U57 Preview 1: Hit Point Pass

[Thar]

Raids are a lot more of a tactics check rather than a stat check. For example, I'm sure I could bring in a first life tank with 4-5k into R1 LoB and do just fine. Just wear spell absorb to avoid the HP debuff or just swap tanks more often. Knowing the raid in its entirety is a lot easier than just trying to brute force it with stats. Granted the 2 newest raids Hunt and Skelly are an exception. They are heavily overtuned compared to other R1 raids. However, I can still take a 5-6k hp tank in there and be able to do my job just using the right tactics and movement. Also PRR being useless is very inaccurate. In the skelly raid, managing the dino's physical damage is the scariest part of the raid for the tanks. That also applies to most of the raid bosses in the game. Btw, AC tanks do not get 4k hp in r1 unless they were built for more than just tanking, even for a first lifer. It's not hard to at least hit 5k on a first life.

if you think you can survive lob with 4k on a first life tank, look me up on sarlona, i'd be happy to get the guild together to run that with you to prove otherwise. switching tanks helps but most pugs can barely get one decent tank. Try skeletons or thth or Dryad not as undead on R1. My guild leader has a racial completionist, heroic completionist, epic completionist tank that was only at 5500 hp and lost 600 hp with these changes. Yes builds will change but if you my point is all other defenses are mute so either devs need to make AC or PRR relevant or HP are the only valid method of R1 tanking. If you can get close to the same with DPS build then why build a tank at all.

[TueNictGut]

The current changes favors ranged builds with 12 ranger lvls, as they will get access to 3 x twf automatically.
I dont see an easy way out of it, so maybe its just to be accepted...
Or do you happen to have a solution for this?

Having seen, that you combined the hp bonus for falconry with the autotake t5 dangerous and made it a multiselector gave me the idea to suggest the same for the ninjatree:

The tree is so bad especially for melee it doesnt need an additional 2ap tax.
Combine it with deadly striker and make it a multiselector between a ranged and melee version. If i understood right your aim is to to boost melee hp and not ranged, respectivly give them something else here or a smaller bonus.

This is also a great opportunity to give the deadly strike melee multiselector +1 crit multiplyer for singlehanded meleeweapons yor are centered with to make the melee ninja more playable and free it from the senseless restriction to go pure monk.
This would make the melee ninja much more versatile allowing it multiclassing to get an useful attackboost, disarm traps from rogue and ofc. more imbue dice.
(as I also suggested in the imbue overhaul thread.)

This alone should allow a fun and playable ninja melee template using ninja poison and add to the games buildvariety
Prove me wrong but atm ninja melee is most likely the lessest played character in the game.

Thx for considering this

[Emergencies]

if you think you can survive lob with 4k on a first life tank, look me up on sarlona, i'd be happy to get the guild together to run that with you to prove otherwise. switching tanks helps but most pugs can barely get one decent tank. Try skeletons or thth or Dryad not as undead on R1. My guild leader has a racial completionist, heroic completionist, epic completionist tank that was only at 5500 hp and lost 600 hp with these changes. Yes builds will change but if you my point is all other defenses are mute so either devs need to make AC or PRR relevant or HP are the only valid method of R1 tanking. If you can get close to the same with DPS build then why build a tank at all.

My main character is fully completed. All relevant past lives, all 156 reaper points. My fighter tank lost 100 hp in reaper mode, I went from 8,4k to 8,3k, that is not even a 2% difference in HP. The only reason your guild leader lost that much hp is either if they are clr/fvs tank or didn't properly respec their trees. Also, I have tanked both Lob and Dryad on R10 and Skeletons on R6, all without any cheese. We had a run of R8 LoB where I ended up with 17 stacks of the hp debuff and was the only tank able to stay on the boss. I had 4k HP in R8 and I lived while face tanking the boss with no debuffs. PRR has a direct impact on how effective your HP is when taking physical damage and is a big reason why I lived. I am more than confident I could make that work in R1. AC is also relevant in R1 tanking, the orthons in R1 VoD are a problem for my 10k hp barb. However, my AC paladin could hold all 4 of them in R7. If I didn't have the AC I did, I never would have lived through that. I also spent like 10 minutes in the builder to come up with a first life pally tank. It was extremely basic, no raid gear or tomes but assuming I could have 21 RP it had over 5k HP in reaper. If you're making a tank with 4k hp you are just building it poorly.

