Update 66 Preview 1 - Epic Destiny Refresh

[Lewticris]

Not sure if any amount of forum whining will change their mind, I have voted with my wallet VIP since 2009 no more canceled.
One Whale down, Will need more to follow suit. They should at least make all the epic moments MCL30, The healing aura nerf is a broad stroke to target a few people who they think should not be healing. one other option would make the Aura only available to Clerics, FVS, or move EA Aura up to T5.

 

[droid327]

As a player that has played healers for years I agree that removing the healing would be terrible. I really always enjoy the auras because it let you do more than just focus on healing. And think not being forced into nurse bot is better for the game.

This. Few healers enjoy the "whack a mole" aspect of healing, that's been a complaint well before this thread.

 

[mikarddo]

No it's not. Balance deals with success vs failure. Completion times are purely QOL. No one should be subjected to arbitrary time sinks, especially because of their build.

Being able to run fast often means you have a much easier time succeeding.

In some place you can entirely avoid aggro by running fast.
Sometimes you can avoid dying by running fast.

Furthermore, very often success is assured - and what you try to improve is the speed. In my experience that is the case far, far, far more often than success not being assured. In 99% of all groups/raids in DDO failure is just not going to happen except if a really bad lag spike hits the group at the wrong time.

Running faster is very often one of the most potent "power" improvements you can get - assuming obviously that you otherwise already have the raw power to make use of the speed. So calling run speed purely QoL is most certainly not correct in my point of view.

 

[Ptalon]

Let me tell you about my early days of playing D&D. Not DDO, D&D basic, expert and advanced. Our party would be exploring dungeons and eventually get into a big challenging fight. Casters were limited to how many spells they could cast. You had to specifically memorize/prepare them. That meant the Cleric has only a couple heal spells he could use each day. So after any tough fight. ANY tough fight...... we had to camp out in the dungeon for days, weeks... etc. just so we could heal back up and be ready to continue our adventure. ........ a couple of years ago, some of those original players wanted to start up a new game. My killer DM friend was of the opinion that 5E's decision to let players buy healing potions was wrong, and overpowered. This caused quite a rift between us old friends. While this was just one of the reasons, our game eventually dies off. As people stopped playing. No end to arguments, all of us cranky old men now. I've played many D&D games over the years. Always starting as wimpy level 1 farm boys with no resources what so ever. Rarely did any of those games last above level 5. Then along comes DDO. Wow! D&D on speed! I could see Kobolds! Watch them be burned by Fireballs! I loved this game. We used to just be able to recall out, heal up and reenter. Not fun, but we could at least finish the quest. Then came lockouts to prevent that. (also I think we used to be able to reuse rest shrines for any difficulty, but hard to remember for sure.) There have been quests where I ran out of spell points, heal pots, raise scrolls, etc. And in fact, the was the only reason we could not complete. After spending all of that time and effort, to have to give up..... not fun at all. Then there is that "trinity" and "role" thing you WOWers brought with you here..... no thanks. I belong to the group of players that have been making self-sufficient toons for 18 years now. I remember when I joined a "No Healers" Tower of Despair raid, back when that was the end game. I think we ended up with just ten people, all self-sufficient, but all healing each other too. I play most of this game with just one or two friends. One of those friends is not self-sufficient, but two of us are. We are not the highest DPS toons, or bags of mostly HPs, but we are able to complete most 6man quests on R1-R4 or R6. We can complete hard or elite on several raids. We are loving this game right now! .... but you want to take that from us for some reason. Reasons not even explained except that you don't like it. ..... I do join PUGs. And the average PUG is overpowered for the content they run. Some of them have the healing aura, most do not. Some of them use Dragon Breath, most do not. Yet they clear rooms with a single cast or swing of their axes. And I feel useless........ occasional, I join a PUG that is not very powerful. Easy to see that they are newer players, or just not that good. My Cleric..... gets expected to heal, heal heal. I have finally found a build I like that feels powerful to me. But I have to spend all of my SP, all of my time in a quest..... putting band aids on people who can't be bothered to carry a healing potion. That healing aura made things so much more fun for me. All I have to do now is be part of the group. And I can cast my offensive spells and not babysit people all the time. if they really want heals, they no longer demand them from me... they go stand next to me. But you want to return me to babysitting duty for some reason. I don't want to play a support nanny-bot. My SPs are for me to use to have fun with. I don't want to play a stupid undead death aura evil character either. I want to play the shining good guy. The agent of the angels of good and light. How nice it would be to keep being able to do that. (despite the fact that every nice item in the game has "taint of evil" on it.) You are killing my fun. Every nerf kill someone's fun. But nerfs that remove something from the game are a major big deal. But hey, we can't have things in this game that the designers just don't personally like being there... See 2:33

 

[droid327]

Being able to run fast often means you have a much easier time succeeding.

