Changes Focused on Boosting Game Performance

[Xezom]

Currently, the cap means that either offhand or mainhand cannot go beyond 100% in effectiveness. So yes, stacking doublestrike past the cap will boost offhand past 50%. Now, granted, this may change, but it's what's currently on Lamannia.

Also to note as I've seen this asked, the proc multiplication will affect on-heal reflective stuff, like Fists of Light. If you heal 2 hp from punching someone, and then multi-hit that punch, that heal will be doubled to 4.



Alrighty, you've convinced me, I'll dive in and see what I can do to to stop Scenario 2. Glad you like the staves!

I'm also going to build out new fun little triple-strike and quadruple-strike icons so you can see just how many times you've struck with this. Right now our feedback only tells you if you've multihit and not how many times, so this kind of reporting is actually quite important. To the floaty text code!

Yay! Thank you Lynn, you truly are the best! I like the idea of differnt icons for 3-4 hits too so you can actively see the effects of your multihit beyond just the big numbers. That'll be a nice change too knowing how many time you multihit not just that you did.

[Kaboom2112]

Before I lose my mind please tell me the changes to the tempest capstone and scrounge pastlives

[Amundir]

[Khurse]

In Update 49 we are making significant changes to how melee and missile combat is calculated to address long-term community and development team concerns about game performance. If you're curious, we've included a long form explanation as to what these changes entail on the back end, but if you're interested in just the changes and the results, here's what we've found:

[
What's Changing

[LIST]
[*]A player's 100% effective Doublestrike cap still applies in this system.[*]Offhand strikes will still be a separate "hit" and will roll their own damage from their own weapon and can still Doublestrike. However, we have removed the stat Offhand Doublestrike from the game. Your offhand now Doublestrikes at 50% of the Doublestrike of your mainhand. This means that if you have a 50% chance to produce an offhand strike, and 100% Doublestrike, your offhand will hit 50% of the time for 50% Doublestrike (so a 50% chance to deal double damage). Abilities and enhancements that used to provide Offhand Doublestrike no longer do so.

The end result of this change should be improved gameplay on the performance end. Furthermore, the numbers you see while dealing damage will more accurately reflect what's happening in the moment, and you should be able to make calculations more quickly. We hope that you'll give this a solid try on Lamannia and look forward to your feedback, both on the usability of this change and any change in performance therein.

So what happens with the enhancements, Past Lives etc that gave offhand doublestrike?

[Monkey_Archer]

Currently, the cap means that either offhand or mainhand cannot go beyond 100% in effectiveness. So yes, stacking doublestrike past the cap will boost offhand past 50%. Now, granted, this may change, but it's what's currently on Lamannia.

Nice. While I'm not sure capping doulbestrike is even necessary anymore now that its no longer a limitation of the system, the idea of diminishing returns for doublestrike is much better than a hard cap at least.

Doublestrike boosts are no longer useless, and ninja spy gets a much needed small buff.

[Monkey_Archer]

Before I lose my mind please tell me the changes to the tempest capstone and scrounge pastlives

If open to suggestions, 10% doublestrike for tempest and 2% doublestrike per past life would seem appropriate.

[CeltEireson]

We are trying to reduce the amount of times over a period that procs happen, and changes that put us to the same amount of procs per second will not fix our effects queue problem.

But won't that effectively lower the power of all effects that only have a percentage chance to go off? I'm thinking particularly about Shiradi in that most of the damage effects and the paralysis effect etc only have 7% chance per hit to go off - in the past with each attack you'd be getting two (or three if you had sufficient doubleshot) chances for the effects to go off but under the new system , if I understand it correctly, it would have only once chance to go off but if it does go off and is extra damage then it will get multiplied up but other effects will obviously not really benefit from this. So effectively for the likes of paralysis from Shiradi its now half (or less) likely to go off (assuming 100% or more doubleshot). And of course there are quite a few non-damage effects that depend on critical hits or vorpal. So all of these are effectively being nerfed by the change so I would have thought there would need to be either a change in the percentage chance to go off (increasing paralysis to 14% say) to keep it as effective as it is now, or in the case of on critical or on vorpal effects increase the amount of the effect.

Which would likely be a lot of work given how many are in the game between enhancements and epic destinies.

Hope that makes sense?

[Tobril]

It would be desirable from a player perspective to preserve equivalent damage from Filigree, Eldritch Knight, Destiny, All-the-weapon-on-hit-damage, and many other procs.