[nobodynobody1426]

Personally, I disagree.

A combination of flat HP bonuses from combat style feats and % HP bonuses from melee enhancement trees is the best route, as it:

1: Gives other %HP sources more relative value.
2: Equalizes out sources of flat HP from (mostly) just reaper points
3: Helps squish the expected HP for melee combatants, allowing easier balancing.

This is the exact opposite of what they are going for, and the entire purpose of EDF.

EDF was created to give melee's a boost in survivability as ranged and casters get the massive defensive benefit of not being near the monsters.

They were trying to remove EDF, as it proves to have issues with melee's and tanks assisting friends, while also raising the HP floor.

The simplest way to go about this is to treat them as two separate issues. Attaching competence bonus to combat feats is exactly what EDF does now, only this would remove the penalty to helping friends out. Then separately look at adding flat bonus to classes that might need it. Them trying to solve both resulted in this dumpster fire. And under no circumstance should the +HP percentage be attached to multi-selector T5's, that's just very bad design and recreates the EDF problem.

[LuisIre]

Can you guys like... NOT try to fix something that isn't broken? Just once? You're literally making work for no reason.

[Stravix]

This is the exact opposite of what they are going for, and the entire purpose of EDF.

EDF was created to give melee's a boost in survivability as ranged and casters get the massive defensive benefit of not being near the monsters.

They were trying to remove EDF, as it proves to have issues with melee's and tanks assisting friends, while also raising the HP floor.

The simplest way to go about this is to treat them as two separate issues. Attaching competence bonus to combat feats is exactly what EDF does now, only this would remove the penalty to helping friends out. Then separately look at adding flat bonus to classes that might need it. Them trying to solve both resulted in this dumpster fire. And under no circumstance should the +HP percentage be attached to multi-selector T5's, that's just very bad design and recreates the EDF problem.

EDF was designed to boost melees up in durability, but a blanket buff of the magnitude needed was explicitly not applied to the fighting style feats, due to the ease of access of other styles taking them, look at a ranged ranger, for instance. Under your suggestion, they would receive a significant amount of competence %HP, simply for being a ranger, whereas now it is limited to just base HP, with that juicy %HP tucked away into the exclusive section of a melee tree.

I agree that the HP should not be tied to multiselectors where melees have to choose between HP or damage, but %HP as a baseline for all combat feats is a terrible idea, and one the devs specifically avoided in the past when the band-aid that was EDF was introduced.

[SpartanKiller13]

I wouldn't put any competence bonus's inside any enhancement tree's, it's asinine and makes winners and losers almost randomly. Put them directly inside the combat style feats, only the highest one works anyway and it will accomplish the exact same thing without needing EDF.
*snip*
Perfect Combat Style = 25% competence bonus

If a caster wants to spend feat slots for 5% competence bonus, let them.

I see you haven't encountered healbots or wizards? Both of which would generally be happy to spend 4 feats for +25% HP lol. Any Fighter-split ranged build (like Inquis) also gets +25% HP for basically free.

On the topic of balance, you did not "save my barb". The only thing you mentioned was it losing 1.2k HP, but provided no evidence on how it specifically was getting nerfed. There was no shown math or accurate testing on Lamm for my barbarian on your part (and as far as I know there are only couple people in the entire game that can build/play a barb tank like I do, you are not one of them). All the math and testing for a barb tank was done by myself and other players.

The 1.2k HP loss is from the barb tank I threw in the build on page 5 (link). It's far from optimized but is the build behind the breakdown of lost HP shown earlier (link). I have no clue what your tank is and I wouldn't build/play that barb tank as written, but nobody else was posting math so I did. It's at least part of why the devs are reconsidering for Preview 2.

