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Band of Air Changes - Preview Feedback Thread
nitocris83
Member, Cryptic Developer, Administrator Posts: 4,498Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Greetings!
Today we announced upcoming changes to the Band of Air. These changes are now on Preview and this thread is available for any feedback or discussions regarding the updates.
Please keep discourse civil and focused on Band of Air. For feedback on General Balance, please go to this thread.
Today we announced upcoming changes to the Band of Air. These changes are now on Preview and this thread is available for any feedback or discussions regarding the updates.
Please keep discourse civil and focused on Band of Air. For feedback on General Balance, please go to this thread.
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All 3 of those would perform at exactly whatever desired power level you wanted. Instead it is still class AND build specific? 😐🤨
The Lotmouth set in mod 5 did 100% weapon damage ( now damage) when you land crit hit.
Warlocks where the bes class to use that set, due lot of DoT based powers.
So in mod 6, developers increased internal cool down. Which in short kep proc rates in check, it was no matter if your all DoTs crit or not, set proc only every certain time duration, which kept outgoing damage in check and also balanced set among classese too.
The Band of Air have exactly same issue, certain classes proc it way more time then others.
After fix ring will proc only from encounter, at will and daily. For example warlocks have more DoT based powers than Cleric or FIghters,.
Also after magnitude adjustment make this ring for Cleric, Fighter as nonsese. Cuz their hit rates are lesser than Rogues/Ranger/warlock and Wizards.
In short this ring remain great only for specific classes/builds. And as for other classes/builds, they don't have alternative to compete with it.
That's why magnitude adjustment will solve no problems.
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Gustave Le Bon.
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2. I like the magnitude drop, that would make keeping the stacks of "damage or heal target for more than 10% HP" pretty challenging for some classes. May be even too much, might be worth making those stack refresh every time you add another one. (that does not happen on helmets)
3. And to straight down dismiss any attempts to balance the effects between classes was way too lazy.
4. Lastly, it seems that BoA+anything other than RoD, or RoD+anything other than BoA is always better choice than RoD+BoA. Technically, it is summing up two bonuses into an inferior bonus mutation. That should not happen. (together they should attack at least a double of the 4% damage increase margin, those are TWO rings, not ONE)
Before the change
- BoA and RoD can not crit (Thus 100 Magnitude of BoA is definitely way less worth than 100 Magnitude of any other attack)
- BoA and RoD use the Magical Power Boost even on non magical classes
- BoA and RoD are unaffected by its triggering source: So no buff from At-Will damage Boost for example.
- BoA and RoD have a maximum working range of 50’.
Then some more information about Ring of Darkness before the change:- RoD (Lingering Darkness) deals 11 times 100 Magnitude damage over 10 seconds
- RoD has an internal cooldown of 10 seconds before it is able to trigger again.
- RoD reduces enemies accuracy by 30%
Then some more information about the set of BoA and RoD before the change:- Set Bonus: When triggered, Dooming Darkness deals 10 times 50 Magnitude damage over 10 seconds instead. The final hit does 500 Magnitude damage. Aery Defender deals 5 times 100 Magnitude damage. Aery Defender may attack a different mob group on its own. Dooming Darkness and Aery Defenders damage are multiplied under the same constraints like above mentioned. ICDs remain unchanged. An Aery Defender is replaced by a new one if BoA triggeres before it disappears (
Damage Potentials before the change:Changes applied
- BoA and RoD are not triggered anymore from any source.
- BoA damage reduced to 200 Magnitude (from 600)
- RoD damage reduced to 50x11 Magnitude (from 100x11)
- Aery Defender damage stayed the same
- Dooming Darkness damage reduced to 30x10+300 (from 50x10+500)
Both of them still can not crit, use the Magical DMG Boost, are unaffected by some multipliers and don't work for ranges > 50°.Damage Potentials after the change:
After the Change
The situation is quite 'interesting'. An example with an okayish barbarian build (unbuffed, out of combat. In combat way better values) shows the weird state:BoA in a normal fight against the Boss training dummy in the training room takes a share of ~3% damage. BoA is triggered ~every 7s. (edit: updated values with a longer fight)
RoD in a normal fight against the Boss training dummy in the training room takes also a similar share of 3-4% damage. RoD triggered ~every 10s. With the ICD it is up for 50%. Due its way of working + its 30% accuracy debuff, it can be considered as the better choice if no other RoD is available in the raid.
