Downtime Notice: Wednesday, April 6th, 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM Eastern (-4 GMT)

[Cordovan]

UPDATE: The game worlds have reopened.

The DDO game worlds will be unavailable on Wednesday, April 6th from 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM Eastern (-4 GMT) to release Update 53.1. Read the release notes on DDO.com.

[Monkey_Archer]

• Shiradi's Prism, Stay Good, and Stay Frosty now have a 5% chance of proccing their damage on spellcast.
• Shiradi's Prism, Stay Good, and Stay Frosty's damage effects now scale with 50% Spell Power for casters.

What an odd change. Prism was as strong if not stronger for ranged builds than casters, and casters can just switch to draconic mantle for 50%-80% of what Prism gave.

[QuantumFX]

What an odd change. Prism was as strong if not stronger for ranged builds than casters, and casters can just switch to draconic mantle for 50%-80% of what Prism gave.

And Mantle of Sound and Fury is still useless for Spellsingers.

[merridyan]

What an odd change. Prism was as strong if not stronger for ranged builds than casters, and casters can just switch to draconic mantle for 50%-80% of what Prism gave.

The change is for casters, does not mention ranged at all.

[Saekee]

thx for the cleanup work!

And, I have to say it, it is mind-blowing how long it took to add that little LFM change. Please plan to overhaul it and grouping in general. If you need ideas, I suggest you post a thread for them.

[droid327]

And Mantle of Sound and Fury is still useless for Spellsingers.

Yeah Sonic casters really get the shaft in Epic. Fatesinger's OK at lower tiers, but they get left out of Draconic goodness, and now Shiradi (their only other Sonic-aligned Destiny) mantle has been nerfed literally by a factor of 24 (1/6 proc rate and 1/4 damage scaling), and that was the only significant DPS component for that tree

Cold casters too. Magus already pretty much sucks, Primal is meh for them since 1/2 the DPS in that spec is Electric, and now they get Stay Frosty nerfed out from under them.

Guess SSG wants everyone to go Light+Fire at endgame since that seems to be the favorite son by far

[eightspoons]

The change is for casters, does not mention ranged at all.

I think that's the point, unless I'm reading it wrong. The spellcaster portion, which is suggested as being already a touch weaker, is getting nerf-slammed rather excessively but the ranged damage variation isn't getting adjusted at all. Going from a 30% chance to proc a damage effect to just 5% seems a bit much. Ranged was 15%, and will still be 15% after.

Why not 15% for casters, too?

And the damage ...

[droid327]

I think that's the point, unless I'm reading it wrong. The spellcaster portion, which is suggested as being already a touch weaker, is getting nerf-slammed rather excessively but the ranged damage variation isn't getting adjusted at all. Going from a 30% chance to proc a damage effect to just 5% seems a bit much. Ranged was 15%, and will still be 15% after.

Why not 15% for casters, too?

And the damage ...

Yeah I can understand the spellpower scaling adjustment, to keep ranged and caster even - casters generally get about 4-5x as much raw Spellpower as ranged builds have Ranged Power, so 200% vs 50% gets them roughly even. But Ranged builds have a far higher proc rate than Casters, who are generally just hitting ~once per second, vs my Inqui hitting ~3/sec

[Arctigis]

Yeah I can understand the spellpower scaling adjustment, to keep ranged and caster even - casters generally get about 4-5x as much raw Spellpower as ranged builds have Ranged Power, so 200% vs 50% gets them roughly even. But Ranged builds have a far higher proc rate than Casters, who are generally just hitting ~once per second, vs my Inqui hitting ~3/sec

It's almost like they haven't a clue what they're doing. At least it's reassuring to take 6 months
break and come back and find absolutely nothing has changed. Proc rate dropping from 30% to
5% AND SP scaling going 200 to 50%. Isn't that a 12x reduction on average? seems a bit
heavy to me?