Just logged into my DPS barbarian on Lammania to check the changes... Going down from 2831 HP to 2659 HP (non-rage, non-reaper).

You'll be interested to read the dev comments (found here: link) that they're looking to help out at least OS a bit and in general rebalance for the 2nd preview.

As noted, pretty big nerf for healbots who are getting animal domain nerfed and never used EDF anyway. By my calculation 300hp animal domain bonus will be reduced down to 104hp.

Adding some kind of tier 5 radiant servant competence HP bonus would be cool. Especially since Cleric healers lag behind FVS healers already in the meta. Maybe not the 15% that tier 5 warpriest is getting per the original post, but something to offset the animal domain loss. Yeah tier 5 RS users not using animal domain like the war domain melee cleric I play or cleric caster/healers using tier 5 radiant servant or healing domain clerics will see a further buff but I don't think that's much of a balance concern.

Are you not planning on running T5 Warpriest on your healbot? Seems like the obvious choice to me lmao. Also probably time to consider like Protection domain? Or like ask for a Healing domain buff? Seems odd that Animal is the #1 pick for Cleric healbots lol.

[axel15810]

Are you not planning on running T5 Warpriest on your healbot? Seems like the obvious choice to me lmao. Also probably time to consider like Protection domain? Or like ask for a Healing domain buff? Seems odd that Animal is the #1 pick for Cleric healbots lol.

I don't run healbots - I'm a melee DPS cleric guy myself, but if I were to, no, definitely not. Cleric healbots are always going tier 5 radiant servant for no max caster level on cures/other healing goodies, aura, radiant servant capstone. Warpriest is a really weak tree for a lot of reasons which I could and have talked about a lot on youtube in the past. Though the proposed 15% competence bonus to hitpoints being added to tier 5, even with the -5% sacred HP nerf in tier 4 makes the tree a little more compelling as a primary tree for cleric tanks and cleric melee DPS. Though it still needs lots of love. I'm not all that in the know on the cleric tank meta but I'd assume you'd go with pally splashes and use sacred defender combined with animal domain or protection domain. But these changes make the animal route far less compelling obviously. As far as DPS melee cleric builds go, warpriest is way behind falconry as a primary tree.

Right now animal domain is the best domain easily for healbots because of the 300 hitpoints which is just better than what's offered in luck, protection and healing (really the only other 3 options for healbots). Not really sure why animal is being touched in the first place, and why the HP there is being cut by ~2/3rds.

My guess is the thinking by the devs is that they want to lower the upper end build HP totals on cleric tanks? Not that cleric tanks are very high meta anyway in my experience (someone tell me if I'm wrong, I could be). Maybe the devs could clarify their design intention with animal domain changes? I don't know if they realized that animal domain is also the #1 domain for healbots so nerfing the cleric tank builds has a side effect of hitting the cleric healbot builds too.

But yeah with the big nerf to animal, I agree buffing some of the other domains like healing domain could be a good solution to this if the devs insist on the animal domain nerf - so that healbots aren't falling through the cracks here. I really don't think the devs intend to nerf healbots really hard. I could be wrong but my guess is they didn't think about animal domain being such a popular domain for healbots when coming up with these changes.

[Shedrakzo]

-Boosting the Base Hit Die of certain classes:

To keep the delta between a wizard and a barbarian tighter we shift the class dice around a little.

-All Classes with a Hit Die of d4 is increased to D6.

-Bard, Arty and Rogue are increased to D8s

-Ranger increased to D10s

On second viewing, I realize that these changes also coincide with most of the 5e HP dice standards. I would like to suggest deviating slightly from those standards to mirror the reality of playing DDO vs Tabletop.

If it were up to me I'd change the list to:

D12: Barbarian, and Fighter. (Fighters could use a pick-me-up given they have no self-sustain, unlike most classes. Barbarians will still retain the highest HP due to their enhancement trees. This deviates from the 5e hit die that I assume these changes are based on.)

