U51 Preview 3: Epic Destiny Overview

[Lynnabel]

Disclaimer

Everything seen on the preview server, Lamannia, is not final and is subject to change or removal before live release.

Greetings! This is a pretty crazy read, so buckle up!

Epic Destinies
We are going to fully revamp the ED structure from the ground up to provide a cohesive leveling experience from levels 20-30 and beyond. The new structure will resemble heroic Enhancements - 6 cores along the bottom and 5 tiers reaching to the top. However, there are some notable differences and similarities to the old ED structure:

You can now be in a maximum of 3 Epic Destinies at a time. Think of it like the current Enhancement window, but without any ability to scroll horizontally along trees. You select up to three trees at a time, socketing them into place in your ED window, just as you select your Heroic Enhancement Trees. You can spend points freely between these three trees, and resetting your ED points out of a tree will allow you to choose a new one.

As you level up beyond level 20, you will earn Destiny Points that you can spend in these ED trees. Epic Levels now display their experience in Ranks, just like Heroic levels do. Each point is earned at each Rank of an Epic Level, which means that each Epic Level corresponds to 4 Destiny Points. The 5th rank of each Epic Level is the level itself, as it is in Heroics. This means that you'll earn Destiny Points at a steady rate rather than in large chunks every 5 ranks.

Each Epic Destiny ability in the new Destiny system has a destiny point requirement as well as a level requirement - just like heroic enhancements do - so you can't jump right to the end at level 20 or without spending the requisite points up the tree. The Level and AP requirements are as follows:

Core 1: Level 20, 0 AP
Core 2: Level 23, 5 AP
Core 3: Level 26, 10 AP
Core 4-6: Will eventually be available at levels higher than 30. Exact breakdown TBD.

Tier 1: Level 20, 0 AP
Tier 2: Level 20, 5 AP
Tier 3: Level 23, 10 AP
Tier 4: Level 26, 20 AP
Tier 5: Level 30, 30 AP (you may only be in one Tier 5 at a time)

You'll notice that the tiers and cores don't exactly match Heroic enhancement trees, and we'll get to that in a moment.

These new ED trees are a mix of the old ED abilities and brand new ones, providing a huge variety of options to players both familiar with our current EDs and hungry for new exciting abilities. As we examine just what made the old Epic Destinies compelling, we're able to make sweeping changes to themes and designs to better support the widest range of available play. You'll see familiar abilities in unfamiliar places, new abilities in the places of old ones, and a lot of radical changes to bring the entire Destiny system together into more of a cohesive whole. We'll have a separate post about the general design notes of the new trees so you can examine the changes in more detail before diving into the trees themselves.

Unlocking Trees
Assuming you've never been in epics before, when you reach level 20, you will be directed to the Fatespinner and a new public area accessible from her dialogue. This area will contain NPCs that correspond to each Destiny. Speak to those NPCs to unlock the destiny for this character permanently. This NPC will give you a description of the playstyles that the tree supports, as well as serve a small part in a new, lightweight tutorial. Once you have done this once on a character, you will not need to do it again. This is just a way for us to vector new players to the Epic gameplay loop into a space that can give them a bit of an aesthetical introduction to our Epic game.

If you have at least one character before this overhaul that has fully capped all of their Epic Destinies, you will receive an exclusive Cloak featuring the now-deprecated Starmap to commemorate your achievement.

Unlocking a tree in the new system also provides +3 Fate Points per tree, which means that a brand new character reaching 20 for the first time will begin with 36 Fate Points.

Fate Points
There are no more Twists of Fate in this system - as players are able to branch out across up to three trees - but Fate Points still have a use. Every 3 Fate Points you've earned will contribute to 1 Permanent Destiny Point in the Epic Destiny Trees. These points are available at level 20 and can be freely spent between the trees you have slotted. If this is your first time in Epics, you will begin with a bare minimum of 24 Fate Points (from unlocking the 12 currently available trees), which means you'll start level 20 with 8 Permanent Destiny Points. This Permanent Destiny Point system is where we recapture the currently-frontloaded Destiny flow and allows us to offer playstyle-defining elements right out of the gate. The first two tiers of each tree are accessible at level 20, so you'll have quite a bit of choice and power at the start.

