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How buffs and debuffs stacking slowly klls the (fun/any challenge in the) game.
diogene0
Member Posts: 2,894 Arc User
While it's been extremely fun for a few weeks, it's time that someone who's played with great players using coockie cutter builds and rotations spills the beans and just reveal to anyone how endgame content is completely FUBAR because of damage buffs stacking. Few elements in this post are new, but combining all of them at once in one party makes the game completely unchallenging, not fun to play, to the point that I feel no harder content could ever change that if the devs ever plan to make harder content "normal" parties and guild can play with non cookie cutter builds.
Let me first remind everyone how buffs and debuffs work in this game. Most tooltips are wrong or inaccurate. When you read "defense reduction", or "effects damage mitigation", it makes no difference. Every single debuff in game is actually a straight damage increase, which has often nothing to do with what the tooltip says. When you see a debuff icon on a NPC (or on a player), it means that damage on this target will be increased by n%. Plain and simple. Nothing to do with defense or current damage mitigation %.
In this game, since most if not all debuffs are just damage multipliers, the more debuffs you stack, the more the final damage multiplier is big. Which means that when you debuff a target by 30% and by 15%, most of the times, the damage won't be additive but multiplicative. In this case, it means the final damage multiplier from debuffs is 1.3 x 1.15 = 1.495, and not 1.45 as most of us would expect it. I have been able to check myself that for of the CW debuffs. For obvious reasons, i haven't been able to finely test it in a 5 man party but I'm almost convinced that all debuffs are multiplicatives, not just the CW ones.
Now let's gather our cookie cutter party: 1 DC, 2 CWs, 1 GWF and 1 GF.
The cleric will use the following feats and spells: Linked spirit, rising hope (feats), divine glow, hallowed ground. He will also use a High prophet set, for an additional 30% damage buff mark on mobs. With linked spirit and rising hope, an ok endgame cleric can share 2k power/1.5k crit, maybe some arpen, with the rest of the team, and with a ~60% uptime on live currently. It should be less on the test server once sunburst is fixed, but that's still a major damage increase.
The cleric spells and set will increase damage by: 30% (high prophet), 2 x 15% (divine mode divine glow), 20% (hallowed ground). Hallowed ground has quite an important downtime but it's only useful for spike damage, during big mobs pulls. So, the spike damage increase from the cleric will be: 1.3 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.20 =~ 2. Yes, that cleric is doubling the team's damage, and he's not even using a terror or plaguefire enchantment yet. Let's add a terror (9% damage increase per stack, I'm just usuing my memory so I might be wrong here, so please correct me if it is): 2 x 1.09^3 = 2.59. Now, that's better. A 2.59 damage multiplier from one guy. If for some reason cleric debuffs don't stack that's still over 2.5x more damage.
Let's add one GF to the equation. This guy will use the AP gain buff spell to help the cleric spamming hallowed ground. He will also use a Knight captain set, to give his party members +60% power each. Combined with linked spirit, party members will get insane power levels.
Here are my own stats, using the lowbie High prophet set. Linked spirit, rising hope & knight captain active:
13k power. Not bad. Thank you, tank. Now let me just say that i've been able, with that amount of power, to buff a GWF to 16k+ power. With the current deep gash buggy mechanics, bleed has been quite insane.
Let's add two wizards to that party. Both will use the same build, and at least one of them will use the high vizier set, which is actually a straight +10% damage buff per set bonus stack on each mob. Obviously the tooltip is wrong.
Both wizards will use the following feats: malevolent surge (free +30% damage increase for themselves with no downtime when fighting), frozen power transfer (+5% damage buff), transcended master (+15% more damage for shard, as if this spells needed that buff), elemental empowerment (+10% damage buff on all targets shard and steal time hit, with an average 50% uptime), and of course asailing force (+15% more damage for everyone because YOLO). The party will deal an additional: 1.3 x 1.10 x 1.15 =~ 1.65 more damage per storm wizard. We're not counting the +6% damge buff from smolder, yes, it works, but storm spell is better for paingiver CW builds and that's what people use anyway.
That makes a 3.3 damage increase for the party with both wizards. These wizards will of course use the best arcane spell to spread debuffs on everything, which is shard of endless avalanche. This 3.3 damage multiplier doesn't include the self buffs feats provide.
