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Mod 16 stat overhaul a game killer?
zimxero
Member Posts: 876 Arc User
Mod 16 (in work) proposes to create stats and anti-stats. In addition, it will remove Recovery and Lifesteal. IMO, the resultant system is a game killer, so I am writing this to explain. I don't want my favorite MMO to go down into a black hole. There are 3 big elements to the change:
1) Recovery removed. First, I'd like to point out Recovery is a stat seen in few other games. It adds character to the stat system. You cannot find a guide telling you how much Recovery to have because the optimal amount is unique to each build and playstyle. The developers want to eliminate the guesswork required when downscaling stats to lower level dungeons or hard modes. They are creating a system that supposedly wont need rebalance as players gain more and more 'stats' from future mods. Recovery doesn't fit this model. We cant have everyone running around five years from now with 1 second encounter times. In addition, the developers have stated that action gain is already way too high.
2) Lifesteal removed. Development wants to remove Lifesteal because it provides such a massive healing amount that players with lifesteal are either 100% health... or are dead.
3) An anti-stat added for Critical and for Deflect, similar to the way Armor Penetration works today against defense. On the surface this sound pretty cool,.. more variety and counters that might revitalize PvP. Let's look deeper for a moment:
All of our stats in PvE are 'positive' effect stats. Even armor penetration is a positive effect stat because we know how much defense the enemy has for us to penetrate. In PvP... armor penetration acts as an anti-stat to defense. You never know if an enemy is packing AP.. or how much. Not only that, AP is cheap as dirt at 100 stat points to eliminate 400 stat points of defense. This leads to defense being worthless in PvP except for a super-tank. The problem with Anti-stats is that it devalues the stat it works against. Critical, deflect, defense, and their counters are a total gamble... they might not add anything at all to your power. Because of this, players will put their stat points into Health and Power, because no matter what your enemies stats are, you will gain from having more health and more power.
My suggestions for solving the developer's problems without introducing stat negation:
1) Recovery: Up the cost of 1% recovery from 200 to 400 stat points. Reduce the AP gain per 1% recovery from .5% down to .25%.
2) Lifesteal: Decrease the Lifesteal severity from 100% base default down to 25% base default. This makes it so that if you successfully lifesteal on a hit which deals 200,000 damage, you will gain 50,000 healing instead of 200,000 healing.
3) Accuracy & Critical Resistance: Introduce these as secondary stats, softcapped like IHB, control, control resist, stamina gain, etc. This will add flavor to the game, and adds only a limited 'gamble range'. Players may want to bring their crit up a little over 100%.
4) Armor Penetration: In PvP, armor penetration should be reduced to 20% effect, but work off of the capped defense number...
PvP example) A player with 16,000 Armor Penetration points versus a player with 48,000 defense. In our system this would be 160% AP versus 120% Defense (capped at 80%) The defender would resist 120% - 160% = No damage resisted. Using a 20% versus the cap system... the defender would have 80% defense minus 20% armor penetration = 60% of the damage resisted.
In summary, I believe the new stat system will be 'vanilla' and lack any 'character'. It will not matter to players what stats they have and dont have, aside from the fact that Health and Power will be valued slightly more than the others. Players will raise their stats evenly to match the monster stats they are fighting in PvE. No choice, no room for uniqueness. In PvP, players will stack their defense into one attribute and their offense into as much power as they can.
About me: I have played Neverwinter for one year. It took 8 months to bring my first character, a GWF to endgame. Once there I decided I liked an encounter-based build even though the meta was At-Will spamming. I decided to trash that character and created a CW which did what I liked.. it was encounter heavy. Ive been playing my CW for 4 months and am reaching end-game. Thousands of dollars and thousands of hours invested so far. I've logged almost 20,000 hours playing GuildWars, Uncharted Waters Online, World of Warships, and now Neverwinter.
1) Recovery removed. First, I'd like to point out Recovery is a stat seen in few other games. It adds character to the stat system. You cannot find a guide telling you how much Recovery to have because the optimal amount is unique to each build and playstyle. The developers want to eliminate the guesswork required when downscaling stats to lower level dungeons or hard modes. They are creating a system that supposedly wont need rebalance as players gain more and more 'stats' from future mods. Recovery doesn't fit this model. We cant have everyone running around five years from now with 1 second encounter times. In addition, the developers have stated that action gain is already way too high.
