Hard to Kill --> Haunting

[oweieie]

The penalty is too ******** to salvage.

The solution is to make better dungeons, not fill them full of stupid trash whose only purpose is to suck up player's time by forcing them to be slowly whittled down.

And seriously, what are we talking here? A stunned/stoned/frozen/held/grabbed mob dies in a couple seconds a tripped/dazed/danced mob in a couple more. Why do you have a bug up your ass about saving a couple seconds on characters built around being good at it? Once a mob is hit by one of these conditions, it is dead, it's just a time consuming and tedious task to grind through the HPs of the hundreds of mobs crapped into the dungeon. The instakills make your game suck less.

Appropriate use of orange and red named mobs where you want silly sacks of HPs that require slowly killing is the way to go. On appropriate yellow named mobs actual dispelable deathward will add the extra time you seem to crave players take to get mobs killed. Undead, constructs and other mobs immune to necromancy where appropriate. Tada! Better game, more fun game, no ******** system everyone will hate that will have to be changed 2 updates down the line.

[Faent]

Seriously, you powergamers should have no problems adapting, but you're always the ones who scream the most.

I see you screaming a lot on the forums. Currently, you're screaming for a complete nerf to builds folks have worked or a long time on. Scream way, but don't be a hypocrite.

[fco-karatekid]

OR... use a different spell than wail!!! Then you don't have to stand around and wait..

Have we really come to this? A wizard's power is the ability to swap spells, to bring the right spell for each encounter/dungeon...

Instead, all we do is cycle through wail, circle of death, and FoD.

And we can't even imagine any other tactics anymore??

Well, THIS is a contributing factor I've noticed for a long time - not enough effective spells available - just 4-6 per class that get overly used. why even cast electric loop when nuke is so much more effective.

[Rizzia]

This is a better suggestion than anything I had come up with. Death spells still work but can't be spammed unless you are just fishing for 1s.

Two concerns:

1 - In content you explicitly intend to be easy, but where HP bloat is over the top, Haunting will likely be a real nuisance. Thinking Inspired Quarter type content here
2 - Finger, Slay Living and Destruction get (slightly) caught up with the overpowered spells in the same nerf.


Suggestion:

- Have Haunting be a 5 second per stack debuff giving -1 to deathspell DCs.
- Single-target death spells cause one stack.
- Multi-target death spells cause three stacks per target.

Finally, does this interact with the 'erased from existance entirely' effect of Prismatic spells and Void 4, or with the 'poisoned to death instantly' effect of Prismatic spells?

Phantasmal killer also gets caught (hene why I belive single (focused spells) targets should be exempt.

And leave void 4 well alone, it takes consdierable effort to build a monk with this, and its totally a random occurence.

[McFlay]

This change isn't going to fix anything. All it means for most quests is you have to stop for a minute a couple times for your haunting to clear.

Why not make caster insta kills function like vorpal. If the mob fails to save and is under a certain amount of hp they die. Scale the hp threshold by the casters DC. A higher DC caster is capable of insta killing bigger mobs. If the mob fails to save but is over the hp threshold of the caster they take some damage that could also scale to the casters DC.

That way there you still won't have casters insta raping what should be hard end game content. But at the same time, if they run up and wail a group of mobs all at 51% hp its not a giant waste of time, effort, and sp.

[Faent]

Absolutely Horrible. Any end-game PMs want some vaseline?

My ARCHMAGE needs some vaseline. Not that that will help. Turbine is taking a baseball bat, dipping it in glue, rolling it in broken glass, and doing you know what with it.

[fco-karatekid]

...The solution is to make better dungeons, not fill them full of stupid trash whose only purpose is to suck up player's time by forcing them to be slowly whittled down...Tada! Better game, more fun game, no ******** system everyone will hate that will have to be changed 2 updates down the line...

Regardless of what happens with Haunting or HtK, do THIS anyway... long overdue. Ugly bags of mostly hitpoints are not, nor have they ever been, fun.

