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Official Feedback Thread: Stat Changes
gentlemancrush
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 445Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Greetings Adventurers!
With the new expanded level cap we are taking this opportunity to adjust how several stats work as well as expand a little on how the new stat curves will work going forward. We have a couple of major changes to touch on regarding Life Steal, Regeneration, and Armor Penetration, as well as some more minor changes regarding stat stacking and overall performance. Finally we are going to discuss the major change to equipment, Gear Score, and how to properly evaluate items.
Item Changes
Gear Score – Gear Score is going away. It never really filled the niche we wanted to approximate player powers because it could not consistently track things we wanted and was often getting adjusted by things it shouldn’t. Therefore we are opting to make some other changes to replace Gear Score as a player metric.
Item Level – Items traditionally have had a lot of under the hood variables that governed how effective they were and this made comparing two items harder the less stats they had in common, and made them relatively confusing overall. Therefore we are exposing a stat on items to simplify this process and help players identify when new equipment has more stat (although not necessarily when it is better for *you*). Item Levels will increase pretty steadily until you reach end game, and then when you reach your first tier of dungeons (item level 130) they will simplify drastically. Each tier of items is 10 ilvls higher than its predecessors, with half tiers being 5 ilvls. Item Level in some form will become the mechanism for locking out dungeons, although the final form this will take has not been decided yet.
With the new expanded level cap we are taking this opportunity to adjust how several stats work as well as expand a little on how the new stat curves will work going forward. We have a couple of major changes to touch on regarding Life Steal, Regeneration, and Armor Penetration, as well as some more minor changes regarding stat stacking and overall performance. Finally we are going to discuss the major change to equipment, Gear Score, and how to properly evaluate items.
Item Changes
Gear Score – Gear Score is going away. It never really filled the niche we wanted to approximate player powers because it could not consistently track things we wanted and was often getting adjusted by things it shouldn’t. Therefore we are opting to make some other changes to replace Gear Score as a player metric.
Item Level – Items traditionally have had a lot of under the hood variables that governed how effective they were and this made comparing two items harder the less stats they had in common, and made them relatively confusing overall. Therefore we are exposing a stat on items to simplify this process and help players identify when new equipment has more stat (although not necessarily when it is better for *you*). Item Levels will increase pretty steadily until you reach end game, and then when you reach your first tier of dungeons (item level 130) they will simplify drastically. Each tier of items is 10 ilvls higher than its predecessors, with half tiers being 5 ilvls. Item Level in some form will become the mechanism for locking out dungeons, although the final form this will take has not been decided yet.
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Comments
Regeneration – This stat has been trouble to find a place where it feels good, and never really felt desirable to the classes (and in the use cases) we really wanted. With that we are reworking it slightly. It will still grant health regeneration, but only while out of combat. To compensate for this, it also improves the effect of all incoming healing on you. This improvement works on self healing and Life Steal. This does *not* affect potions.
Life Steal – Life Steal has been converted into a proc. Now instead of healing a percentage of your outgoing health one each outgoing attack, each outgoing attack has a chance to siphon a percentage of its damage (equal to your life steal severity) as healing for you. This healing does benefit from sources of increased healing including Regeneration.
Armor Penetration – With a more strictly tiered end game in the works, we have adjusted how Armor Penetration works at end game. More specifically we are making the amount of damage resistance dungeon dwellers have increase sharply with each tier of dungeon. Luckily we are also going to include far more armor penetration as a core stat for damage dealer PVE gear. This won’t affect most players all that much, however it will provide a pretty steep damage increase in subsequent dungeon tiers as you pick up more Armor Penetration equipment.
Stat Curves – As a general rule the new stat curves at level 70 will feel much more restrictive but they are vastly improved in two major facets that will facilitate better content going forward. Firstly they are far friendlier with stacking stats, meaning you can chase stats much harder than you could before without being strongly penalized. While the curves are not totally linear, they will feel that way for the most part. Secondly they are designed to work much farther into our projected gear growth over the coming modules, and as such should handle power creep much more gracefully than before. Overall this means you will see smaller percentages at level 70 than you are used to, but as your equipment fills in you will still find value in your core stats.
We need to collect as much feedback as possible regarding PVE difficulty and stat growth. Given that, we would like you to categorize and color code your feedback so we can sort it and act on it most effectively! Please use the below format to submit bugs/feedback.
Type: Bug/Feedback (Please only choose one)
Please use “Bold” face text for the Type then type your feedback in the body of your post. If you are listing a bug please have this text in RED, if you are posting an opinion or feedback please use BLUE.
(Concise Feedback & Screen Shots are much appreciated)
Examples:
Bug: Destroyer
Destroyer’s Purpose didn’t grant stacks while dealing damge.