2) Lifesteal removed. Development wants to remove Lifesteal because it provides such a massive healing amount that players with lifesteal are either 100% health... or are dead.
3) An anti-stat added for Critical and for Deflect, similar to the way Armor Penetration works today against defense. On the surface this sound pretty cool,.. more variety and counters that might revitalize PvP. Let's look deeper for a moment:
All of our stats in PvE are 'positive' effect stats. Even armor penetration is a positive effect stat because we know how much defense the enemy has for us to penetrate. In PvP... armor penetration acts as an anti-stat to defense. You never know if an enemy is packing AP.. or how much. Not only that, AP is cheap as dirt at 100 stat points to eliminate 400 stat points of defense. This leads to defense being worthless in PvP except for a super-tank. The problem with Anti-stats is that it devalues the stat it works against. Critical, deflect, defense, and their counters are a total gamble... they might not add anything at all to your power. Because of this, players will put their stat points into Health and Power, because no matter what your enemies stats are, you will gain from having more health and more power.
My suggestions for solving the developer's problems without introducing stat negation:
1) Recovery: Up the cost of 1% recovery from 200 to 400 stat points. Reduce the AP gain per 1% recovery from .5% down to .25%.
2) Lifesteal: Decrease the Lifesteal severity from 100% base default down to 25% base default. This makes it so that if you successfully lifesteal on a hit which deals 200,000 damage, you will gain 50,000 healing instead of 200,000 healing.
3) Accuracy & Critical Resistance: Introduce these as secondary stats, softcapped like IHB, control, control resist, stamina gain, etc. This will add flavor to the game, and adds only a limited 'gamble range'. Players may want to bring their crit up a little over 100%.
4) Armor Penetration: In PvP, armor penetration should be reduced to 20% effect, but work off of the capped defense number...
PvP example) A player with 16,000 Armor Penetration points versus a player with 48,000 defense. In our system this would be 160% AP versus 120% Defense (capped at 80%) The defender would resist 120% - 160% = No damage resisted. Using a 20% versus the cap system... the defender would have 80% defense minus 20% armor penetration = 60% of the damage resisted.
In summary, I believe the new stat system will be 'vanilla' and lack any 'character'. It will not matter to players what stats they have and dont have, aside from the fact that Health and Power will be valued slightly more than the others. Players will raise their stats evenly to match the monster stats they are fighting in PvE. No choice, no room for uniqueness. In PvP, players will stack their defense into one attribute and their offense into as much power as they can.
About me: I have played Neverwinter for one year. It took 8 months to bring my first character, a GWF to endgame. Once there I decided I liked an encounter-based build even though the meta was At-Will spamming. I decided to trash that character and created a CW which did what I liked.. it was encounter heavy. Ive been playing my CW for 4 months and am reaching end-game. Thousands of dollars and thousands of hours invested so far. I've logged almost 20,000 hours playing GuildWars, Uncharted Waters Online, World of Warships, and now Neverwinter.
Post edited by zimxero#8085 on
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I think that approach is flawed because this game was really good before mod 6. There was the occasional lag bomb, overpowered ability, pvp flavor of the month that needed to be nerfed, and so on, but by and large everything worked as expected for most classes. I don't know what the stats are on new players since then, but in my opinion everything worthwhile about the game is carryover from before the mod 6 disaster.
As for lifesteal? Just put it back to what it was before mod 6, a flat percentage of damage done. Removing it will make us all, except for healers, rely on healing companions and consumables CONSTANTLY in solo content. It's just a bad idea.
Recovery? Sure, remove it. But reduce all cooldowns to where they ought to be, equal for every class (hell, equal for every encounter), remove cooldown reductions from feat trees and everywhere else, and change at-wills so that they all do the same DPS/healing per second.
I don't think all DPS classes should work the same way, but they should all do the same damage in the end.
My concern, as I've stated elsewhere, is that this dev team has not done much of anything right lately and so there's no reason to believe they can handle this project. It just makes more sense to roll back mod 6 and scale the entire game accordingly. And also, I'm sick of having to refine new artifact equipment, redo my build, get forced into a new playstyle, and so on. A new level cap would be fine if 80% of the players were at or near endgame level and we could all just solo queue into the RAQ or REQ and expect a success in a reasonable amount of time, but we're nowhere near that. We're years away from it.
And I don't think that redoing crit as a balance contest between crit and crit avoidance stats is a good idea, either. Just keep it simple. Crit percentage is crit percentage. Forget soft caps. Forget diminishing returns.
