Melee Mitigation / Avoidance.

Discussion in 'Melee' started by Brogett, Mar 27, 2015.

  1. Brogett Augur

    DPS melee in particular seem pretty weak compared to our caster counterparts, who get nice runes. (Some only minor, some more significant.)

    It's melee that are in the firing line so much, but we suffer more. We don't get more hp than casters really. Our mitigation *should* be better, but I get the feeling that bosses have been designed with attack ratings to overpower plate tanks and so the melee mitigation just can't cope. Maybe it's avoidance we need more?

    An example from last night:

    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:16 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 19386 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:16 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 32311 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:16 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 14769 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:16 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 40006 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:18 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 15692 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:18 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 26154 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:18 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 6458 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:18 2015] Praetor Vitio slashes YOU for 10763 points of damage.
    [Thu Mar 26 19:58:18 2015] You have been slain by Praetor Vitio!

    So approx 105k dam in 1 wild ramp round followed 2 sec later by 60k damage. 8 hits, 0 misses. This is, I'll happily admit, unusual. I don't normally die to wild ramp and wouldn't have here apart from it unluckily doing 2 rounds is such close proximity. Only 1 other player died - a bst app. However it *did* do 2 rounds close together and all the glass cannons surivived it bar me. (I'm not weak! I would have had ~146k hp and 11-12k ac depending on bardage at that point.)

    Obviously you cannot tune around unlucky rounds, but I'd be interested to know how silkies compare to melee for wild ramp. (I'll do some digging tonight through my logs.) My instinct tells me that we don't have any real advantage from wearing chain.
    Norathorr and Songsa like this.
  2. Riou EQResource

    Hasn't avoidance still been basically "broken", it was "fixed" in CotF t2 and on but even then it seems that mob accuracy is still at like a 95% rate where it was at 100% from like RoF to t2 CotF, but before that players had realistic avoidance ranges (like 20% avoidance or more right?) vs even raid bosses
  3. Brogett Augur

    Note - this is MY guild with MY logs. It's not indicative of classes as a whole, or even other fights in general.

    I gathered some stats from the total damage from Vitio wild ramp per round. So this is for the same second, the sum of all hits seen for that player. I then totalled up tallies of total damage, number of attack rounds and class to get this table. Not quite what I expected!

    16240 6 enc
    31371 195 war
    35132 104 pet
    38111 242 pal
    44611 88 shm
    45359 174 clr
    45479 46 wiz
    47386 58 mag
    47502 230 brd
    48128 72 shd
    48284 97 rng
    48461 208 mnk
    48597 224 rog
    49742 19 ber
    52032 97 nec
    52621 48 dru
    55402 83 bst

    The first column is average damage per attack round, 2nd is frequency (so low numbers indicate less reliable stats) and the third column is the class.

    Note that we have some low gearred players (guests, alts, new recruits) and sometimes this can have a major swing in stats as it means if we several weak guest/alt shadowknights and lots of well gearred main pallies then SK looks poor vs Pal, but this is just a guild thing and not something about the class as a whole. "Pet" here is all pets regardless of class of owner or pet type.

    However it goes against my expectation that rogs were weaker than other melee: mnk, rog, ber all right next to each other (mnk in there suprised me - must indeed be due to broken avoidance). It's clear though that in *my guild* wiz and mag both take less damage on average than the melee dps, and we should make our enchanters tank!

    I'm curious now to see how other guilds compare, or how our guild compares on other targets. Even between the classes it seems I get hit around 10-15% harder on average than the other rogues. I've no idea why! I think I probably have joint best gear amongst the rogues so I can see no logical reason for it. Maybe just luck and a small sample size. Indeed every single wiz in guild mitigates better than I do... w.t.halfling?