In some place you can entirely avoid aggro by running fast.
Sometimes you can avoid dying by running fast.

You can do that even without Tumble, for the most part, though. I'd say the number of places where running Tumble-fast lets you avoid something that you cant already dodge by running Haste-fast are very very limited. If that was their concern, they should disable Invisibility and/or take those scrolls off vendor, since that lets you bypass far more than Tumbling past stuff does.

Tumble has far more of an impact on low-leverage situations like running through hallways, especially in quests that make you backtrack or contain long non-combat stretches. I dont think the few high-leverage edge cases that may arise justify taking away the low-leverage benefits.

Furthermore, very often success is assured - and what you try to improve is the speed. In my experience that is the case far, far, far more often than success not being assured. In 99% of all groups/raids in DDO failure is just not going to happen except if a really bad lag spike hits the group at the wrong time.

Running faster is very often one of the most potent "power" improvements you can get - assuming obviously that you otherwise already have the raw power to make use of the speed. So calling run speed purely QoL is most certainly not correct in my point of view.

What you're describing is true, and also you're explaining why its not a balance issue. You're explaining why increased movement rate is valuable, for sure. But its valuable because of its high QOL impact, not because it makes you actually stronger, outside those few possible edge-case exceptions. Everything that could be described as a power/balance issue would affect kill speed, not move speed. That's the part of it that scales with difficulty, that's the part that your build, your PLs, your gear etc. is meant to help you improve.

 

[Mindos]

Let me tell you about my early days of playing D&D. Not DDO, D&D basic, expert and advanced. Our party would be exploring dungeons and eventually get into a big challenging fight. Casters were limited to how many spells they could cast. You had to specifically memorize/prepare them. That meant the Cleric has only a couple heal spells he could use each day. So after any tough fight. ANY tough fight...... we had to camp out in the dungeon for days, weeks... etc. just so we could heal back up and be ready to continue our adventure. ........ a couple of years ago, some of those original players wanted to start up a new game. My killer DM friend was of the opinion that 5E's decision to let players buy healing potions was wrong, and overpowered. This caused quite a rift between us old friends. While this was just one of the reasons, our game eventually dies off. As people stopped playing. No end to arguments, all of us cranky old men now. I've played many D&D games over the years. Always starting as wimpy level 1 farm boys with no resources what so ever. Rarely did any of those games last above level 5. Then along comes DDO. Wow! D&D on speed! I could see Kobolds! Watch them be burned by Fireballs! I loved this game. We used to just be able to recall out, heal up and reenter. Not fun, but we could at least finish the quest. Then came lockouts to prevent that. (also I think we used to be able to reuse rest shrines for any difficulty, but hard to remember for sure.) There have been quests where I ran out of spell points, heal pots, raise scrolls, etc. And in fact, the was the only reason we could not complete. After spending all of that time and effort, to have to give up..... not fun at all. Then there is that "trinity" and "role" thing you WOWers brought with you here..... no thanks. I belong to the group of players that have been making self-sufficient toons for 18 years now. I remember when I joined a "No Healers" Tower of Despair raid, back when that was the end game. I think we ended up with just ten people, all self-sufficient, but all healing each other too. I play most of this game with just one or two friends. One of those friends is not self-sufficient, but two of us are. We are not the highest DPS toons, or bags of mostly HPs, but we are able to complete most 6man quests on R1-R4 or R6. We can complete hard or elite on several raids. We are loving this game right now! .... but you want to take that from us for some reason. Reasons not even explained except that you don't like it. ..... I do join PUGs. And the average PUG is overpowered for the content they run. Some of them have the healing aura, most do not. Some of them use Dragon Breath, most do not. Yet they clear rooms with a single cast or swing of their axes. And I feel useless........ occasional, I join a PUG that is not very powerful. Easy to see that they are newer players, or just not that good. My Cleric..... gets expected to heal, heal heal. I have finally found a build I like that feels powerful to me. But I have to spend all of my SP, all of my time in a quest..... putting band aids on people who can't be bothered to carry a healing potion. That healing aura made things so much more fun for me. All I have to do now is be part of the group. And I can cast my offensive spells and not babysit people all the time. if they really want heals, they no longer demand them from me... they go stand next to me. But you want to return me to babysitting duty for some reason. I don't want to play a support nanny-bot. My SPs are for me to use to have fun with. I don't want to play a stupid undead death aura evil character either. I want to play the shining good guy. The agent of the angels of good and light. How nice it would be to keep being able to do that. (despite the fact that every nice item in the game has "taint of evil" on it.) You are killing my fun. Every nerf kill someone's fun. But nerfs that remove something from the game are a major big deal. But hey, we can't have things in this game that the designers just don't personally like being there...