The set bonus actually performed fair in contrast to before. Around 7% increase in damage due to Aery Defender and Dooming Darkness.
However, lets not forget that barbarians attack quite often while being in rage (~0.15-0.35 cd). Let's check the Expected Damage:
- Band of Air - expected to trigger once every 7s - has a damage potential of dealing 285 Magnitude damage in 10 seconds.
- The Ring of Darkness - expected to trigger once every 17s (with icd of 10s) - has a potential to deal 325 Magnitude damage every 10 seconds.
- The Set Bonus changes the expected damage to 850 Magnitude (1x Aery Defender trigger + Dooming Darkness every 17s) damage every 10 seconds.
Barbarians definitely do not stand in a bad spot for triggereing BoA. Seeing that it resembles only an expected increase of ~3% damage with rng included, BoA is comparably close and rather less worth than the Red Eye's Glare. Other classes like Fighter will see not enough damage from BoA.BoA is after the changes worse than the Ring of Darkness (when no other RoD is around), which is quite weird.
The Set Bonus seems fair (needs further testing).
Conclusion
I have not really made my mind up yet, so I may add a conclusion later.Regarding the other points already mentioned by the other posters, the BoA nerf seems a bit too much however. I personally do not like heavy rng either so a trigger once every 10s with an already high atk speed at-will doesn't feel comfortable.
The other thing is the Band of Ait and Ring of Darkness set bonus. Still the same issue as before. Separately those rings are better than together. Really weird combo.
Unless the grind for reagents is made easier I don't see a reason for smashing that ring that much.
I find it odd you want to make this ring still not equal on all classes. Some classes attack much faster than others. Take off % procs and make it do it's actions while in combat...
The Band of Air could have a Gush of Wind (small AoE) at the start of combat and then repeat this AoE every X seconds. If the range is small then it would incentivize people to group up and this would help the healers.
The Ring of Darkness could have a single target DoT activated on first target when entering combat then reapply X seconds after the DoT wears off.
Making the rings unique for different types of fights could incentivize different builds and would make the decision of which to go for first have weight and both rings useful.
Set Bonus something similar based on being in combat.
I don't see any other way to balance it.
But now that it suits your financial gain to make everyone switch builds at the same time to the same items with inflated prices all Three points are blatant lies, furthering that your Blog's claims are hallow since your word changes to suit you.
Legally its called a "Bait and Switch" but here its called a "ZenShop Sale", how many times have you sold Journals in the last year? Why do you think we bought the Journals? The extra hit for at best 1k? Or because you were capitalizing on BoA+Journal's synergy?
BoA was helping with this procs, and now most people will struggle to make a good use of this items. I suggest 5% instead of 10%
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I think it's annoying that this means you can't have the equipment diversity that would theoretically be possible. Like this proc based ring means classes build around generating as many procs as possible, leading to slight variants that you normally wouldn't have seen. But with the current state of class balancing, where the reaction to obvious discrepancies usually takes over a year, you have to take the safe approach and make sure no class benefits from stuff more than others.
More than that, I'm concerned what this means to similar formats in the future. The Band of Air back then was interesting because it was overpowered. I wouldn't have put in the effort for the current version and I got lucky with the reagents and "only" had to do 70+ runs. Yeah the droprates are increased now, but the rate of failure as the system was introduced was fairly high and I doubt anyone would have gone through the trouble if a ring from the normal version (Red Eyes Glare) gets you pretty much the same DPS increase or even more on some classes.
Second, I found the adjustments that the rings underwent interesting.
Third, as mentioned before, I didn't have the ring, but in a way I understand the pain that the players who did are suffering. I survived module 16, so you will survive these changes too!
boa as it stands right now does 2-4% damage depending on the class so its not really clear bis for anybody just a valid option for some. It is also about 90% nerf from what it was before for me at least so if thats not too drastic in your opinion i dont know what is...
boa as it is rn
boa on preview
as some have suggested before in this thread the magnitude needs to go back up somewhat to 300 or 350 and then it needs some more testing this is just stupid and an insult to all those who spent hundreds of hc vos runs trying to get their ring
As for the class balance, this nerf will undoubtfully nerf the classes that took the most of this ring. You have to monitor this nerf very carefully, knowing that anyway most of the players did not have this ring.