Fate Points also grant +2 Hitpoints and +1 Spellpoints each, starting at level 20.

You earn Fate Points in a variety of ways - from the Tomes of Fate currently available, from Epic Past Lives at the ratio of 3 Epic Past Lives to 1 Fate Point (which is an improvement, compared to 4:1 as it is currently), and from unlocking Destinies in the new system. You will no longer receive bonus Fate Points at levels 29 and 30.

The current maximum Fate Points is 55: 36 from unlocking trees + 16 from Epic Past Lives + 3 from a Tome of Fate. This means that you will start with up to 18 Permanent Destiny Points from Fate at level 20 (+1 extra Fate Point).

Epic Reincarnation
Rather than requiring Karma, Epic Reincarnation simply allows a player at level 30+ to take the Epic Past life of your choice and return to level 20.

Epic Completionist, rather than granting a Twist of Fate slot, will instead grant a flat +1 Destiny Action Point. You will also earn additional copies of Epic Completionist every 12 Epic Past Lives you earn thereafter. This means that a player with 24 Epic Past Lives will start with 2 copies of Epic Completionist, and will be able to earn 2 more as they reach the 48 total Epic Past Lives. A player with all 48 will have 4 copies of Epic Completionist, for a total of +4 Permanent Destiny Points.

This means that a player with Epic Completionist, all Epic Past Lives, the Tome of Destiny from Feywild, a +3 Tome of Fate, and all unlocked Destiny Trees, will begin level 20 with 23 Permanent Destiny Points (18 from fate, 4 from four copies of epic completionist, 1 from tome).

Epic XP, Epic Destiny XP, and Karma
Although you may have gleaned this from the above sections, just to make sure everyone is on the same page, there is no Epic Destiny XP or Karma in this new system. A player will not be required to level up in a destiny, or earn XP in a destiny, to unlock new trees or reincarnate. The base 12 destinies will be unlocked at level 20 via a simple tutorial (see the Unlocking Trees header for information) and reincarnation will no longer require Karma to complete (see the Epic Reincarnation header for information).

This means that the only type of XP you need to worry about in Epics is Epic XP, which will be unchanged from how it is earned. Epic XP will be displayed on your XP Bar differently (by splitting each level up into Ranks so we can award points more often), but the amounts and totals needed to level up are unchanged from how they are currently.

Leveling Up in Epics
In order to address the backloaded feat flow and frontloaded enhancement flow, we are meeting in the middle for the new level-up experience for Epics.



As you can see, we are moving the Destiny feat levels to follow directly after the Epic Feat levels. We are making an effort to ensure that every level in Epics gives a player some sort of choice or advancement. We want to smooth out the rate at which a player gains power considerably, which means we will be lowering the minimum levels of the Destiny feats.

Epic and Destiny Feats
Epic Destiny Feats no longer have Sphere requirements, as there are no more spheres. Instead, they will simply have level prerequisites.

The level prerequisites of Destiny Feats have been changed. Whereas before a Destiny Feat would have a prerequisite for levels 26, 28, and 29, they will now follow the new acquisition level flow, moving to min level 22, 25, and 28 respectively.

Several Epic and Destiny Feats have changed in functionality, as will be detailed in a separate post.

[Lynnabel]

Disclaimer

Everything seen on the preview server, Lamannia, is not final and is subject to change or removal before live release.

This is a companion post to the main Epic Revamp framework. Please read that post if you haven't already before reading this one! This post focuses on our Design Philosophies and the rules we used to build out the new Epic Destinies themselves.

Epic Destiny Design Paradigm
When looking at our current spread of 12 ED trees, they're all over the place in effectiveness and usability. We've had to contend with several strange and relatively inelegant designs that make balancing the destinies quite difficult. Therefore, when approaching the monumental task of remaking the system from scratch, we wanted to go back to the very beginning and explore the rough edges in the current system and how we've changed our designs to address those problems.

