Upcoming powers/balance changes

amenar

Howdy forums,

In an upcoming patch, we’re going to be making some long overdue changes to a handful of powers and items. For some of them, and the ones that will be foremost in peoples conversation, they’ll be getting some fairly large power reductions (or “nerfs” in the common tongue). We’ve taken a long look at what these powers and items do to the game, and if they are something we can sustain, and we have decided that trying to reshape the game around them as they are is not feasible, and would leave are game worse for it. Some of these issues have existed for some time, and we’ve let you down by letting them go this long before addressing the issues. In either case, we wanted to talk a little bit about the upcoming changes, and give you some insight into why we’re making them.

Lostmauth’s Vengeance

The Lostmauth Artifact set is a mighty beast, even without the unfortunate issues that are allowing it to greatly outperform all of our other Artifact sets. The set bonus is supposed to be a powerful choice for DPS characters that focus on Crits, and it is definitely that. In its current state, it’s also one of the best choices for… well, just about everyone else. The root of the problem is that the set bonus is supposed to “hit for Weapon Damage” as stated in the tooltip. However, the damage dealt by the power is buffed by every damage buff you have on you. This means, for players that say, have a weapon damage of 2,000, instead of dealing a bonus 2,000 damage whenever they crit, they get a bonus 2,000 * DamageMultipliers. In some cases, players can get those multipliers really high, easily allowing it to hit for 10x or more that amount. For builds that are maximizing the potential returns of the set bonus, upwards of 40% of all damage the character deals is caused solely by this set bonus.

This is not a good situation to be in, as this means characters can deal vastly more damage than expected, which trivializes content by allowing people to defeat enemies much, much faster than expected. This means those critters can’t live long enough to do the damage we expect them to do, which means gearing up defensively enough to survive the fights becomes less important, further pushing people to maximize DPS at the cost of all else, which gets the balance further out of whack.

So what do we do?

Well, we have two options. Nerf the set bonus, or buff all of the other set bonuses to be equivalent to Lostmauth’s.

Buffing all of the set bonuses sounds pretty good. All of the people that aren’t using Lostmauth’s are happy they got buffed (massively). Options for using different sets for people that feel forced into using Lostmauth’s open up again. No one is unhappy that they got nerfed.

It also has some serious downsides. Do we just let everything in the game be trivialized? No, that’s probably no good. So we have to increase the difficulty of everything at the end game to account for the massive increase in power that all characters are expected to have. Dedicate an entire module (maybe more) of work to rework all of the dungeons, skirmishes, and campaign zones. And then we have to think about what this does to other item desirability. If your one set bonus accounts for 40% of your damage on a character that is maxed out in all other regards (amazing enchantments, best-in-slot gear, all Mythic Artifacts), why even care about leveling up that other gear? Running around in early tier purple loot, you’ll still be amazing. Any individual reward you get will feel like an almost meaningless contribution to your overall power.

Or we can nerf Lostmauth. People that have invested in Lostmauth’s won’t be very happy. No one gets buffed. However, people that feel forced into using Lostmauth’s do get lots of options opened up with this route as well.

And the upsides are large – it’s only one set bonus being touched, instead of many, so our ability to test the change is greatly improved. We don’t have to spend tons of time rebalancing the game. We don’t have to worry about upending the reward cycle for the entire game.

In the end, we chose the nerf option. Lostmauth’s Hoard will now do exactly what it says it does, which is deal Weapon Damage on a Critical hit. We feel that this puts it where we originally wanted it - a powerful choice for classes that go for heavy crit specs, but not the clear choice for every damage dealer.

amenar

Oathbound Paladins & Devoted Clerics

There are a handful of Oathbound Paladin abilities that have been causing some serious consternation internally for a while. When we look at dungeon difficulty, we have to say things like “no using Power X, we all know it has to get reworked.” That’s not a good thing to let go on for long. The primary culprits that get called out are Divine Protector & Shield of Faith, alongside the Devoted Cleric Feat Gift of Haste. One of the most commonly proposed solutions to the problem was “turn off AP gain while Divine Protector & Shield of Faith are on.” We looked into that idea, and weren’t happy with what happened in that case.

