Official Feedback Thread: Weapon Enhancement Changes

treesclimber

They are dual sided enchantments, you hit fast, you debuff better your oponent but as consequence the damage provided by your weapon enchant damage will be lower, now that the enchantments scale up the 3% DR debuff from flaming comes nowhere close to the weapon damage applied by the counterpart on fast stacking situation, suming it up the DR debuff from flaming should be increased to match the weapon damage on slow attack, about plague fire it's very arguable as the enchantment provides damage for the team....

ruffneck

ghoulz66 said:

treesclimber said:

The problem is not the dot the problem, or not problem, is the stacking, many classes/playstiles will pass way over the 3 stacks those enchants have, but if you use for example on a DC. using blessings of battle, that is probably the slowest at-will in the game and astral shield in the rotation the hits will hit if not all praticly all.

Yeah, the problem WAS the DoT.

You call 400-1000 damage per second viable!? I never saw it stack beyond that.

Buffing that AoE sounds good on paper. But what we have here is a completely useless WE until you get to pure/trans to get that. The DoT needs a serious buff.

Why are all of these offensive enchants being made to perform so poorly for slow classes?

i would agree the dot would or could use some love,

Flaming:

tier 1 dot 1.5k per second for 6 seconds
Tier 2 dot 3k per second
Tier 3 dot 5k per second for 6 seconds

Plague: (as it has the debuff)

tier 1 dot 1k per second for 6 seconds
Tier 2 dot 2k per second
Tier 3 dot 3k per second for 6 seconds

ruffneck

rgutscheradev said:

Quick clarification:
Nothing is getting nerfed overall (compared to what's on live). It's just a smaller buff. Remember, none of this stuff is live yet. So if we buff Fey (say) by half as much as the other enchants, it's still getting a buff. Just a smaller one than the other enchants (because it already has other stuff going for it).

All of the enchants that convert from non-scaling to scaling damage will be getting a huge buff. The only question is how big? So any lowering of lightning or fey (compared to what's now on playtest) represents "smaller buff for these two than for the others", not an actual nerf (compared to what's on live).

Hi there @rgutscheradev

I know you have Buffed Barkshield however most Transcendent enchants have 2 parts / effects

Negation even has 3

Effect 1 - 20k Per charge and works better now as it auto refreshes every 6 seconds
Effect 2 - ?

Possible in the time we have to add a second effect?

1: Knock-back when all charges are expended?
2: Root for 1/2/3 seconds When all charges Expended?
3: HOT when all charges expended?

P.S also possible to change the animation of Shadowclad. to make it keep popping those cool Black spikes over the shield that pops up

P.P.S also possible to look at negations Animation the effect how it covers parts of the armour etc looks awful imho

thefabricant

Ok @rgutscheradev I checked closer, the Arc is scaling off of buffs, however it is not scaling off of Power or your attribute bonus.

rgutscheradev

OK thanks all for the clarification -- I will take another look at the arcs on Lightning. I had misunderstood and thought people were talking about the first hit.

Removing cooldowns: I'd rather buff the effects (like the x12 damage I did for the Flaming 20-sec proc) so that they are appropriate for the 20 second cooldown. There are enough frequent little procs in the Weapon Enchants that I don't want to add more. I think keeping the design intent of "big cool thing 20 seconds", but making it actually big and cool, will be the better path. Some of these may need to wait for the one-by-one passes, though

Oh, people have mentioned "hidden scaling", and it's quite true. There is some math that scales up the damage for slow attacks. This isn't a general part of the combat engine, but something that was specifically added for the weapon enchants. Each hit gives *either* the damage bonus stated in the tooltip, or a scaled-up damage if the attack is really slow (whichever is larger). If people are seeing "hidden scaling" on certain attacks, that is probably where it is coming from.

Flaming DoT being low: I'm a bit confused by this one. The base numbers on Flaming are 17% weapon damage plus 11% per DoT stack, and there are 3 stacks. So that's 33% total on the DoTs, which makes a total of 50% weapon damage base (all of it scaling). As far as raw damage goes, that's the most of the Weapon Enchants (of the ones that do damage directly like that). I agree the numbers *look* small in the combat log, because each stack of the dot lists separately (sorry about that -- I have no control over how things appear in the combat log, it's not a super-sophisticated system, although for the parsers that is probably just as well, it's hard to parse if it's doing lots of extra stuff). But the totals should be pretty high compared to the other WEs. (The only caveat is that you get the best benefit if your attack speed is around 1x/sec -- slower than that, and you can't keep up the DoT stacks, faster than that and you are "wasting" some DoT procs because enemies are often at max stacks when you hit them. For the truly leet, this can be mitigated somewhat by clever target rotation, but most people -- myself included -- can't really do this effectively.)

ghoulz66

rgutscheradev said:

OK thanks all for the clarification -- I will take another look at the arcs on Lightning. I had misunderstood and thought people were talking about the first hit.

