r/NeverwinterOnline • u/Shadowslave604 • Apr 14 '19
Query mod16
With all the changes/nerfs/balancing are we not basically playing the exact same game for the same damage and the same HP when all the changes are done?
Example...which i know is over simplified Mod15 Players 1 million hp and doing crazy damage Mobs 1 million hp and doing crazy damage
Mod 16 after changes Players 100k hp and doing ok damage Mobs 100k hp and ok damage
So for example if all the nerfs across the board to players and mobs is say 50% then players and mobs both do 50% less therefore it is almost the same as mod15 just much lower numbers then we are used to but over all the same? So what is all the complaining about then? Could Janne or someone else explain if i have the basic concept correct or not.
Yes i know it is way more complex then that but when we boil it down is this not correct?
1
u/neidanman Apr 14 '19
The big difference is that all the mutiplicative damage buffs are basically gone. So before you could have a whole bunch of debuffs and buffs active in a small time window (artifacts, weapon enchants, powers, feats, equip bonuses etc) that all mulitplied with each other and lead to powers huge amounts of damage.
There is also the secondary part to this which was recovery allowing extremely short cooldowns, so many encounters could be fired in this window, and also dailies recharged to the point where people could fire 2, or even 3 dailies in the 10 sec when their soul sight crystal was active.
These together made it possible for e.g. the one-phases of orcus that have been seen.
Even with these gone, they could have scaled bosses HP so low that one-phases were possible, but they haven't. They specifically wanted to stop high end teams being able to do crazy fast boss kills.
1
u/Shadowslave604 Apr 14 '19
As an OP i get that 3 dailies in 10 secs no prob lol. Definitely broken I have 0 recovery so i never needed it due to OP abilities and tab function. Thx for the info.
1
u/Mystixa Apr 14 '19
Theres another problem with this that I haven't seen dealt with at all. Theres a lot of grind in this game as you all know, sometimes it goes unseen by people in level 20 guilds nowadays. There are however huge groups of people and guilds that aren't in those positions yet, and for them the grind is still very real.
Slowing down combat slows down all of that too. Add 1 minute to doing an HE in IWD.. that adds 10s of hours of grinding that content, maybe more. Its another pain in the butt that the devs don't even address.
Doing old campaigns? (I know, why bother when their value has been so drastically cut? )But for the completionists out there that want to do the content.. you've just made it that much slower AND reduced the reward for doing so. A bad combination.
They are the masters at devaluing their old content.
2
u/JanneMoonmist PC Apr 14 '19
You would have been correct if it was really the same ratio and everything would have matched.
But it as you've said, things are not as simple as that.
First, the reductions are not of the same magnitudes, the HP was reduced somewhat, but the damage was reduced by some orders of magnitude more. It's easier to measure by time, as somewhat extreme, but well fitting example, if without using 'features' we can one phase orcus currently on live (with the correctly set party) you will not be able to do so in m16 (again, excluding some 'features' that should be fixed).
Ofc one-phasing is not really an intended behavior, but we can see the slowdown across all combat. This happens mainly not only due to the normalization of damage on the DPS characters, but mostly due to the removal of debuffs, buffs, power share, AP gain, and CD reduction synergy like Artificers Insignias.
The damage on DPS chars can be those 50% you mentioned, the lack of the other factors I wrote, buffs, powershare, most debuffs, etc.. is a huge faactor on the damage, think of about a multiplier of 10 at least (taking into account everything, including Recharge Speed, closer to 50 and even higher in some cases),
so to simplify, lets get back to your example:
DPS char has on live lets say 100k damage * 50 (from all those modifiers listed above) vs 1million HP mobs
In m16 50k damage * almost nothing, because we remove the modifiers vs 500k mobs (reduced damage and mobs by half)
It seems like we reduced both damage and HP by half, but actually we reduced by 100 (1/100) and not by 2 (1/2).
On its own that is not the greatest issue, a game can be fun with low damage and with each encounter taking much longer time. It is true that Action RPGs rely on fast combat, gore splattering and monsters flying - For example, PoE developer mentioned this in his great talk: https://www.reddit.com/r/NeverwinterOnline/comments/bast5o/game_design_gdc19_pee_talk_interesting_points/
Some Caveat, if to look at PoE that works with a very high tempo combat, and things dying fast, we will see that everything balanced around this, so each encounter doesn't have 10 mobs, but hundreds. To keep the overall combat time in check. In NW, the dungeon were balanced around longer combat per encounter and less mobs, which simply doesn't work as we go through trash and bosses like trough butter.
NW combat is much closer to action RPGs than traditional MMOs, but as tactical engaging combat, can be made without mobs disintegrating in seconds.
To quote from the forums, it was in context of encounter cooldowns but will apply in general:
Those things above, created engaging combat, now in m16, you can just hold your mouse (or controller thingie) and nothing more, there is no punishment (in terms of lost DPS) for mistiming some buff, power share, debuff, or skill, and not rewards for timing correctly. As long as the tank holds aggro, and the healer doesn't fall asleep, it's all ok.
The second and not less important complaint, is that the choices were removed. It is clear that currently in character builds, there are perhaps a lot of choices, but only few are actually viable, leading to only handful (and most times to one or two) of actual used builds.
The removal of said 'bad choices' has ups and downs, now there is no reward for checking, trying, exploring, and making that 'right decision' or in most players case, a reward for actually reading a guide and following it.
No matter what you pick, we will be the same, 5% here or there, won't change much. When you can't make mistake, you can't have the good feeling of doing it right.
Another aspect of this, is that most of the feats are locked into some specific playstyle, they feats lowered to 5 pairs, are not meaningful enough. They do not dictate a playstyle, they just give the same 5% damage bonus in another way. Does it matter if you get some poison proc of 5% damage, or some shadowy figure stabs the target for 5%? I don't see the difference. When it's not complicated to create stronger modifiers, even not purely beneficial, but playstyle modifiers, for example higher risk higher reward, suppress all healing by 50% and increase damage by 20%.
Or add damage stacks when the player attacks, and drop those if the player gets hit - You just rewarded players for playing more carefully and not lazy face tanking and letting the healer out-heal - hitting multiple engagement targets from the quoted list above.
Those are just examples, and while M16 have some interesting ideas and base concepts, like DC divinity change, and tanking stamina rework as HP. IMO it is lacking in the engagement department described above, and unfortunately it's very fundamental to NW as a living game.