D10: Ranger, Paladin, and Monk. (Monks are predominantly melee builds and frontliners. If Rangers, who are more often played as ranged instead of Tempests, are getting the HP increase, then so should monks. This also changes from the 5e die where monks are still a D8, but let's be honest, if Rangers are getting the advancement, we might as well give it to monks at this stage in the game.)

D8: Cleric, Druid, Rogue, FVS, Arty, Bard, and Warlock. (Warlocks have always been a more 'healthier' arcane since 3.5e. And since these changes are updating the classes to fit 5e standards, then Warlocks should similarly have their D8 like 5e rather than keeping the same HP standard as the new floor for arcane casters.)

D6: Wiz, Sorc, and Alch. (This is their 5e standards. So good for courting new players and overall making these classes feel a little less squishy.)

[Vellrad]

So, you are adding (at level cap) 45 to 75 HP to DPS feats, while the sole feat which purposie is to actually increase HP still remains at +35?

Seriously, do something to toughness...

[Infiltraitor]

Almost this entire time I've been talking about developer intention when talking about Warpriest.

Aggro is a zero sum game. You either have aggro or you don't. There is no middle ground. This binary nature thus means that all class enhancement trees can be categorized into two groups. Those that seek to grab aggro and those that do not.

This is all the more important since the threat generation mechanism is a tier 5 ability, thus locking the player out from all other enhancement tree tier 5s. It is thus a core mechanic that warpriest puts the player into an aggro seeking build and locks out other build possibilities. The fact that it is too small compared to other enhancement trees is irrelevant. It is an aggro seeking ability that locks out other enhancement trees. If you take it, you can not take tier 5 from other enhancement trees. You are purposely locked out. You are locked INTO seeking aggro and prevented from any other role.

Yes, it is an insufficient amount of threat generation to overcome player DPS, but that is a player meta argument. It is a condition resulting from player actions and we all know that the devs are very far removed from trying to understand what the player meta actually is. So making inferences based on player meta actually has ZERO correlation to developer intent. It doesn't matter what the players actually do because the devs devote very little time to understanding what the players actually do anyway. Any real dps can out dps a 50% threat bonus. Obviously the devs didn't have the time to find that out 8 years ago when they made warpriest. They probably still don't have the time to find out now.

I'm not sure how I can make that ANY simpler. The core mechanism and binary nature of aggro and tier 5 abilities locking players into a specific role. That's pretty much conclusive evidence for developer intent. Warpriest is a tank. If you still don't understand the implications of that, I give up. You win. So go on and brag about how correct you are and how I'm an idiot who has never seen a warpriest enhancement tree before. There's no need to feel a shred of embarassment over attacking an innocent person. A win's a win.

[TueNictGut]

EDF was designed to boost melees up in durability, but a blanket buff of the magnitude needed was explicitly not applied to the fighting style feats, due to the ease of access of other styles taking them, look at a ranged ranger, for instance. Under your suggestion, they would receive a significant amount of competence %HP, simply for being a ranger, whereas now it is limited to just base HP, with that juicy %HP tucked away into the exclusive section of a melee tree.

I agree that the HP should not be tied to multiselectors where melees have to choose between HP or damage, but %HP as a baseline for all combat feats is a terrible idea, and one the devs specifically avoided in the past when the band-aid that was EDF was introduced.

A multiselector to divide melee from ranged and give the first the hp bonus, which was intended to boost melees is most likely the most efficient way to apply the bonus in trees that allow both rangeed and melee builds like falconer and ninja and vistani.

I dont see why a multiselector per se should be bad design?

Thats why the vistani hp bonus in t5 should definetly be a multiselector to whirling wrists and not vendetta.

