Melee Mitigation / Avoidance.

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

  1. Brogett Augur

    Understood. Nothing is in isolation. EQ is largely about powerflow, between mobs vs players and between players. Balancing is always hard and frankly it's unrealistic to expect it to ever be perfectly in balance!

    I'm simply presenting some of the consequences of these changes.

    Edit: Putting it another way, changes have to happen to balance classes, but in doing so it has knock on effects. Melee get pummelled more so now than ever before, largely as a consequence of mob power gains vs tanks. We need better avoidance ourselves.

    Well that and some is just plain odd. More data required, but it's looking like druids can take a beating better than beastlords. What's going on there?
  2. Dre. Altoholic

    actually, what disciplines are you referring to, specifically?
  3. Brohg Augur

    Armor of Darkened Runes, obv.
    Dre. likes this.
  4. Brogett Augur

    To be frank, I don't know all the ins and outs! I know you did get some tanking boosts to compensate for lack of heals (which is fair, but as I say nothing is without consequence). Some of it is simply upgraded spam-discs like more AC while other things would be mitigation upgrades like cotf BP clicks or a bit older NTTB. Some of it is even just buffs from other classes which are kept on the tanks and no one else (due to sheer time).

    I'm sure there are other things but I'm no warrior. I don't particularly want to get bogged down with arguments over specific abilities as I'm not trying to get any specific ability changed either! Indeed even discussing tanking upgrades was just one of many points I raised and not IMO the sole cause by any stretch. My aim is simple - to demonstrate that things have moved on and melee dps aren't tougher melee variants of their caster dps cousins. Instead quite the reverse can be true.
  5. Ravengloome Augur

    Or that whole permanent 30% mitigation increase they got last expansion via the stance?
    Brogett likes this.
  6. Brogett Augur

    Lol I knew I was forgetting something important :)

    Dre is correct though, you can't just undo something like that, even if it's by way of stagnation or changing mob mechanics, as it was added for a reason (war vs knights). So I'd amend some of my earlier views perhaps.

    Maybe what it needs instead is a lesser version added to all pure melee. Eg 30% to wars, 10% to mnk, rog, ber. (Bst need something too it seems!) No idea if that would work - just thinking out loud here.
  7. Dre. Altoholic

    I'm having a hard time figuring out which Warrior upgrades are responsible for the problem you're seeing.

    Defensive Proficiency did not widen the gap between "discd vs undiscd" mitigation, in fact it did just the opposite. The mitigation portion of Warrior 'Defensive Discipline' line has not increased in magnitude since Kunark. Regarding all the rest of our 'stuff', see also this thread. TL;DR - a cornucopia of stacking issues.

    More to your topic, dealing with (wild)Rampage specifically, rampage damage can be tuned separate from regular mob attacks, so that might be a better focus here. New melee abilities with regenerating or procced 'parry/block/spelldodge' type abilities could help melee classes here as well.

    The danger of adding raw mitigation to non-tank classes is that you erode the need for tanks. If you can heal through the mob's damage with a DPS class tanking, that's going to be preferable in most situations. Looking at your graphs, you're only talking 20-30% in some cases of hit variance. While this can be a big deal in getting rounded by raid bosses, you bring that to the group game and it's a different situation entirely.

    Another issue here is that a lot of people misunderstand the nature of the 'tank' as it applies to other games; heavily armored, impenetrable. A a better metaphor for the EverQuest tank would be a containment vessel like a septic tank. In this case that tank contains HP that rapidly drains and must be continuously refilled.
  8. Songsa Augur

    Its not a problem "warrior nerf or not". What annoys melee is the lack of risk vs reward. Its ok to take risks to do dps if you can have a reward for it (for melee dps it would be being very competitive). Taking risks (ae ramp), having always same annoying/not fun effects in raid (slow/snare/ds) and see some other classes with more power and less penalties/risks is what make melee wanting to reroll/stop the game.
    To resume : Fix melee mitigation/avoidance to have same security/fun than casters or put a clear dps advantage for classes taking risks if they can survive or avoid penalties with good skill.
  9. Dre. Altoholic

    I think the bigger issue here is the elegance and "completeness" of the spellset for any casting class, vs the lack of utter lack of attention devoted to the melee toolbox.

    On top of that the game in general suffers from far too much copy-paste.... just ignore the squeaks and keep the wheel cranking along.