At the end of Mod 15 here Most of my characters are sitting at 100% crit, 100% armor pen and 100% recovery. Lifesteal chances of 15-20% and some add on deflect of 100% when in combat. So the question is .... where do I go from here? All I can really do is add more power and crit severity and hit points. Even TONG has ceased to be a challenge and really the only way I die is when one shotted because the tank lost agro or I did something foolish. The game is stagnant and has been for a couple of modules now.
Recovery -
An end game geared DC can stack enough recovery to keep some powers going all the time ... like Astral Shield, Annointed Army, Exhaltation. Clearly these were never intended to be "always up". Endgame CWs can use Ice Knife like it's an encounter power .... Maybe removing recovery outright is overkill, but then again even if you changed the scaling on it in a few modules it would be back to where it is now.
Lifesteal -
This one is a bit of a double edged sword. Right now my Cleric really doesn't bother to heal, people recover far faster with lifesteal usually than I can find them and drop a heal on them. Healers are really more buffers in the game at the moment. Removing lifesteal changes this totally and means the healer is needed to heal first, and buff second. That's a plus ... though it also means playing a healer now comes down to watching the party closely and being prepared to drop heals as required (ie "Babysitting") as oppsoed to just spamming buffs as fast as possible.
As for Solo play .... here is the downside of removing lifesteal and I hope the Devs have something in mind other than "Drink alot of potions" for solo healing. Otherwise DPS classes may really suck to play solo ...
Contested Scores -
This one is huge and should extend the life of the game significantly. Now a new dungeon does not need to crank up damage to extreme levels, it only needs to up the scores of things like the monsters accuracy. crit avoidance and the like to make the monsters more challenging. No more one shots required and players won't waltz into a new dungeon as soon as it is released with their scores already topped out. Putting caps on stuff like crit also helps keep older dungeons more of a challenge and reduces the huge damage gap between high and low item level people.
I think some of the concepts here are good .... we will have to wait until this all hits preview to see how the execution of it works out (and possibly panic then).
Winter Lily (CW) / Winter Rose (DC) / Winter Ivy (HR)
Pandora's Misfits Guild Leader
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
I do agree that the game is very stagnant though, good point
I was here when they introduced the Rank 14 Bondings and the outrage over that. Didnt affect me or my enjoyment.
I have reverted to enjoying the free to play game and slowly bringing a GWF through the old content.
Winter Lily (CW) / Winter Rose (DC) / Winter Ivy (HR)
Pandora's Misfits Guild Leader
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
Major changes like this however is a lottery(even though I do agree it is needed and a good idea in principle)
* Will the devs manage to preserve the uniqueness of the classes? It has been a major selling point for NW
* Will the devs manage to balance the classes properly? Who will be king of the hill this time?
* Will the game be reasonably bugfree on launch?
This could be a disaster, or it could breathe new life into and revive NW. We'll know in a few months.
Basically NW, like most MMOs, is really a form of addictive gambling. You grind away for the prize, a new shiny. A ball of gold in the sky. This is in contrast to a game like Baulder's Gate which, you play for the story, the complex interactions with the NPCs, with the ability to change the story due to your interactions. Things like reputation, NPC and encounters flow charts (you choose this, now this happens), etc.
NW is NW, I don't expect much to drastically change. Even as significant as these changes are, it is still chasing a ball of gold in the sky. The end game players at 18K+ know that ball of gold is just clay.
If so, then no, no it's not...
As allways it depends on how they gonna implement all this, where some of you might be right to be scary, looking into the past.
2 things I do expect to see that I don't like:
1. End game content being pulled out of reach again for many players and it taking much longer to get them there. A monkey could build a toon using the current system.
2. All 5 of my end game dungeon toons will probably be broken the day this goes live. Sure I enjoy balancing my toons but I'd rather do it one at a time while I build them, not get them built and have the stat mechanics all change.
For professions, they basically threw everything you had away and made you start over, with some partial credit for mats and slots and whatnots. Good basic idea, questionable implementation, with more bugs and issues than I really expect to see from professional coders who had substantial early feedback from the test server.
I can see that maybe NW has worked itself into a power-creep corner, and a re-work might well bring a certain freshness to the game. Unfortunately I also see a team that for the past year or so has talked a better game than they can implement. As has already been mentioned: if you have trouble getting your code to count to 10, you may want to hold off on the ambitious, sweeping, game-changing re-writes for a bit.