[SpartanKiller13]

I don't run healbots - I'm a melee DPS cleric guy myself, but if I were to, no, definitely not. Cleric healbots are always going tier 5 radiant servant for no max caster level on cures/other healing goodies, aura, radiant servant capstone. Warpriest is a really weak tree for a lot of reasons which I could and have talked about a lot on youtube in the past. Though the proposed 15% competence bonus to hitpoints being added to tier 5, even with the -5% sacred HP nerf in tier 4 makes the tree a little more compelling as a primary tree for cleric tanks and cleric melee DPS. Though it still needs lots of love. I'm not all that in the know on the cleric tank meta but I'd assume you'd go with pally splashes and use sacred defender combined with animal domain or protection domain. But these changes make the animal route far less compelling obviously. As far as DPS melee cleric builds go, warpriest is way behind falconry as a primary tree.

Right now animal domain is the best domain easily for healbots because of the 300 hitpoints which is just better than what's offered in luck, protection and healing (really the only other 3 options for healbots). Not really sure why animal is being touched in the first place, and why the HP there is being cut by ~2/3rds.

My guess is the thinking by the devs is that they want to lower the upper end build HP totals on cleric tanks? Not that cleric tanks are very high meta anyway in my experience (someone tell me if I'm wrong, I could be). Maybe the devs could clarify their design intention with animal domain changes? I don't know if they realized that animal domain is also the #1 domain for healbots so nerfing the cleric tank builds has a side effect of hitting the cleric healbot builds too.

But yeah with the big nerf to animal, I agree buffing some of the other domains like healing domain could be a good solution to this if the devs insist on the animal domain nerf - so that healbots aren't falling through the cracks here. I really don't think the devs intend to nerf healbots really hard. I could be wrong but my guess is they didn't think about animal domain being such a popular domain for healbots when coming up with these changes.

Idk, I have a Bard heal/buffbot and for it I'm just maxing out survivability - I have enough heals around that I'm in US mantle/T5 for instance, and I find it really nice for being able to grab an Orthon or just to survive dumb mishaps (if I'm dead I can't heal lol). If I was on a Cleric I feel like it'd be an easy argument of "15% more HP vs even more healing of which I already have tons"? Like I'm pretty sure FvS can do the AoE healing thing better than a T5 RS, but maybe that's not true. I don't have a full cleric to judge from.

I have a 9/6/5 Cleric/Warlock/Paladin tank that I wouldn't call a cleric tank - originally it was Cleric 11 with Animal Domain to be able to natively quickened rez at range (made well before EDF) but around the ED rework I rebuilt it into Protection Domain. I can't see 190 HP (or 300 HP and a dash for a full Cleric) as being better than RF clicky and 20 PRR/MRR (or 65 PRR & 45 MRR for a full Cleric) esp with the AoE buff, but YMMV.

TBH I think Animal Domain and FvS HP is being nerfed directly towards healers - Animal Domain tank Clerics are ~even from Animal Domain losing 216 and gaining 220 from base HP (Competence % aside as that's under review). Non-Animal Domain Cleric tanks would gain base HP.

Healers gaining a ton of free HP at low opportunity cost I think is the issue they're aiming for? For a DC caster or a nuker, there's something lost in going Animal Domain, but for a healer there's basically no price - it's just ~300 free base HP. Why wouldn't you? I don't think I've ever seen a Healing Domain build lol. I would expect Protection Domain to take over and like then you're just pushing more buttons which I guess is good? Turning for +40 PRR/MRR in an AoE seems hilariously good to me.

[Stravix]

A multiselector to divide melee from ranged and give the first the hp bonus, which was intended to boost melees is most likely the most efficient way to apply the bonus in trees that allow both rangeed and melee builds like falconer and ninja and vistani.

I dont see why a multiselector per se should be bad design?

Thats why the vistani hp bonus in t5 should definetly be a multiselector to whirling wrists and not vendetta.

I guess I should clarify. A multiselector for a hybrid tree to bundle it with melee goodies is fine. Multiselectors where someone has to choose their %HP or a notable damage upgrade is less so, like in the case of Barbs in FB.