    Specific to risks and defense, with a few exceptions, Wild Rampage and other specials generally hit tanks too. As a Rogue they typically hit you when you're at full health, but the tank's health is all over the place. And those other fun things (fear, charm, stuns, etc) that don't kill you, but annoy and impede... well they actually kill us when it happens to our healers. The gap that tanks have over non-tank melee in survivability is needed, desperately.

    Still, it's still pretty sweet when you're standing over a nasty mob's corpse and get to say 'tanked it' for the first time. Having played a Rogue in another life, I gotta say it's even better than topping the parse.
  10. Zaknaffein Augur

    I'm not surprised at all on most of the results there.This expansion has proven to be the Enchanters Time to Shine Expansion. Gogo Runes and IoG/Auras, ae stuns and ae mez! Pets are still ridiculously overpowered in terms of Mitigation and agro generation, and I don't just mean Pet class pets here, (Hello Phantom Agressor Pet and Idiot FV who is basically just a Mage pet who's owner doesn't have pet command and doesn't control it). So again I'm not surprised to see how well pets can take a hit at all.

    Tanks obviously should take a hit the best.

    We all know how bad off Melee DPS are at the moment in terms of DPS Compared to caster DPS. Now we can see actual results that can confirm how bad off they are in terms of comparable survivability as well as the DPS discrepancies.

    Melee dps have to work harder to reach thier potential compared to caster dps along with needing to be situationally aware of thier surrounding and manually adapt to any sudden movement changes/ae flux etc. Casters don't. I have been playing my druid in raids recently, and I have to say it is the easiest freakn thing to do on a raid is to play a Caster DPS class. I see no Incentive at all to play Melee dps honestly at the moment.

    Beastlords though is a head scratcher to me, why are they taking a beating like that?


    Stop with the discussion about warriors or suggesting it's because of warrior abilities and tuning around said abilities when you don't know what you are talking about there. The logic of going from Melee shortcomings and linking it to warriors abilities and therefore warriors should be nerfed is just plain irresponsible and all you will end up doing is derailing your initial purpose of your thread which deserves Developer attention.

    What your results show can be summed up with one word though: RUNES.

    Runes are extremely powerful, and they seem to be handing them out to casters like candy.
  11. Sheex Goodnight, Springton. There will be no encores.

    I still don't really understand why some dev decided casters needed the Shield of Fate line, but that melee didn't need something similar. Were casters getting obliterated in raids more than melee prior to it being added? I certainly don't remember it that way....

    What little melee get in that arena also come at a rather impactful cost of tying up the disc window when using them, making them something that can't be used very effectively when they are needed most. So hey you can pop your avoidance disc but better not do it until all other dps discs are exhausted or you'll be under parsing and thus not doing your jeb!
    Ferry-Tunare, Dre. and Brogett like this.
  12. Brogett Augur

    You're quite right, the permanent defensive abilities will of course narrow the gap for warriors between disced and undisced (although going back further in time there have been short duration defensive changes, like NTTB that have the opposite effect). However they *do* increase the gap between warriors and non-warriors which while perhaps desired between wars and knights, I don't think it's desirable between tanks and non-tanks. It means we take an even bigger pasting than before.

    Granted though this isn't really the sole issue and I didn't mean for it to get so much attention. The overall picture is what matters - that caster dps >> melee dps for absorbing damage. It's plain wrong.
  13. Sirene_Fippy Okayest Bard

    These are the two biggest issues I see for melee classes in TDS raids:

    1. Being in melee range tends to be deadly
    • TDS 3 (Nomia):
      • Melee have to dodge a snare/slow/DoT cast by bone golems
      • Nomia's auras (Dreadfrost and Dread Hoarfrost) are snare/slow
      • Nomia randomly summons players into her snare aura
      • She also casts a 7s stun, which can stop you from running away
      • Amidst all the snares, she casts a 145k 50' AE
      • If you die during the undead totem phase, you spawn an add. This discourages melee from putting themselves in any danger, since they have reduced DPS and poor defense.
    • TDS 2 (Numicia) and Praetor Vitio:
      • The purple golem and Praetor Vitio AE rampage, and hit melee DPS classes for an average of over 40k per hit.
    2. Melee are often hit with anti-kite mechanics
    • TDS 1 and Tita's Ghost:
    [48013] Eldritch Binding
    Target: Single
    Range: 1000'
    Resist: Magic -850, Min Resist Chance: 10%, Max Resist Chance: 25%
    Duration: 90s (15 ticks)
    2: Increase Melee Delay by 65%
    3: Increase Disease Counter by 32
    4: Decrease Movement Speed by 60%
    • TDS 4 (Lucia):
    [17623] Chains of Binding
    Target: Target AE
    Range: 600', AE Range: 45'
    Resist: Unresistable
    Duration: 24s (4 ticks)
    2: Decrease Movement Speed by 65%
    3: Decrease Melee Haste by 45%
    4: Stun for 1s

