Update 23 Second Look

[B0ltdrag0n]

One thing that's messing up our mitigation balance testing; (as players have reported) DR and energy resistance are being subtracted from damage after it is being reduced by PRR and MRR. That wasn't our intent as it makes those abilities far more powerful; the buffs to PRR are also effectively boosting the relative power of straight subtracted damage effects. We are discussing that internally.

Sev~

This is good I look forward to hearing what you conclude from this.

[Severlin]

I just tested the DR/PRR order last week. I did not see what is being claimed here. When I tested, it was the following order:
- Mob hits you, DR is subtracted, PRR is applied to the remainder, you take damage.

This was tested very thoroughly and held true across multiple cases. If anyone is seeing something different (ie, prr first, then dr) I would request a detailed description of what mobs/situation you were using, which sources of dr, what order it was equipped or applied in, etc. It is possible there is some bearing on the situation or order of actions which is affecting results.

I used no dr sources except Shadow Guard Docent, being hit with melee attacks (mob swings) and ranged attacks (mob archers), with PRR swapping after the docent was on to generate a range of test values (so docent equipped first). I equipped DR first, saw DR applied first, and it worked consistently across a variety of attacks etc.

I did not test energy resistance, but for "since I can remember" its always been:
- Nuke hits you, protection is subtracted and/or resist is subtracted, absorb is applied to the remainder, you take damage.

If that changed, I have no idea why, but Ill admit that one I have not tested in years. It probably relates to MRR, now that I think about it, that I didnt look into.

If you can provide more information on either of these Sev I can test. Just post it.

Thanks for the feedback. I will look into whether the issue was only energy resistance and MRR, or it was also an issue with DR and PRR.

Sev~

[Rull]

One of the top concerns for players was that melee damage on Epic Elite was too high. This comes from player feedback. The PRR buff addresses that particular issue.

In my opinion, the problem was never that melee characters took too much damage but the damage that non-melee players receive in endgame was too low. Melees weren't popular because some builds did more damage AND were near-invulnerable by just staying out of melee range.

Then there was also a problem that people who did level16 quests on elite when they were 18 on their first life toon also expect to do level26 quests on elite at level 28 on their first life with the same ease.
At the same time it was said that the endgame in general in DDO is soloable and too easy.
The fact that the same EE that new players expect to beat is the endgame we have is the problem. This is partly a problem of created expectancy due to the normal-hard-elite naming format.

These two problems combined may have led to people asking for less melee damage in EE quests, but just answering the calls without looking at a bigger picture does not necessarily make the game better.

[Scrabbler]

One thing that's messing up our mitigation balance testing; (as players have reported) DR and energy resistance are being subtracted from damage after it is being reduced by PRR and MRR. That wasn't our intent as it makes those abilities far more powerful

Putting aside the question of total defense available, the Energy Resist and DR things needed help being more powerful. Because in general and prior to this PPR/MMR buff, they were pretty weak and often forgettable; certainly weaker than they should've been compared to their placement in various class features.

But then again, there were different sources of DR added in different eras... old Barbarian DR, and eventually recent shadow-armor DR which was designed under the assumption that Epic Elite monsters are hitting for hundreds per swing.


PS. If it was up to me, all Energy Resistance effects would also provide MMR against the matching energy type (and other sources of MMR would be lowered). That would help solve the problem of enhancements that give +6 energy resist, which is kinda useful at level 2 but a silly joke at level 20 (whereas a low-level 3% Dodge enhancement stays useful in high levels)

[Scrabbler]

We are planning to reduce the MRR caps; no armor will cap at 50 and light armor will cap at 100. We are avoiding capping PRR for now, but we have considered it.

Cappable stats in RPGs are preferably avoided, as they tend to lead to player behavior that is weird and counterintuitive. A stat cap creates the situation where gaining a kind of buff can be highly important, except when you have enough of it and it has zero importance thenceforth.