Removing cooldowns: I'd rather buff the effects (like the x12 damage I did for the Flaming 20-sec proc) so that they are appropriate for the 20 second cooldown. There are enough frequent little procs in the Weapon Enchants that I don't want to add more. I think keeping the design intent of "big cool thing 20 seconds", but making it actually big and cool, will be the better path. Some of these may need to wait for the one-by-one passes, though

Oh, people have mentioned "hidden scaling", and it's quite true. There is some math that scales up the damage for slow attacks. This isn't a general part of the combat engine, but something that was specifically added for the weapon enchants. Each hit gives *either* the damage bonus stated in the tooltip, or a scaled-up damage if the attack is really slow (whichever is larger). If people are seeing "hidden scaling" on certain attacks, that is probably where it is coming from.

Flaming DoT being low: I'm a bit confused by this one. The base numbers on Flaming are 17% weapon damage plus 11% per DoT stack, and there are 3 stacks. So that's 33% total on the DoTs, which makes a total of 50% weapon damage base (all of it scaling). As far as raw damage goes, that's the most of the Weapon Enchants (of the ones that do damage directly like that). I agree the numbers *look* small in the combat log, because each stack of the dot lists separately (sorry about that -- I have no control over how things appear in the combat log, it's not a super-sophisticated system, although for the parsers that is probably just as well, it's hard to parse if it's doing lots of extra stuff). But the totals should be pretty high compared to the other WEs. (The only caveat is that you get the best benefit if your attack speed is around 1x/sec -- slower than that, and you can't keep up the DoT stacks, faster than that and you are "wasting" some DoT procs because enemies are often at max stacks when you hit them. For the truly leet, this can be mitigated somewhat by clever target rotation, but most people -- myself included -- can't really do this effectively.)

You have to take in account that it's a DoT. It's gated behind that. There are utility WEs that are yielding higher numbers, because most classes can get off more than one hit per second, even they are giving out superior damage.

The overall damage of this enchant is inferior to even the utility enchants. Someone already compared the total dps of various WEs and flaming was at the bottom.

This WE in this state won't even come close to being remotely similar to bilethorn or lightning.

That DoT needs at least tripled in damage. Fast classes can't exploit a DoT, and slower classes desperately need another option other than vorpal and feytouched.

kacsanever

@rgutscheradev there is something wrong w/ Flaming enchant. It seems it does not take Resistance Ignore into account (most of the time). Toon has RI: -54%; I did not use any DR debuff. Enemies were Berserkers in IWP.
Flaming effectiveness:

Lightning effectiveness:

Holy effectiveness:

Edit: figured out how to encapsulate image into spoiler

tripsofthrymr

@rgutscheradev thank you for the excellent communication. It's great to have a real dialog with a member of the development team about how game mechanics.

treesclimber

I was too rushed saying the mistake was in the burst i just assumed for the 0% but the problem is with the arc and nowhere:


2 logs for 2 targets, 2 logs for 1 target, 2 logs for 3 targets in this order.

The only problem that i could point out that can or not be a problem at all is on 2 target the intially hited target cannot be chained with and on 3 targets it can so i supose the target as a timer or a rule that is passed by the lightning flux(sound a bit weird ^^) that while 2 other targets are not chained he cannot be hit by that specific chain,

Passing to the flaming, there are some problems related with it, ice shard/wicked reminder (both sltealthed and unstealthed)/daring shout etc etc will proc enchantments multiple times so for example this



will stack imediatly 3 times, i tried the same thing with a almost instantaniously lashing blade, and the log grew 2 lines and lashing blade only procs the enchant once so these stacks are not special, just like others (there is a weird 1% weapon damage that is tiking along with the 11% on flaming), so the results of this enchantment (on preview now) are worse than the use of a terror that inspite of the aditional 1% dr debuff has a quite lower contribution from the weapon damage based damage, the increase on the aoe seems promissing but i dont know if enough to make justice to the enchantment in these cases, i would add a aditional condition of for example: on 100 stacks applied to any target the next attack will process the aoe. still keep the 20 seconds cooldown to be favourable to both cases of super fast stacking and slow stacking with timed aoe proc.

ghoulz66

Please, no additional CDs or other nonsense, just buff it for crying out loud. It's pretty obvious it needs one and a very serious buff. It doesn't compete with any of the other offensive WEs.