[eightspoons]

It's almost like they haven't a clue what they're doing. At least it's reassuring to take 6 months
break and come back and find absolutely nothing has changed. Proc rate dropping from 30% to
5% AND SP scaling going 200 to 50%. Isn't that a 12x reduction on average? seems a bit
heavy to me?

Mathematics isn't exactly my strongest suit, but I think it actually works out as a 24x overall reduction. Or is it even more? Percentages befuddle me.

[Arctigis]

Mathematics isn't exactly my strongest suit, but I think it actually works out as a 24x overall reduction. Or is it even more? Percentages befuddle me.

You're right. It's approx. a 6 x 4 reduction.

It's 12x for Prism and 24x for Stay Good/Stay Frosty I think.

[mikarddo]

Devs - why such a huge nerf for Shiradi casters? I dont use Shiradi on my own caster - but such a nerf is really confusing.

A 95% ish reduction in power is pretty huge... Did you get some of those numbers wrong?

[Steelstar]

So: let's break down the factors in mantle-based proc damage from Shiradi (current), Draconic, and EA, assuming we're level 30. The four main factors here are Damage Dice, Scaling %, Proc Rate (which is the chance for the effect to apply when the effect is not on cooldown), and Cooldown.


Draconic:
30d6+180 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 100% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


EA:
30d3+90 and another 30d3+90 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 15% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 30% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown. (Note: Stay Good/Frosty currently say they scale at 200%, but don't. They're at 100% right now.)


On the top end, assuming fast casting and perfect luck, Shiradi procs are dealing more than double damage than these others, and occur 50x as often as the others just due to the cooldown. Granted, you'll never hit that exact level of luck (or cast 10 spells per second), but when you average it out Shiradi is still capable of doing significantly more damage than the other Mantle procs.


Post-Patch Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 50% Spell Power scaling, 5% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown.

Half the Spell Power scaling means your potential for double the damage compared to others evens out somewhat, especially as you get into higher and higher Spell Power. And even with 5% chance to proc when off cooldown, you're still going to see it more frequently on average than procs in other Mantles.


We wanted to retain Shiradi's signature frequency of procs here, so we were hesitant to touch the cooldown; it still has the potential to hit far more often than the other Mantle Procs. With the new numbers, a Shiradi caster casting at a single target may fall behind a similar Draconic or EA caster's proc damage, but they also might come out ahead. That largely depends on how often it DOES proc. And if they're dealing any AOE, they're quite likely to stay ahead.


Ultimately, if we did end up moving the needle too low here, it'll be easy to resolve. We'll have eyes on it.

[Arctigis]

So: let's break down the factors in mantle-based proc damage from Shiradi (current), Draconic, and EA, assuming we're level 30. The four main factors here are Damage Dice, Scaling %, Proc Rate (which is the chance for the effect to apply when the effect is not on cooldown), and Cooldown.


Draconic:
30d6+180 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 100% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


EA:
30d3+90 and another 30d3+90 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 15% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 30% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown.


On the top end, assuming fast casting and perfect luck, Shiradi procs are dealing more than double damage than these others, and occur 50x as often as the others just due to the cooldown. Granted, you'll never hit that exact level of luck (or cast 10 spells per second), but when you average it out Shiradi is still capable of doing significantly more damage than the other Mantle procs.


Post-Patch Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 50% Spell Power scaling, 5% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown.

Half the Spell Power scaling means your potential for double the damage compared to others evens out somewhat, especially as you get into higher and higher Spell Power. And even with 5% chance to proc when off cooldown, you're still going to see it more frequently on average than procs in other Mantles.


We wanted to retain Shiradi's signature frequency of procs here, so we were hesitant to touch the cooldown; it still has the potential to hit far more often than the other Mantle Procs. With the new numbers, a Shiradi caster casting at a single target may fall behind a similar Draconic or EA caster's proc damage, but they also might come out ahead. That largely depends on how often it DOES proc. And if they're dealing any AOE, they're quite likely to stay ahead.


