U57 Preview 1: Imbue Overhaul

[Sqrlmonger]

The placement isn't random - and if you're indeed curious I'd love to explain why these numbers all ended up where they did.

1: Any time the game had a scaling proc, its turned into an imbue (examples: Dark Apostate, Sacred Fist, Arcane Archer)

2: Any time a place in the game had a cool non-scaling proc, it's turned into an imbue as well (examples: Iced Edges, Lightning the Candle, the sonic crit thing in Swash)

3: Any time the game adds a not-so-cool proc or increases the damage of an existing proc, its turned into dice (examples: Music Box from Swash, Kotc Cores 2-6, EK later cores)

4: Once the existing stuff was moved over, I then went through and added a few imbues to places that I thought could use them (examples: Druid's Elemental Forms, Artificer's Battle Engineer)

5: Finally, I added a few bonus dice to places where I thought it would make thematic sense. I tried to make sure that every Imbue was supported by at least a few bonus dice, that way players can get used to the system at their own pace. (examples: Rogue's Poison stuff and the cores of Henshin Mystic)

Hope that helps!

This is good info, and to be clear I don't agree with the person you responded to that things seemed random. The changes and your explanations are pretty much what I and I'm sure most others had surmised.

But if we could get 1 more explanation of why you felt Inquisitive needed to be knocked down on their dice specifically for the upper cores that require large AP investment, it could help us target our feedback more productively.

[dkyle]

It passively limits most of it by default, so there's very little difference. Melee won't benefit from the caster stuff, and vice versa, and it gets rid of the need for them.

Barbarian: I picked up a Greataxe and forgot to breathe!
DM: It's magic.
Kobold: Really? Really??

I'm not necessarily saying the balancing power of EPL toggles is employed flawlessly, but it's a good idea in principal, and it's clear that making them all passive would significantly increase player power.

Don't see how that example maps to any of the EPLs, but a magic Greataxe that has a "forget how to breathe" curse on it sounds kind of interesting.

[Oxarhamar]

The placement isn't random - and if you're indeed curious I'd love to explain why these numbers all ended up where they did.

1: Any time the game had a scaling proc, its turned into an imbue (examples: Dark Apostate, Sacred Fist, Arcane Archer)

2: Any time a place in the game had a cool non-scaling proc, it's turned into an imbue as well (examples: Iced Edges, Lightning the Candle, the sonic crit thing in Swash)

3: Any time the game adds a not-so-cool proc or increases the damage of an existing proc, its turned into dice (examples: Music Box from Swash, Kotc Cores 2-6, EK later cores)

4: Once the existing stuff was moved over, I then went through and added a few imbues to places that I thought could use them (examples: Druid's Elemental Forms, Artificer's Battle Engineer)

5: Finally, I added a few bonus dice to places where I thought it would make thematic sense. I tried to make sure that every Imbue was supported by at least a few bonus dice, that way players can get used to the system at their own pace. (examples: Rogue's Poison stuff and the cores of Henshin Mystic)

Hope that helps!

Just curious will this make as I haven’t had time to test but won’t this make Deadly Weapons a weak self buff in comparison ?

[Xgya]

Just curious will this make as I haven’t had time to test but won’t this make Deadly Weapons a weak self buff in comparison ?

Not necessarily.

We're comparing a crit-scaling 1d10 to a spell-power-scaling 2d6 (for a pure arti).

The real thing that makes it look weak is the fact a level 4 infusion and a level 6 infusion's bonuses seem close enough to almost even out. That's the alarming thing.

[DRoark]

I'm not necessarily saying the balancing power of EPL toggles is employed flawlessly, but it's a good idea in principal, and it's clear that making them all passive would significantly increase player power.

Don't see how that example maps to any of the EPLs, but a magic Greataxe that has a "forget how to breathe" curse on it sounds kind of interesting.

I guess the proper parallel would have been, "I picked up a Greataxe and I stopped Healing!"