Caster Levels
Old EDs gave specific bonuses to specific caster levels in the cores, but these bonuses did not give Max caster levels, just caster levels. There was also a smattering of specific caster level/max caster level bonuses spread across some trees for only specific spells.

New EDs will give no specific caster levels to classes. You'll instead gain +1 Caster Level and +1 Max Caster Level with all spells for every 2 Epic levels you've earned - so at level 30, you'll be at +5 to your caster levels.

Spell Schools and Spell DCs
Old destinies supported either a small subsection or all DC types at the same time, and even then, if you wanted DCs, Magister was the clear choice most of the time.

Our goal is for each spell school to have a specialized destiny (for example, Fatesinger and Enchantment), but to also support several DC bonuses. This means that each type of DC has plenty of room to be specialized in instead of living in a single tree. Magister itself is a very special case, but we'll get to that later. Our new Spell DC Paradigm is as follows:

• Each core of a casting tree grants +1 Epic bonus to all DCs (so core 2 grants +2 Epic bonus, core 3 grants +3 epic bonus)
  
  • Since this is typed, it does not stack, so taking cores from other trees will not increase your DCs.
• Each of these casting trees in tier 5 has an enhancement that grants +1/2/3 to all DCs.
  
  • Since this is in tier 5, and like with heroic enhancement trees you can only spend points in the tier 5's of a single Destiny, you can only access one of these universal DC boosts.
• In tier 3, there is a multiselector of a subset of DCs that grants +1/2/3 to the selected DC
  
  • These are antirequisites of the same DC found in other trees. Once you select necromancy in one tree, you can't take it in the other tree.
  • This means that if you are a Necromancy DC caster, you will want 1 of your trees to have that Necromancy, but once you've gotten that DC, your other options are wide open
  • This also means that you can go wide for more DCs for secondary DC values OR go tall to keep focusing, rather than wanting to go wide for all of the DCs across all of the trees that offer it
• We are also planning on removing the Epic Resilience buff from all monsters at endgame to make DCs across the board far easier to achieve.

Spellpower Types
Our goal is for each type of spellpower to have at least one tree that specializes in that type of spellcasting damage, with Draconic and Primal Avatar both leaning on different parts of the role of "choose a spellpower to specialize in". This means that if you're a caster that tries to deal spell damage, you'll have two or maybe three trees full of attractive options to encourage you to pick the ones that are right for your specific build. We're also opening up Draconic and Primal Avatar to cover a lot more ground horizontally, but you'll see that in the specific trees itself.

There simply isn't actually a lot of Spellpower in the current Epic Destinies, which means that compared to a melee or ranged character, your spell damage from raw spellpower didn't actually increase that much in your Epic Destiny.

In our new flow, each core of a Spellcasting Destiny will grant +5 Spellpower in the thematic types (For example, Fatesinger will boost Force and Sonic) as well as +5 Universal Spellpower. There will also be +20 thematic and +20 Universal spellpower in the tiers of each Spellcasting Destiny, for a total of +35 thematic/+35 universal in each tree.

Spell Critical Chance
Old EDs gave a smattering of spell critical chance that disproportionately boosted the elements presented. Fire and Light were at a severe advantage, and other elements were neglected.

New EDs will give no spell critical chance.

Spell Critical Damage
Draconic being the only source of Spell Critical Damage meant it was clearly superior in terms of raw damage for almost all damaging casters, even if it was aesthetically or synergistically suboptimal.

New EDs will give no spell critical damage, but that doesn't mean players won't have access to it going forward, as we'll get to further down.

Melee and Ranged Power
Each tree that wants you to deal damage with weapons will now support both melee and ranged in both their active attacks and respective powers.

Each tree that grants Melee/Ranged power will now do it at an equal rate across all trees to prevent one tree from simply granting more than the others. We want players to choose the tree that best fits their desired playstyle and not the tree that simply has the greatest numerical superiority.

