Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[Eladrin]

See our planned changes here, which are dramatically different from what is described below.


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Thank you for the feedback on the Hard to Kill buff. We're planning on making changes to it based on your comments.

Instant death effects are a powerful tool that are difficult to strike perfect balance with. We've wavered over time from completely unusable (old Epic blanket Death Wards) to excessively strong (the current live situation). When they're completely unusable, that's a bad thing because it decreases the number of options you have to deal with encounters. When they're too strong, they likewise decrease the number of viable options that exist, and can dramatically reduce the enjoyment of other characters in your party.

Hard to Kill was intended to be a system that would put some restrictions on death spells, dropping once the enemy was reduced to half health, in an attempt to promote teamwork between casters and the rest of the party. We intended for this to turn death spells into an "execute" sort of mechanic - the party could take the monster down to half health, and then a Pale Master (or other caster) could finish it off.

The system turned out to be too restrictive, and we're planning on making changes to it.

In the Hard to Kill thread, there was a suggestion to use a system similar to the change we made to Saves vs. Poison. We considered this internally - giving players and monsters a bonus to Saves vs. Death Magic* (but not physical death effects like Assassinate) if they were at high health, and a penalty if they were low on health (on death's door!) This would not have included the "don't fail saves on a natural 1". Monsters on different difficulty settings would have had different save bonuses.

This would have kept the desired "let people do something in fights, prep monsters with Improved Sunder, and stuff like that", but we decided that it would have excessively harmed casters with low to middling DC's, who would go from being able to occasionally land a death effect to ending up in a situation pretty similar to the original Hard to Kill.

We want you to be able to have the "moment" of killing a bunch of creatures with a death spell, but don't want to leave the rest of the party with little to do. We want to control how often you're clearing rooms of all enemies with a few quick casts of a spell, but don't want to have even longer cooldowns (which again unfairly harm weaker casters the most, since their death effects are less likely to actually stick). We realized that the key was to let you use your death effects, but apply restrictions only when they're used successfully.

Our current idea is as follows:

When a death spell successfully kills one or more targets, the caster acquires a debuff called "Haunting" for each target killed, for a short period of time.

We're still working out details, but right now, Haunting is a stacking debuff that lasts 15 seconds and applies a -2 penalty to Death Magic save DC's. It decrements by 1 stack whenever the timer runs out.

We may consider a small buff on Hard/Elite/Epic Hard/Epic Elite difficulties to Saves vs. Death Magic for players and monsters at full or very high health, as well as a penalty at very low health, but at much smaller numbers than we were considering previously, when that was considered as a standalone system prior to the implementation of Hard to Kill.

This system essentially would create a "soft cooldown" that is triggered primarily by mass death effects, but still lets a caster Finger of Death a creature or two in fights. It has no effect unless you succeed, so weaker casters aren't harmed by it, and in emergencies even if your Haunted stack is high, Power Word: Kill can still strike down an enemy. (Its effectiveness is not reduced because it doesn't have a saving throw.)

Since your cooldowns wouldn't be longer than they are now, it would be up to you whether you wanted to chain death effects together, debuff opponents with spells like Energy Drain or work with a character with Improved Sunder to overcome the Haunting, or save your Wail for strategic moments when it will have the biggest effect.

We're still working out the details on this, and will then send it on to the engineers. Let us know what you think! Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

* I love making first edition references.

[Blank_Zero]

It's a good start, but getting a debuff for *EVERY SINGLE MOB KILLED* might be a bit excessive.

Also, a cooldown like that, with only 1 tick coming off every 15 seconds might make some people a bit off, considering we've already had a HUGE increase to Wail of the Banshee recently.

Edit: Also, Is there no hard cap? That right there makes it a bit excessive.

[Tid12]

Will rogues and monks be unaffected by this? Their abilies kills 1-2 mobs and aren't overpowered as Aoe necro spells.

[Ape_Man]

I kinda get it . . . so this "haunting" only affect my CoD and wail but my FoD stays as it?

EDIT: got it, read it again.

So this would only go in affect Epic H and E?

[B0ltdrag0n]

Harms Circle of Death and Wail, without unfairily harming Finger/Destruction/Implosion.

Gives a scalar penalty so thatthose who are max geared with a ton of past lives can reasonably work with it without unfairly punishing those that are not full max on their DC's.


I like it.

My only suggestion are:
to make the debuff -1 Death effect DC for each stack,
remove the idea of increasing monster saves at all,
Make the Timer 10 seconds per kill and/or make sure it goes away on rest at a shrine.

With that in mind, I see this as a fairly balance debuff.


Edit: Good point raised above. Please only implement this on Epic Hard and Epic Elite.

[Ganolyn]

I don't know about the DOOOOoooooooOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!11!1!!!1!!1!! sayers, but this sounds like a good compromise to me. Nobody should be sweeping through dungeons like a broom. This will make timing important and will give the other people in the party a chance to protect the mage while he/she/they recharge their batteries. With good timing and several mages, there probably won't even be a need for that.