Ultimately, if we did end up moving the needle too low here, it'll be easy to resolve. We'll have eyes on it.

Couldn't you just have added a cooldown for casters - I think my Warlock is going to be hit hard by this. Not all
Shiradi casters are MM spammers...

[NightHiker]

Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 30% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown.

The 0.1 second cooldown was allegedly inserted (by your own admission - "your" as in the devs, I don't remember who exactly stated it) to prevent abuse from magic missile spam builds. It has otherwise no real consequence to every other caster build, as NO build besides magic missile spammers will ever get to take advantage of such small cooldown. Most caster builds can work, at best, with a 0.5 to 1.0 sec de facto cooldown at best because that's how long they take to cast spells anyway. You actually using that pretty much irrelevant cooldown as an integral part of your math is quite absurd, SteelStar. Did you actually look at REAL damage numbers from Shiradi casters on live servers, or are you basing this entire nerf on that incredibly flawed Math? Even for magic missile spammer builds Shiradi didn't seem to be performing so much higher because the actual spells do very little damage themselves, while for other casters there's significant spell damage aside from the procs, so there's already a trade off for those spammers.

But with the new numbers the vast majority of casters using Shiradi will only see ONE proc per mob every 10 to 20 seconds on average, making the mantle pretty much irrelevant from now on. Draconic is one guaranteed proc per mob every 5 seconds, not counting the DOT upgrade, which everyone using the mantle will likely have (and which you also seem to have ignored on your math). I can't see one reason to use Shiradi now instead of just going Draconic. I know I won't.

Halving the spell power seems like a fair compromise, as Shiradi was doing more damage (depending on how fast one can cast - I believe the threshold in relation to doing more damage than Draconic was faster than one cast every 1.33 seconds. Making long term damage between 12 to 24 times smaller will make any Shiradi caster unviable compared to Draconic or even Primal or EA. That damage will actually be for all intents or purposes negligible.

I have never in my whole forum history complained about any nerf and have mostly defended the dev's choices, but this is really pushing it.

Cheers,
NH

[droid327]

So: let's break down the factors in mantle-based proc damage from Shiradi (current), Draconic, and EA, assuming we're level 30. The four main factors here are Damage Dice, Scaling %, Proc Rate (which is the chance for the effect to apply when the effect is not on cooldown), and Cooldown.


Draconic:
30d6+180 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 100% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


EA:
30d3+90 and another 30d3+90 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 15% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 30% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown.


On the top end, assuming fast casting and perfect luck, Shiradi procs are dealing more than double damage than these others, and occur 50x as often as the others just due to the cooldown. Granted, you'll never hit that exact level of luck (or cast 10 spells per second), but when you average it out Shiradi is still capable of doing significantly more damage than the other Mantle procs.


Post-Patch Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 50% Spell Power scaling, 5% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown.

Why arent you actually doing the math? The math is right there, it can be done.
The whole point of having math is so you dont have to just "keep eyes on it" to resolve what will happen

First off, Cooldown and Proc Rate are two sides of the same coin - ultimately what matters is "how often does this go off?" For spells with ICD << 1/sec, its basically Proc Chance * Casting Rate. For spells with ICD > 1 sec, its basically ICD + 1/Casting Rate * Proc Chance

Lets assume ~900 prime spellpower for a decently-geared L30 caster (not the max attainable, but more of an endgame average; plus it makes the math easier heh). Lets assume 300 average "random" spellpower, which is probably conservatively high. Lets also assume Shiradi casters are using more multi-hit spells, so lets say 2 casts/sec for them vs 1/sec for non-Shiradi casters. Its not perfect, but its ballpark, and no one right now is running a true old school Shiradi sorc spamming nothing but Magic Missiles purely for high proc rate.