Melee Power per Core Ability: 5
Ranged Power per Core Ability: 4

Each melee/ranged tree will also grant both melee and ranged power at the same time. The exception to this is Fury of the Wild and Shiradi Champion, which will grant only Melee Power and only Ranged Power respectively, and contain only melee and only ranged attacks respectively.

To make up the rest of the Melee and Ranged Power that was currently available, we are doubling the bonuses of the Epic Power feat that is granted at each Epic Level from +3 to +6. This means that you will earn a total of +60 Melee and Ranged Power from leveling up versus the currently available +30.

Usage-Per-Rest Abilities
Rather than individual abilities having their own charges (for example, Healing Spring in Shiradi being usable some number of times per rest), if we use a charges-per-rest system in the new ED trees, it will always have a heroic or shared component. Keeping with Healing Spring, in the new paradigm, it will instead use Wild Empathy charges (and grant a few so that you'll be able to start with the same amount of charges or more in the new flow). You'll see a lot more abilities that use things like Turn Undead, Bard Songs, Rage, and Smite Evil, and a lot of ways to augment recovering those charges or increasing your pool. This helps the Epic Destiny trees feel more like an extension of your existing abilities than an unconnected system meant to replace them.

Feat Tie-Ins
We're going to try to reclaim as many of the old and sub-optimal feats as we can - for example, an ED ability that grants a significant bonus if you have the Luck of Heroes Feat trained - in ways that would reward you for having them in your build without making them mandatory. Some feats might need additional help, but with this we're going to make an effort to tie a lot of those loose ends up.

You'll also see a lot of abilities that tie into Destiny and Epic feats that are underused or overlooked, such as Embodiment of Chaos/Law and the Bulwark of Defense feat. When these appear, rather than being requirements to train, they will instead apply an additional bonus if you have the feat to reward players who decide to shift their own meta.

Ability Score Bonuses
There are no more ability score bonuses in these trees (meaning the line of +1 Stat across the right edge of each ED) - they took up a full 1/5th of the real estate of the old EDs and caused far more trouble than they're worth from a build choice perspective. This means that any class or build can effectively use any tree without worrying about ability score mismatches. This also means that we have 20% more real estate per tree to pack in more exciting abilities that better explore the themes of each Destiny.

DC Checks
Old Epic Destinies had DC checks that used specific stats to determine their DC, and sometimes didn't include DC bonuses they should have. This meant that if you were a specific caster type, you were limited in which SLAs had workable DCs.

If an ability in a new Epic Destiny uses a DC, it follows this formula: 20 + (highest of int/wis/cha if a spell, highest of str/dex/con if a purely physical ability, highest of all ability scores if otherwise/both) + (spell school bonus if it's a spell, appropriate DC boost such as Sunder or Trip if not, includes things like Breath Weapon if it's a Breath Weapon, etc)

This means that you can expect a relatively small range of DCs for your abilities that use the same stats, even across separate trees. It also means that if you're a spellcaster, your primary spellcasting stat will be able to contribute evenly, regardless of which tree you are in.

New Trees
One of the major changes as a part of this refactor is that we can begin releasing entirely new Epic Destiny trees. Our goal is to end up with 12 at the start, and then slowly start rolling out more, at least until we can get up to 15, with each tree loosely corresponding to a heroic class.

In more immediate news, we're going to be retiring the Magister Epic Destiny and replacing it with Magus of the Eclipse, a brand new ED that focuses on Negative, Cold, and Necromancy spells, as well as weaving potent anti-magical defenses. Eventually The Magus of the Eclipse tree preview post will have a lot more information on why this tree specifically was replaced entirely instead of being refactored but that isn't ready for this early preview. For now, suffice it to say that when we went into building out a new cohesive epic ecosystem Magister in it's current broad form did not fit the framework.

Epic Destiny Mantles, Epic Strikes, and Epic Moments
To help keep Epic Destinies feeling mechanically different than heroic trees, we're putting together a global system of active play across all trees.