Let me start by setting out that I fully agree that the BoA should not proc from procs. That is, really, understood and accepted by pretty much everyone, it has changed the meta into nothing more than chase BoA procs.
What I don’t understand, or agree with is how these changes have been based on such erroneous information. I intend to address each in order and explain why they undermine the entire process.
Firstly, the blog states that “a typical At-Will is 1x WD, an Encounter is 3x WD (dailies used to be 5x WD, but they are probably closer to 10x now).” Now, this is a serious misrepresentation of the current facts. If references to “Weapon Damage” mean Base Damage, and that we should have been talking about magnitude rather than a factor, let’s look at some examples at either end of the speed of attacks scale.
Fighter DPS:
At Wills – Reave (60, 0.4s cast = 150 /sec), Heavy Slash (175, 0.75s cast = 233 / sec)
Encounters – Bull Charge (520 or 820), Commanders Strike (780), Anvil of Doom (880 or 1,260)
Daily – Mow Down (2,100 or 2,500)
Rogue Assassin
At Wills – Duellists Flurry (35, 0.15s cast, applies bleed stacks up to 10, dealing circa 15 magnitude per stack per second, meaning an effective magnitude of 383 / sec), Gloaming Cut (150, 1.1s cast, effective 136 / sec)
Encounters – Wicked Reminder (800), Lashing Blade (715), Assassinate (845, potentially 1,056)
Daily – Shocking Execution (2,200)
We can clearly see that the values presented in the blog are completely and utterly out of scale with the actual magnitudes that we are seeing. The BoA proc magnitude is less than a standard encounter and is circa 2 – 4 times higher than at wills.
The statements about the impact of the BoA on damage are therefore fundamentally wrong and the scale of the changes needed are wildly overstated.
Secondly, the choice of ring to compare to is flawed as no consideration has been given to the respective difficulties in acquiring the respective rings. The Red Eyes Glare is obtained through farming where death does not end the run. Hardcore mode represents a significant uplift in the challenge posed by any dungeon, as all it takes is one mistake for significant amounts of time and effort to be wiped out, and the run to fail. When a completion by normal groups can take anything from 30 to 60 minutes, doing this in hardcore represents a significant time effort.
On top of the increased difficulty of completing in Hardcore, getting the components themselves is hugely RNG locked. Some players get drops on their first few kills of a miniboss, some have spent hundreds of runs and are still missing components.
A ring, or ring set, that are as difficult as the BoA and RoD to obtain, should not be compared to a ring that can be obtained through normal completion, so using the Red Eyes Glare as a benchmark is understating the difference in difficulty of obtaining the rings.
In addition to the above 2 points, repeated statements have been made throughout this process that the rings would remain the clear BiS option. It was never mentioned that the majority of DPS classes would no longer be using these since they would be nerfed that hard. This goes against the reasoning given for not bringing back such things as the paranoid delusion on the basis it would need to be balanced for all classes. Continual supply of conflicting information does not present the actions being taken in a positive, or good faith, fashion.
Therefore, I would like to present an alternative:
Band of Air – Change to 450 magnitude, increase internal cooldown to 2 seconds, giving an effective maximum magnitude per second of 225. This also ensures that fast hitting, but low damage classes continue to be able to maintain at least some of the stacks for the “deal more than 15% of your HP in damage” items that will otherwise present significant difficulty for them.
Ring of Darkness – Increase to 125 magnitude per second for 10 seconds with an internal cooldown of 10 seconds. Giving an effective maximum magnitude per second of 125. This ensures that slow hitting classes only need 1 proc per 10 seconds, rather than trying to get procs constantly.
Change the set bonus to be:
Dooming Darkness – 100 magnitude per second, 10x last tick for 1,900 magnitude total
Aery Defender – 225 magnitude per second for 5 seconds for 1,125 magnitude total
Internal cooldown of 11 seconds on dooming darkness and 5.5 seconds on Aery Defender.