If they were passive, someone would have +3 Saves and +15 Heal Amp working at the same time for example, sure, but that's nothing compared to players numbers already.
Some of them wouldn't matter, no build utilizes all of them at once. Is it a bump? Sure, but it's a minor one, and it's 51 EPLs deep. )

[Xgya]

I guess the proper parallel would have been, "I picked up a Greataxe and I stopped Healing!"

If they were passive, someone would have +3 Saves and +15 Heal Amp working at the same time for example, sure, but that's nothing compared to players numbers already.
Some of them wouldn't matter, no build utilizes all of them at once. Is it a bump? Sure, but it's a minor one, and it's 51 EPLs deep. )

Some of them a lot of builds would ABSOLUTELY use together.

I don't think ANY Sorc would refuse both energy criticals AND spell cooldowns at the same time. I wouldn't call the increase "minor" either.

Think any ranged build wouldn't use fast healing, colors AND doubleshot if they could? The doubleshot alone is a whole Legendary item's worth.

Some bonuses could be passive without really breaking anything, but making them competing active stances makes a lot of sense.

[Lotoc]

This is good info, and to be clear I don't agree with the person you responded to that things seemed random. The changes and your explanations are pretty much what I and I'm sure most others had surmised.

But if we could get 1 more explanation of why you felt Inquisitive needed to be knocked down on their dice specifically for the upper cores that require large AP investment, it could help us target our feedback more productively.

it's pretty much been explained earlier in the thread, namely nobody wants a repeat of the Vistani/HW situation (41 points in vistani is ideal for many none dagger melee builds, t5 horizon walker is ideal for a bunch of none bow builds) being so overloaded with imbue dice creates a potential situation where every EK, Every Vile Chemist, every imbue focused build is spending more points in the dual crossbow tree than their actual class tree while not even using dual crossbows.

it's honestly rather obvious with a bit of thinking.
Inquisitive on live is overloaded with dice, which means with the imbue system going forward for an imbue focused character no matter what weapon/combat style you're going for 41 points in inquisitive will outperform anything actually relevant to your build, like how vistani is so strong even 2hf barbarians go 41 points vistani to optimize dps or horizon walker t5 is so strong that most every ranged build (including throwers and crossbow builds) will ignore their own t5 just for the extra ranged power.
Inquisitive should absolutely have their scaling per dice boosted back up to 200% RP rather than the 150% it is currently at so that per dice Inq is stronger to compensate for the loss of overall dice, but it shouldn't just be the defacto best +imbue tree.

Pretty spot-on analysis. This kind of shift might indeed end up being the right answer. As many many people have pointed out, if Inq becomes the single best tree for gaining imbue dice, its going to cause a ton of problems for builds as it will become optimal to be an inquisitive for the Dice while you forgo the rest of the tree. The great news is... this kind of balance is exactly what this system is designed for. Inq needs to be stronger without changing anything else? No big deal, their base imbue can just become better. It can remain completely silod from the rest of the game AND we can retain the dice synergies we want to keep.

[dkyle]

I guess the proper parallel would have been, "I picked up a Greataxe and I stopped Healing!"

Where in DDO does simply picking up a Greataxe stop a source of healing?

Activating the THF Primal EPL isn't simply "picking up a greataxe", it's calling upon the power granted by an inherently magical process. Who's to say the magic doesn't just work that way? Maybe each stance is a different spirit, and they don't like you double-timing them. Or maybe something else. The point is, there's always a reasonable explanation for mechanics, if you think creatively. Making a strawman of a ridiculous explanation proves nothing.

If they were passive, someone would have +3 Saves and +15 Heal Amp working at the same time for example, sure, but that's nothing compared to players numbers already.
Some of them wouldn't matter, no build utilizes all of them at once. Is it a bump? Sure, but it's a minor one, and it's 51 EPLs deep. )

Most bonuses in the game are small and incremental. They add up. Might as well argue that an AP spent usually gives a small bonus, so we should just get all enhancements for all our trees.