[Clatterfist]

I like this proposed solution, it seems to hit the right note and strike a fair balance.

[MrWindupBird]

I have some observations.

First, the assumption that a high necro DC trivializes content. There is a lot of hyberbole going around in this thread (largely about palemasters, which is interesting: without a +4 tome, a geared Necro AM (wf) has the same DC as a geared human PM, and is actually a more efficient instakiller being able to SLA a web and round up then kill, and having more sp. Where the PM shines is in damage absorption, not DCs, at the cost of burst healing. Not sure why people have such a strong misconception. The reason why a PM is a more efficient epic soloer is solely due to much greater efficiency torc'ing- whole different can of worms. A lot of bad information in this discussion). I have a 44-dc caster, which pretty squarely falls into the very-good-but-not-best-imaginable category. And from all this talk of the unstoppable, carefree wail-pushing juggernaut that is a PM, I think that the posters claiming that PMs are easy-button only run House P epic.

44 DC simply does not kill entire rooms in challenging content. It just doesnt. If you debuff wisely (turtle with lionheaded, crushing despair, circle, wail) then results are improved, but it really isnt a 95% thing in things that aren't trivial to any well geared and played toon. And if you debuff in that fashion you are A, getting the crud kicked out of you, and B, using lots more SP. And in places like eChains, it's still nowhere near enough to get everything. The argument that the hordes of eberron simply melt away in front of a half-decent DC caster does not bear water. There are very few places where that is true.


The complaining about kill count is also pretty absurd. What does that matter? And since when is there a proper apportionment of kills, evidently according to class? I think that there is a camp of players, many of whom can be found complaining about casters in this and related threads, who fundamentally want there to be only one way to play the game. These individuals are essentially playing an archetype of DDO, not the game itself. In that archetype, a divine's role is to heal everyone, the melee's job is to be valorous and foolhardy and charge the enemy, and the caster's job is to buff everyone and be squishy. In this model, it is HOW things get done that matter- ie. that they be done in the prescribed manner.
When people ask me what I like about DDO (I am really not an MMO person) I answer them with 2 things. One, the movement system is really pretty good and responsive: I like that the combat positioning is fast and that it matters, and there's a realistic-enough sense of motion and physics. The other is that this really is a flexible game: there are many many ways to accomplish just about any quest. I really like the fact the MMO stereotypes do NOT apply: my divine is a zergy monster who very rarely heals, and my melees definitely dont need anyone to babysit them. I like things like all-melee epics, like tanking shadows in TOD on a melee, having an instakill-focused monk, or tanking eDQ2 on a wizard. I like that a group of strong players can succeed despite very unusual party composition, by archetypal standards. If all those possibilities go away, it's a much less interesting game. This may be a bit of an overreaction, but I strongly feel that the undercurrent to the current backlash against casters is: You need to play MY way, and go hide in the back like you're supposed to and let me be a big man! That sentiment is extremely distasteful.

As to the suggestion at hand. I find it interesting but very flawed. I'll list some obvious drawbacks:
A. the dynamic penalty essentially creates an equilbrium of uselessness that all casters will surf. As others have mentioned, a 50DC caster and a 40DC caster are equivalent after the first 2 rooms of a dungeon, due to the penalty being directly proportional to success. That is terrible game design. Being better at something (necro DC, here) should never result in a greater penalty than being mediocre.
B. you are making people into pikers. This is also terrible game design. As an example of what I mean, see Abbot raid. I love abbot. But that is because I nearly always run tiles. Other people hate abbot. And that is because they have to wait around for 5-8mins, literally just wait, while 2 people have fun. This is why I always bring grease clickies to roids when I go there. As to the argument that arcanes have other options than instakills: yes, that is true. But they should be options to be used when appropriate, not a forced choice.
C. The magnitude of the haunted effect as it is proposed will be very large. Imagine a typical encounter: first thing you do is finger (with energy drain if necessary) the caster-type in the back, then drop CC, gather mobs, and wail. The wail will already be at -2DC, and if you succeed in killing 5 creatures, you are now at -12 DC and completely useless with instakills for the next.... 90seconds. That is a very very long time, 90 seconds.