Fingers crossed, but expectations low.
My trepidation has nothing to do with the content of mod 16, but the performance of Cryptic evidenced over the past few modules, and especially over the past months. Mod 16 will not be mod 6 just in the fact that content is not being removed, but added. The same problems with level cap in mod 6 will happen in mod 16. But the ability to code without bad bugs that stifle game play is the only issue that will cause me to just shrug and move on. Mod 6 had the arm pen bug (which was solved with synergies between tanks, before it was fixed). With a radical change in formulation (like in mod 6), there are bound to be formulaic bugs found in design of the game play. Trying to identify and test these is a massive undertaking, and I am guessing the alpha testers are specifically targetting this (or hope). Be that as it may, removal of content (which is not happening) and major game-stifling bugs (which have been happening) are my own real concerns. Otherwise, the change will be fine. I don't care much otherwise.
Guild--And the Imaginary Friends
This change is needed for the life of the game.
"Go back to Mod 5" is nonsense talk.
The only thing to do is test the changes and give feedback, and not "I don't like the changes" feedback, feedback that actually identifies problems in the way the changes work inside themselves.
Obsidian Oath - Warlock
A whole lot of other Obsidian toons as well.
from what i understand your entire build is probably obsolete. (goes for everyone) they're nuking feat trees and re writing them to be one feat tree per paragon. and the feat trees are much smaller than now. no idea how closely our powers will be to what they are now either.
I plan to test play the new module 16 on preview next month. All 8 of my characters has finished Ravenloft. I plan to find out if they can still fight and survive in Barovia. If all my characters are dying in Barovia after beating it, then the system is broken. If I cannot play old content without having having support from other players, then there is something wrong. So I will hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But a "game killer" there is no such animal. You either play the game and enjoy it, or you don't. Players toss out in chat "this game is dead", no you are here playing it, therefore it is still functional. Regardless of how good or bad module 16 turns out to be, I will continue to play Neverwinter & Champions until Cryptic shuts their servers down.
Have fun! Hope to see you on preview next month.
That's hyperbole.
This is a sharp left turn. Too soon to say if it will be better or worse.
In fairness to Cryptic, a change is badly needed.
The power creep is beyond bloated.
Classes are sadly imbalanced. Half the feat trees are worthless. New players and end-game players cannot play together. The majority of founding players abandomed the game years ago and have not been replaced.
The player base has shrunk.
Change had to happen.
We all have anxiety about how this will affect our investment.
But the OP's hopes for modified retention of recovery and lifesteal are too little too late. That horse has left the stable.
I am Took.
"Full plate and packing steel" in NW since 2013.
Fools wearing toques
Everything about character creation, advancement and growth is being changed. So don't be surprised if additional Encounter powers or even at-wills are given some form of Lifesteal effect for the squishier DPS classes. Remember it's not being removed entirely from the game, and will exist in certain specific situations.
Anyone who's familiar with GF's At-Will "Crushing Surge" will understand what I mean.
As to Recovery... well, I've got a DC who is by every standard the height of mediocrity, who I basically use for daily and weekly Guild grind, but fires out Flamestrikes almost as fast as Encounters. (OK. Doom helps with that a LOT...)
I have a 13.5K CW who drops Ice Knives like a HAMSTER. (Multi type, largely AoE, Encounters with a decent Recovery allows fast turn around, which just generates fast AP from damage done, it's not rocket science.)
It wasn't hard to get either of these to that level.
That all needs to change.
We have no idea if Crit Severity is being altered to offset the (generally) reduced Crit Chance by increasing its effectiveness.
We don't even know if basic damage values will change.
We don't know much of anything, and until the changes we do know about can be studied in the context of the FULL overhaul, any assumptions about who or what is going to die as a result are extremely premature.
I generally do not lag or DC, which means that Cryptics servers and the network close to Cryptic basically is OK.
The most common cause of lag and DCs is the network between you and Cryptic. That is easy to diagnose with ping and traceroute. You need to discuss network problems with your ISP and possibly switch ISP(if you can).
Another common source of lag is your PC. Make sure you have an updated graphics driver, that your PC is not running all sorts of junk software in the background, and make sure that your PC hardware is up to the task.
Cryptic is generally doing the job on their side(although there is the occasional incident), most causes for lag and DCs are the responsibility of the player to handle.