Builds that rely on non-front-number damage are penalized unless those after-front-number effects are accommodated in some way.


Considering the excellent efforts to make every weapon style viable it would be nice to make sure they also maintain current damage levels.

[fabhpk]

Nice. While I'm not sure capping doulbestrike is even necessary anymore now that its no longer a limitation of the system, the idea of diminishing returns for doublestrike is much better than a hard cap at least.

That would be a nice boost to Acrobats too. They do need some love.

[Lynnabel]

But won't that effectively lower the power of all effects that only have a percentage chance to go off? I'm thinking particularly about Shiradi in that most of the damage effects and the paralysis effect etc only have 7% chance per hit to go off - in the past with each attack you'd be getting two (or three if you had sufficient doubleshot) chances for the effects to go off but under the new system , if I understand it correctly, it would have only once chance to go off but if it does go off and is extra damage then it will get multiplied up but other effects will obviously not really benefit from this. So effectively for the likes of paralysis from Shiradi its now half (or less) likely to go off (assuming 100% or more doubleshot). And of course there are quite a few non-damage effects that depend on critical hits or vorpal. So all of these are effectively being nerfed by the change so I would have thought there would need to be either a change in the percentage chance to go off (increasing paralysis to 14% say) to keep it as effective as it is now, or in the case of on critical or on vorpal effects increase the amount of the effect.

Which would likely be a lot of work given how many are in the game between enhancements and epic destinies.

Hope that makes sense?

We understand that this change will carry a side-effect of reducing the effectiveness of non-damage procs across the board. However, we believe that the overall benefits of this pass will outweigh these side-effects, and will keep an eye on non-damage procs in the near future to ensure this does not have adverse effects on the player experience. We would also like to invite you to copy over to Lamannia and test out your rotation with these changes so you can better gauge the effectiveness of what's been changed. It's very important that these kinds of changes are put through their paces not just by us but by the players, and we want to iron out any rough edges ASAP so we can improve game performance.

[Sythe777]

Ok, so help me out here. I am twf monk with 100% DS (reaper buffed) and 90% offhand strike. Say i do 100 damage. What is the damage before and after U49. Is it the same? Just bigger numbers and less frequent? Or is there a nerf in there somewhere? I saw 50% thrown out there for offhand strike in an earlier thread, so just trying to understand if that was for example purposes or if that is the cap now for offhand strike.

Also, please keep this in mind if you do anything to monk ki attacks. In other words, less procs (due to less "hits", means less ki generated. Right now, monk benefits with double ki from doublestrike. This is bad potentially. Please keep this in mind.

Thanks!
Nico

So how I understand it:
Hit once:
X damage
X_d = % chance of doublestrike of X damage on the hit = X*(1+X_d/100)
Y = Y damage done on offhand = X*(1+X_d/100) + Y
Y_o = Y_o% chance of Y damage on offhand = X*(1+X_d/100) + Y*(Y_o/100)
Y_d = X_d/2% chance of double Y damage on offhand = X*(1+X_d/100) + Y*(Y_o/100)*(1+Y_d)
= X*(1+X_d/100) + Y*(Y_o/100)*(1+(X_d/100)/2)

Total damage in your case = 100*(1+100/100) + 100*(90/100)*((1+100/100)/2)
= 100*2 + 100*0.9*1
= 200 + 90
= 290

So this depends on what your offhand doublestrike is on live. This also means you can go above 100% doublestrike to boost offhand doublestrike chance, according to:

Currently, the cap means that either offhand or mainhand cannot go beyond 100% in effectiveness. So yes, stacking doublestrike past the cap will boost offhand past 50%. Now, granted, this may change, but it's what's currently on Lamannia.

[aGarde]

This seems to me to be an issue of "death by a thousand cuts". I've worked on similar projects where every piece of the product was inefficient but not so bad as to stand out, due to every other component sucking just as much.

For DoubleStrike/Shot, why not simply make them be a damage multiplier? This would have the added benefit of not needing a separate trip to your RNG routine and simplifying the damage logic. It also seems like the damage multiplier should be done as part of the base weapon damage. This again, would make the effects be more of a 1 time static calculation vs a real time calculation done every hit.

I've often thought that some things like ship buffs should just be permanent in order to reduce the number of timer effects needing to be tracked.

[Greeka]

Well I have seen this talk before about finding solutions to the lag issues plaguing the game for some time now, and I have to say I am still not very hopeful to say the least. However maybe something might get accomplished this time.