[danotmano1998]

This is about 1000 times better than the initial proposal IF IT IS IMPLEMENTED IN EPIC HARD/ELITES.

Sounds like a decent start.

[Cauthey]

1) Thank you for coming to the communities with a response to all of our feedback (and for listening to our feedback).

2) Bravo! I like the idea. Needs a hard "cap" ceiling for the penalty, but I think that this is a terrific solution.


Personally, I love it when you guys introduce well designed dynamics to meet your goals that ALSO address community concerns. BRAVO, indeed!

[DrunkenBuddha]

Interesting. Mostly I want to thank you for acknowledging that this was an area of concern.

[Barazon]

So your compromise is that, instead of screwing over instakills in epic content, you're going to do so in all content?

[Fefnir_2011]

Seeing as how the purpose of this buff is to prevent instakilling PCs from running gleefully through quests and killing it all at the end, what if this was a buff that Epic Hard/Elite monsters gave as an AoE to each other? Something like:

Whenever 5 or more monsters are within a certain radius of each other, a bonus to equal to the number of monsters is given to all such monsters to their Fortitude saves against death effects. However, pack mentality is bad at making decisions, so a -2 to will saves versus enchantments also applies.

it would still scale, so that say maybe the highest DCs wizards in the game could instakill a group of 7 or 8 instead of having to kill in 5s. However, it would encourage parties to group up a certain number of mobs and pare them down to a number the caster can handle, allowing everyone to participate equally.

And if you want to give further disincentive to soloing Epic quests on these difficulties, you could add a buff to damage and to-hit, meaning that any wizard looking to round up a dungeon could end up getting eaten alive before they can even get their spell off.



Regardless, this Haunting seems like a pretty fair compromise, as long as the cool down for it isn't too long. Like you said, gotta walk that fine line between instakills being useless or completely overpowering.

[stainer]

Would this impact an arcanes ability to solo?

[Beethoven]

I sort of like it.

Suffering the hubris of violently tearing the souls from bodies by supernatural means, being haunted by the souls of your victims is a nice touch. Its also not excessive and encourages to circle through more than exclusively insta-kills.

The downside I see is that it sounds more complex than it would need to be (ie: saves scale with difficulty, thus elite epic mobs have higher saves and stack a +10 bonus vs insta-kill spells instead of immunity with Hard to Kill on top of it). Haunting is a little harder to understand and with all the other changes it risks things becoming somewhat overwhelming.

[Avidus]

So this would only go in affect Epic H and E?

Since it is an effect placed on the player not the mobs I think this would happen everywhere.

Not too sure I like the part about it applying to players as well and not giving bonus to save vs assassinate. Rogue mobs could wipe out parties with just a few bad rolls. Fight all the way to the end of dungeon, roll poorly, get assassinated while wearing deathblock... hmm....

I also think the 15 second timer might be a bit too long. I would go with 8~10 seconds.
-2 per kill is a bit rough. I would go with -1 per kill, and I would also implement a maximum stack of say 6~8 ish.

[Drwaz99]

We may consider a small buff on Hard/Elite/Epic Hard/Epic Elite difficulties to Saves vs. Death Magic for players and monsters at full or very high health, as well as a penalty at very low health, but at much smaller numbers than we were considering previously, when that was considered as a standalone system prior to the implementation of Hard to Kill.

[/I]

Um, not on heroic Hard/Elite. Only Epic please.

[MrkGrismer]

I like it... if

1) Physical death (not magic) is unaffected (vorpals, monks, assassins)
2) The amount of the haunting is not based on the number of kills, but rather on the HP of the kills (such as -1 DC & 1 sec per 1,000 hp or so, just as an example). This way killing a bunch of rats doesn't haunt someone quite as much
3) There is a cool animation to go with it, I recommend something like this:


(or maybe use miniature spectre/wraith models circling the head.)

[Emili]

I am happy that you openned this up for discussion to brain storm along with the player's interest.

First I agree that insta-death did trivialize the content in beta, they would basically run to end of quest and my viewpoint is that everyone should have fun with the quest - as a whole. A quest should not be an end-boss for most.

I really like what I see in your proposal here so far... will ponder over it some.

[Grace_ana]

As I don't have an end game arcane, I can't really comment on some of it. However, I'd like to see this limited to only certain spells.

If this were to be implemented, I could see it with circle of death and wail. MAYBE FoD (though it's single target and the cooldown is longer than the debuff, so I'm not sure of the point). But again, I don't have an end game arcane, so I'll leave the comments on those to them.

ETA: If this was to go live, it should ONLY be in epic hard and elite, preferably only epic elite.

[LeLoric]

When a death spell successfully kills one or more targets, the caster acquires a debuff called "Haunting" for each target killed, for a short period of time.

The 15 seconds is too long. Finger of death has an 8 second cooldown meaning we cant even cast finger each time its off cooldown and stay free of hauntings. Single target fingers are not the issue here. 6 sec debuff would work fine its a long delay for those that like to masskill large numbers but doesn't penalize the spot killer.

[Ladywolf]

What is the hard cap for the debuff?