Better to have a soft cap / diminishing returns, where additional investment has less value over a certain point, but never becomes worthless. For example, you might want heavy armor to gain 100% of MMR increases while Med gets 75% and Light gets 50%.

(Although I'd prefer detaching MMR from armor entirely, greatly lowering the total MMR possible)

[CaptainSpacePony]

One thing that's messing up our mitigation balance testing; (as players have reported) DR and energy resistance are being subtracted from damage after it is being reduced by PRR and MRR. That wasn't our intent as it makes those abilities far more powerful; the buffs to PRR are also effectively boosting the relative power of straight subtracted damage effects. We are discussing that internally.

Sev~

The way some other games address this is to apply the flat reduction (resistance, DR) prior to the % reduction. It does greatly nerf DR, but it wasn't all that hot anyway.

[J-mann]

Thanks for the feedback. I will look into whether the issue was only energy resistance and MRR, or it was also an issue with DR and PRR.

Sev~

I always thought it should be in this order, otherwise our dr sources just havent kept up with the times. On the prr argument, lets look at a real world example, a cloth monk, 20% blur, 10% ghostly, 25 dodge, and 100 prr (pretty respectable) vs a heavy with 20% blur, 10% ghostly 5 dodge, and 200 prr. Assume 100 hits for 100 damage, discount ac for now:
Cloth:
55 of the hits are avoided by percent defences, leave:

45*100damage= 4500 damage*50% dr form prr=2250 damage

Heavy:
65 hits get through:
65*100=6500*100/(100+200)=2166.67 damage.

Those numbers are all fairly reasonable, and as we can see, the heavy build DOES take less damage than the cloth, and as a plus it is far less spiky than the monk build. Another point to examine is that just equiping heavy armor should NOT mean you automatically take less damage over time than a cloth build, it should depend on your role. A dps heavy armor and a dps cloth SHOULD take nearly the same damage over an extended period of time, unless we want to let cloth dps greatly out match your heavy armor, and I dont think thats what we want now is it?

The difference between heavy armor and cloth should be the method of mitigation, not the numbers. Cloth should be an avoidance based with enough dr to not get one shot, and heavy should be dr based.

Ps. Sev is right, so many of you do not understand percentil mechanics. 1% point increase means nothing if you do not know your starting point. 0-1% increase in dr is a 1% drop in damage taken, however, a 98-99% increase is a 50% decrease in damage taken. In another game I had played the devs ran into this problem in trying to balance various classes tanks. The upper ends of mitigation had gotten so high that while all classes were withing 2 percentage points of each other, some classes too up to 20% more damage than the best because mitigation values had gotten so high, making it impossible to balance around.

[J-mann]

In my opinion, the problem was never that mob melee damage in endgame was too high, but the non-melee damage in endgame was too low. Melees weren't popular because some builds did more damage AND were near-invulnerable by just staying out of melee range.

Then there was also a problem that people who did level16 quests on elite when they were 18 on their first life toon also expect to do level26 quests on elite at level 28 on their first life with the same ease.
At the same time it was said that the endgame in general in DDO is soloable and too easy.
The fact that the same EE that new players expect to beat is the endgame we have is the problem. This is partly a problem of created expectancy due to the normal-hard-elite naming format.

These two problems combined may have led to people asking for less melee damage in EE quests, but just answering the calls without looking at a bigger picture does not necessarily make the game better.

In a way, you are correct. However, increasing ranged damage might hurt ranged builds some, it will sink all melee builds instantly. Just imagine the ambush in friends in low places if archers were hitting for 100-200 each, melee (who tend to get initial aggro anyways) would be insta fried.

[J-mann]

The way some other games address this is to apply the flat reduction (resistance, DR) prior to the % reduction. It does greatly nerf DR, but it wasn't all that hot anyway.

This is how resistance and dr work on live. It also makes dr realatively useless in ee unless you have numbers like the shadow scale provide.

