all items that use that specific statistic without further intervention necessary on the part of the player. The two stats we're exploring this for are:

a: Raising the values of Spell Resistance found on items
b: Raising the values of Spell Penetration found on items

Why these stats specifically? Mostly because they're very binary and, due to how our monster CRs are calculated, could stand to be inflated slightly. As part of this overhaul, we may not actually be adjusting monster CRs, which means that the only way to adjust how players interact with this system is to adjust their SR and SP stats directly. And since we can now do per-stat adjustments... why not start here?

That's just about it for right now, but we're not done tinkering behind the scenes. So please, if you have further feedback, absolutely feel free to share it here. Thanks for your patience as we work through this significant overhaul!

I am trying VERY hard to believe this. Really. But I don’t — I will say, however, that since we haven’t seen caster trees it MAY be better than I think, but what I’ve seen so far it is ANYTHING but “Fair” to DPS casters. Our abilities and damage are getting utterly destroyed (FYI, damage is our ONLY way to survive unless you want to (I do NOT!) want to be a PM, or “splash” in other classes for armor, healing, etc). If you want to really make it believable, address this:

Is damage reduction, loss of Crit, stats, etc = to a 1:1 diminishing of monster HP, AC, BUFFS do that the SAME % damage to overall HP will be done relative to before?

Are DPS casters losing, as a %, MORE damage than other DPS characters, thereby making them
Relatively weaker to other classes as they were before?

We are seemingly (release caster trees and maybe I’m dead wrong) losing massive spell Points, Crit, damage, skills, and what we have toiled for YEARS for feel like it was for nothing (AFTER you ALREADY killed RL belts, spells like MS, and destroyed caster levels!!) and likely any chance at rejuve cocoon (often our only heal).

Why are healing pots JUNK at endgame??! These things should be 500-1000 HP heals every pop, or scale them based on level.

You’ve also forced everyone to spend on trees they have no interest in just to get ONE t3 or t4 ability. We do NOT want to be forced to spend (makes us weaker!) umpteen points on things we don’t want just to get things we do, when twists could be from ANY tree at any level except the highest.

No point spend on alt trees!! It makes it worse, not better. If it’s going to be ONLY 3 trees allow all three to be wide open by your main tree’s spend!! Then you can TRULY have flexibility. Forcing you to take abilities you hate or will never use is just a bad idea when twists didn't make you do that.

Lastly, I have to say I don’t think you understand that it took a lot of people, like me, YEARS and enormous dollars spent in real money to get to this point where I can keep up with others. If you go through with this DPS “Nerfular Bomb” you pretty much destroy the game for me, and everything that made all the slog and grinding over many years worth it.

You know what I want to see? SCALING.

Scale raids for people who can’t sit waiting for two hours in the HOPE that they can find a raid party BEFORE they start. I can’t even spend 2 hours a day on the game let alone 2 hours before I get to start!

Scale raids for 4,6,8,10,12 players. That’s how you allow “new” players to catch up. I cannot get raid gear almost ever because I CANNOT wait hours just to start play. Hey, while you’re at it, make the gear that you DO get in raids always relevant to your class. I don’t want another darned docent I can’t ever use thank you very much.

Scale gear from its min level, having it advance as your level advances and scrap the mat farming thats just awful. No gear is going to stand out as better now anyway, so no reason scaling can’t occur. Only reason to change anything with this change is visuals. Why put people through mat chasing?

Scale augment and powers from their min level as well.

Scale crafted gear.

I don’t know what you think is fair, but from everything I see, anything about DPS casters is seemingly that we are getting far more disproportionately affected than anything else in game. That’s the opposite of fair.

[Stravix]

We don't get full ED power at epic levels start, so there is definitely something happening at level 21.

Correct, but that is happening U51, and is discussed to be happening then.

Multi quote not working for me.

Anyway, this specifically says 'older epic content'. This means the stuff that was Epic before
MotU I think i.e. House D, House P. With ED(U51) pass all 20+ content will need re-scaling.
U50 needs some re-scaling in 26+ epic and all legendary. Preview 1 was only - saves and
removal of T2 Legendary buff in Sharn+. There are also L26+ Raid loot items which are
getting re-scaled - this needs to be taken into account too IMO.

Sadly, "older epic content" isn't super specific, I agree, and I interpreted it as content lower in epic levels, which is most of where the power loss would be felt.

That said, I do think the U50 update does need to hit lvl 29 mobs harder, as AC and HP are still concerns, from what I've heard.

[Arctigis]

Sadly, "older epic content" isn't super specific, I agree, and I interpreted it as content lower in epic levels, which is most of where the power loss would be felt.
That said, I do think the U50 update does need to hit lvl 29 mobs harder, as AC and HP are still concerns, from what I've heard.

On discord it wasn't very clear cut. There was talk about what they COULD do but not much
comittment or detail about what they WOULD do. I think they need to take a bit more time
to get this right. U50+U51 change a lot.

For U50, they only need to scale L26+ Raids and L28+ legendary quests as that's where
the stat reductions are. This needs to include HP as player DPS is significantly lower.