Feedback: Sentinel
I feel like I don’t have enough tools to stay alive under fire now and it makes tanking too hard.
Please try to play for a few hours to get used to the changes. Thank you again for all your help Adventurers! We look forward to hearing back from you!
Chris “Gentleman_Crush” Meyer
As with all other such threads, please restrict your posts to useable feedback in the format requested. The devs are looking for numbers and figures to tweak the changes before live release. Parses and ACT logs are helpful in this matter, as are screenshots. Also, be aware that posting your text in cyan does not automatically tag it as valid feedback--the content of your post must be constructive feedback.
Attacks on another poster's feedback or opinion, or anything not related to your experience with the changes posted to this thread will be moderated accordingly without further public notice. Posts based on conjecture without valid testing, where applicable, will be removed.
To ensure that the devs get the feedback in a logical and orderly manner, we're having to enforce this rather strictly. Please do make sure that your feedback is in the format specified in the opening posts of this thread, or it will be moved.
Please do not respond to or reply to this notice, but use the PM system to address your concerns, per Rules of Conduct, Section V.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
The life steal description here, and the life steal description in the patch notes preview, directly contradict one another. This one says you get 100% of the damage back, but the notes say there is an entirely new stat called "life steal severity" that determines the amount drained. Is it one, the other, or that 100% is the base amount and there's the severity stat that increases it...?
That is correct, the default life steal severity is 100% currently.
EDIT: Updated post to clarify.
i got question
will defense debuffing skills and enchants work better now since dungeon mobs have higher def?
They will be no more or less effective than they were before because Armor Penetration happens first and debuffs currently do not get clamped. If you reduce a target's damage resistance by 20% they will always take 20% more damage, regardless of how much armor penetration you have.
I do not know for sure at this time, but you are welcome to open a new thread to discuss those changes. Devs will be reading these forums most days.
if life steal now steals 100% the damage done as HP, but its % based, if i have lets say 15% chance to active, and miserable damage compared to dps classes, i will only have 15% of getting 2-3k HP back when a ranger gets DPS hits 30k damage easy geting a full bar every 6 hits when a GF get 2-3k on those same 6 hits?
So on Dungeons we GF´s trust on DC's out side on normal lving/dailies we count on what low damage = very low HP from life steal, without regen we hide behind the shield and die in a few secs, specially when we can not drink potions when blocking, or will GF´s finally be able to drink a potion while blocking? or do we GF's have to ask a DC friend to helps us do normal dailies?
ty i understand it now
I really hate this change - this game already has too much RNG, effectiveness of life steal is too random with deflect(deflect increases value of each hitpoint by resisting damage) and critical hits and endless consumption.
but i do love regeneration change if you will buff tank dr and hp to compensate, posted almost same suggestion(though without healing increase) some time ago
Came home from work today, saw patch notes. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the supposed changes. I am in a state of panic and confusion that I cannot stem until I am able to test this for myself.
But I must make this very clear.. As I understand, all my endeavors to have Incoming Heal bonus, in order to boost my Self Healing will now be 100% Useless.
This means, that the 99 levels of RP spent on my Defenders Artifact, is a Complete Waste.
If I read this all correctly of course, it would mean SW's would be required to be a pure Glass Cannon. This will not work for us in PvP, do you know that in Domination's, people ALREADY have been kicking SW's form groups?
Because of our ridiculously slow abilities, which we could offset with survivability...
Do you understand my Pain right now? When can i get on the Test Server?
Reegenration only works out of combat, right? Tell me, which class can leave combat AT WILL, please. How is this balanced? TR will be unkillable 1 shot machines. Or are we reworking it for TR so they cannot regenerate their health in stealth?
Not trying to troll, this is a serious concern, considering how massively overpowered the TR class already is.
Rogues actually can't leave combat at will. As long as you are on an enemy threat table you are classified as in combat. This means that TRs cannot just stealth and have healing kick in. In PVP I believe it takes 8 seconds to drop combat, so the same thing applies.
Feedback:Life Steal
Items Proc. Spells should not Proc. I'd be much happier with % begin reduced as opposed to RNG proc'ing of spells.
I can see how you can get "a solid blow" or an accurate strike triggering a "proc" - hit a vital organ, bone, nerve, etc.
How do you "sometimes" get a spell right? In my opinion, it just feels really ridiculous and anti-immersive.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
Feedback: Regeneration
I must say that I'm strongly against this change, for multiple reasons. All of my arguments are geared solely toward PvE.
1. If your gear grants you a regeneration ability, it should first and foremost do so *during* combat -- that's the entire point of wearing combat gear in the first place!
