General opinions on weapon enchanctment changes

System · January 2017

Please use this thread to debate general opinions on the weapon enchantment changes. If you have actual preview feedback or testing to report back, please utilize this thread:

http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1227227/official-feedback-thread-weapon-enhancement-changes

beckylunatic · January 2017

lanfearmierin said:
Who asked for this.

If you're familiar with the history of game feedback, tons of people, actually. It's more of a problem with "you're not addressing the issue foremost in my mind right this very second, therefore you suck" than of them making up a problem out of whole cloth. Weapon and armor enchant imbalances have been bugging players since practically day one.

hmdq · January 2017

lanfearmierin said:
"TLDR: We’ve buffed the dps of a whole bunch of the weaker weapon enhancements. Did we mess up? Anything broken? Please try them out (they’re in the Preview tab of the Wondrous Bazaar). Mathcrafters especially welcome.

The Problem

Right now, players are using just a few of the existing Weapon Enhancements (e.g., Vorpal, Dread). Why do so many of the others go unused? The biggest reason has to do with scaling. The Weapon Enhancements (let’s call them WEs for short) were originally built as non-scaling. If you wanted to scale them up, you could increase their rank, but at any given rank, they did a fixed amount of damage. If your character’s power went up, it didn’t matter. (They do scale with weapon damage, but that’s not a number that rises that much in Neverwinter compared to things like Power.)

But then come WEs like Vorpal and Dread. They add a fixed amount of crit sev. So that’s OK, right? For a fixed rank, you always get the same amount of crit sev, no scaling, right? But not so fast. Crit sev gives you more crit damage, and crit damage is a multiple of your base damage. And your base damage scales like crazy!

The Change

It’s really hard to have a non-scaling thing compete with a scaling one. So, with some trepidation, we’ve decided to make the other WEs scale. In other words, if your character’s power goes up, the amount of damage your Flaming Enchantment does will go up as well. The overall effect should be that all the WEs now scale at basically the same rate as Dread or Vorpal.

The Design Goal

The goal is NOT to make these other WEs better than Dread or Vorpal. The goal is just to get them onto the same playing field. Given how much some players have invested in their WEs, and how much effort it is to switch to a new one, we’d rather the new WEs come in a bit below Dread/Vorpal rather than above (because we don't want to be obsoleting anything). In any case, it’s still a really dramatic buff to all these WEs.

Ideally, we’ll end up in a place like this:

people with Dreads and Vorpals are happy to keep them

people who like to experiment feel there might now be some point in doing so

people who, for reasons of flavor or character concept or looks or whatever, want to use another WE feel they aren’t being completely punished for doing so

if some specialized builds find that another WE is BiS now, that can be OK, as long as it’s not too extreme (again, we don’t want to totally nuke large numbers of people who have invested in their current WE).

Realistically, if 2/3 of the currently “sad” WEs looked tempting (to a knowledgeable person), and 1/3 actually turned out to be good for certain builds, I’d be pretty happy with that.

The Help We Need

But to end up in this happy place, we need your help!

Adding in scaling is such a big change, it’s almost like these are new items. The raw numbers (7% of weapon damage or 11% of weapon damage or whatever) are almost certainly off now. If you care about dps, we’d love to have you take a look, try these different WEs, and let us know what you think.

The big question we want input on is, does the extra damage you are getting seem right (given whatever else the WE does)? Remember the goal is overall comparable to Vorpal/Dread, but not always better. When you tell us what you find, be sure to mention what your power is and what the WE is saying its bonus is (the tooltip should adjust as your power does).

What’s affected:

Bilethorn, Feytouched, Flaming, Frost, Holy Avenger, Lifedrinker, Lightning, Plague Fire, Terror.

All these WEs now have scaling.

Not affected:

Dread, Vorpal: because these feed off crit sev, they scale naturally already. They are already strong WEs.

Bronzewood: Bronzewood is just different. It needs some love too, but it’s not part of these changes. Sorry Bronzewood.