What I would like to see: more varied encounters, and greater variance in saves and attributes among mob types. Unfortunately, as it stands most epic mobs are meatsacks which hit you with a stick, or meatsacks which wave their hands and make things go boom. They make look different, but in terms of their saves they are fairly close together. We may deal with them differently, but that is a reflection of their offensive traits, not their defensive ones. Make it a bit more rock paper scissors- as it stands now we have rock; we have something which looks like paper from afar but is suspiciously igneous on closer inspection; and scissors, which are rocks only with evasion and mostly negligible pewpew.

More variation in mobs defences would be an extremely compelling reason to approach them differently, versus just wailing, or debuffing then wailing. The only extent to which we really have this atm is epic drow, and then it is solely because of SR and web not having a SR check, not strength/weakness of save.
On a somewhat related note, giving melee (players and enemies) stronger tactics options is also a good idea. The nerf of offhand procs for TWF tactics remains utterly boggling to me. That should be reinstituted, and 2handed weapons should be given a bonus to the DC to compensate, or allowed to cleave tactics. Encouraging more intelligent use of melee CC and tactics is definitely a good thing.

[Grace_ana]

No change to the spell mechanic is needed. Better AI and mobs are needed.

For those complaining that casters use the "same 4-6 spells," let's look at a comparison. Spells are the equivalent of a melee's weapons. At end game, how many weapons does a really high-end player use? Do they have 10 different epic weapons they swap? No. They have one or two favorites, and another few really good situational ones. Why are we expecting casters to max out their abilities in more spells than melees do for weapons?

PMs are death spell users. It's what they are. It's what they are built for. A significant investment in time, build points, TRs, and gear goes into optimizing those one or two schools.

Let's do another equivalency experiment. Let's say you build your barb to be awesome at THF. You got gear, enhancements, and feats to maximize strength, glancing blows, cleave, etc. You farmed and farmed until you got that eSOS. And then you are told, "Sorry, we think you are OP. We are making it so you are unable to use a THW until the mobs are below 50% health. Until then, you have to use TWF. It's just that you can do so much more damage with that eSOS and all those TRs and such, and other players are feeling left out."

So, you'd have to play a way you did not plan for, play a way you do not like, play a way that you are not optimized for. You don't have the feats and such to be best at TWF. I mean, you could change your entire build to be TWF, change your gear, change everything, but that's not what you planned and not what you farmed for. Of COURSE you can kill things faster, but look how long it took you to do that! And your reward for getting really really good and geared and top-of-the-class was to be nerfed down to the level you were months or years before. All because some people want to feel like they are killing things as fast as you.

Now, would that be fair? Were you breaking the game with your mad melee skillz? Or were you just being the best you could be and contributing effectively to a quest?

You all need to really stop and think about why exactly you think it is "broken" and if those reasons matter. Because from what I have seen and read, this is essentially a problem that could be solved best by removing kill count statistics.

[Forzah]

I'm not a fan of this idea, it's not restrictive enough. My solution would be the following: remove instakills from the game, and have them replaced with proper negative energy spells.

I'm surprised that the developers are giving in so easily to a bunch of people complaining on the forums. The forums are by no means representative. I've spoken with about 20 people ingame about the changes, and so far there isn't a single one who's opposed to the changes (this includes everyone in Mitis Mors, a fairly high-end guild, 5th in renown on Thelanis). Most of the people I spoke saw this coming, and they were long prepared to adapt. The forums and the game are truely a different world....

[yk49]

Third, there is an issue that needs to be addressed: the myth that most PM's or necro-focused AM's can sweep through epic content and lay low virtually all of the content, with little challenge. This is simply not true, and really only applies to the top percentile of necro-focused arcanes.

Quite frankly, if a player has invested enough lives into an arcane to have +9 spell pen (3 x wizard and 3 x favoured soul past lives), the maximum possible intelligence (i.e. completionist) and farmed out the best possible gear (+4 intelligence tome, tier 3 alchemicals...) then they had better be dominating content, for two reasons.