[the_one_dwarfforged]

We are planning to reduce the MRR caps; no armor will cap at 50 and light armor will cap at 100. We are avoiding capping PRR for now, but we have considered it.

Sev~

good.

you also really should cap prr depending on armor type. otherwise whats the point of buffing it? can you shed any light on that aspect of the pass (which you originally were rolling with but changed) that im not seeing?


i think heavy armor being great melee defense for a while will be good for the game. it will give all players a chance to get real hands on experience on live over a longer period of time with more builds. i think what this will show (at least im assuming it will based on the heavy armor lam videos ive seen) these changes dont really help the situation between tanks and dpsers defensively (tank can get better defenses, but its just not needed anywhere. especially when you can get by with a bit less defense and not have to trade ddos kingpin stat: dps) and will provide a clearly superior option in mitigating physical damage taken. you will take less damage per hit, still be able to benefit from displacement, some incorp, and a bit of dodge. ultimate effect? a greater percentage of your defense is coming from just getting hit more for less. so we have less spike damage. which means you arent punished as much for bad/lazy melee maneuvering, to such a degree that with sufficient self heals (too easy to reach the point of sufficient self heals, but thats a different problem) you will be able to just snooze through everything waking up occasionally to heal yourself.

so what i see to be the issue with this is that melee dps will benefit from prr too much at no significant cost, and melee tanks will not benefit enough from prr and will still not generally bring enough dps/threat gen to the table to earn *their own role* in raids 100% of the time (dragon kiters anybody? yea you know who the real tanks are.). so once these changes have gone live and you can get lots of real feedback on this, you can change the curve to be a bit less rewarding the less you have in it, and a bit-a good bit more rewarding the more you have in it. why would this be a good thing? could possibly at some points in time eliminate the need for an arbitrary prr cap on some armor types. if melees are speccing for dps, why should they be allowed to also get such a meaningful chunk of the defense that traditional tank builds get? but not vice versa? with the kind of curve suggested it might actually give traditional tanks a place in the game without making melees too weak defensively to be real dps options. assuming of course your high int employees make the numbers work nicely.

not capping prr just seems like you guys are just accepting that monkchers will continue to be the most effective tank builds available. which is ok because they have great built in defenses, and kiting can fall completely within the definition of tanking. but really? i think we all know monkchers would have a role without also being the best tanks. really.

[Rull]

In a way, you are correct. However, increasing ranged damage might hurt ranged builds some, it will sink all melee builds instantly. Just imagine the ambush in friends in low places if archers were hitting for 100-200 each, melee (who tend to get initial aggro anyways) would be insta fried.

I didn't mean to say ranged mobs should deal more damage. I meant that ranged players should receive more damage. I admit I misphrased this, changed it for clarity.

[Qhualor]

The way some other games address this is to apply the flat reduction (resistance, DR) prior to the % reduction. It does greatly nerf DR, but it wasn't all that hot anyway.

if DR is going to be another form of damage reduction in game, than it should not be nerfed, rather scaled better. as the game has changed, DR was never upgraded along with the changes. it should still be very much relevant, otherwise might as well just get rid of it because much of DR in game is virtually useless. this is one of the biggest issues with barbarians as well. their DR does not scale well into epics and making it totally useless takes away what is supposed to be the best defense for the class. i think its important that the DR math on this gets figured out properly, especially since barbs are next on the class list and would like to see their DR be viable defense.

the simplest solution would be to scale DR like barbarian inherent, Angelskin, Ironskin Chant, Adamantine Body, Stoneskin etc according to class levels, but im sure there are probably some issues with that. armor with DR needs to scale higher for epics with a starting point of probably DR 10/? my suggestions are just numbers to get my point across and i would leave that aspect of it up to the devs.

[Rautis]

One thing that's messing up our mitigation balance testing; (as players have reported) DR and energy resistance are being subtracted from damage after it is being reduced by PRR and MRR. That wasn't our intent as it makes those abilities far more powerful; the buffs to PRR are also effectively boosting the relative power of straight subtracted damage effects. We are discussing that internally.