 

[Nokowi]

This thread has been pretty exasperating so far. Little wonder so many experienced players have completely lost interest in participating in these balance discussions.

* No attempt to improve other melee EDs to make them more competitive with Fury
* Nearly the entire focus of SD revamp is caster oriented instead of how to improve it for rogues, other stealthy types, TWF builds, ranged builds, etc
* Mysterious nerf to EA healing aura with about half the posts in this thread asking for an explanation but STILL no dev answer
* No real progress on improving Magus as a caster ED (see Lazuli's excellent posts so far on how to think about the tree's problems)

And the list goes on. This could have been a great chance to fix some real problems with the EDs, not squander community goodwill by nerfing popular destinies that didn't need such heavy handed adjustment. You guys just keep on writing the book on how NOT to do it.

My idea was to put healers complaining about aura damage agro into stealth. That's your best chance of getting anything addressed.

I think I still have about 200k DDO points if you are on Sarlona these days. Feel free to PM me on the forums, I check in from time to time. You all are much better people than me for continuing to provide constructive feedback without response.

 

[CBDunk]

Plus, with a tank, there's no need for in combat healing, really, in most quests until you get to r8+, and even then good tank play can do without just fine

We run r8 most of the time except when we are 3 manning the legendary raids. Above r8, combat healing from the aura is virtually non-existent anyway. We like to experiment with different builds each life, so we've had all different kinds of tanks and some of them obviously need more healing than others. Of course, we each have a few dozen past life feats, >70 reaper points, and plenty of end game gear... so we're not exactly talking about weak characters.

We could drop down to lower reaper levels of course, but the point I am making is that removing the EA healing aura makes the game more difficult for smaller groups. It is going to be very unpopular with solo and duo players, annoying but not game-breaking for trios, and probably not too big a deal for quartets and larger that will often have a dedicated healer already.

There are already plenty of things in DDO that 'penalize' solo players excessively. Continuing to spread that to make larger groups more necessary does not make sense to me.

 

[Ellisaria]

The only "answer" we got so far is form the Friday's at Four stream, and the answer was basically "we don't like passive healing, so it's gone"

Should get rid of the weaker Radiant Servant aura at the same time, and remove/change the poor excuse of the HoT attached to the Fury Mantle too. It's all passive healing

 

[popejubal]

Should get rid of the weaker Radiant Servant aura at the same time, and remove/change the poor excuse of the HoT attached to the Fury Mantle too. It's all passive healing

I know the Fury tree is good overall, but are people actually using the Fury mantle when there are other mantles that are actually good?

 

[Ying]

What if ... all epic moments reset cooldowns of all feats (Stunning Blow, Sunder, Ruin, etc), SLAs and spells/epic strikes besides itself?

 

[JaynChar2019]

Heck, as it is right now most groups demand that you have some level of self-healing or self-sufficiency to be able to play with them. They're not gonna carry your soulstone around the map if they actually need your help, and they're not gonna babysit you to keep you healed.

Most groups at least.

When you start getting into higher end Reaper content you start seeing the return of roles like having an actual healer and tank in the team. And people actually stick together because it's needed.

Doesn't help that most Melee DPS drop dead after 1-3 hits as it is.

Our groups always need a healer and a tank and we do raids on normal sometimes even. SSG Please, please please don't ultra nerf your new player base just because the CEO's want to make up for a loss of cake sales. Not all of us have played for 16 years. IF you want to reatain new player base and entice other new players you need to take a damn hard look at yourselves otherwise this is just one BIG sinking guildship. The hardcores/completionists will go down with the ship but us newbies will jump ship and spend our HARD EARNED CASH elsewhere. Yeah even though I have developed a whole raiding army on Sarlona increased our guild 10 fold and revived it from the grave, even I am like why am I gonna waste my time on this game anymore if you guys are not gonna tell us WHY you are nerfing us sooo hard, and just please for the love of everything good in this world don't blame it on lag. All I can say is it REALLY feels like cake sales are all you guys care about and I'll be damned if I ever buy one again if these changes go through. Instead of these unnnessary nerfs know one wants you actually work on the real issues for lag. I mean in this day and age I REALLY feel like the "LAG" issue can totally be resolved, your excuse of old coding is just simply pathetic at this point when we have things like the unreal engine out there. Obviously there is some way to fix it. BUT SSG is just not motivated to do it because it helps to kill us so a happy little "would you like to buy a cake box" shows up in our face. How about that. On top of that you guys add Dungeon Alert which nerfs your attacks and couples with LAG and oops your dead again, wanna buy a friggin cake! Now you are BLANTALY nerfing us in our trees and NOT just with dungeon alerts that are ridiculous when you come around a corner in a quest and ARE NOT ZERGING AT ALL. So This is my conslusion, SSG has decided to make the game lag on purpose, then has chosen to add the dungeon alerts to nerf us further, then on top of all of that decides to nerf our epic destiny moments and heals. It smells to high heaven in here!! What's SSG's response "LET THEM EAT CAKE"

 

[Solarpower]

Should get rid of the weaker Radiant Servant aura at the same time, and remove/change the poor excuse of the HoT attached to the Fury Mantle too. It's all passive healing

They should just completely remove healing form the game.
I don't know what's going on within PnP D&D 5ed, but judging from Solasta and BG3, healing has been thrown away from D&D.
Guess, DDO simply follows the modern D&D trends...