Do... some... damage every 20 seconds in a boss fight?

dupeks

tripsofthrymr said:

@rgutscheradev thank you for the excellent communication. It's great to have a real dialog with a member of the development team about how game mechanics.

100% agree thank you for taking the time to engage with the community @rgutscheradev (as well as for the fixed damage weapons)

sabre10

I don't have ACT loaded to my pc so am only able to look at the combat log and floaters so am a little unsure if theres something else going on, but I tested Bilethorn again using greater and transcendent. On neither do I see the DoT after 4 seconds. Would someone be able to verify that?

demonmonger

Bug: lightning chains on critical with multiple targets, all chains do not critically hit.

Same effect happens with other enchants.
Main target will critically hit but secondary targets are not consistant.

Bug: bilethorn is not respecting criticals. The tick damage done by this enchantment is not critical, even though the main attack was critical.


All enchantments are working in this manner. Main critical hit to primary target does not grant a critical chain to secondary and third targets hit in chain.

warpet

rgutscheradev said:

OK thanks all for the clarification -- I will take another look at the arcs on Lightning. I had misunderstood and thought people were talking about the first hit.

Removing cooldowns: I'd rather buff the effects (like the x12 damage I did for the Flaming 20-sec proc) so that they are appropriate for the 20 second cooldown. There are enough frequent little procs in the Weapon Enchants that I don't want to add more. I think keeping the design intent of "big cool thing 20 seconds", but making it actually big and cool, will be the better path. Some of these may need to wait for the one-by-one passes, though

Oh, people have mentioned "hidden scaling", and it's quite true. There is some math that scales up the damage for slow attacks. This isn't a general part of the combat engine, but something that was specifically added for the weapon enchants. Each hit gives *either* the damage bonus stated in the tooltip, or a scaled-up damage if the attack is really slow (whichever is larger). If people are seeing "hidden scaling" on certain attacks, that is probably where it is coming from.

Flaming DoT being low: I'm a bit confused by this one. The base numbers on Flaming are 17% weapon damage plus 11% per DoT stack, and there are 3 stacks. So that's 33% total on the DoTs, which makes a total of 50% weapon damage base (all of it scaling). As far as raw damage goes, that's the most of the Weapon Enchants (of the ones that do damage directly like that). I agree the numbers *look* small in the combat log, because each stack of the dot lists separately (sorry about that -- I have no control over how things appear in the combat log, it's not a super-sophisticated system, although for the parsers that is probably just as well, it's hard to parse if it's doing lots of extra stuff). But the totals should be pretty high compared to the other WEs. (The only caveat is that you get the best benefit if your attack speed is around 1x/sec -- slower than that, and you can't keep up the DoT stacks, faster than that and you are "wasting" some DoT procs because enemies are often at max stacks when you hit them. For the truly leet, this can be mitigated somewhat by clever target rotation, but most people -- myself included -- can't really do this effectively.)

tested trans flaming on my gwf and it was quite bad think it was aprox 13% of my dps and trans bile did not preform to great either it was doing aprox 19% and if we take in account planed nerf of trans bile it might become quite weak as well

beckylunatic

warpet said:

if we take in account planed nerf of trans bile

Where are you even getting this?

Unknown

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demonmonger

Damn it...
All 20 second cool down on enchantments should be removed

treesclimber

Wait.....preview wasn't updated yet, im curious to see how lightning arc will do after buffed, power alone can easly double damage without any party influence.

warpet

treesclimber said:

Wait.....preview wasn't updated yet, im curious to see how lightning arc will do after buffed, power alone can easly double damage without any party influence.

what do mean ?

warpet

kacsanever said:

@rgutscheradev there is something wrong w/ Flaming enchant. It seems it does not take Resistance Ignore into account (most of the time). Toon has RI: -54%; I did not use any DR debuff. Enemies were Berserkers in IWP.
Flaming effectiveness:


Lightning effectiveness:


Holy effectiveness:

similar problem has trans plaugefire to only at PF it is 69% effectiveness log here https://www.dropbox.com/s/ckfhaelq44l0jdn/plauge.png?dl=0

treesclimber

warpet said:

treesclimber said:

Wait.....preview wasn't updated yet, im curious to see how lightning arc will do after buffed, power alone can easly double damage without any party influence.

what do mean ?