You can buy all of these WEs cheap (plus Barkshield, which we’ve also buffed) at the Wondrous Bazaar (the special Preview Only tab). There are also some fixed-damage weapons to make testing easier. Please buy, test, and let us know what you find! "

Ugh. Oh please, treating PC players like your beta-testers again for the Xbox and PS4 consoles. I'm tired of it.

We gave you (not you specifically, but to the devs) loads of feedback on bugs and features that actually need fixing: pvp balance (where is the promised NCL? we only had the pre-season! over a year ago!), class spells and abilities (half of the level 60+ skills on loads of classes are stupid or plain don't work) the foundry (dead in the water), dungeon key changes with 50+ pages of feedback. You (devs) have ignored it, yet ask for more feedback on ... weapon enchantments? Who asked for this. If it a ploy to coerce us to use more coal wards/pres wards then it might do it's job.

Feedback can't be a one way street you know. I have so little faith in this game rn ...

+1 and it seems that the "community" has short memories for certain things. Already get excited about any HAMSTER they play on the fan!

sonji · January 2017

hquadros said:

lanfearmierin said:
"TLDR: We’ve buffed the dps of a whole bunch of the weaker weapon enhancements. Did we mess up? Anything broken? Please try them out (they’re in the Preview tab of the Wondrous Bazaar). Mathcrafters especially welcome.

The Problem

Right now, players are using just a few of the existing Weapon Enhancements (e.g., Vorpal, Dread). Why do so many of the others go unused? The biggest reason has to do with scaling. The Weapon Enhancements (let’s call them WEs for short) were originally built as non-scaling. If you wanted to scale them up, you could increase their rank, but at any given rank, they did a fixed amount of damage. If your character’s power went up, it didn’t matter. (They do scale with weapon damage, but that’s not a number that rises that much in Neverwinter compared to things like Power.)

But then come WEs like Vorpal and Dread. They add a fixed amount of crit sev. So that’s OK, right? For a fixed rank, you always get the same amount of crit sev, no scaling, right? But not so fast. Crit sev gives you more crit damage, and crit damage is a multiple of your base damage. And your base damage scales like crazy!

The Change

It’s really hard to have a non-scaling thing compete with a scaling one. So, with some trepidation, we’ve decided to make the other WEs scale. In other words, if your character’s power goes up, the amount of damage your Flaming Enchantment does will go up as well. The overall effect should be that all the WEs now scale at basically the same rate as Dread or Vorpal.

The Design Goal

The goal is NOT to make these other WEs better than Dread or Vorpal. The goal is just to get them onto the same playing field. Given how much some players have invested in their WEs, and how much effort it is to switch to a new one, we’d rather the new WEs come in a bit below Dread/Vorpal rather than above (because we don't want to be obsoleting anything). In any case, it’s still a really dramatic buff to all these WEs.

Ideally, we’ll end up in a place like this:

people with Dreads and Vorpals are happy to keep them

people who like to experiment feel there might now be some point in doing so

people who, for reasons of flavor or character concept or looks or whatever, want to use another WE feel they aren’t being completely punished for doing so

if some specialized builds find that another WE is BiS now, that can be OK, as long as it’s not too extreme (again, we don’t want to totally nuke large numbers of people who have invested in their current WE).

Realistically, if 2/3 of the currently “sad” WEs looked tempting (to a knowledgeable person), and 1/3 actually turned out to be good for certain builds, I’d be pretty happy with that.

The Help We Need

But to end up in this happy place, we need your help!

Adding in scaling is such a big change, it’s almost like these are new items. The raw numbers (7% of weapon damage or 11% of weapon damage or whatever) are almost certainly off now. If you care about dps, we’d love to have you take a look, try these different WEs, and let us know what you think.

The big question we want input on is, does the extra damage you are getting seem right (given whatever else the WE does)? Remember the goal is overall comparable to Vorpal/Dread, but not always better. When you tell us what you find, be sure to mention what your power is and what the WE is saying its bonus is (the tooltip should adjust as your power does).

What’s affected:

Bilethorn, Feytouched, Flaming, Frost, Holy Avenger, Lifedrinker, Lightning, Plague Fire, Terror.