    Edit: and the same chart produced from Arc Facultas Ingens wild rampage hits:

    27722 420 war
    31783 194 pet
    33280 67 enc
    33498 187 rng
    35747 632 pal
    37864 131 shd
    38019 452 brd
    40255 354 mnk
    40966 399 clr
    41960 89 mag
    43651 129 shm
    44429 381 rog
    44588 140 wiz
    44794 60 ber
    47173 169 bst
    47689 52 dru
    52073 178 nec

    This time wiz are along side rog and mnk less. Shows how much variation there is and how big a pinch of salt to take this data with!
  4. Brogett Augur

    For (my) reference, my hacky command line approach of processing this is:

    # Gather a file of rampage hits
    (zcat Backup/eqlog_Brogett_antonius_20150308.txt.gz; cat eqlog_Brogett_antonius.txt) | egrep "Arc .*Wild Rampage" |egrep -v ' pet ' > r3

    Looks like:
    [Thu Jan 15 20:14:30 2015] Arc Facultas Ingens hits Ksuz for 20909 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Thu Jan 15 20:14:30 2015] Arc Facultas Ingens hits Isilduur for 6209 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Mon Jan 19 19:35:42 2015] Arc Facultas Ingens hits Sonal for 20909 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Mon Jan 19 19:35:42 2015] Arc Facultas Ingens hits Sonal for 15507 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Mon Jan 19 19:35:42 2015] Arc Facultas Ingens hits Grumbletum for 5589 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Mon Jan 19 19:35:42 2015] Arc Facultas Ingens hits Grumbletum for 6285 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)
    [Mon Jan 19 19:35:42 2015] Arc Facultas Ingens hits Hazimil for 17649 points of damage. (Wild Rampage)

    #Join neighbouring hits together (bar last one):
    awk '{if ($4.$10 == l) {d+=$12} else {print d,c;l=$4.$10;c=$10;d=$12}}' r3 > r3b

    Looks like:
    20909 Ksuz
    6209 Isilduur
    36416 Sonal
    11874 Grumbletum
    17649 Hazimil

    # Append class names
    perl -lane 'BEGIN {open(P, "<player_class.txt");while (<P>) {@a=split(" ", $_); $c{$a[0]}=$a[1]}};print "@F $c{$F[1]}"' r3b > r3c

    Looks as above with mag, dru, brd etc added.

    # Summarise the results:
    awk '{a[$3]+=$1;n[$3]++} END {for (i in a) {print int(a/n),n,i}}' r3c|sort -n

    Yes, I should probably put it all into a single script. I'm lazy!
    Sirene_Fippy likes this.
  5. Ravengloome Augur

    Looks like you need tell your necromancer(s) to keep shield of Fate up.
    Iila likes this.
  6. Ravengloome Augur

    Also the chanters seems about on par given they have a 95% vie and Shield of Fate for when Runes are expended.

    however, Chanter actual tanking bosses doesn't work well due to the DI distributions they recieve tearing through runes extremely fast.

    On Wildramp they can just recast runes between Wild ramp rounds, however versus a bosses real rounds or extremely high DI mobs, they get roasted pretty quick. Due to the fact they can't feasibly sustain runes fast enough to outpace the incoming DPS.
  7. Sirene_Fippy Okayest Bard


    What's in player_class.txt? Would like to copy this.
  8. Brogett Augur

    It's my own file I put together showing playername and class as two columns. Manually curated, but I could probably have extratced it from our roster or magelo or something. Manual was just quicker. It was simply something to join on to add an extra column.
  9. Sirene_Fippy Okayest Bard

    Thanks Brogett for sharing how to do this, I gathered up my logs since January 1st and parsed for AE ramp damage on various classes during Arx 2 and Vitio -

    [IMG]

    [IMG]

    As mentioned before, for small numbers of hits, the data isn't going to be very accurate (enc's only had 3 ramp hits for Vitio). Most casters don't take AE ramp from Vitio.

    I think melee DPS are in a pretty bad situation. They don't need to tank on raids, but they do need to be able to survive. Dying in 1-2 rounds because something touched you (a stray add, loose rampage, AE ramp) isn't fun, and it's not very avoidable. Melee absolutely need to be near the mob to function - if something AE rampages for 40k+ per hit, it's not going to be pretty. That, combined with huge AEs, snares, and (in CotF) damage shields puts melee DPS in a very sorry state for current raid content.

    There are two ways this could be fixed - either by changing the mobs (reducing AE ramp damage) or by giving melee classes a way to defend themselves, be it a "1 round" absorb ability on a short reuse, or a self-vie like casters have. Not so that they can tank in an exp group, but so they can survive the crazy amounts of damage being doled out in raid content. I don't know what would be appropriate, but having nothing to prevent instant death from normal raid mechanics is not a skill check, and it's certainly not fun.
    Nniki, Sheex, Behelit and 6 others like this.
  10. Brogett Augur

    Obviously all these plots are skewed by player abilities and gear, with just 1 or 2 weak people in a class making that class look poor. However the more data we get from more guilds, the clearer the true picture will emerge.