It was less the multiselectors themselves that are the problem, simply the way they were used in this preview.

[ChristopHilljr]

I think the HP pass is fine. I just don't think this is the biggest issue with Melee right now. AC is useless in game as it is implemented at this moment. Please consider an AC update in the future that would make AC useful again. Doesn't matter how much HP you have if you can never stop things from hitting you. Just my two cents on the matter.

[TueNictGut]

I guess I should clarify. A multiselector for a hybrid tree to bundle it with melee goodies is fine. Multiselectors where someone has to choose their %HP or a notable damage upgrade is less so, like in the case of Barbs in FB.

It was less the multiselectors themselves that are the problem, simply the way they were used in this preview.

Thx for clarifying
I absolutly share your opinion on this
Making multiselectors for some trees that force to choose between damage and hp is no general buff in melee but a nerf compared to the other classes, that at least needs a a very good reason.
This is the case for fb and also vistani

[rabidfox]

I'm not sure how I can make that ANY simpler. The core mechanism and binary nature of aggro and tier 5 abilities locking players into a specific role. That's pretty much conclusive evidence for developer intent. Warpriest is a tank. If you still don't understand the implications of that, I give up. You win. So go on and brag about how correct you are and how I'm an idiot who has never seen a warpriest enhancement tree before. There's no need to feel a shred of embarassment over attacking an innocent person. A win's a win.

At the end of the day, intent or not (I assume having threat in a tree = intent myself), the reduction of stats on some tank setups hurts the endgame community in general. PUG raids (and likely smaller guild raids) will have less quality choices for tank stuff if the HP pass makes those build less or non-viable for the content being run. At the end of the day, it's a game and while one can be elite and say "Oh XYZ shouldn't be a tank, only my ABC class should be a tank", it doesn't help the overall gameplay when we have population issues at times and sometimes you just want to fill in the roles needed in your group and play the game without being picky.

[Yamani]

At the end of the day, intent or not (I assume having threat in a tree = intent myself), the reduction of stats on some tank setups hurts the endgame community in general. PUG raids (and likely smaller guild raids) will have less quality choices for tank stuff if the HP pass makes those build less or non-viable for the content being run. At the end of the day, it's a game and while one can be elite and say "Oh XYZ shouldn't be a tank, only my ABC class should be a tank", it doesn't help the overall gameplay when we have population issues at times and sometimes you just want to fill in the roles needed in your group and play the game without being picky.

Think its more like this: Warpriest is a support tree. It's not a dps, tank, or healer tree. But assists in all 3 roles. Claiming its primary intent is to be 1 of the 3 is just nonsensical, that ignores the primary intent of it being a support to the class itself: Cleric. But anyways what's this got to do with HP changes?

[rabidfox]

But anyways what's this got to do with HP changes?

I just assumed they were getting hit hard given all the other people talking about them and some talking about "are they a tank tree or not" so I was commenting on that (I didn't read thru all 11 pages to see where/what the full extent some setups are getting nerf'd or not). I have no clue how hard the animal/stout/EDF stuff is hitting the war priest/soul trees personally, just had an opinion on more things that can fill in roles the better for filling raids and if we get caught up on "X isn't a tank" it doesn't really help the game play aspect of things.

[elvesunited]

Think its more like this: Warpriest is a support tree. It's not a dps, tank, or healer tree. But assists in all 3 roles. Claiming its primary intent is to be 1 of the 3 is just nonsensical, that ignores the primary intent of it being a support to the class itself: Cleric. But anyways what's this got to do with HP changes?

In high diff content, you are very role defined. You tank, you DPS, you crowd control, or you heal. If you can't do any of those, you aren't support, you're nothing. Besides primary intent doesn't matter. Some people figured out a way to make warpriest tanks. To go now and say "warpriests weren't meant to be tanks, be healer support, and know your place!" is a slap to the face which leads to 3 options:

1) Stick with lower diff content they can still tank.
2) Change their playstyle to healer support and leave tanking to other characters
3) Reincarnate into something else.