Sev~

A buff like this to DR would be nice if DR was more build dependent and didn't come in such huge quantities on items. Barbarian with full DR spec or Adamantine Body Warforged with all general feats spent on Improved Damage Reduction can't sadly compete with Shadow Guardian effect or EE Ring of the Djinn for example.

Maximum DR possible for Barbarian is afaik 14/-. With 50% PRR mitigation it would mean 28 base damage results in a zero. For 60/epic effect on Shadow Guardian hits of up to 120 base damage result in a zero. With higher mitigation each point of DR gets even better.

I hope that something gets done about build based DR in general whenever you decide to look at Barbarians as it is one of their defining abilities. Items that equal or exceed DRs granted by class/feat investments shouldn't have been released imo(though 14/- is like nothing when you can get hit for 200 points per attack). Now that there are such items I'm not sure what is the best way to deal with this problem.

[Kalimah]

I really like the idea of the Harper tree, always nice to see more enhancements and more of them would be nice to play around with, HOWEVER, I hope you don't put it out as is and listen to player feedback a bit.

If you do decide to add this (and maybe more in the future) I think there should be SOME restrictions on it. (it's really nice for the pure characters who might not have enough points of stuff they absolutely want to spend into)

At this point I'm fine with them doing things without asking us. Its when they ask us what we want that I get nervous as hell.

[Kalimah]

i dont think giving those destinies a small amount more melee power is going to make a single bit of difference in how people view those destinies.

I could not agree more. And by neutering the melee destinies we DO play in you are definitely not increasing my enjoyment of the game.

[BigErkyKid]

The problem I see is that new systems keep being added:

Dodge, MRR, PRR, AC, DR...

But then abandoned and they just pile up.

Because they were not decided all at once, the interactions between them are out of control.

It is clear to me that Dodge and PRR are to conflictive sources of damage reduction, yet this is mostly ignored in the mechanics.

DR is absolutely useless as the game stands, aside from the DR of the shadow plate that might be hit with the nerf hammer.

You guys should have a look at all of them at once, decide what each is meant to be and when you add them to trees make sure it is not conflictive with the original spirit.

[Scrabbler]

Items that equal or exceed DRs granted by class/feat investments shouldn't have been released imo(though 14/- is like nothing when you can get hit for 200 points per attack). Now that there are such items I'm not sure what is the best way to deal with this problem.

An obvious thing to try would be to let Barbarian DR stack with (most) item-based DR. Or if that's too strong, half of it could stack and half overlap.

[Kalimah]

My problem with balancing one at a time is that it has resulted in FOTM builds.

Bard swash was arguably one of the top classes, specially because with very little grind you could have a fantastic character for all kinds of content. It packed heals, massive PDS (SWF plus swash), self casted displacement.

Now paladin is better than bard offensively (THF is king now with twitching, plus holy sword) and only behind defensively (but since overall defenses have become a bit of an overkill in this Lama update, it is not so crucial).

Do we have to expect next update to have barbarians better than paladins?

If you had updated paladin and bard at the same time, people would have complained that one was better than the other. Because bard was passed alone, most of us just let it go with a: "meh, bards deserve love even if it is too much".

But now I personally worry that this is a trend, that every update will make king the class revised.

Oh the bard pass that had a month of pages of the "bard is OP" junk? Every update where character power is adjusted to help "game balance" all we do is "shift game balance" then argue about it.

Puke.

[Seikojin]

I and others have spent a lot of time farming out Divine and PDK past lives for PRR. It would be very unfair to limit the value of that PRR after the fact. So, if you do put a limit on PRR, consider either make it sufficiently high that normal PRR sources +past lives can fit, or make the past lives increase the cap.

I think if they made the 50/100/200/None cap for prr and mrr, it would be fine. (no armor/light/medium/heavy). I think 50 is a good reduction when utilizing items and past lives.