Destiny Mantles
In the lower tiers of each Destiny Tree you will find an enhancement labeled as a Destiny Mantle. These are powerful persistent abilities that must be toggled on in order to gain their benefits. You can only have a single Destiny Mantle active at a time. You can take multiple of these Mantles in order to swap between them on the fly, however, you can only gain the benefits from one of them at a time. These exclusive toggles are how we plan to keep powerful passive abilities and aspects separate from each other (for example, Grandmaster of Flower's monk animation suite versus Shadowdancer's Shadowform) without making them truly exclusive. Their exclusivity also means that we can allow players access to them right at level 20.

Epic Strikes
Scattered throughout the Destiny Trees you will find abilities that are labeled as Epic Strikes. These abilities share a cooldown but are not exclusive. These powerful abilities are enhanced as you spend points in their respective trees, and are meant to be accessed right out of the gate at level 20.

Epic Moments
In Tier 5 of each tree you will find an Epic Moment. Epic Moments are powerful abilities with a long cooldown, and represent a significant amount of lategame power. Our design philosophy for Epic Moments was quite loose to give each tree the freedom it needed, but a general rule is that Epic Moments will break one fundamental "rule" of DDO for its duration. As an example, the Shadowform Epic Moment ("Shadow Mastery") allows you to be considered "stealthed" for its duration, regardless of your actions.

[neain2008]

Still nothing at 29 and all the 'epic' moments are level gated for 30. Can you at least re-name them to be legendary moments?

As someone who barely spends any time at cap because I am on the TR hamster wheel (and I find play at the cap to be boring), I will rarely get to use these for any real length of time.

[Bladedge]

Level 29 should have ED Teir 5 unlock seeing how trier 3 and 4 unlock every 3 levels. Why keep level 29 with nothing to advance for or what I call a dead level. Their is already 2 feat choices at lv 30 don't leave lv 29 nothing but filler.

[Arkat]

Lynnabel,

I took a look at some of the new Legendary sands items and my attention was drawn to the Legendary Sirocco longsword.




I guess the most obvious issue I have with it is that it's named "Legendary Sirocco" but its Sirocco power is the plain old Heroic version.

May I suggest you rename the power to "Legendary Sirocco" and up the DC from 20 to 100 like you updated the Telekinetic power to "Legendary Telekinetic" and upped its DC to 100?

Thanks for your consideration.

[mikarddo]

Still a very obvious failure that there is nothing at all at level 29 - and t5 is only level 30.

This ... is ... a ... horrible ... design ...

T3 at level 22
T4 at level 24
T5 at level 26

Do not rob the low and mid epic levels of all fun - design new fun for levels above 30!

[Loromir]

Still a very obvious failure that there is nothing at all at level 29 - and t5 is only level 30.

This ... is ... a ... horrible ... design ...

T3 at level 22
T4 at level 24
T5 at level 26

Do not rob the low and mid epic levels of all fun - design new fun for levels above 30!

It's hard for me to find motivation to play lately....but this is definitely motivating me to NOT play.

[Dandonk]

Still a very obvious failure that there is nothing at all at level 29 - and t5 is only level 30.

This ... is ... a ... horrible ... design ...

T3 at level 22
T4 at level 24
T5 at level 26

Do not rob the low and mid epic levels of all fun - design new fun for levels above 30!

So much this.

As always, though, they change a few superficial things and and pretend they've listened to feedback. When the entire core design is awful.

Sometimes I think they've read too much Hitchhiker's: "- In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation`s Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

[Stoner81]

Still locking T5's until level 30 despite countless negative feed back on this specific issue!

Stoner81.

[Assassination]

New song for epics in ddo, "You've lost that epic feeling... oo o o"

Some of the trees look very promising, others would be weak or even useless in heroics.

[pjw]

...
The current maximum Fate Points is 55: 36 from unlocking trees + 16 from Epic Past Lives + 3 from a Tome of Fate
...

I still find this extremely disappointing, and the first statement misleading. The new system -- at level 30 -- has in excess of 150 'Fate Points' (50+DP times 3). The old system had 20-something, and Tomes of Fate granted up to 3, which was a significant gain for a significant cost. Now...it's a drop in the ocean.