All these WEs now have scaling.

Not affected:

Dread, Vorpal: because these feed off crit sev, they scale naturally already. They are already strong WEs.

Bronzewood: Bronzewood is just different. It needs some love too, but it’s not part of these changes. Sorry Bronzewood.

You can buy all of these WEs cheap (plus Barkshield, which we’ve also buffed) at the Wondrous Bazaar (the special Preview Only tab). There are also some fixed-damage weapons to make testing easier. Please buy, test, and let us know what you find! "

Ugh. Oh please, treating PC players like your beta-testers again for the Xbox and PS4 consoles. I'm tired of it.

We gave you (not you specifically, but to the devs) loads of feedback on bugs and features that actually need fixing: pvp balance (where is the promised NCL? we only had the pre-season! over a year ago!), class spells and abilities (half of the level 60+ skills on loads of classes are stupid or plain don't work) the foundry (dead in the water), dungeon key changes with 50+ pages of feedback. You (devs) have ignored it, yet ask for more feedback on ... weapon enchantments? Who asked for this. If it a ploy to coerce us to use more coal wards/pres wards then it might do it's job.

Feedback can't be a one way street you know. I have so little faith in this game rn ...
+1 and it seems that the "community" has short memories for certain things. Already get excited about any HAMSTER they play on the fan!

I love how people are so quick to blame. yes i know the Devs released new material.....oh wait they were told to. You have to look at the fact that the Devs are employees. Just because the company doesnt give a rats HAMSTER less about the players doesnt mean the devs dont. And no not one dev is going to stand up and say this because they probably want to keep their jobs. Grow up people games change. People complain about the changes. game goes on or it doesnt. thats the life of a MMO. you want my opinion? NW has walked out the RPG doors long ago cause noone does their class specific jobs, and everyone worries about most dmg delt. but hey thats what 51+% of people want. and as long as 51+% of people want something thats the majority and the majority wins in a MMO. Get used to it. WEs have been a discussion forever as far back as i can remember. I feel its about time they got fixed a little. yes PVP is more important IMHO but thats my opinion and only about 40% of the server PVPs....thats less then 50% so its gonna be on back burner.....Foundry....same thing. so ya....oh and about 90% of the server uses WE/AE so you do the math

nitocris83 · January 2017

So, one of the things about working on games as your every day job is that you can start missing things because you do then every day. Like when you edit a document and after the 10th time reading it you start autocompleting sentences in your head. Even if there's a "the" missing, your brain fills it in. So you ask a friend who is knowledagble about the topic you wrote but has never read this doc to look it over and give you feedback. And with their fresh eyes but vast knowledge, they can provide extremely valuable feedback and catch things you've missed. So, the preview shard is what's we've working on for months and you guys are the fresh eyes with knowledge.

(Typed this on phone, sorry if typos)

abaddon · January 2017

nitocris83 said:
So, one of the things about working on games as your every day job is that you can start missing things because you do then every day. Like when you edit a document and after the 10th time reading it you start autocompleting sentences in your head. Even if there's a "the" missing, your brain fills it in. So you ask a friend who is knowledagble about the topic you wrote but has never read this doc to look it over and give you feedback. And with their fresh eyes but vast knowledge, they can provide extremely valuable feedback and catch things you've missed. So, the preview shard is what's we've working on for months and you guys are the fresh eyes with knowledge.

(Typed this on phone, sorry if typos)

ignore these haters. i know theres a lot of them. but most are probably newish players. they must not see how much this game has improved over the last year. from where it came from. appreciate all the work you guys are doing. as do many other people who just dont say it on the forums. plenty in my guild are happy with most of the changes and are hoping for more improvements. the ones who are hating would hate no matter what you did. even if you gave in to their every demand they wouldnt be happy.

rustlord · January 2017

I understand what you're saying because I'm a software developer too, albeit not on the gaming platform, but it's codes all the same. What you've just described is the job of the beta tester -- a paid personnel with proper training and insight in the context of the final product. Then there's the consumer feedbacks after changes are pushed to live.