For U51 they probably need to rescale everything.

[Stravix]

On discord it wasn't very clear cut. There was talk about what they COULD do but not much
comittment or detail about what they WOULD do. I think they need to take a bit more time
to get this right. U50+U51 change a lot.

For U50, they only need to scale L26+ Raids and L28+ legendary quests as that's where
the stat reductions are. This needs to include HP as player DPS is significantly lower.

For U51 they probably need to rescale everything.

Fair.

Not entirely convinced on needing to rescale the content that would be adjusted in u50 again in u51, as the power level actually looks pretty similar at that point, but I could definitely see it being a thing given more testing.

[Lynnabel]

On discord it wasn't very clear cut. There was talk about what they COULD do but not much
comittment or detail about what they WOULD do.

We try to avoid committing to anything numbers-wise before we finish our due diligence, hence our reluctance to go into detail on that front. It would be a bad idea for one of us to make a promise we can't deliver on.

Sadly, "older epic content" isn't super specific, I agree, and I interpreted it as content lower in epic levels, which is most of where the power loss would be felt.

When we say "Old Epics" we mean content that was introduced and statted before Epic split into Epic Hard, Epic Elite, etc. These monsters are artificially propped up at those difficulties using a set of scaling formulas that modifies their base stats. Newer content simply has a new monster variant per difficulty, so we can actually modify difficulty on a per-monster basis. With U51, we want to remove a lot of the monster power in those low epic dungeons to remove a chunk of the barrier to entry into Epics, which on our end means we want to make hard/elite versions of those monsters and pull them off of our global scaling system.

That said, I do think the U50 update does need to hit lvl 29 mobs harder, as AC and HP are still concerns, from what I've heard.

This is something we address directly in this post.

1: We are pretty confident that our changes are fair for DC casters but are not meeting the mark for those who actually deal damage - either via melee or ranged or by spellcasting. Melee/Ranged players specifically are also fighting against an old problem made new again, namely that our AC formulas climb much higher than our accuracy does. With that in mind, here's our tentative solution (although this is subject to change):

a: We're going to apply a blanket debuff to monsters at cap that takes a chunk out of their AC.
b: We're exploring ways to safely globally adjust monster HP at cap downwards.

Both of these exact solutions have numbers we're still noodling on, so please forgive us if we don't give you exact numbers until we're 100% confident on our end. We've gotten a ton of great feedback on the adjustments on the player end that we're still cataloging, and we're incredibly thankful that so many people took the time to test out their current loadout on Lamannia.

[Arctigis]

We try to avoid committing to anything numbers-wise before we finish our due diligence,
hence our reluctance to go into detail on that front. It would be a bad idea for one of us to make a promise we can't deliver on.

Sure, I totally get that. I think it would be helpful if SSG could state where they see things ending
up for U50 and U51. Then how you actually get there is an implementation detail. For instance, if you
could commit to the same relative dps to mob health and mob dps to effective healing, that would
put a lot of players minds at rest I would think.

[Arctigis]

We try to avoid committing to anything numbers-wise before we finish our due diligence,
hence our reluctance to go into detail on that front. It would be a bad idea for one of us to make a promise we can't deliver on.

*duplicate*

[Tobril]

A few things that may or may not have been addressed:


Trap Saves and DCs

Social Skill checks, particularly intimidate. Some of the current bosses are quite high and tanks are generally required to be no-fail on their taunt otherwise the raid will wipe.

[Seph1roth5]

Please see Cordo's post

I was actually on discord when steel had posted his page 11 update. In the future it'd be nice if you guys would just make a new thread for a big pile of update like that. Or update the first post and at the top say "(updated 6/27)" or whatever.

Also, I had taken the HP remarks (correctly after reading lynnabel) that the "old epics" were more the ooooold stuff like carnival whose monsters are much more bloated than quests of that level.

What I was talking about was HP reduction in legendary stuff (where we're losing the most power). It looks like they're definitely looking into all sorts of things atm. So not much to do but wait until the next lam build and then see where everything lands after some testing.

[amessi1]

One of my favorite mini-games inside of ddo is gear tetris. I'm afraid the "Itemization Adjustments" will have a lasting drag on the game b/c of the mountain of data which will be wrong in ddowiki.

When i'm playing gear tetris I look up gear by stat & slot, so, there's a good chance I'll have bad data for the foreseeable future...effectively taking a part of the game I enjoy and making it tedious and/or frustrating.

There's also a high probability that I'll see the old gear and remember how it used to be, when reaper points where less of a grind and I got to play with the occasional doom reaper. (Based on dev comments that, the flat stat bonus reaper monsters get will not be adjusted, effectively making high skull reaper out of reach for me, again)

Plus keen, ugh, i've worked my gear to bypass most fort & with Mark of the Hunted, I nearly always had fort bypass. keen's 2[W] is a huge constant bonus & you go from everybody gets benefit against every monster to a some builds get bonuses against some monsters 5% of the time.

I get these large scope changes are designed to widen the player base, but this gear sweep may have lasting impacts beyond in-game combat, potentially frustrating then shrinking the player base...I hope I'm wrong.