Tomes of Fate should become Tomes of Destiny, granting up to 3 Destiny points. Or, we should have the option of a refund for those of us who feel that they have little to no value now.

Edit: Note : this suggestion still represents a relative weakening of Tomes of Fate/Destiny, but not so much as the current which (to me) make them valueless.

[pjw]

T3 at level 22
T4 at level 24
T5 at level 26

This seems much better AND provides for actual smoothing of power gain. In the current system, it's not EDs that result in huge power gain, it's all the level 29 gear that is a HUGE leap in power. Restricting T5 access (not especally powerful TBH) to L30 just seems to make the boost at 29+ even more sudden.

Do not rob the low and mid epic levels of all fun - design new fun for levels above 30!

This ^^^

When "Deific"(??) level 31+ comes along it should be a new system, not just the old ED's spread more thinly. Such a new system should then grant stuff at 30 just like the epic system grants tier 1-2 at 20.

[elvesunited]

I just went to test Legendary Dreadnought's Destiny Mantle.

And the thread has disappeared? Granted when I last looked at it the conversation had gotten a bit heated. Since it has gone away I'll post my results here.

Results: On epic elite the dread mantle did about 75 with 5 stack 150 with 10 stack and 225 with 15 stack.

at 4d4+4 damage per stack of terror should come to about 15 per stack which puts just about right on the numbers. And reaper reduces it further.
Is this significant damage? Not really. It needs to scale with melee power and I would allow in to stack higher.

[Theboss71]

I just went to test Legendary Dreadnought's Destiny Mantle.

And the thread has disappeared? Granted when I last looked at it the conversation had gotten a bit heated. Since it has gone away I'll post my results here.

Results: On epic elite the dread mantle did about 75 with 5 stack 150 with 10 stack and 225 with 15 stack.

at 4d4+4 damage per stack of terror should come to about 15 per stack which puts just about right on the numbers. And reaper reduces it further.
Is this significant damage? Not really. It needs to scale with melee power and I would allow in to stack higher.

Didn’t found the thread either, I hope it’s for a good reason. This tree needs to be scrapped and redone.
I don’t know if it got heated by me, I’m just really frustrated from this tree since this tree is what I’m using live and I got really excited from this epic destiny revamp only to find out LD is not getting the love he deserves.

[FengXian]

So Tome of Fate will keep granting +1/+2/+3 Fate Points completely disregarding the weight a Fate Point carries now compared to the much lesser weight it will carry after U51?

Also T5 still hilariously at lv 30 xD as if mid epics weren't boring enough already...

[Synthetic]

I've said move T5 to level 29 enough times.

I no longer care what, but you should put something in at level 29.

[Natashaelle]

Still think ED Tier 5 should be bumped down to level 29. Tier progression as it currently stands looks skewed and illogical, and inelegant mathematically.

[Natashaelle]

Still nothing at 29 and all the 'epic' moments are level gated for 30. Can you at least re-name them to be legendary moments?

As someone who barely spends any time at cap because I am on the TR hamster wheel (and I find play at the cap to be boring), I will rarely get to use these for any real length of time.

Things will likely change when level cap increases. My own gameplay anyway will certainly adapt accordingly.

[Aelonwy]

Agree T5 should be at 29.

My reasoning:
https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...t=#post6464581


Also, I'm not really sure where to put this feedback with Magister being slain but last weekend playing on my capped Wiz Illusionist through Night Revels, in Magister obviously, I became acutely aware of how often and how much I depend on Arcane Tempest in her spell rotation.

I want my Arcane Tempest! I enjoy it, its purple and sparkly and it makes the masses sizzle and dissolve in my majesty of FORCE magic. Okay, okay there are way better spells of better elements... but if your an Illusionist, Force is your thing.

Derp! My apologies, friend just PMed me the spell changes, don't know how I missed them but YAY!

[Loromir]

Still think ED Tier 5 should be bumped down to level 29. Tier progression as it currently stands looks skewed and illogical, and inelegant mathematically.

The silence from SSG on this subject is deafening.