This means that the 2 rings combined would deal an effective maximum magnitude of 377 per second and is useable by both fast and slow hitting classes since the internal cooldown and long uptime ensure that all classes are able to benefit, with some of the individualism between the 2 effects still retained.
That way people will have a goal to replace it with the new items on M24. Since if done during the end M23, the motivation by the players part to change the build will be close to zero, since m24 is on the horizon
"It will remain bis for quite a bit"...sure :V how to loose trust 1x1 that was so recently gained - very few people are against the nerf I spoke to but at least communicate clearly that the intention is to make the ring useless for the majority of dps classes. The way this was done is very very off-putting.
x2
Really, why do you ask for feedback when this is going live already?
Is there going to be a 2nd iteration of change? If not, then you might as well delete this thread. (respectfully)
Maybe in about a year we get a lengthy blog post that they now installed a "Nerf Council" next to their "Rewards Council" which reviews every nerf. *yawn*.
When theorycrafting a build, there is a term denominated Opportunity cost. This means that for every decision made when choosing a piece of gear, there is something that must give up, either an effect or stats. This point is often forgotten when players make builds.However, when you can easily cap the stats, there is not much opportunity cost lost.Consequently, in order to improve the damage, players must look towards other damage multipliers, which are for the Neverwinter case:
- Base damage (ilvl)
- Number of hits
- % of damage increases sources
The listed items also have linear scaling and therefore diminishing returns when analyzing incremental changes.All these modifiers then multiply each other to give the total damage done by the players and dividing by time we have the damage per second (DPS). Which for damage dealer class is what we are trying to maximize (and not the total damage).
However, in Neverwinter, there is an additional damage source, often denominated "procs". These procs are not a straight multiplier to the total damage mentioned below but are better modeled as sourced of damage is added instead of multiplicative since some of the previous scaling methods mentioned before do not apply to them. The procs can be divided into two categories and two groups each: with an internal cooldown and without // with or without proc chance (100% proc chance).
For procs with an internal cooldown and without proc chance, the DPS done during a fight depends on the fight duration itself, for shorter, the damage contribution is higher and decreases asymptotically with the fight duration, with peaks that match the internal cooldown. Obs. Mount power like tunnel vision can be included in this group, for example, due to the high cooldown time.
For procs without internal cooldown and without proc chance, the DPS done during a fight is a linear correlation with the number of hits per sec a class can perform. An example of this is the Mythallar set or poisoned thorn weapon enchant. Usually, the magnitude is extremely low for these types of procs, so it does not become extremely overpowering in fast-hitting classes (e.g Rogues).
Now for procs with a proc chance, which in my opinion are way harder to analyze intuitively due to the probabilistic nature, but still can be performed mathematically.For a given P chance to proc, the mean number of hits to proc, after the cooldown is finished, if it has it, will be 1/P. However, we are interested in DPS, so the analyses need to account for the time, which in this case is the mean-time for the proc to occur. The mean time to proc (MTP) can be modeled as function of the hits_per_second (HPS) as MTP = CD + (1/P)/(HPS). The proc total damage (PDPS) is then a function of the proc damage (PD) and MTP as PDPS = PD / MTP. Performing some manipulations we obtain PDPS = PD * P * HPS / (CD * P * HPS + 1), which will be final equation we will analyze.
Our objective is then to maximize PDPS under certain constraints (gear,skills,...). If someone wants more detail, I recommend starting the search "optimal decision problem." Nevertheless, here will do a crude analysis on what can be made to balance a proc.
Looking at the equation for the PDPS, we see that by changing PD, there is a linear relation: eg. reducing the damage by 66% will reduce the DPS contribution of the proc by 66%.Now the product of P and HPS. We see that for small values of it the PDPS will increase linearly; however, as it increases, the PDPS will asymptotically approach the value of PD/CD, which it has a strong diminishing return.Finally, by increasing the CD we see asymptotically decay towards zero of the PDPS.This behavior is problematic since it is not intuitive when performing decisions, without perfoming a numerical analysis.
Band of Air
The band of air is a ring that does additional damage with a 10% proc rate for every hit done and has an internal cooldown of 1s. The developers and the majority of the player base agree that it is a BIS item due to how much damage its procs do. And therefore was decided to nerf it, in order to be in balance with the other items in the game.