Now let's add a GWF. He will use deep gash (feat) student of the sword (feat), an avatar of war set (damage buff for himself), he could also use trample the fallen (iron vanguard self buff) or some other feats and spell I don't know well since I don't play this class. He will add an additional 1.45 damage buff to the party with no downtime because his crit chance is likely very high - probably over 40%.
While I am aware of the fact that most of these buffs can't have a 100% uptime on every single mobs, most of them are easy to apply and don't require suboptimal spells rotations or weird stuff slowing the party down. of course, in a boss fight situation, though, this NPC will likely have all of the damage buff markers on him and everyone will probably be stay with an optimal amount of self buffs stacks.
So far, our party may apply the following damage multiplier on NPCs: 2.59 x 1.65 x 1.65 x 1.45 =~10. Yes, that right, all spells will do up to 10 times more damage to NPCs. This isn't even crit damage, that's merely base damage. We didn't consider the power buffs from the GF or the linked spirit buffs, and of course, both wizards will be at max malevolent surge stacks when required. Most of the times, a x6-7 party damage multiplier is pretty easy to maintain. Self buffs should have an optimal uptime if players know their characters.
Now, let me translate this into in-game effects:
- the spider queen die in under 30s, and didn't have time to transform.
- I (CW) have seen 70k crit shard hits (base damage around 3k hit per target, just as a reminder). Of course this was on one mob, not the total damage from shard. 50k invidivual crit hits are definitely not rare.
- temple of the spider legit full clear record time: 12 minutes. The party composition wasn't even ideal, and I didn't even use my High prophet set. Less than 15 minutes is now slow when everyone uses good cookie cutter debuff stacking builds.
- we spend a lot more time walking in dungeons than killing stuff (except in spider temple maybe).
Well, while it's been fun for a few weeks, it's now just boring. Content isn't even remotely challenging. 4 npc groups pulls die in no time. Considering that mobs die before they can cast the dangerous aoe, and considering bosses aren't bosses anymore because minions take longer to kill due to the fact they're spread accross the arenas, sometimes, I can confidently say that endgame content is FUBAR if the debuff mechanics have to remain the same. No harder content can fix a straight +10x damage increase, unless the content is so hard, and mobs have so much HPs that the average pug group can't even complete the easiest of the T3 dungeons some players are advocating for. T3 won't fix anything from an endgame standpoint. The only way to make T3 interesting for everyone (if such content will ever be released) is to minimize the gap between "average" and "cookie cutter" parties, without nullifying it.
Here are some possible fixes:
- diminishing return on damage buffs, with a hard cap.
- fixing most debuffs and buffs mechanics, so that they do what the tooltip says.
- debuffs aren't multiplicatives anymore.
- a tenacity stat added to mobs.
- and probably some different stuff.
Now I know that kind of post may create a lot of hate from people benefiting from these IMO broken game mechanics, because some will think that their character's progression is never fast enough and that they "need" to run castle never in under 30-35 minutes to be competitive (with who?) but at some point, something should be done, because an action based game like this one offering zero challenge is probably not healthy on the long run.
Let me first remind everyone how buffs and debuffs work in this game. Most tooltips are wrong or inaccurate. When you read "defense reduction", or "effects damage mitigation", it makes no difference. Every single debuff in game is actually a straight damage increase, which has often nothing to do with what the tooltip says. When you see a debuff icon on a NPC (or on a player), it means that damage on this target will be increased by n%. Plain and simple. Nothing to do with defense or current damage mitigation %.
In this game, since most if not all debuffs are just damage multipliers, the more debuffs you stack, the more the final damage multiplier is big. Which means that when you debuff a target by 30% and by 15%, most of the times, the damage won't be additive but multiplicative. In this case, it means the final damage multiplier from debuffs is 1.3 x 1.15 = 1.495, and not 1.45 as most of us would expect it. I have been able to check myself that for of the CW debuffs. For obvious reasons, i haven't been able to finely test it in a 5 man party but I'm almost convinced that all debuffs are multiplicatives, not just the CW ones.
Now let's gather our cookie cutter party: 1 DC, 2 CWs, 1 GWF and 1 GF.
