Update 73.1 Release Notes

[Frieling Slyhand]

I would love to see any one of the Devs try to play a rogue assassin. It’s one of the most difficult even before the nerf. Almost no one plays this style because it is so difficult—no AOE, squishy defense, daggers do low damage. Cordo please try this play style on stream.

 

[danzig138]

I would love to see any one of the Devs try to play a rogue assassin. It’s one of the most difficult even before the nerf. Almost no one plays this style because it is so difficult—no AOE, squishy defense, daggers do low damage. Cordo please try this play style on stream.

I recently lightly re-specced my dual dagger assassin to just do straight up fighting damage because the stealth was just not working the way it should. It's bad enough that you can't actually assassinate things that need assassinating but with the stealth borked it's not worth the AP.

 

[Hjeelmee]

Stealth play has been neffed for years, devs just hate that you can bypass the mobs to end and win, they put up kill objectives to stop (I am looking at you Sharn part 1, in the bear switch room-have to clear room, wheras before you can just sneak in and pull lever and on your way), mobs can true seeing and tremor sense and now any reaper can frack ya no matter how high your stealth is, kinda sad to see a once good game play so badly shafted, and now this...

To be fair, this isn't how most groups I've seen dealt with the bear room before the change. Unless you're pushing high reapers, the common strategy used to be zerging past everything, ignoring the mobs, pulling the lever and rushing to the end fight a couple rooms over. The change seems to be implemented to prevent players from just completely ignoring the room, stealth or no stealth.

A similar issue happens in the beginning of the first night brigade quest. You get to act as a stealthy rat and sneak past a bunch of patrolling panthers while hiding in a crowd of people when panthers come close...or just ignore the panthers and crowds and run past everything because it's faster and no more dangerous.

The real issue here is, there's very little that can be done to curtail zerging without also hampering stealth play at the same time. Even if you can find a way to discourage zerging while promoting stealth play, it tends to be a solution that's been baked into one adventure and doesn't carry on to any others. Given that zerging is a much more common phenomenon than stealth play, it stands to reason devs would place higher priority on anti-zerging mechanics than giving a good stealth experience.

 

[vryxnr]

(based on my memory of those times) one of the original reasons for exp being granted on quest completion and not on a per kill bases was (again, based on my memory of discussions about DDO happening in the very early days) was the original devs wanted to encourage different playstyles and avoid the mindless murder-hobo questing of most other games. What matters is completing the quest, not how many things you killed. If you killed a lot, you got a bonus, but if you killed very few, you also got a bonus.

While I'm not completely lost in my rose tinted glasses (there is plenty about the current game that is way better now than it used to be imo), I do miss some of the things that DDO brought to the table back in those days. This (early days stealth play) is one of those things I do miss.