 

[PraetorPlato]

Our groups always need a healer and a tank and we do raids on normal sometimes even. SSG Please, please please don't ultra nerf your new player base just because the CEO's want to make up for a loss of cake sales. Not all of us have played for 16 years. IF you want to reatain new player base and entice other new players you need to take a damn hard look at yourselves otherwise this is just one BIG sinking guildship. The hardcores/completionists will go down with the ship but us newbies will jump ship and spend our HARD EARNED CASH elsewhere. Yeah even though I have developed a whole raiding army on Sarlona increased our guild 10 fold and revived it from the grave, even I am like why am I gonna waste my time on this game anymore if you guys are not gonna tell us WHY you are nerfing us sooo hard, and just please for the love of everything good in this world don't blame it on lag. All I can say is it REALLY feels like cake sales are all you guys care about and I'll be damned if I ever buy one again if these changes go through. Instead of these unnnessary nerfs know one wants you actually work on the real issues for lag. I mean in this day and age I REALLY feel like the "LAG" issue can totally be resolved, your excuse of old coding is just simply pathetic at this point when we have things like the unreal engine out there. Obviously there is some way to fix it. BUT SSG is just not motivated to do it because it helps to kill us so a happy little "would you like to buy a cake box" shows up in our face. How about that. On top of that you guys add Dungeon Alert which nerfs your attacks and couples with LAG and oops your dead again, wanna buy a friggin cake! Now you are BLANTALY nerfing us in our trees and NOT just with dungeon alerts that are ridiculous when you come around a corner in a quest and ARE NOT ZERGING AT ALL. So This is my conslusion, SSG has decided to make the game lag on purpose, then has chosen to add the dungeon alerts to nerf us further, then on top of all of that decides to nerf our epic destiny moments and heals. It smells to high heaven in here!! What's SSG's respone "LET THEM EAT CAKE"

First, I am suspicious of any claim that SSG is making raiding harder to sell cakes for obvious reasons. If you mostly care about raiding, then cakes are 100% irrelevant.

Second, the game has never been easier than it currently is in terms of high skull play, and after these nerfs, it will still be relatively easy compared to almost every other time for r10s.

Third, moments aren’t getting nerfed? EA moment is getting a potential nice buff, because *nobody used it*.

 

[DBZ]

For veterans not new players new players are not jumping into r10s they barely survive r1s

And no one will use ea ill grab deflect arrows and call it a win

 

[JaynChar2019]

First, I am suspicious of any claim that SSG is making raiding harder to sell cakes for obvious reasons. If you mostly care about raiding, then cakes are 100% irrelevant.

Second, the game has never been easier than it currently is in terms of high skull play, and after these nerfs, it will still be relatively easy compared to almost every other time for r10s.

Third, moments aren’t getting nerfed? EA moment is getting a potential nice buff, because *nobody used it*.

It's not the raids silly its the quests you can buy cakes in you should know that by now. And I have created 4 different toons, and am currently slogging my 10th TR on my main. Cake sales are definitely a thing. Raiding is a good three months or so, most days once we get back to top teir with all of our friends and guildies. But I def tr and def get the little cake message when the dungeon alert procs for no good reason other then a large mob and then it lags to high heaven and me and my husband all our hireling and summons die. Good times.

 

[PraetorPlato]

For veterans not new players new players are not jumping into r10s they barely survive r1s

Well, sure, but the game used to be even harder on higher skulls-it’s getting easier and easier over time, especially post stat squish.

 

[DBZ]

Anything that knee caps veterans kills new players strategic nerfs

 

[PraetorPlato]

Anything that knee caps veterans kills new players strategic nerfs

Maybe new players shouldn’t be in r10s without optimized builds? I don’t know why r10s need to be accessible to brand new players without effort, they’re still very accessible to new players with well optimized builds (hence why easier than almost all prior times)

 

[JaynChar2019]

Maybe new players shouldn’t be in r10s without optimized builds? I don’t know why r10s need to be accessible to brand new players without effort, they’re still very accessible to new players with well optimized builds (hence why easier than almost all prior times)

We are not in reaper 10 quests, R1 is what we run to try to get something at least over time.