    I think the problem stems from multiple areas.

    1) Upgrading warrior disciplines. Yes people asked for such things and got them, but actually it's a nerf, even to warriors. Fact is the game isn't static. If you get an ability to mitigate more, then the bosses get abilities to hit more to compensate otherwise it would all be too easy. In turn that means everyone else gets a little bit nerfed, and *even warriors* not under disc get nerfed too.

    In short, defensive discs have accentuated the spikey nature of damage, meaning that if you're not the current tank supposed to be taking hits then the game is more dangerous for you.

    2) Poor tuning between classes. Silk, leather, chain, plate makes no difference at all any more. Indeed it's more likely for a silk class to deal with AE rampage than a chain class. What gives?

    3) Avoidance seems suspect. Some classes mitigate well and some avoid well, but it does indeed seem that isn't happening so much now.

    4) Runes - they're just incredibly powerful! Brokenly so IMO, especially if you can chain cast them.

    5) Anti-melee abilities. They're just everywhere, either deliberate (damage shields, AE rampage) or just things that dramatically harm us more than ranged players (snares, PBAEs, targetted AEs, movement emotes). Couple that to the fact that melee rez effect is much harsher than caster rez effect and you get a double whammy. I know a lot of players that are getting rather jaded with the whole game as they feel unduly punished with no apparent benefits for the hindrance we have.

    The anti-melee thing is what really gets most melee in my guild angry. Seeing things like damage shields that can kill you in a couple seconds basically just screams: melee don't bother on this event. We were told that Daybreak want to concentrate on the *FUN* aspects of the game. Well trust us, DS is not fun. Not even remotely. Please reconsider its use in future and find something else to tune around; eg adds to clear.
    Sheex, Songsa, Phrovo1 and 1 other person like this.
  11. Conjurous_AB Elder

    With high strikethrough and bosses rarely missing u barely avoid or defend anything on raids. So that means non tank classes easily get killed to wild ramp or ramp alot.
  12. Norathorr Augur

    I was discussing with Fujiko as we looked back on eq. And in its current state playing a melee is utterly pointless in our books. Its good that you are still fighting for the cause Brog and always so well researched. I just hope for all the work you do for us all that someone actually listens to you and does something about it.
  13. p2aa Augur


    You want to speak of the best ability warrior had since a long time ? our defensive stance that we can keep 24/24 and it's a 30% mitigation on hits ? This ability explains why warriors are at the low spectrum of your chart wild rampage hits dmg.
    This ability allowed us to close the gap we had when we had no defensive disc up, and we still can tank very well with this + our AC disc that goes in disc window, especially when TDS raid boss can still tear through your warrior TO chain even under their defensive disc and you need to step up on the job without any war having defensive up
    But most importantly close the gap versus knights, that without their 36 % defensive disc with all their self-healing ability were able to be as much competitive as warriors without their 45 %defensive disc.
    Putting it away would be a massive nerf to warrior ability to MT Raid Boss mobs

    Let warriors alone thx, it's expected that warriors are there on your chart, we are the best mitigation tank of all class as it shall be.
  14. Derresh Augur


    clueless much? Brogett is saying that because of these types of tanking abilities, the dev's increase the damage of mobs to compensate, which causes the side effect of higher damage to everyone else.
  15. p2aa Augur

    Without a dev confirmation, it's just pure invention, unless Brogett is a dev ?

    The rest of my statement remains, better be proactive in advance on possible hidden call for class nerf.
  16. Phrovo1 Augur

    I hope you are joking right now. Its in plain English what he's trying to say. Given the broken attack values of raid mobs tuned around warriors and the fact that melee *which is the archetype that has to deal with ramp and pbae's on a nightly basis* has fewer tools to cope with them than the people shooting fire balls 50 feet away and the fact that there is only 1 raid mechanic that is obviously to mess with casters this whole expansion vs. the many that wreck melee. Why put a slow component on the snare that was meant to prevent kiting, ect. Maybe if there was a small nerf to warrior mitigation there would be a more reasonable level to tune raid mob mitigation around. As it stands anyone who is not a warrior or knight (even that's questionable, I see knights rounded all the time) and isn't lucky to have something defensive running (like Earthforce) gets eaten if even trash spits in their direction. Casters get plenty of time to fade while if a melee isn't on the ball they go splat. This game is fairly broken. Maybe nerfing the level that determines the raid mob's attack or boosting a whole archetype's mitigation would be a step in the right direction.
  17. Cicelee Augur

    I am a caster, 15+ years. And as a caster I can say that Brogett is saying nothing degrading, at all, about warriors.