The cleric will use the following feats and spells: Linked spirit, rising hope (feats), divine glow, hallowed ground. He will also use a High prophet set, for an additional 30% damage buff mark on mobs. With linked spirit and rising hope, an ok endgame cleric can share 2k power/1.5k crit, maybe some arpen, with the rest of the team, and with a ~60% uptime on live currently. It should be less on the test server once sunburst is fixed, but that's still a major damage increase.
The cleric spells and set will increase damage by: 30% (high prophet), 2 x 15% (divine mode divine glow), 20% (hallowed ground). Hallowed ground has quite an important downtime but it's only useful for spike damage, during big mobs pulls. So, the spike damage increase from the cleric will be: 1.3 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.20 =~ 2. Yes, that cleric is doubling the team's damage, and he's not even using a terror or plaguefire enchantment yet. Let's add a terror (9% damage increase per stack, I'm just usuing my memory so I might be wrong here, so please correct me if it is): 2 x 1.09^3 = 2.59. Now, that's better. A 2.59 damage multiplier from one guy. If for some reason cleric debuffs don't stack that's still over 2.5x more damage.
Let's add one GF to the equation. This guy will use the AP gain buff spell to help the cleric spamming hallowed ground. He will also use a Knight captain set, to give his party members +60% power each. Combined with linked spirit, party members will get insane power levels.
Here are my own stats, using the lowbie High prophet set. Linked spirit, rising hope & knight captain active:
13k power. Not bad. Thank you, tank. Now let me just say that i've been able, with that amount of power, to buff a GWF to 16k+ power. With the current deep gash buggy mechanics, bleed has been quite insane.
Let's add two wizards to that party. Both will use the same build, and at least one of them will use the high vizier set, which is actually a straight +10% damage buff per set bonus stack on each mob. Obviously the tooltip is wrong.
Both wizards will use the following feats: malevolent surge (free +30% damage increase for themselves with no downtime when fighting), frozen power transfer (+5% damage buff), transcended master (+15% more damage for shard, as if this spells needed that buff), elemental empowerment (+10% damage buff on all targets shard and steal time hit, with an average 50% uptime), and of course asailing force (+15% more damage for everyone because YOLO). The party will deal an additional: 1.3 x 1.10 x 1.15 =~ 1.65 more damage per storm wizard. We're not counting the +6% damge buff from smolder, yes, it works, but storm spell is better for paingiver CW builds and that's what people use anyway.
That makes a 3.3 damage increase for the party with both wizards. These wizards will of course use the best arcane spell to spread debuffs on everything, which is shard of endless avalanche. This 3.3 damage multiplier doesn't include the self buffs feats provide.
Now let's add a GWF. He will use deep gash (feat) student of the sword (feat), an avatar of war set (damage buff for himself), he could also use trample the fallen (iron vanguard self buff) or some other feats and spell I don't know well since I don't play this class. He will add an additional 1.45 damage buff to the party with no downtime because his crit chance is likely very high - probably over 40%.
While I am aware of the fact that most of these buffs can't have a 100% uptime on every single mobs, most of them are easy to apply and don't require suboptimal spells rotations or weird stuff slowing the party down. of course, in a boss fight situation, though, this NPC will likely have all of the damage buff markers on him and everyone will probably be stay with an optimal amount of self buffs stacks.
So far, our party may apply the following damage multiplier on NPCs: 2.59 x 1.65 x 1.65 x 1.45 =~10. Yes, that right, all spells will do up to 10 times more damage to NPCs. This isn't even crit damage, that's merely base damage. We didn't consider the power buffs from the GF or the linked spirit buffs, and of course, both wizards will be at max malevolent surge stacks when required. Most of the times, a x6-7 party damage multiplier is pretty easy to maintain. Self buffs should have an optimal uptime if players know their characters.
Now, let me translate this into in-game effects:
- the spider queen die in under 30s, and didn't have time to transform.
- I (CW) have seen 70k crit shard hits (base damage around 3k hit per target, just as a reminder). Of course this was on one mob, not the total damage from shard. 50k invidivual crit hits are definitely not rare.
- temple of the spider legit full clear record time: 12 minutes. The party composition wasn't even ideal, and I didn't even use my High prophet set. Less than 15 minutes is now slow when everyone uses good cookie cutter debuff stacking builds.