[DRoark]

Where in DDO does simply picking up a Greataxe stop a source of healing?.

Ok, I'll explain what I implied... really... slowly.

Wolverine's fighting you (just run with it), swinging like crazy (Doublestrike). He sees a big axe, and decides to chop your head in half since you're not using it. Picks it up, concentrates really
hard (Ancient Power) preparing a really nice Category 5 haircut... and his Regeneration fails (Fast Healing). Apparently his brain decides to shut his body off, so he can swing REALLY hard.

[Same sphere now, right? There you go!]

Point is, the powers have little reason to be linked at all. Yes, you can say "Magic!" /Jazzhands... /Throws Glitter.... But really?

------------------------------------

Sorry for whatever Wolverine Barbarian meme I'm responsible for now. )

[Daeronzw]

• (Warchanter Tier 3) 1d6 Cold Damage on hit, cold spellpower
• (Warchanter) Each core beyond the first grants +1 Dice

One question, kinda obvious to me, but no one seem to asked this yet. Why this scales with cold spellpower instead of melee power? This, living in melee enh tree gives wacky feel to scale off of a spell power. It maybe makes sense for a stormsinger, but not for a og bard. Let's make it the 'whichever is higher' thing and we're set. Unless I'm missing something? : )

[Lotoc]

One question, kinda obvious to me, but no one seem to asked this yet. Why this scales with cold spellpower instead of melee power? This, living in melee enh tree gives wacky feel to scale off of a spell power. It maybe makes sense for a stormsinger, but not for a og bard. Let's make it the 'whichever is higher' thing and we're set. Unless I'm missing something? : )

the easiest answer is probably that warchanter doesn't really have any melee power to scale with and in heroics your only sources of melee power are other enhancement trees, mythic bonuses and crown of butterflies.
generally spellpower is easier to itemize and you get an okayish amount just from spellsight, warpriest and apostate scale their imbues with spellpower too, eldritch knight is a melee tree all about scaling with spellpower.
The nice thing about imbues scaling with spellpower is that you can also itemize for the Primal Avatar mantles at the same time (The magic damage can trigger on melee, often making the primal mantles more effective for melee than for casters) and if you're going imbue focused you can get +3 imbue dice from shared mantle so the synergy is going to get even better.

[Arlathen]

The placement isn't random - and if you're indeed curious I'd love to explain why these numbers all ended up where they did.

1: Any time the game had a scaling proc, its turned into an imbue (examples: Dark Apostate, Sacred Fist, Arcane Archer)

2: Any time a place in the game had a cool non-scaling proc, it's turned into an imbue as well (examples: Iced Edges, Lightning the Candle, the sonic crit thing in Swash)

3: Any time the game adds a not-so-cool proc or increases the damage of an existing proc, its turned into dice (examples: Music Box from Swash, Kotc Cores 2-6, EK later cores)

4: Once the existing stuff was moved over, I then went through and added a few imbues to places that I thought could use them (examples: Druid's Elemental Forms, Artificer's Battle Engineer)

5: Finally, I added a few bonus dice to places where I thought it would make thematic sense. I tried to make sure that every Imbue was supported by at least a few bonus dice, that way players can get used to the system at their own pace. (examples: Rogue's Poison stuff and the cores of Henshin Mystic)

Hope that helps!

So why did the Scion elemental feats lose the ability to grant an 'Imbue' and now only give dice? Surely they qualify under 1) and not 3) ?

I'm really tired of asking this question repeatedly in this thread, with no response. I'm major Sad Panda over the elemental Scion feat changes

[Sqrlmonger]

it's pretty much been explained earlier in the thread, namely nobody wants a repeat of the Vistani/HW situation (41 points in vistani is ideal for many none dagger melee builds, t5 horizon walker is ideal for a bunch of none bow builds) being so overloaded with imbue dice creates a potential situation where every EK, Every Vile Chemist, every imbue focused build is spending more points in the dual crossbow tree than their actual class tree while not even using dual crossbows.