Before I get to the solutions we went with, let’s talk about the individual powers and why we think they’re a problem.

Divine Protector, at max rank, lasts 20 seconds. For this duration, you redirect 100% of the damage from your entire party to yourself. All of that damage is reduced by 80% before it actually hits you. Then your normal damage resistance gets applied. The end result with this power in its current state is that… no one cares about damage. All but the most dangerous enemy splat attacks are completely ignored, healing is unimportant, and even having a geared up tank isn’t terribly important. Even without the Gift of Haste interaction, it’s not hard to focus solely on AP generation and get this close to 100% up time.

Shield of Faith, at max ranks, lasts 24 seconds. For this duration, all damage dealt to your party is reduced (before damage resistance) by 50%, and they receive 20% more healing. While not as powerful as Divine Protector, this is an incredibly powerful buff, and it lasts long enough for it to be easy to have 100% up time.

Gift of Haste, the Cleric Feat, grants 5% AP whenever you cast a Heal over Time power on anyone. With builds designed to maximize this, you can generate 5% of your entire teams AP every second – leading to entire teams activating Daily powers every 10-12 seconds. Coupling this with the above 2 powers is especially bad, since it lets you maintain both Daily Powers with almost 100% up time on both. It’s incredibly powerful for a single Feat to provide this level of effectiveness to your entire team.

So now let’s talk solutions. First, we looked into the idea of turning off AP gain while Divine Protector or Shield of Faith were up.

With Divine Protector, we felt like play patterns ended up feeling pretty bad. The “correct” way to play in PvE was to have your Paladin Tank make the entire party immune to damage for 20 seconds, then have your party run around helpless for 20-30 seconds while the Paladin gets his AP back. The power is so strong for such a long period of time, that we felt like we could use it to get through content that was much more difficult than we were geared for, by just playing in this relatively frustrating way. And of course, if you bring 2 Paladins… the old problem is back.

Shield of Faith started to feel like it wasn’t worth casting. While the effects are very powerful, the duration is so long that not being able to use another Daily power for such a long time made it feel like a very large commitment, and you couldn’t respond to situations – you couldn’t hold on to your Daily power for one of those “oh HAMSTER” moments.

Another problem, which is more esoteric, is that they didn’t feel like Neverwinter Daily Powers. Really long durations on Daily Powers means the decision process for which Dailies to slot, as well as which to use at a given time, are drastically different. How can someone ever compare the power levels of something like Divine Protector to Lay on Hands or Divine Judgement? Is there ever a realistic case for instantaneous damage over 20 seconds of virtual damage immunity for your whole party? Probably not a very good case, if any.

Internally, we looked at whether we should try to make either of these powers stay as a really long duration, with greatly reduced effects, or try to find a way to keep their effects near intact, with much shorter durations. We found that if we tried to make both of them last a long time, the end result was that both of these powers were really similar, and had the same net effect – even though the exact implementations were slightly different. So, we went with shortening their durations, as well as some targeted reductions in efficacy.

For Divine Protector, we looked at what the original intent of the power was – a really powerful “oh HAMSTER” button that could save your entire party if used properly. 20 seconds is just too long for the timing of when you cast it to matter, and using it properly is just plain old using it. So, we dropped the duration down a lot. Previously, it lasted 5 seconds for each rank of the power, 20 seconds in total. It now lasts 3 seconds at Rank 1, and gains 1 extra second for each rank – a total of 6 seconds at Rank 4. We also felt that there was absolutely zero risk in using the ability – reducing damage down by 80% before your own damage reduction kicks into play means that if the entire party is taking damage from splats, it’s the same net damage as you just standing in one and absorbing a whole bunch of it. We took that 80% reduction and made it into a 50% reduction. This means if only a handful of your party members need saving, you are doing the right thing. If the entire party stands in a dangerous splat while you are doing this – you might not survive it.