- we spend a lot more time walking in dungeons than killing stuff (except in spider temple maybe).
Well, while it's been fun for a few weeks, it's now just boring. Content isn't even remotely challenging. 4 npc groups pulls die in no time. Considering that mobs die before they can cast the dangerous aoe, and considering bosses aren't bosses anymore because minions take longer to kill due to the fact they're spread accross the arenas, sometimes, I can confidently say that endgame content is FUBAR if the debuff mechanics have to remain the same. No harder content can fix a straight +10x damage increase, unless the content is so hard, and mobs have so much HPs that the average pug group can't even complete the easiest of the T3 dungeons some players are advocating for. T3 won't fix anything from an endgame standpoint. The only way to make T3 interesting for everyone (if such content will ever be released) is to minimize the gap between "average" and "cookie cutter" parties, without nullifying it.
Here are some possible fixes:
- diminishing return on damage buffs, with a hard cap.
- fixing most debuffs and buffs mechanics, so that they do what the tooltip says.
- debuffs aren't multiplicatives anymore.
- a tenacity stat added to mobs.
- and probably some different stuff.
Now I know that kind of post may create a lot of hate from people benefiting from these IMO broken game mechanics, because some will think that their character's progression is never fast enough and that they "need" to run castle never in under 30-35 minutes to be competitive (with who?) but at some point, something should be done, because an action based game like this one offering zero challenge is probably not healthy on the long run.
Post edited by diogene0 on
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I really enjoy this game and will carry on playing but I must add as a general notice, without going into any detail. This isn't even remotely the worst of the many many things that makes endgame or any content to be honest really easy. Again, no intention on debating this or dropping hints, it's against forum rules if anything else, I will slightly contradict the rule breaking though by merely staying something a lot of people would understand. Certain people really need to pull their finger out, be more forthcoming with your player base and tackle stuff head on with an immediate and direct approach.
I'll make you a deal.
You offer me sweet loot, r10 enchants, perfects, tier 3 ubergear etc. - dropping from bosses. Drop rates - like in WoW - from 1% something legendary, to 20-30% class epics. No BLUE DROPS BS. No R4s and R3s insults.
And then make boss fights TRULY challenging, by adding more phases, and more mechanics, and more challenge. I wanna see epic boss of 15 mins fight to make my hands hurt on the keyboard.
TLDR:
Bad rewards - easy content
Good rewards - hard content
Also there's a guy that opened a channel with 9K max GS participation. Feel free to undress chars and run CN or whatever at 9 GS if this is what you want, I'm sure it will make the game more of a challenge.
Or just PvP. The PMvsPM channel is dead almost 90% of the time cause few want to run suicidal matches against full R10/emblems people playing together for months. Pretty sure you will find playing against them MOST CHALLENGING, even with the OP debuff stacking
Yeah it has no target cap.
100k x as many mobs as the teams hp allow us to pull, and given how tanky everyone is now, that's basically until the dungeon forces us to click on something like a door thus forcing us to stop to kill the trash.
Oh look, overgeared guys'r melting 1 year old content. Let's increase difficulty of it to give new players even less chances to play this game.
Here, have a cookie.
For a lot of players ToS is a hard dungeon due to the high DPS demand.
If you have no more challenges and you refuse to seek new ones don't expect the dev's to make a dungeon for the 0.5% totally over geared people that can match your god-like abilities. I hope they sooner care about the current game play (exploit) issues than to nerf everything just so you can get a challenge.
Solo-queue and help some new 60's get gear, don't run with your 17k GWF/CW/DC friends to find a challenge.
With your demand you only make dungeons harder for 99% of the players.
It still is fun for me. It is not boring at all. Content is challenging, sometimes very challenging. 2 NPC groups pull can kill 1 or 2 of my party, 3rd group may result in a wipe.
This would be nice.
Before you make a thread like this, please consider the whole playerbase who's not uberly geared yet. Thanks.
And if you want your suggestion to go through, like what pers3phone has posted,
Make the dungeons more rewarding, not drop ENCHANTMENTS APPROPRIATE FOR OUR LEVEL.