    These mechanics are problematic because the NPCs which cast them are always, at some point, more than 20' away from their target. In event 1 (and Tita's Ghost), right when they spawn and get aggro on the raid, a bunch of snares go off. They continue snare/slowing people throughout. The permarooted mobs do this as well. In event 4, the rooted mobs (after 4 fortitio are dead) all start to AE snare/slow the raid. This snare (Chains of Binding) is much worse than the one in event 1 because it is a target AE (all melee who are on the mob will be slowed) and isn't curable.

    There is a need for something in raids to hold back the players; the problem is, most of these are lopsided (snare/slow doesn't really matter to casters), or completely unavoidable.

    Here are some suggestions for TDS raids in particular, or future raid content -

    - Add a timer to anti kite mechanics, like the Bored/Annoyed/Furious stages on Tita's Ghost. Pretty much every NPC that has an anti-kite ability, will use it as soon as they spawn - give them some sort of delay on using these abilities.
    - Restrict anti kite mechanics to NPCs that are currently able to move. Rooted mobs should not be chain snare/slowing people when they aren't even engaged.
    - Please, no AE anti kite mechanics - this just punishes everyone who is meleeing.
    - Max hit for Wild Rampage should never kill melee classes in one round. If a raid geared character has ~150k HP, a round of 37.5k will kill them. The max hit needs to be lower than this, for all melee classes. Mysteriously dying due to an unlucky AE ramp is not fun or challenging.
    - Instead of slow, if you need to reduce player DPS, have NPCs use more "vie" buffs that absorb both spell and melee damage.
    Ferry-Tunare likes this.
  14. Random_Enchanter Augur


    because certain dev's want to see you die more on raids ;)

    In all seriousness though, in my enchanter option you should be looking for mitigation style abilities rather than rune style abilities. Runes are great don't get me wrong, but there more of a front loaded "in case of" situation (or "its coming!") they do next to nothing when runes can cover X incoming DPS and the mob is doing Y DPS to you (Y > X). What helps a heck of a lot more is the mitigation ability's that reduce mob damage by X% for Y time/damage cap.

    Also, damage absorbed by runes don't show up on parses for incoming damage Sirene_fippy's charts show that
  15. Sheex Goodnight, Springton. There will be no encores.

    The problem with mitigation type abilities is they can be often used in "tanking" situations, so they need to be powerful enough to help a melee dps live against an AE page raid boss, but not turn the user into a "dps tank" in all other content. The monk earthforce/impenetrable line comes to mind, wasn't it was originally intended as an oh crap emergency tanking and or pulling tool? Now it's a pretty big part of the class on a ~2m timer and one of the stronger abilities in the game.

    And I die plenty as is, thank you sir!
  16. Dre. Altoholic

    I have a lot of personal respect for you Brogett, but you're off the rails here. Tanks take hits, DPS makes stuff dead. There are other ways of dealing with the issues you bring to light that don't involve further blurring the archetypes into each other.
    100% agreed.
  17. Ravengloome Augur


    You do realize that Enchanters have had all those things for awhile now right (what like 2 years for IOG, forever for AE stun/Mez and 7 or 8 years for the auras?).

    The only thing they got that they didn't have before was a way to proc chromatic haze on their group.

    Maybe people are just now realizing enchanters are powerful, but they have been very powerful for a very long time.
    Fenudir and Random_Enchanter like this.
  18. Zaknaffein Augur

    You really couldn't be any more of an obvious troll Raven.
  19. Ravengloome Augur

    Your right obviously enchanters were useless before TDS. Sorry.
  20. Brogett Augur

    I agree we shouldn't be needing to take hits, but fact is we get them far too often. Adds spawn and whack us before they get picked up. Maybe only 1 round, but that's sometimes enough. If we could guarantee every mob is always on a tank then fine, but it's just unrealistic. I'm sort of thinking in all directions trying to get my head straight on what the right solution is, so don't take any of my views too seriously. I'm not even sure myself what works and what doesn't. :)

    Maybe the solution lies in runes, but that's a slippery slope too. See what it's done for enchanters!

    What other ways were you thinking?