    Let's say EQ devs wants Boss to do 30k DPS on a warrior. Well if Boss hits for 30k DPS, then a warrior can mitigate that way down. So in order for a Dev to get 30k DPS on a warrior under full mitigation, then that means Boss has to hit for like 70k DPS or whatever to achieve the desired results. Which means bad things for melee.

    While my main is a caster, I also have an alt melee (monk to be exact). I am doing COTF T1 raids right now and I can sympathize with melee about the mechanics because I am experiencing them myself. And while my caster main is much better geared than my alt monk... my monk should not be having so many more issues as a silk class.

    I do not know the answer. If you add discs or stuff for melee (like casters get with Shield of XXX) then the group game becomes way imbalanced. Then my monk is tanking current content with trivial ease, which should not happen. I do think some of the numbers on damage shields and AOE rampage needs to be lowered to give melee a chance. No one likes to go from 100 to 0 in 0.4 seconds flat, but there also has to be some sort of challenge or mechanism to make it dangerous. Like 100 to 0 in 6 seconds, which gives melee some chance to do whatever needs to be done to avoid death.

    I also wonder how feasible it is for some discs or AA that can only be used in a raid instance. This way group game stays OK and melee now has a fighting chance in raids. I still say lower the amounts would be one start...
    Brogett likes this.
  18. p2aa Augur

    No thanks
  19. Brogett Augur

    I think you misunderstand me, my intentions, and above all my influence (or lack of!).

    Obviously I know why warriors are low on mitigation, although think on it a bit, not every warrior is in full defensive disc when they get hit by AE rampage. If they were there would be no rotation. However it is right and proper that they mitigate well naturally. I speak of knowledge of the guild I am part of. Warriors themselves complain that if the previous tank dies then it requires quick reactions for the next tank to live, to the extent that they really dislike the idea of having the ST ride high on agro lest they get pummeled on MT death. Instead they prefer someone else inbetween in order to properly get their discs up before taking agro. I've seen one too many cases of "tank dominoes" to realise there is a certain element of truth in what they say.

    It is foolish to believe you can gain something vs the mobs. As your defense goes up, so the mob attacks get tuned. It is the same for dps. As our dps goes up, so does the mob hp. This is how every MMO works and it's reasonable. Where things can run amok is multiplier upgrades.

    An example is for melee dps. Now and then we get a new disc. It's the same as the old one but instead of, say, +200% dps for 30 sec it's now +250% dps for 30 sec. Or +300%, etc. What's actually happening here? The "dps under disc" becomes futher and further away from the "dps without disc", yet the players all thank the devs for their boosts because they're thinking only of one thing - they need that dps disc upgrade in order to compete with their fellow dps classes. So it goes with all aspects of the game. Is it good though? Probably not for the long term. It's only certain game aspects too. Do enchanters and shaman get higher ranks of slow every expansion? Are clerics able to heal a higher and higher percentage of your health every expansion? Yet raising the damage multiplier for dps or the damage reduction %age for a tank isn't considered as a problem.

    As for my intentions. Nerf is a bad thing. It angers players and doesn't really help. Instead the devs try more subtle approaches, such as boosting the mobs in new ways that compensate and avoid a stat which has become too strong. Consider heroic strikethrough as one such example. They're not without their flaws, but perhaps over time something similar could arrive. If there is a way to add additional attacks into a mob that don't get reduced as much by defensives discs, for NEW content, then it's not a nerf for anythign existing, just a renormalisation for newer mobs. There are probably dozens of nuances and tricks that could be done to prevent tank dominoes and non-tanks being one-rounded on a tank death so often. I don't pretend to have all the answer, but definitely I don't just want to blanket nerf warriors!

    Finally if you think I have the ear of the devs and can just suggest something to get it implemented, not a hope! Nor would I want it that way.
  20. Dre. Altoholic

    Just pointing out that these didn't come from nowhere, but instead were necesssary responses to increases in Knight Healing/Defense