PS: all this should be documented on wiki and in tooltips so people know what skills and feats REALLY do...
I don't want to offend you, but sometimes if it gets boring, maybe it is time to move on and seek other challenges?
Of course, you also have the challenge to convince the product manager of PWE to create harder encounters for you.
In my parties we regularly wipe at the end boss at least once, sometimes we even call it a day after enough wipes (10+) and try again another day.
Here, have a cookie.
For a lot of players ToS is a hard dungeon due to the high DPS demand.
If you have no more challenges and you refuse to seek new ones don't expect the dev's to make a dungeon for the 0.5% totally over geared people that can match your god-like abilities. I hope they sooner care about the current game play (exploit) issues than to nerf everything just so you can get a challenge.
Solo-queue and help some new 60's get gear, don't run with your 17k GWF/CW/DC friends to find a challenge.
With your demand you only make dungeons harder for 99% of the players."
was going to say the SAME thing. but I really understand the problem. you invested in your character, exceeded the capacity of the game and now wants a challenge ... my suggestion would be the creation of a parallel event called "impossible dungeons" which would be the same thing, only enemies would be at lvl 100 or any something else.
could be an event that occurs parallel to the time of the foundry. we could have a daily dd and this would be the lord november / rhix reward.
My suggestions to you are : roll and play another char if you like the game; wait for new content, the game is 1 less than year old; stop playing so much because you overgeared.
There has to be a "top of the ladder".
You are there.
Be happy! You beat the game!
Now I just wonder how this work in PVP (rofl)
A) massively overgeared, and
It's a case of "we now CAN faceroll all content", rather than "it is impossible for us NOT to faceroll all content".
You could still take sub-optimal parties, play with different rotations, use different armour sets, etc. If none of these appeal, then yes: maybe you've just broken the game for yourself. If the fun was in working out how to faceroll content, then goal accomplished, achievement get! Time for new game?
If the game itself is still fun, then see above regarding sub-optimal parties, or hell, reroll. Try a character you don't usually go for?
In general, though, I think the devs are starting to learn how to write better boss mechanics: VT for instance is less about "melting boss instantly" and more about team coordination. Ok, yes, if you can melt her REALLY fast then handling caskets is less important (plus you can probably just melt the wights too), but it's still a step in the right direction.
Second, to people who are yelling uber geared - everybody will get there at some point and will have the same problems. Also, running with sub-optimal builds/equip? What's the point if you're not actually trying to improve your char all the time? I don't think people grind dungeons because they enyoy grinding dungeons - they do it to get better gear!
Third - this game has a problem of lack of end of game content. Anyone stating otherwise is deluded. PvP is being improved, wil lsee what happens but we need more maps and modes. For the dungeons - I would love to see a procedurally generated dungeon that scales based on the player's who enter it. That though would require quire some work and inventive and I'm honestly afraid will have to look elsewhere for that. There are no new ideas in NWN and that makes you realise that however is making it just improves upon the existing and does not really have much immagination or dares to experiment. My guess is next module will really show if this game can keep afloat in the face of the competition (imminent and massive).
Look, I am on one side of the fence, making a hole through it and I have took a peek at the other side. And I can totally see both sides of the argument.
On one side, I totally get what the OP is saying. I have been at parties where the damage multiplying was so insane trash simply seemed to vaporize. As the GF, I must say that I felt I was more of a companion than anything else. It didn't really matter if I tanked or not, because there was nothing to tank and everything died before CC expired. We did 3 runs in DK, and the only reason we failed to do a 4th one was the queue not working and robbing us around 3 minutes.
Yes, that absolutely was not a challenge. It was a ROFLstomp.
But I can assure you, it is often NOT like this. Most parties do not have such a well-tuned machinery, and at those, you struggle. So, I can also see why most players are infuriated at the idea of introducing changes that would make the dungeons more challenging. If you had suggested that 1 month ago I'd have probably flamed you.
In the end, the origin of all these discrepancies is clear, inescapable, and obvious to a 10 year-old:
There is content that some people are running with 16K + Stone + Perfect enchantments, where others are running at 10K + Green companions + Lesser enchantments. And the thing is, the content is the same, same number of enemies, same mechanics, same damage, same HP. Yes, there are ways to mitigate the difference, making the fights more about skill than gear, by using some clever mechanics (Hello, Kel Thuzad Ice cubes. Hello, Prince's Dark Nova. Hello, Saphiron ice cubes). But let's face it, the game, mechanic-wise, is simply not there yet. And even if it was, the effect is still fairly limited.