This is based on my current experiences on the hardcore server. If this is something that is being caused by raids and if the hardcore server is its own independent server, then why is there some much large that it is like your character it a stop motion filmed entity at times and everything else is moving in real time compared to you. I have ran into issues where I was killed 30 seconds later in an entirely different room and I was not lagging or rubber banding. Is it that issue where some of the new champ types can kill through walls like the old beholder bug where the beholder was able to kill you at your respawn point from within the instanced dungeon? I do not see a lot of raiding happening on the hardcore server so what is generating the lag there? Is the hardcore server an instance of another server, because that could possibly make sense as to the lag experienced there. Hell I have logged in and lagged right from the start, and have seen that happen with other players.

I am hoping for an improvement in the lag issues facing the game, but I would probably turn blue and die if I held my breath in hopes of reduced server lag.

[Snormal]

Other people have said it, but this change really messes with a bunch of things that are important and/or central to some builds.

Shuriken builds that previously were throwing 4-5 stars per attack also used to get 4-5 chances to proc effects, which was a niche but fun way to play. Damage seems basically unchanged except it appears that sneak attacks aren't being multiplied. The 2 big issues I have with this change are Aimed Shot (from DWS) and nerve venom (from Shiradi). It used to be I had 4-5 chances to paralyze enemies on each throw, which made it pretty reliable.

The even bigger issue, IMO, is aimed shot and to a less extent archer's focus in general. It used to be that even when kiting I'd often have time to stand still a bit (nerve venom, leg shot, other party members cc'ing) and get off 1-2 attack animations, which would recover up to 10 stacks of archer's focus that I had lost while kiting. The same applies for aimed shot. If you know you can't stand still for the requisite time, you could throw an aimed shot and get 3 stacks for each of the 4-5 hits. Now I'm recovering 1 stack per attack and 3 per aimed shot (+1 if standing still for 3s while using aimed shot). This is overall a pretty big decrease to sustainable ranged power in high reaper quests where you have to constantly move to not get one shotted. It also really slows the ramp up time for archer's focus in a way that makes it feel a lot more clunky.

It dilutes what was previously a very fun and interactive playstyle (maintaining archer's focus stacks through timing stationary periods and aimed shot usage) and turns it into "only stand still while firing, or forget about archer's focus entirely". I know there are a lot of moving pieces with a change like this, and consequences can be totally unintended or just missed, but I really hope you guys have a plan that generally addresses 'non-damage' procs that keeps them roughly the same in power level as live.

edit: another huge thing here is improved deception, which previously allowed basically all attacks to be sneak attacks after initial ramp, and now barely procs at all. Testing on Gardak in Cabal for One, it is taking me almost double the time to kill him on Lamannia compared to live (17.89s vs 34s). That can be attributed partly to sneak attack not being multiplied, but I also notice a huge lack of sneak attacks comparatively which I believe is due to improved deception uptime being reduced by ~80%

[Carpone]

Sneak attack damage is not scaling with doublestrike (and doubleshot) like the base damage is scaling.

[Tsutti]

The Crunchy Details

Right now, a player “Doublestrikes” when their attack scripts use their Doublestrike stat to determine if they fire off another detect-attack. A player “Doubleshots” when the Missile Attacker code gets to the part in the code where we determine how many "Missiles" are a part of the projectile. From there, the scripts use the number of missiles to determine how many times they use a detect-attack.

Is this why Adrenaline only affects a single attack in the animation for melee but affects every attack in the single ranged animation?

[Mindos]

This is going live after hardcore is over, right?

[voxson5]

Damage multiplication for procs happens AFTER spellpower/other power scaling. That being said... I kind of feel like we should change our scaling to happen BEFORE we do resistance/reduction from damaging effects, to prevent scenario 3 in the new paradigm. I know scenario 2 in the live experience is massively frustrating, and if we're already in the combat code, why not go a little above and beyond? Right now I'm pretty sure damage from just regular ol weapon attacks doesn't have that problem with flat DR, right? This stuff should be consistent.

EK & AA love you long time GI

[Arkat]

Sneak attack damage is not scaling with doublestrike (and doubleshot) like the base damage is scaling.

I think Lynn has acknowledged that and is working on a fix:

Unrelated, but from some chatter it's looking like Sneak (second number) stuff didn't get multiplied correctly, I can take care of that asap.

[rabidfox]

This is going live after hardcore is over, right?

Given the lag on hardcore deaths, I'd guess we'll see this one pretty soon.