It was decided that the base damage of the proc would reduce from 600 to 200 magnitude and will no longer procs from other procs. So lets break it into parts.The first is the damage reduction; as we saw before, any change in the base damage of the proc will cause a linear change in the dps done by the proc. Therefore the 66% damage reduction in the base damage will cause a 66% reduction on the DPS of BoA.The justification for the amount of this nerf is, however, somewhat flawed. First, it compares with a certain magnitude value for at-wills/encounters/dailies, which, as pointed out by others in this thread, is wrong, where the actual power used by the classes is in order of 2x the ones used by the devs to compare.However, there is also one point missed: Band of Air CANNOT critical strike; this means the average the BoA lost a 1.81x damage multiplier due to crits, which at-wills/encounters/dailies have, therefore investing in critical has zero effect for BoA. In conclusion, you overestimated the contribution BoA towards the total damage by not looking at the full damage equation. (As a note, there are other procs in the game that behave like that, where only a few stats scale them, some cant crit, and others can not deal combat advantaged damage). Now that part that gets more convoluted: By reducing the base damage, some classes will not be able to keep a good uptime on stats buffs that require a certain amount of %hp damage. Therefore the effectiveness of chess/helm slots drops considerably since, for some of the class they were able to proc with band of air, which they can't.
Now the tricky part: procs from other procs. Due to its strong scaling with the number of hits, players found that maximizing the total number of hits during the fight is the optimal strategy to increase DPS; this involved using several pieces of gear that would increase the number of hits, from weapon enchants, mount power, companions, feats and so on.This means that on average, players had 4x more hits than actions performed (at-wills/encounters/...), with some classes being over 6x.
By removing the procs of procs scaling, the devs now separated the classes into two groups: high HPS and low HPS. As we saw before, by reducing the HPS (CD is constant in this case), classes with inherent low HPS, will suffer a linear decrease in PDPS. In other words, removing 4x number hits multipliers can cause a decrease in PDPS of the BoA of about 80%. While classes with inherent high HPS will still be in an asymptotical regime and suffer a reduced nerf in the BoA contribution.
Therefore for classes with low HPS, the implemented changes for the BoA, the nerf can be severe as a 90% decrease in contribution, while for high HPS classes will be around 70%.The problem relies on that classes with HPS are also the classes where BoA already had more impact (20~25% of the total dps), while low HPS classes are balanced with 15% dps coming from BoA before the nerfs. Now applying the nerf, the classes with HPS will have around 6%-7% contribution from BoA, while low HPS classes will be at 2%-3% contribution.
The devs stated they still wanted the BoA will be BIS, which is true at 6% damage contribution for the ring slot. However, that is not the case for low HPS classes, where at 2% there is clearly other options from just raw %stats perspective (like the red eyes glare), which in the worst case scenario is still 2.7% damage increase, or 10% damage based on enemy type rings which are around 5% incremental damage.So for low HPS, the player will think, why would l use a ring where I can only get 2% damage increase when I am losing the opportunity to equip other rings that will alleviate %stats pressure, allowing me to equip other pieces of gear with better effects (i.e. The opportunity cost talked earlier).
So that is why I mentioned yesterday, do not implement the changes until M24, because right now upgrading gear to accommodate the changes to remove BoA of the gear is pointless since there will be better alternatives on M24. It is just that during today and M24, players will feel worse now than they were yesterday.
Suggestion (knowing will be too late and pointless since most likely BoA will state the way it is now)
Increase the proc chance of Band of Air from 10% to 100% -> this will remove the dependency of HPS and the difference in low and high HPS classes. Bonus point: you don't need to calculate rand() for every hit anymore
Increase the cooldown from 1s to 3s -> low HPS will perceive this chance because the mean time to proc is already in this region, while high HPS will see a slight decrease in hits.
Reduce the base damage nerf to be 600 to 300 instead.
By performing these changes, the overall contribution of BoA across all classes will be around 7-8%, which is the BIS state that the devs said they wanted.
Additional note on class balance
By performing this nerf now, the class balance will be broken until at least M24, maybe even later. Since the classes that can use BoA efficiently will clearly have an advantaged over low HPS classes, even more than now.
From a player that in some games had more fun theorycrafting than actually playing it.