For Shield of Faith, the original intent was to be a buff that would take a dangerous situation and make it easier to heal through. As such, we first reduced the duration down from 24 seconds at max rank, to 12 seconds at max rank. Then we looked at the 2 buffs it gives – 50% damage prevention, and 20% increased healing. Damage prevention in large amounts can just lead to no real need for healing, and that isn’t what we’re looking for. So we dropped the damage prevention to 30%, and increased the healing bonus to 30%. This means more damage will get through while it’s up, but any healing will be able to help you through it even better.

The last piece of this particular puzzle was Gift of Haste on the Devoted Cleric. 5% AP every second for your entire party was just too much. Coupled with the above Paladin powers, it meant that most healing Clerics weren’t even playing a healer – they were solely important to give everyone AP. Keep casting HoTs on the whole party to make sure you are generating as much AP as possible, and any incidental trivial damage someone happens to take while Divine Protector was down for a second or two would just get taken care of by the HoTs that were already on them. What we ended up doing with Gift of Haste was changing it from an instantaneous AP gain to a 5 second buff that grants AP every second. Getting it more than once just refreshes the duration, instead of stacking up larger and larger amounts of AP gain. This means at best you are maintaining 1% AP gain per second for your party. Coupled with the changes to the Paladin powers, you might have to start caring about picking who you are healing with which powers, instead of just throwing HoTs out with little care as to who is getting healed by what.

amenar

What Else?

While doing these reviews, we felt a few other changes were needed that came to light during the process. Oathbound Paladins needed a few less-major changes.

• Heroism was another Daily power with a really long duration. While less powerful than Divine Protector or Shield of Faith, we felt like it was becoming the next must-use power due to the long duration. As such, we reduced its max duration to 10 seconds, down from 20 seconds.
  
• Aura of Vengeance had a weird bug where it counted as an At-Will power. This led to lots of weird proc interactions, so we fixed this.
  
• Echoes of Light was letting certain builds almost completely forget about the fact that powers have cooldowns. We changed it so that the Echoes of Light proc can only occur once every 15 seconds, but messed with the chance for it to proc. Previously, it maxed out at 5% and had an undocumented feature where that chance went up as you hit multiple targets. It now always has a 10% chance, regardless of how many targets you are hitting.
  

We also saw that Guardian Fighters were still a fair ways behind the Oathbound Paladin as a tank, even after these changes to the Paladin. As such, we decided to make a few tweaks to the Guardian Fighter, though these changes aren’t all we have planned to help them in the long run.

• Mark no longer roots you in place, and can be used while Blocking.
  
• Aggravating Strike and Shield Slam fell behind the damage curve after we increased the level cap to 70, so we changed their scaling slightly to bump them up.
  
• Crushing Surge was changed to heal on every hit, instead of only on the last hit. The last hit still heals for the same amount, and the earlier hits heal for less. Getting to the third hit of this combo is not a trivial thing to do as a Guardian Fighter, since you need to be blocking much of the time.
  
• Indomitable Strength got an added debuff component, lowering the targets damage for a while. This lets this power provide some tanking utility, reducing the damage you take as a tank, or reducing the damage your party is taking when you can’t tank the target.
  
• Most of their At-Will powers – Aggravating Strike, Shield Slam, Crushing Surge, Cleave, and Tide of Iron – had activation times reduced. This means you can cast them faster, with shorter times after activation before using your next power.
  

Thanks for listening! We make changes like these with the best of intent: to make the game we all love into a better experience for everyone. While there are big changes to these powers, and will create a large shift in the way top-end players do end-game content, we feel like these changes do make the game an overall better experience – leading to a healthier and more enjoyable, challenging experience for all.

This thread will be locked. Three separate feedback threads have been created, and you can find them here:

Lostmauth's Vengeance: arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1214508/lostmauths-vengeance-changes
Oathbound Paladin & Devoted Cleric: arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1214507/oathbound-paladin-devoted-cleric-changes
Guardian Fighter: arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1214506/guardian-fighter-changes