2. If we survive the fight without regen then we didn't need it anyway, and if we don't, then we're...DEAD! At level 60, PvE players generally don't have to worry about having enough healing potions as they drop and as we generally have plenty of gold. What use is regen after the fight when we can just quaff potions at our leisure? It's illogical on its face.
3. Most classes cannot heal themselves. That's the gap that regen fills, and I always argue that for certain classes it's far more useful than lifesteal. Case in point: the HR. An HR is an aggro magnet, and relying on lifesteal to self-heal is inherently suicidal. Further, as the HR cannot stealth and can only dodge a short distance, the time when passive healing is needed the most is when he is being pummeled by multiple critters and is dodging to stay alive. The HR isn't attacking during that time; he is too busy trying to stay alive. That's where regen keeps him alive and lifesteal doesn't.
To me, this is a devastating nerf to anyone who cannot self-heal and has to do dailies. During dailies, we're always outnumbered, which means our enemies always have combat advantage. In places like IWD and WoD where we're at a level disadvantage to boot, we have to rely on our ability to whittle enemies down over time, dodge like crazy, and...wait for it...regen. This isn't a slight modification, this feels more like a severe, illogical, arbitrary punishment.
If your overall goal is to make all content more difficult, please don't make an important ability irrelevant (and, yes, making it useful only after combat is over is making it irrelevant!). The problem, IMHO, with current content is that it's way too static and predictable. If you're doing a daily in the Blighted Grove, redcaps shouldn't be content to just blight acorns for you to kill them: there should be a chance that half a dozen redcaps in the hut overhead might notice and attack! There should be wandering bands, not of powries, but of giantsouls, and they should appear at randomly-chosen places and patrol paths. There should be a chance that a witherer knows a different spell than the weak one they normally know, one that does something nasty to you. This should be the case in every zone where we currently do dailies. Danger is not in arbitrarily penalizing players; it's in making life in the wild unpredictable.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
I really don't like the randomness aspect of the new Lifesteal stat. As a poster said above me, it's thematically incoherent. But furthermore, it also introduces more random elements (which is not a good thing), it has the potential to screw up combat (reliance on lifesteal procing on high dmg attacks), it requires us to stack two different stats (which only complicates and muddies things further), and it differs completely from what other games are doing (all other games have lifesteal being 'Steal x% of the damage you deal' - why should NWO be different?). To worse this, randomness doesn't fix anything anyway! What is the benefit of randomness? No context has been given here.
As I see it now, you are trying to reduct the effectiveness of lifesteal. Why don't you just do this directly? Nerf lifesteal if you want, but this new system is just... really ugly. Please reconsider.
I personally like this change but would make a few suggestions:
1) Regen now is a flat % of your HP heal every 3 seconds outside combat - regardless of HP %. Meaning you dont need to be under 50% for the "full effect". Whenever you are out of combat, you gain the full effects.
2) Regen in DND is supposed to be a soft of "safety net" heal. So why not make this along the same lines as a ferocious reaction type thing?
Regen: Not only increases healing effectivenss, heals you outside combat, but has a 60 sec ICD to proc anytime you go below 20% HP it instantly heals you for X% of your HP (depends on the amount of regen you have).
So you go into battle, get "bloodied - aka under 20 or 25%" and it "procs" with a nice heal for like 15% of your HP. Then you fight again until dead.
Outside combat it heals nicely for the full amount, and also increases healing effectiveness. Overall that seems fair to me.
A couple overall comments to hopefully redirect some of this feedback.
1) Life Steal thematics - Remember that this is *not* a spell you are casting. Your fighter with no levels of wizard is not using a magic spell to steal health. He is using magically enhanced equipment. And in that vein, equipment being persnickety and not always doing exactly what you want (especially when you really really need it to) has been a feature of lots of special items in DnD. This is no exception.
2) Life Steal mechanically - One of the things we wanted to change was the *reliability* of life steal. Making it operate as a more random even makes it feel streaky in practice and not something you can rely on to just carry you through a tough place. You will have to adjust your tactics when soloing to account for this, but the new content also keeps this change in mind.
3) Regeneration, and its place in statting/gearing. We wanted to drastically reinforce Regeneration as a tanking stat and a really viable stat for high end PVE tanks regardless of the situation they were in. Before it was awful at dealing with large spikes of damage, but could effectively remove small steady streams of damage. Now it is a flat heal out of combat (regardless of your health percentage) as well as a VERY powerful tanking stat because it drastically improves all healing you get from any source. Players who are playing a DPS class will get less from this stat, but it will still make you far easier to heal, which includes healing caused by artifacts and companions. It also helps reduce potion consumption between fights and downtime between fights. This also helps reinforce the roles of players in group content. Tanks cannot easily just mitigate the need for a healer with enough Regen/Lifesteal any more. This was exceptionally important with us adding a new tank and healer this module.