We'll also ignore everything but Draconic and Shiradi since the other mantles are junk for DPS already

Draconic
5 sec CD + 100% proc rate means its basically applied every 5 secs
30d6+180 = 285 base damage * 900 spellpower / 5 sec * 4 ticks (you forgot that part!) = 2280 average DPS

Old Shiradi
30% proc rate and 2 casts/sec means its applied every 1.7 secs
One proc scales on the higher Prime spellpower of 900, the lesser one scales on the lower Random spellpower of 300
3d100+100 = 251.5 base damage * (900+300) spellpower = 3521 damage / 1.7 sec = 2071 average DPS

It was already lower than Draconic. The only difference was tactical - Draconic can only apply to 1 mob at a time, while Shiradi could sprinkle in better among AOE. Arguably, the "AOE premium" on Shiradi's DPS was not high enough, but it was definitely not twenty-four times too high.

New Shiradi
5% proc rate and 2 casts/sec mean its applied every 10 seconds
251.5 base damage * (450+150) spellpower = 2012 damage / 10 sec = 201.2 average DPS.
Its now over 10 times weaker than Draconic

[btolson]

So: let's break down the factors in mantle-based proc damage from Shiradi (current), Draconic, and EA, assuming we're level 30.

Draconic:
30d6+180 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 100% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.

When I tested this, character level did not seem directly relevant. Max Caster Level of the spell being used was. So for example, as a level 30 Sorc using his Lighning Bolt SLA from Air Savant, you would get 13 dice (10 from its natural max casting level, +3 from cores) not 30.

[Lanttanno]

So: let's break down the factors in mantle-based proc damage from Shiradi (current), Draconic, and EA, assuming we're level 30. The four main factors here are Damage Dice, Scaling %, Proc Rate (which is the chance for the effect to apply when the effect is not on cooldown), and Cooldown.


Draconic:
30d6+180 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 100% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


EA:
30d3+90 and another 30d3+90 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 15% proc rate, 5 second cooldown.


Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 100% Spell Power scaling, 30% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown. (Note: Stay Good/Frosty currently say they scale at 200%, but don't. They're at 100% right now.)


On the top end, assuming fast casting and perfect luck, Shiradi procs are dealing more than double damage than these others, and occur 50x as often as the others just due to the cooldown. Granted, you'll never hit that exact level of luck (or cast 10 spells per second), but when you average it out Shiradi is still capable of doing significantly more damage than the other Mantle procs.


Post-Patch Shiradi:
3d100+100 and another 3d100+100 dice, 50% Spell Power scaling, 5% proc rate, 0.1 second cooldown.

Half the Spell Power scaling means your potential for double the damage compared to others evens out somewhat, especially as you get into higher and higher Spell Power. And even with 5% chance to proc when off cooldown, you're still going to see it more frequently on average than procs in other Mantles.


We wanted to retain Shiradi's signature frequency of procs here, so we were hesitant to touch the cooldown; it still has the potential to hit far more often than the other Mantle Procs. With the new numbers, a Shiradi caster casting at a single target may fall behind a similar Draconic or EA caster's proc damage, but they also might come out ahead. That largely depends on how often it DOES proc. And if they're dealing any AOE, they're quite likely to stay ahead.


Ultimately, if we did end up moving the needle too low here, it'll be easy to resolve. We'll have eyes on it.

Everything you said above was obvious well before ED was released though... and doesn't it all just imply that the other mantles need some work? I loved the shiradi caster playstyle and it is my current setup on alchemist, but after this change, I wont be swapping over to Draconic, I'll be TRing into a ranged character again as they are significantly more powerful as it is, so the 'fun' aspect just isn't worth the difference in power anymore.

Even just making Draconic mantle track cooldowns separately per enemy so it was usefull in AOE, and amping up the utility aspect of the EA mantle would make people a lot happier than nuking what makes some caster builds fun and viable from orbit. Really, the fact that certain elements such as electricity fall so far behind others in terms of tree support is more of a problem than shiradi proc damage. I think this addresses the 'problem' by screwing over a lot of other non-problem builds as well (i.e druid, warlock, and to a lesser extent alchemist) when it should just primarily address the main problem which is MM and meteor swarm spam casters. Can't it just be 30% on spell cast rolled once for multi-hit spells with the same spellpower scaling?