We are planning to reduce the MRR caps; no armor will cap at 50 and light armor will cap at 100. We are avoiding capping PRR for now, but we have considered it.

Sev~

One thing that's messing up our mitigation balance testing; (as players have reported) DR and energy resistance are being subtracted from damage after it is being reduced by PRR and MRR. That wasn't our intent as it makes those abilities far more powerful; the buffs to PRR are also effectively boosting the relative power of straight subtracted damage effects. We are discussing that internally.

Sev~

Thanks, however I think PRR needs the same caps. Even after switching when DR is utilized.

prr cap would be bad since you can get 36 past life and 30+ from items + armor. melee need this damage reduction. all melee (even the monk haters).

They mentioned MRR cap, but a PRR cap of the same would be just fine. So it would free up your bracelet slot.

Why? Why make no armor so much lower than light armor? They have the exact same evasion mechanics available (both regular and improved). There is no reason for them to be artificially capped in a worse position defensively. They already have less sources of MRR available (no boost from armor and similar), why be so strict about ensuring they never reach as high?

I can get perhaps wanting to stop "robe casters" from matching "armored tempests" or something like that, but theres no reason monks or simply high dex armorless evasion rogues/druids/etc should also be pigeonholed like this. None. Any response akin to "players thought it was too much"... its completely invalid. I am tired of jealousy resulting in biased feedback against different classes. So what if a monk can use MRR like a rogue... how is that any kind of problem?

You have made a VERY clear divide that MRR and Evasion are two sides of the same coin, and with all of your changes this pass (from armor bonuses, to shield proficiency and evasion permission changes, to PrE based sources of MRR, etc) have supported that. This divide does NOT make sense in the context of two different MRR caps. It serves no purpose but arbitrary limitation.

You have created two populations, Evasion and No-Evasion. There are PRR differences pertaining to armor types and the sourcing of various bonuses which result in a good distribution of ability across that curve. The MRR bonuses have only a passing relation, with some of their value derived from similar sources. But mechanically, MRR and Evasion are tied, and there is no reason to punish a subset of the evasion population with a smaller cap.

Show even one case where this was needed to result in balanced play. I doubt such a case exists, and instead people are simply reacting over envy. I strongly hope it is reconsidered.



I just tested the DR/PRR order last week. I did not see what is being claimed here. When I tested, it was the following order:
- Mob hits you, DR is subtracted, PRR is applied to the remainder, you take damage.

This was tested very thoroughly and held true across multiple cases. If anyone is seeing something different (ie, prr first, then dr) I would request a detailed description of what mobs/situation you were using, which sources of dr, what order it was equipped or applied in, etc. It is possible there is some bearing on the situation or order of actions which is affecting results.

I used no dr sources except Shadow Guard Docent, being hit with melee attacks (mob swings) and ranged attacks (mob archers), with PRR swapping after the docent was on to generate a range of test values (so docent equipped first). I equipped DR first, saw DR applied first, and it worked consistently across a variety of attacks etc.

I did not test energy resistance, but for "since I can remember" its always been:
- Nuke hits you, protection is subtracted and/or resist is subtracted, absorb is applied to the remainder, you take damage.

If that changed, I have no idea why, but Ill admit that one I have not tested in years. It probably relates to MRR, now that I think about it, that I didnt look into.

If you can provide more information on either of these Sev I can test. Just post it.

No armor half light armor. makes common sense to me. 50 mrr would give you room to gear and past life to it. And if you hit the cap, change up the items that make you hit cap. It would allow flexibility to hit cap and expand other capabilities (like DC's, defense layers, etc).

[Failedlegend]

We are planning to reduce the MRR caps; no armor will cap at 50 and light armor will cap at 100. We are avoiding capping PRR for now, but we have considered it.

Sev~

I really need to stress that not all robe wearers have evasion so need to have a way to increase that cap possibly with orbs increasing the caps (and counting as large shields for enhancements and MRR)