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Piercing Damage and Flat Damage Reduction
arbitrarity
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 96 Arc User
Two things in PvP seem to me poorly thought out, in that they are seemingly unintentionally very effective/balanced for PvP and worthless in PvE. These are "untaxed" piercing damage (that is unaffected by target mitigation) and flat damage reduction effects.
There are two significant sources of "untaxed" piercing damage, a mostly ignored one, and two relatively minor ones. These are Shocking Execution, and Piercing Blades, along with Assailing Force, Oppressive Darkness and Longshot. These abilities/feats/features are mostly fairly weak in PvE, where mitigation is irrelevant, but disproportionately powerful in PvP (Longshot and Oppressive Darkness aren't really good either way). In order to improve these abilities for PvE and weaken them somewhat in PvP, I would suggest roughly quadrupling their damage (value subject to balancing), and removing the piercing feature, allowing the abilities to be affected by mitigation and deflect. This may require a bit of rearrangement of damage with regards to Piercing Blades, since having a feat that says "increase melee damage by 40/80/120/160/200%" seems a mite silly (but oddly, not overpowered, since Combat HR deals a pitiful amount of melee damage to single targets in PvE, and still fares poorly compared to GWF in AOE)
This would leave all sources of piercing damage effectively taxed by damage reduction, that is, Shadow of Demise, in place, while significantly improving the abilities in PvE, plus weakening them in PvP, given that everyone geared tends to be running around with 80%+ effective mitigation once you factor in deflection.
Secondly, flat damage reduction. There are two such effects in the game, Cold Shoulder, and Astral Shield. These effects disproportionately affect low-damage high-frequency attacks, which tends to make them quite useless in PvE, but absurdly strong in PvP. These should probably be changed to be %damage reduction, similar to Guardian Fighter block (multiplicative with all existing sources) or deflection. 15% for Cold Shoulder and 20/40/60% for Astral Shield seem like good values, personally. An alternative would be to cap the damage reduction per second, or have the reduction effect trigger only once every second (or fraction thereof). Both these are basically as effective as pre-nerf Emblem of the Seldarine, and that was a bad time all around.
I have a lot of other suggestions for areas where the math in this game seems weird or inconsistent, but those are the two that stand out the most as being of interest to dedicated PvP players. The next suggestion I have of relevance to PvP players is probably tenacity base values/scaling, then maybe deflect severity.
There are two significant sources of "untaxed" piercing damage, a mostly ignored one, and two relatively minor ones. These are Shocking Execution, and Piercing Blades, along with Assailing Force, Oppressive Darkness and Longshot. These abilities/feats/features are mostly fairly weak in PvE, where mitigation is irrelevant, but disproportionately powerful in PvP (Longshot and Oppressive Darkness aren't really good either way). In order to improve these abilities for PvE and weaken them somewhat in PvP, I would suggest roughly quadrupling their damage (value subject to balancing), and removing the piercing feature, allowing the abilities to be affected by mitigation and deflect. This may require a bit of rearrangement of damage with regards to Piercing Blades, since having a feat that says "increase melee damage by 40/80/120/160/200%" seems a mite silly (but oddly, not overpowered, since Combat HR deals a pitiful amount of melee damage to single targets in PvE, and still fares poorly compared to GWF in AOE)
This would leave all sources of piercing damage effectively taxed by damage reduction, that is, Shadow of Demise, in place, while significantly improving the abilities in PvE, plus weakening them in PvP, given that everyone geared tends to be running around with 80%+ effective mitigation once you factor in deflection.
Secondly, flat damage reduction. There are two such effects in the game, Cold Shoulder, and Astral Shield. These effects disproportionately affect low-damage high-frequency attacks, which tends to make them quite useless in PvE, but absurdly strong in PvP. These should probably be changed to be %damage reduction, similar to Guardian Fighter block (multiplicative with all existing sources) or deflection. 15% for Cold Shoulder and 20/40/60% for Astral Shield seem like good values, personally. An alternative would be to cap the damage reduction per second, or have the reduction effect trigger only once every second (or fraction thereof). Both these are basically as effective as pre-nerf Emblem of the Seldarine, and that was a bad time all around.
I have a lot of other suggestions for areas where the math in this game seems weird or inconsistent, but those are the two that stand out the most as being of interest to dedicated PvP players. The next suggestion I have of relevance to PvP players is probably tenacity base values/scaling, then maybe deflect severity.
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Comments
I'd like to add that imo, nothing unmitigatable should exist in pvp. It's an awful way to "balance" classes.
And the huge damage immunity field any decent cleric can spam over and over again is ridiculous. High % reduction, fine, but complete immunity for the entire party, until those who weren't lucky enough to get a healer is dead? No thanks.
With the piercing damage, i think i'ts good, in most of the games that i have played, theres a class called something like "Tank Piercing", the entire class is all about countering tanks. Sadly in neverwinter there are not too much pve foes who need to be piercied, you just stack 60% RI, and you are good to go, piercing damage is only usefull against those spinning white dragon cultist who deflect all damage.
Balancing does not mean damage or survival equality. It means your class should do what is expected of it, when compared to other classes. Even in PVP.
Like in some many games out there today Dual Spec would alleviate or even fix some parts of this "balancing problem".
As for now it seems the devs dont want to make it easier for them or us.