First, it is consistent with the lore that comprises the foundation of the game - that at the highest levels, spell casters are indeed the most powerful.

Second, if there is no tangible benefit to investing countless hours TR'ing and raiding and farming gear, then where is the underlying motivation to continue?

yea, this...

[Xilth]

Will haunting be activate on archmage PK SLA? this would change cooldown from 6 to 15 sec., its quite big change in PrE that has only 1 good option, and its very costly.

and yes, i like playing my gimped illusion/enchantment wiz

[emptysands]

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.

I'm not entirely convince that the existing system is broken. Certainly Elite Epics need to very difficult for any class to solo, but as many people have said blank immunities are not the way to go - they have too many unintended consequences, plus there is no way to tune them. They are either ON or OFF and binary style mechanics do not lead to very fun gameplay.

One question, as the above debuff mechanism is unclear. Is the timer for each stack independant of additional stacks? ie. If I have 10 kills from one wail does that mean 10x15sec, then if 10sec later does that timer reset back to 11x15sec? So basically I can not kill anything for 165 secs? And so on?

Further if I have waited 82.5sec or 5.5 stacks and I FOD one mob does the this then reset the timer to 6x15sec?

Personally I think that means that PMs and Nerco AMs will be running at a constant debuff. More than 60secs and the debuff probably will be constant. Would it be better to have a time reduction as the stack increased? ie. 15sec per stack for first five stacks, 7 for the next five stacks, 3sec for the next five and 1sec per stack after 15. At 10 stacks this is 75 + 35 = 110sec, almost two mintues. At 20stacks is this 110 + 15 + 5 = 130sec.

However stacks will be popping off the top faster - this means you can tune the amount of debuff to about where it matchs the encounter rate.

Put another way, at present ignore the cooldown a death magic is essentially a high dps mechanic. So a PM can potentionally kill 20 mobs at 2000+ HP every 30sec -1000+ dps. Plus they do not suffer the cost faced by melee, whom take damage in return.

This debuff is planned to provide negative feedback to reduce this dps rate, in order to balance death magic against other forms of dps.

I think the take away from this that it is important to to uniformly debuff all death magic for all players. If you target the top players then the lower tiers will feel the effects even greater.

I suggest the best way to tune for this situation it to target an expected DC level per quest difficultly. So Elite Epic may have a -2 DC per stack, then a 55DC Wizard sitting at 5+ stacks will start missing 50% of the time and at 10 stacks 95% of the time. Whereas a 40-45DC Wizard will be missing 95% regardless. For hard it would be -1 DC and for Normal -0.5, the difference being at with an adjustment in the saves of the mobs at 5 or 10 stack on elite, hard, normal the debuff be (-10,-20) , (-5,-10) or (-2.5,-5) for 75sec or 110sec. So a 55DC Elite Wizard would be at 45/35 and a 50DC Wizard running Hard would be 45/40DC and a 45DC Wizard running at Normal would be 42DC/40DC.

Then you tune the saves of the mobs in the quest so that on Elite a 45DC hits only 50% of the time and a 35DC hits 0% of the time, etc.


Whatever the case, I think it would be simpler to just use an HD system. In Hard/Elite epics change the spells so that then don't kill but they cast an high level Energy Drain - CR50 trash mob in lvl 25 Elite quest will then if saved lose, say 20HD or potentially 40% of their hit points. All the aggro is going to switch straight away on to the caster tho and they need to wait another 30sec before they can get the 2 wail off. Get rid or circle of death and reduce the cooldown on symbol of death. So then there is only one death aoe for the living.

[Forzah]

i dont know about you but i dont have such a uber spec'ed PM. seen a few completionist wizard, grouped with them while i played a melee/healer etc but i didnt feel im useless. im just talking from my experience.