[Oliphant]

Hmm.

• Shiradi is the proccing destiny, why would you go and figure out the math to make Shiradi proccing equal out with Draconic and EA?
• What about all those other goodies in Draconic and EA? e.g. crit chance?
• Seems like scaling down Shiradi proccs to 1/6 *1/2 = 1/12 is a clue this is a drastic blunder.
• You can fix Shiradi easily enough you say but we saw Shiradi-Lite after Shiradi was nerfed in the days of yore and Shiradi-Lite was never a thing, no one bothers and you wont fix it for years.

[Lanttanno]

Why arent you actually doing the math? The math is right there, it can be done.
The whole point of having math is so you dont have to just "keep eyes on it" to resolve what will happen

First off, Cooldown and Proc Rate are two sides of the same coin - ultimately what matters is "how often does this go off?" For spells with ICD << 1/sec, its basically Proc Chance * Casting Rate. For spells with ICD > 1 sec, its basically ICD + 1/Casting Rate * Proc Chance

Lets assume ~900 prime spellpower for a decently-geared L30 caster (not the max attainable, but more of an endgame average; plus it makes the math easier heh). Lets assume 300 average "random" spellpower, which is probably conservatively high. Lets also assume Shiradi casters are using more multi-hit spells, so lets say 2 casts/sec for them vs 1/sec for non-Shiradi casters. Its not perfect, but its ballpark, and no one right now is running a true old school Shiradi sorc spamming nothing but Magic Missiles purely for high proc rate.

We'll also ignore everything but Draconic and Shiradi since the other mantles are junk for DPS already

Draconic
5 sec CD + 100% proc rate means its basically applied every 5 secs
30d6+180 = 285 base damage * 900 spellpower / 5 sec * 4 ticks (you forgot that part!) = 2280 average DPS

Old Shiradi
30% proc rate and 2 casts/sec means its applied every 1.7 secs
One proc scales on the higher Prime spellpower of 900, the lesser one scales on the lower Random spellpower of 300
3d100+100 = 251.5 base damage * (900+300) spellpower = 3521 damage / 1.7 sec = 2071 average DPS

It was already lower than Draconic. The only difference was tactical - Draconic can only apply to 1 mob at a time, while Shiradi could sprinkle in better among AOE. Arguably, the "AOE premium" on Shiradi's DPS was not high enough, but it was definitely not twenty-four times too high.

New Shiradi
5% proc rate and 2 casts/sec mean its applied every 10 seconds
251.5 base damage * (450+150) spellpower = 2012 damage / 10 sec = 201.2 average DPS.
Its now over 10 times weaker than Draconic

Even without doing the maths, in practice I mostly run a mix of both draconic and shiradi dependent on the situation as low hit-per-second casters like druid benefit much more from draconic on boss fights than they do from Shriadi. Really this nerf caught me completely off-guard, why nerf anything when Exalted angel and the primal avatar mantles are so pathetic. Shouldn't that be addressed first before nerfing anything? Or the fact that there are no hybrid supporting epic strikes? Or that melees have a much harder time until about lvl 23? This seems like a really ignorant target to go after and I'm speaking as someone that TRs the same character into many different builds regularly so I know where the frustrations are.

What's most frustrating about this change is that it essentially just makes draconic mantle mandatory for all casters which was pretty well already the case, just more-so now. I'm already seeing every caster build I do go T5 draconic with Ruins to keep up in R10 dps, the only thing that comes close is EA T5 with shiradi mantle.....

I guess the intent of this change is to just have everyone go back to being a fire sorc or fvs running the exact same build. I was in a group (as an alchemist) running r10s yesterday with 3 other alchemists which is obviously rare, but all four of us were running completely different specs which is great, whereas after this im pretty sure they would all be going poison spec as per the usual.