I don't have time to read every post in these longer threads so I do appreciate you pulling the info from whichever page that was on.

This explains why changes were desired, but it doesn't explain why dice were completely cut and not added back in using the methods Lynn calls out. I'm perfectly fine with scaling the dice back proportionately to compensate for the return to 200% scaling. That flat out needed to happen in a uniform imbue system for fairly obvious balancing reasons. And I think it would have been kind of silly to add the missing dice back to the base imbue (like Lynn mentions) as this would end up with like 4-5 imbue dice at level 2 for Inqs.

But surely there is a way to add back the proportional dice purely for true Inquisitors? If the issue is the people splashing Inq. then lets return pure Inq's back to where they were before this in a way that splashes cannot take advantage of instead of punishing people who play the pure Inquisitor.

This all seems very straightforward if this is the concern.

[Daeronzw]

the easiest answer is probably that warchanter doesn't really have any melee power to scale with and in heroics your only sources of melee power are other enhancement trees, mythic bonuses and crown of butterflies.
generally spellpower is easier to itemize and you get an okayish amount just from spellsight, warpriest and apostate scale their imbues with spellpower too, eldritch knight is a melee tree all about scaling with spellpower.

To use the same retoric, warchanters don't have a way to scale cold spell power as well. If taking equpment into consideration, then there is no point in taking the cold spell power at all for the vanilla bard, as none of their spells use it. Again, it might be okay for stormsingers. I guess giving the ability the auto scale from mp/cold sp would be good enough.

[SpardaX]

I asked before in the preview of Sacred Fist, and I'll ask again here since it seems like it's just becoming more and more required.

Can we please remove the -1 Ki on hit of Lighting the Candle? In a world where multiple other classes get toggles that are as strong as, or in many cases, stronger than, lighting the candle (Especially now that it only does 1d6 fire regardless of weapon type (with the 1d6 force on crit), do we still really need the -1 Ki? Lower the +2 Ki on Quarterstaff hit in Henshin Core 3 to only +1 if you have to in compensation, but having a toggle that functionally makes anyone not using a quarterstaff almost entirely unable to even build ki, seems not good.

Or, since I'm about 95% sure Lyn will read this, can I just ask why you feel it should stay?

It's really disappointing and confusing to me making a Monk / SF, seeing the SF toggle do x3 or x4 the Lighting the Candle toggle, and still the game thinks the Lighting the Candle toggle is the one that deserves the penalty.

[SpardaX]

15 Wiz 2 Rogue 3 monk gives 40d8 acid on shurikens, plus you can use PA instead for max/emp/quick/enl strike/multi-proc mantle. Should work fine in heroics and epics, as long as you ditch your non-spell power scaling imbue for a spell power scaling one.

About 10k acid imbue dps.

Can go back to IPS use as well. 8k possibly to multiple targets.

Where are you getting 40 dice?
15 Wizard is 5
2 Rogue is 3
3 Monk is...2 or 3 ish? depending on where you go

....the other 30 dice is....?

[ivorycoaster]

The placement isn't random - and if you're indeed curious I'd love to explain why these numbers all ended up where they did.

1: Any time the game had a scaling proc, its turned into an imbue (examples: Dark Apostate, Sacred Fist, Arcane Archer)

2: Any time a place in the game had a cool non-scaling proc, it's turned into an imbue as well (examples: Iced Edges, Lightning the Candle, the sonic crit thing in Swash)

3: Any time the game adds a not-so-cool proc or increases the damage of an existing proc, its turned into dice (examples: Music Box from Swash, Kotc Cores 2-6, EK later cores)

4: Once the existing stuff was moved over, I then went through and added a few imbues to places that I thought could use them (examples: Druid's Elemental Forms, Artificer's Battle Engineer)

5: Finally, I added a few bonus dice to places where I thought it would make thematic sense. I tried to make sure that every Imbue was supported by at least a few bonus dice, that way players can get used to the system at their own pace. (examples: Rogue's Poison stuff and the cores of Henshin Mystic)

Hope that helps!