You can pretty much do all of that on a 2nd life caster already. My guildy Haedo, for instance, instakills most spawning mobs before I can even reach them in epic DA. In the end I just stop moving because it's pointless. And he's even a human archmage... Same for FvSs that solo through all sorts of raids and epics.

[ponzo]

I'm kind of okay with the suggested change. Although, like others I think the -2 is harsh and it needs a cap of some form. Just thinking out loud here, but how about..

1. On each successful cast of instant death spells (i.e. when the -2 would be applied), the caster gets a saving throw from either will or fortitude (whichever is highest) to reduce the penalty to -1 for that successful cast.

2. PM's (and any other prestige that deals with necromantic effects often) get a bonus to this saving throw,

3. The penalty does not apply at all to successful instant death spell casts against unintelligent targets. (Or some similar check for over-sized vermin - seriously, I can't see myself feeling "haunted" about killing my lunch!)


I have no idea how to deal with a hard cap, but maybe it should be some factor of the caster's constitution bonus?

To be honest, I think Eladrin's suggestion needs a lot more thought, but the intention is good.


*edit* thinking a little more about this, i guess you could factor the heroic/epic dungeon level and difficulty into the saving throw also.

I know, its all more complications and calculations added in to something which doesn't feel all that great to begin with. I'm just trying to suggest an improvement if the devs decide they are going to run with the haunted mechanism. I would still rather they came up with something entirely different.

[Faent]

Given the current proposed system, if you wail in eDA, and knock out a group of bats and scorpions, you'll be done with your instakills for the rest of the duration of the wave. You're now a hage/disco/holdbot for people like Thrudh. Ok, so clearly don't ever touch Wail or Circle... Finger some trash every 15 seconds while being a hage/disco/holdbot for people like Thrudh.

Eladrin's proposal is not a little nerf. It's a nerf of epic proportions, and it basically removes Circle/Wail from the game. It relegates the use of Finger to once every fifteen seconds (and this will be the only instakill spell you'll ever be using). The most epic casters will be able to "play through" this insane nerf by adding an extra Finger here or there, and that's about it.

Don't be duped. Eladrin has proposed one of the greatest nerfs this game has ever seen.

[Faent]

You can pretty much do all of that on a 2nd life caster already. My guildy Haedo, for instance, instakills most spawning mobs before I can even reach them in epic DA. In the end I just stop moving because it's pointless. And he's even a human archmage... Same for FvSs that solo through all sorts of raids and epics.

There are plenty of mobs in eDA that your guildie IS NOT instakilling. Focus on them. If you're running after that warlock or ranger to try to kill it before your guildie kills it, you're playing stupid.

[Naerethil]

IMO I still can't understand why you need to create some new mechanics, debuffs, and so when they're not needed.

For ultra maximized DC solo players (I think that's the main concern), this new haunting thing just means "Hey, room number 1. Wail. Alt+Tab for X minutes. Continue to room 2. Repeat."

For a party-based player means "Hey, room 1 is mine. Wail. Rebuff other players. Alt+tab for X minutes. Already in room 4? Fine, room 5 is mine. Repeat.".

Sure, you can say "You can do blah, blah, while on haunting.", and I reply again "Fine, but this doesn't fix that death spells are overpowered in hard/elite. Just add a terrible cooldown to those skills and that doesn't fix, either, a party with 2-3 'wailers'. taking turns for scream-to-death."

As I noted on the other thread regarding this "Hard to Kill", I think that hard/elite mobs should have a guard that prevents them from insta-death but instead get some hard damage if failed the DC. I suggested 50% of current hps. Some people suggested 25% on elite, 50% on hard. and some made more modifications to this. Again, its only my opinion, but I think this is the way to nerf an overpowered effect without changing the gameplay experience of the player... or just making the player play X secs per cooldown.

[Viisari]

There are plenty of mobs in eDA that your guildie IS NOT instakilling. Focus on them. If you're running after that warlock or ranger to try to kill it before your guildie kills it, you're playing stupid.

Yeah I know right? I mean I can count atleast three, and they're all immune to instakills due to boss immunties :<