The solution? Obviously, special challenges for greatly geared people, so they can have their Xtreme challenge while the common mortal progresses through T2. Of course, give them nice rewards: Bragging rights, uber-cool skins, Titles, achievements, and some BoA goodies (So that they can use it in alters if so they please, but do not harm the market).
A single size does not fit all, plain and simple.
You can't bypass insane DMG with mechanics. They will just do not work. Or eventually will extend battle a bit more. It's not normal to can to stack buffs/debuffs up to 10x more DMG. IMO 2-3x is far enough.
Anyway this was a problem in CoH/V as well, buffs/debuffs/damage was the trinity of that game. Content got easy. New content was hard for 2 minutes due to unfamiliar with it then it was just faceroll.
For a challenge, queue with less people. Who said you need 5 people to play D&D?
You are against someone who said that there is a problem?
Maybe is better to want the problem to be fixed - no ?
Who said that you need less than 5 ppl to play D&D ?
(from chest): some seals that you dont need, 1 piece of shard that you dont need, 1 epic item that you probably dont need(aside from offhand and mainhand- in VT)
(from bosses): some seals that you dont need, 1 piece of shard that you dont need, a blue item that you wont even bother rolling need/greed, and sometimes a fragment and/or artifact that will drop once in your lifetime.
you make this dungeons harder, you'll make them trash......just like epic dread vault..... lol
theres a reason why CN is the most popular dungeon, its because its the most REWARDING one and also not everyone can finish it.
making things harder while loots remain like trash will probably make things worse
well if you wanted a challenge why not do a dungeon with 4 rangers in your DC?
I can fix your problem easily. Just PUG dungeons from now on. Sure, its easy to burn through a dungeon with a team of players with the best build/best gear and that all know the strategy for running each dungeon. Which is why I say try running epic dungeons with PUGs and you'll see just how challenging these dungeons can be. It's a world of difference when you're running a dungeon with players that are poorly geared, poorly built and run every dungeon the exact same way because, you know, "that's how I did it in the other dungeon". I run the DV daily almost every day with PUGs and even with such a simple dungeon its rare to actually start attacking the last boss with all 5 team members, normally 1 or 2 die just trying to get to the back platform.
I understand your frustration. You would rather run dungeons with friends/guildies but at the same time no one forced you use a cookie cutter build. You made that choice because you wanted to be able to easily beat the dungeons. You are part of the blame here, it's like you're mad because you rushed to the top of the mountain only to find there is no where else to go.
If they don't soften that gap a bit, they will indeed have to make impossible content for people who invest a bit of money or time in their chars, and I'm not sure Cryptic or PWE want to make content that only 10-15% of the playerbase will ever win. I could be wrong, but I really doubt this could ever happen.
Yes I'm working on one other game-breaking alt for now, thanks.
But again this post has little to do about me. It's more about game mechanics in need of improvement.
*cough* You're talking about 120k ice knives on valindra? :rolleyes: *cough*
Dude, that's what the game is about: farm or pay for a better character. Am I the one to blame if it's the sole purpose of this game? I won't answer such comments ("ungear", "it's your fault", "you're the one to blame for doing what the game is about") in the future, this condescending tone is clearly disrespectful.
actually 500k+ ice knives. won't get into detail
The laser beam is arcane, so it works for elemental empowerment... I guess it has something to do with 3 wizards with the laser beam on mastery. Yes in VT that's insane.
So, no, T2 dungeons aren't too easy (and the easier ones are also very lengthy) if done with an "average" party.
half doesn't won't to understand.
Capping debuffs/buffs or DRs on debuffs wouldn't affect people with bad gear or
bad builds and skill selections. They don't profit from them anyway. And it wouldn't
affect PUGs with suboptimal group composition either. They never come to stack
buffs/debuffs high enough for that. The ones that would be affected are those
DC/3*CWs/GWFs groups that can blast through the content. And that would
be a good thing.