I believe you mentioned earlier that this, then, is not being done due to lag reasons, can we revisit the idea of not changing the scion procs? +3 imbue dice is not going to be utilized by non spellpower imbues anyway, so they probably won't take them. I think it's a pretty big net loss for spellpower based imbues. Also, for flavor's sake and for the purpose of providing a somewhat weak but consistent alternative damage source against immune targets, it would be a big help for these choices to remain in tact. EK, for instance, has a pretty distinct disadvantage when it comes to immune bypassing. Vile alchemist gets an immune bypass in tier 2, EK/AA could get one in core 5(level18) without breaking the game. Sorry if I am beating a dead horse here. Changing the level 18 core to a multiselector that causes an on-hit dmg bypass would be a big help. This is a balance change that would still not threaten druid/sorc/ek as the top nuker damage dealers while providing some quality of life? Warlock is in a similar boat of not being close to the dps levels and yet also not having the ability to meaningfully strip immunity.

Perhaps.... As I mentioned before, improved elemental dice will be less than half as useful as embodiment of law/harbinger of chaos. That would be a great place for it to function as a similar imbue damage bypass that functions similarly to alch/druid/sorc bypass, although admittedly it would require much less investment than 18 levels of wiz and 31 pts in EK tree.

[dkyle]

Ok, I'll explain what I implied... really... slowly.

Wolverine's fighting you (just run with it), swinging like crazy (Doublestrike). He sees a big axe, and decides to chop your head in half since you're not using it. Picks it up, concentrates really
hard (Ancient Power) preparing a really nice Category 5 haircut... and his Regeneration fails (Fast Healing). Apparently his brain decides to shut his body off, so he can swing REALLY hard.

[Same sphere now, right? There you go!]

Point is, the powers have little reason to be linked at all. Yes, you can say "Magic!" /Jazzhands... /Throws Glitter.... But really?

------------------------------------

Sorry for whatever Wolverine Barbarian meme I'm responsible for now. )

Yes, the particular fiction you invented doesn't make sense. Is that supposed to prove something? Wolverine's powers don't work that way. But there easily could be a character who does work that way!

The mechanics make sense in terms of game balance. They're linked because it makes sense to limit depth of power, while providing breadth of options. That's all that really matters. It's trivial to come up with a good faith fictional explanation if that's what you care about.

[TueNictGut]

Where are you getting 40 dice?
15 Wizard is 5
2 Rogue is 3
3 Monk is...2 or 3 ish? depending on where you go

....the other 30 dice is....?

Well just on the fly:
But 7 come from inquisitive, 2 from drow, 3 from draconic incarnate, 3 from scion, 9 from 3 sets, i havnt played endgame so not sure if you can combine them all.
Thats 24 of the missing 30

Only 6 missing, thats really impressive dmg on shuricans for sure, cant say if thats op as im not firm with endgame

[Xgya]

To use the same retoric, warchanters don't have a way to scale cold spell power as well. If taking equpment into consideration, then there is no point in taking the cold spell power at all for the vanilla bard, as none of their spells use it. Again, it might be okay for stormsingers. I guess giving the ability the auto scale from mp/cold sp would be good enough.

The Melee Power we'd expect on a Warchanter at level 20 is around 15, and that's being VERY generous - the lowest is a straight 0.

An 8th Bard with absolutely no equipment, a base Int of 12 and still putting some of their rather impressive amount of skill points in Spellcraft will have 27 cold spell power. Even without the skill, we still have 16, just from the passive bardic ballad and +1 int.
A single piece of equipment raises this by 60 points (a level 5 item from Feywild would give 59), but even without it, you're always one step above any melee power you might be lucky enough to have.

Iced Edges was already scaling off spell power. Having it scale off melee power would generally be a straight-up nerf in heroics, even without the changes to imbues.