Like the others have stated, yours looks like a case of cutting corners. Skip the whole beta phase and let the consumers (playerbase) do the testing. But it's not a question of whether we're unwilling. It's a total blast for me to get access to pre-released content BUT

The quantity of feedback you get on the preview server beats quality any day. Many, if not most, of such feedbacks have personal biases in the player's perspective, others inaccurate. Since only a portion of this feedback is viable, you have to sift and weed out the rest. This leaves a lot of sore feelings hanging around by the time of release. It is neither the dev's fault nor the preview testers', but if previous mods are indicative, a lot of bugs do make it to live and most of those had in fact been reported by players on preview way prior.

rjc9000 · January 2017

nitocris83 said:
So, one of the things about working on games as your every day job is that you can start missing things because you do then every day. Like when you edit a document and after the 10th time reading it you start autocompleting sentences in your head. Even if there's a "the" missing, your brain fills it in. So you ask a friend who is knowledagble about the topic you wrote but has never read this doc to look it over and give you feedback. And with their fresh eyes but vast knowledge, they can provide extremely valuable feedback and catch things you've missed. So, the preview shard is what's we've working on for months and you guys are the fresh eyes with knowledge.

(Typed this on phone, sorry if typos)

I can sympathize with this feeling: as a college student whom writes many essays, I often need multiple drafts and multiple proofreads to finalize my drafts for a good grade.

But in this instance, the proof-readers have poured their heart and soul into improving the work. Time and time again, the proof readers find that the author has ignored their comments, or only fixes an issue that is so huge that it would be a travesty to not fix. This cycle repeats time and time again, with the author seemingly not ever listening to the proofreaders, and the proofreaders growing frustrated at a half finished work being released.

Can you blame the proof-readers, the people who benefit from the work, for being somewhat skeptical in terms of not trusting their feeback being heard? I wouldn't, as their perspective makes sense to me.

...

I am happy that the new patch and new testing weapons/enchants have came on preview. I see it as a sign of hope that the authors are listening to their editors and that, maybe, we can gather our party and venture forth without distrust.

sonji · January 2017

lanfearmierin said:
> @sonji#4352 said:

> I love how people are so quick to blame. yes i know the Devs released new material.....oh wait they were told to. You have to look at the fact that the Devs are employees. Just because the company doesnt give a rats HAMSTER less about the players doesnt mean the devs dont. And no not one dev is going to stand up and say this because they probably want to keep their jobs. Grow up people games change. People complain about the changes. game goes on or it doesnt. thats the life of a MMO. you want my opinion? NW has walked out the RPG doors long ago cause noone does their class specific jobs, and everyone worries about most dmg delt. but hey thats what 51+% of people want. and as long as 51+% of people want something thats the majority and the majority wins in a MMO. Get used to it. WEs have been a discussion forever as far back as i can remember. I feel its about time they got fixed a little. yes PVP is more important IMHO but thats my opinion and only about 40% of the server PVPs....thats less then 50% so its gonna be on back burner.....Foundry....same thing. so ya....oh and about 90% of the server uses WE/AE so you do the math

I agree that the majority of weapon and armor enchantments need to be worked on. What I really disliked about the tone of the post was getting the playerbase again to do testing for them as if it were a given:

"Did we mess up? Anything broken? .... Mathcrafters especially welcome."

If you are so quick to defend devs, what about the players who devote their free time to bug testing and providing actual player based feedback, but then have that ignored so that the devs can continue with their prerogative?

Who do you think pays for the devs salary? It's the players. But then asking the players to QA for them as well? It sounds pretty dire coming from the company if that is the case. Without players, the company goes down, without devs troubleshooting, and well, developing, players will leave. Although we are reliant on each other, a bit of give and take, not just take and take and take, is required.