Couple all this with the fact that your stat curves will let you stack as much of any given stat as you could desire without losing much effectiveness (or being in diminishing returns) it will be about getting what stat means the most for you and figuring out how you want to spread out your stats rather than trying to spread all of your stats out so you are just barely touching those diminishing return caps.
THANK YOU. Now maybe characters will be evaluated more than just based on a single number.
Thank you, Crush. I was really curious as to whether Regen would work out of combat, and this helps alleviate my worries quite a bit.
QUESTION: Okay, this really got my antennae twitching. At present, my HR has (off the top of my head) 6200 defense, for example, which puts Thia *far* into diminishing-return-land (Tiamat devils hit ***HARD*** when all you have on is leather!). Does this mean that such a stat would yield a vastly different result?
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
Correct.
/10char
After 2 years of looking at gearscore and measuring changes made to it you introduce sth else. Can't say I'm excited about it but we will see. Players got used to that metric and amount of posts about gs doesn't come from respective amount of people actually playing NW. If you made an ingame poll - with yes/no it would be much better than threads with 20 replies.
Question: For tanks I'm curious to know how will this affect GF's fighter's recovery? Also, will it become a % chance to heal like life steal is? If so that seems a little off to me thematically considering that it IS in fact a skill that they are using.
As for the regen changes I don think that they will really hurt tanks when doing dailies, my GF has always been able to stay alive and at near full health if nothing else by using fighters recovery and (rarely) a potion.
I don't think that just making harder diminishing returns on life steal would be enough. My DC can still heal to full with a single chains cast if it hits 3-4 enemies (which is the size of most add groups in dailies), and that is with ~5% life steal. A CW using icy terrain on a dozen enemies will regenerate just as much health, if not more, per tick, whether they have 5% or 10%. It will heal them full, and full is full. Healing 300k vs 150k doesn't matter if they have 30k HP. I like the idea of a chance as it will prevent dps classes from facetanking the beholder in CN on their own; or facerolling other bosses in a similar manner. The chance most likely won't be crippling either way with the decrease on diminishing returns which will let those who want it to be more reliable invest in more life steal.
I compared my defense stat on live vs. preview for the same character.
Level: 60 on both
Live: Defense 6208, damage resistance: 48%
Preview: defense 6679, damage resistance: 48.6%
If this is "stat stacking", I'm not seeing it. Can someone explain? This is very disappointing.
Defense is higher on preview most likely because I rush-trained my companions to 35, and three give me defense (man-at-arms, frost mimic, chicken).
Bug: Defense
The second I went to level 61, my defense remained at 6679 but my damage resistance went DOWN from 48.6 to 45.4.
Feedback: Regen/Lifesteal changes
Short version: I hate it. I hate it. I HATE IT!
Longer version: I'm not a DPS build, and I *rely* on regen in the form on Live to stay alive. I tested the new mechanic on preview in several fights and I'm not seeing squat for healing while fighting (as a reminder, when doing these hourlies on my HR, there is no cleric available). I carry regen because I cannot carry a cleric. When there are damage spikes, I'm using way *more* potions, not less!
Medium version: I want my regen back.
Blood Magic (RELEASED) - NW-DUU2P7HCO
Children of the Fey (RELEASED) - NW-DKSSAPFPF
Buried Under Blacklake (WIP) - NW-DEDV2PAEP
The Redcap Rebels (WIP) - NW-DO23AFHFH
My Foundry playthrough channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Ruskaga/featured
In my time messing about on the Test Sever I never saw it rapidly double proc. It's hard to test accurately of course with out being able to easily boost my life steal high enough to be likely of a double proc with certainty.
Trickster Rogue
I monitored lifesteal proc while doing other testing. It may have procced once or twice in an hour. It was not noticeable at all. My main healing came out of combat through regen. That being said, I was hardly pushing LS to it's breaking point. My stat was only ~7% chance.
All in all I felt a noticeable difference in live and testing. I wasnt getting the happy green numbers and had I needed to I'm fairly certain I would have been chugging potions and given the choice I wouldnt stack lifesteal at all.
Control Wizard
As a CW I had no issues whatsoever. Lifesteal at only 8% and I was rarely below 80% health.
Avariel Merilwen: Burn baby, MoF/Rene
Aejun The Silver: Devoted to Healing, DevOP/Justice
Mina Rosepetal: Super Natural, Pathfinder/Melee
Frost: Benchwarmer, Soulbinder/Fury