This is not a reference to a bug, just everything melting but let's wait, maybe i'm wrong.

beckylunatic

defiantone99 said:

beckylunatic said:

warpet said:

if we take in account planed nerf of trans bile

Where are you even getting this?

* I tweaked the numbers down somewhat on Lightning, Feytouched, and Bilethorn second hit (details in patch notes). It should still be a net win for all of these, though. Reasoning: Lightning and Feytouched discussed above; Bilethorn second hit had very high base numbers to begin with, so once they started scaling it got pretty nuts, especially at Transcendent when it was an every-hit AoE. The overall damage on Bilethorn is still really good compared to the other enchants, since the second hit is very consistent. Note all of these number tweaks are just to the base damage, not to any of the "special effects", so the end result is still a pure power increase in every case (same "special effects", and a net increase in damage because of the scaling).

Thanks. I had read that and then forgotten it mentioned Bile. I do object on principle to calling it a nerf though, since should represent a net improvement over live.

ghoulz66

30% was high for the second hit? Guess will have to wait till it's patched. Will bilethorn buffed with scaling have the second hit around the original? That was 15% but it jump to around 30-40% on a decked out char. So we should expect the second hit to be similar?

thefabricant

Here is my write up about weapon enchantments.

Warning: The above link contains lots of maths, if you don't like maths, don't click on it.

Here is the spreadsheet with the values used for this write up.

Here is the spreadsheet that I derived these values from.

Credits:

@d66723225 Simplified the formulae and added illustrations for each equation.
@falkon84: Provided his own simplified version in addition to some tools.
@greyjay1: pointed out the formula had been simplified too far and was excluding Vorpal+Dread.
@micky1p00 Proofreading and giving some criticism on my approach, as well as suggesting ways to simplify the formulae. She also created a tool for the comparison.

I am not going to say which enchantment is best for CW, here are my tests, you can look at them and draw your own conclusions. When the changes to Bilethorn, Lightning and Feytouched go through, I will have to update all of those links.

What I will say is the following:

Lifedrinker, Holy Avenger and Terror are all objectively worse than at least 1 enchantment on the list of enchantments here. Therefor, these enchantments need to be buffed.

ghoulz66

thefabricant said:

Lifedrinker, Holy Avenger and Terror are all objectively worse than at least 1 enchantment on the list of enchantments here. Therefor, these enchantments need to be buffed.

Don't think as in damage buff. They are utility. Can't speak for lifedrinker, but terror and avenger need their buffs/debuff improved.

That 60 second CD kills avenger, and terror's debuff isn't enough.

I think terror should just be a small partywide debuff, as well as a small damage debuff that benefits the party.

thefabricant

ghoulz66 said:

thefabricant said:

Lifedrinker, Holy Avenger and Terror are all objectively worse than at least 1 enchantment on the list of enchantments here. Therefor, these enchantments need to be buffed.

Don't think as in damage buff. They are utility. Can't speak for lifedrinker, but terror and avenger need their buffs/debuff improved.

That 60 second CD kills avenger, and terror's debuff isn't enough.

I think terror should just be a small partywide debuff, as well as a small damage debuff that benefits the party.

I listed PF because it is the best performing utility enchant for CW. Those 3 enchants listed are literally just worse, in 1 way or another, than at least 1 of the enchants on my list. Lifedrinker's buff is completely meh.

Unknown

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chemodan007

How fast ticking DoT of Flaming? DoT of Flaming stack?
I think that in a real fight DoT will not have time to tick to the end.
UPD.
OK, Now I know that DoT stack. So Flaming is too strong.

ghoulz66

defiantone99 said:

So, Flaming is over-performing, but Lightning is getting nerfed?

I call absolute BS on that idea. Test that pile of garbage on some mobs vs any other offensive enchant and see the difference.

chemodan007

@thefabricant
Have you tested WE on the mobs 73lvl? They do 25% less damage vs 73lvl?