I am so quick to defend the Dev's...mainly because i have been there done that. and i will never do so again. you ask about players who devote free time to bug testing and providing feedback? i do that. and i cut my actual play time down to none to do so. i should be finished with the last of my boons on yet another alt instead im playing test trying out new content reporting bugs, minor glitches, and typos so that the devs have it comming from someone who knows that they only have so much time to do everything. Did the DEVs ignore us when we told them that the new key system was going to be a massive "insert your own 4 letter word here" up? i doubt it. Were they told hey your putting this in now and they did it? more than likely. Yes DEV teams have a little pull into what comes and goes. but not as much as everyone gives them credit for. if this next mod that is comming out launches like the others then i figure we have a couple months to test it and i plan on doing so....even if my new pvp char doesnt get levels, even if i dont finish my SW, my GF, my CW or many many others im working on. Why? so that i can get this info to the DEV team as fast as i can. so that they have a couple more days to fix and repair stuff before it HAS to go live whether we think it needs to or not, or whether it is ready or not. I honestly dont know what all the devs can and cant do here. never worked here. But on the game i worked at we could do just about anything nut when commander and chief said go it went. didnt matter what we had to say about it...and if we tried to argue we got fired. Because thats the way F2P games work. the man with the money makes the rules...and when the money starts to dry up he implements a new way to help us spend our money to put more money in his pockets. Sry for carryingon this long but it irks me a little.

(and no im not angry, im not upset, im not yelling, or throwing things. Im just having a very basic this is why i will always defend the devs conversation. If you have an argument to raise against this please by all means send it to me in a message so we can keep it off the page where more important matters can be disscused.

nitocris83 said:
So, one of the things about working on games as your every day job is that you can start missing things because you do then every day. Like when you edit a document and after the 10th time reading it you start autocompleting sentences in your head. Even if there's a "the" missing, your brain fills it in. So you ask a friend who is knowledagble about the topic you wrote but has never read this doc to look it over and give you feedback. And with their fresh eyes but vast knowledge, they can provide extremely valuable feedback and catch things you've missed. So, the preview shard is what's we've working on for months and you guys are the fresh eyes with knowledge.

(Typed this on phone, sorry if typos)

Thx for Letting us know. and thx for asking our opinion. (and like some of these guys idk if you guys care or not but at least you ask)
((oh and Knowledgeable

))

katbozejziemi · January 2017

It took 4 years to reach this change. And through most of this time Vorpal was the only enchantment out of the line, because it scaled total damage and not added a flat amount. And all that had to be done to fix it was changing it to add flat amount of damage on a critical hit instead of increasing critical severity. The effect would be exactly the same (extra damage on crit), but completely under control.

As it is now it will still give a 50% extra multiplier to your crit damage which can by any number, it can be 10K or it can be 100K. Will this power scaling let you do extra 100K damage per hit with flaming enchantment? Doubt it.

ghoulz66 · January 2017

etelgrin said:
Huge part why community choose to pass on others enchantments than Fey, Vorpal or Dread among those being reworked now is the cooldown, make their cooldown on par with Feytouched or sorta similar and people will be more likely to use them.

Holy needs it's uptime to be 100% or way more often.

Dunno why they can't be bothered to buff bronzewood..... Really? Is it that big of a time constraint to tweak some numbers?

dread4moor · January 2017

First, on-topic feedback:
Shorten ICD on frost, flame, holy. Increase holy threshold for DR boost taper (worthless now if you have >50 % DR.

nitocris83 said:
So, one of the things about working on games as your every day job is that you can start missing things because you do then every day. Like when you edit a document and after the 10th time reading it you start autocompleting sentences in your head. Even if there's a "the" missing, your brain fills it in. So you ask a friend who is knowledagble about the topic you wrote but has never read this doc to look it over and give you feedback. And with their fresh eyes but vast knowledge, they can provide extremely valuable feedback and catch things you've missed. So, the preview shard is what's we've working on for months and you guys are the fresh eyes with knowledge.

As I said before, it is unfair to blame you for the bad decisions of your superiors. But the above anology has a fatally spurious error.
You were pouring your heart and slug into a document, then asked a friend to proofread it. You asked a friend. Not a client. Not a customer. A friend.
And in your anology there is no evidence the friend was already impatiently waiting on you to fix the last 10 documents you gave him.

mistalow · January 2017

This is maybe good for those who already have their perfect or trans lighting, but for others like me it means we need spend milions of AD and buy it. This game makes me sick :[

waywardwizard · January 2017

I wish i could make account bound copies of my main weapon/armor enchantment just to use on my alts instead of unslotting, sending, slotting and unslotting again etc. Just a little QoL since for a longtime player like me the tax in gold doesnt even register.

luks707 · January 2017

mistalow said:
This is maybe good for those who already have their perfect or trans lighting, but for others like me it means we need spend milions of AD and buy it. This game makes me sick :[

The changes will be to enchants at all levels as far as I understand. People tend to discuss trans level as that's where the most extreme changes happen.

hustin1 · January 2017

I'd like to echo the sentiment about being able to refine the Loamweave enchantment. One of the lovely things about it is that its visual is so unobtrusive.

akta · January 2017

(PlayStation 4) A few opinions here: the words "lightning enchantment" should not be displayed every time I swing my weapon, dread enchantment visual effect on weapon is ugly, brilliant energy enchantment from heroes of North pack looks cool but has no use other than visual because it's such insignificant damage increase, loamweave is pretty weak as well but also looks very cool

nickjdowe · January 2017

mistalow said:
This is maybe good for those who already have their perfect or trans lighting, but for others like me it means we need spend milions of AD and buy it. This game makes me sick :[

If you feel compelled to buy/make a T Lightning based on the current testing that are not even concrete then sell your current WE and go for it. Some of us have been running a Vorpal for 2-3 years and welcome the changes. As stated though, none of the boosts to the other WE are meant to make them Superior to Vorpal or Dread, so if you have one of those 2 I would suggest keeping it.

tgwolf · July 2017

I'm going to save my thoughts on actual testing of certain enchants for later and discuss one in particular that I've used for a long time but even when it gets love, still falls short somehow: The Lifedrinker Enchantment.

Putting aside that it looks heckin' cool (Blood Weapon ftw) I feel that a factor of its base purpose goes unused as a potential way to make it more in-line with other Enchants.

As it is, balancing it is difficult due to the simplicity of the damage it adds;
Do you have it do more and risk being too strong?
Or do less and remain under powered?
How much is enough/too much?
How can you match it to a character's increasing strength?

So..

Allow it to inflict Lifesteal Damage.

This is the Lifedrinker Enchantment's main use, increasing your LS chance, so why not make that work more for the damage it adds to a character?

As a TempLock heals for a percentage of the damage it deals based on its Lifesteal Chance, make the Lifedrinker Enchantment deal damage each time you Lifesteal equal to:

Amount of health stolen by Lifesteal/Lifesteal Chance

So for example:

If you deal 10,000 damage and Lifesteal Procs. and your Lifesteal Chance is 15% then you deal 1500 Damage to your target.

This accounts for character strength increases naturally and prevents it from being too over-centralizing based on the relatively lower percentage values of LS combined with the unpredictable nature of Lifesteal.

Sure you might LS on that 25k Hit but you might also LS on that 500 damage hit instead. Or both, who knows?

As for concerns about higher damage numbers becoming an issue, no problem.

That 500k hit for example, with a 10% LS Chance that would equal a 50k damage bonus but lets think about what kind of things lead to that 500k damage being possible, that's right; a factor is the Enchantment they're using. Not a Lifedrinker.

Lifedrinker would be used primarily by lower damage builds/classes that would seldom see damage numbers that high, certainly not while using the enchantment.

In addition to the above proposed change the following change to the current base Necrotic Damage dealt would work well for consistency:

Lesser:
Deal 25% of flat Weapon Damage.

Normal:
Deal 50% of flat Weapon Damage.

Greater:
Deal 75% of flat Weapon Damage

Perfect/Pure/Transcendent:
Deal 100% of flat Weapon Damage.

All other effects as they pertain to Lifesteal chance given and other effects tied to Pure/Trans. Rank should remain as-is.

General opinions on weapon enchanctment changes

Comments