With EQs dedication to a vertical progression system for every xpac many percent modifiers need to be adjusted. Passive percent modifiers do not hold up well from a design perspective unless there is a choice behind them. As time has gone on in order to keep the player chasing gear these passive mods have had to get larger and larger causing exponential growth and power bloat. Percent modifiers should only be on active abilities or should require some choice/compromise to use otherwise they are just needless power bloat. My idea of a solution is for successive xpac AAs with passive crit mods swap over to bonus damage. AAs like Healing Adept and Fury of Magic would now just provide a flat bonus damage of near equivalent value. This same logic could be applied to focus effects. Just remove focus effects the extend duration and give every spell 35% boost to durration and same with spell haste. For increase to damage, mana pres, and healing just use the stats Heal amount Spell damage and clairvoyance. This would create a much more manageable and smoother power progression. In addition this opens a lot of design space to make gearing interesting and customizable as you can have gear and augs that focus on certain stats and allow players to stack up these stats. Another idea to overhaul focus effects is to limit them to one slot like for instance the mask. This way players have to choose what they want to focus in and then accommodate any lost power in through bonus damage or bonus healing. This seems like a solution that could be implemented easily without breaking past expansions just requiring a bit of math to make sure all these averages match up so we do not have a revisiting of the necro epic fiasco on a global scale.
I'm not sure if players are interested in expanding and applying the Type 3 augment system to everything else (which seems to be your suggestion at least in part).
I would disagree and I am sure many others would as well. How exactly is it broken and unsustainable? Most of what you are talking about have been in place for decades and have not caused any issues. Everything you are talking about would pretty much break/nerf the entire game. Considering all spells/abilities/items have been designed around the current system they would all have to get updated to support any changes. I see nothing wrong with how things are currently setup, sure it would have been nice if a different design had been put in place to allow for growth over time but that wasn't the case. Any changes at this point would require most of the game to be rebalanced to reflect the massive nerfs that would come because of those changes. Personally I would rather they spend their time elsewhere.
Its pointless bloating. If everyone who can heal has an AA that makes it 40% better why even have that AA? Why not just make the spell heal for 40% more? Its an extra calculation that serves no gameplay purpose and overcomplicates. Its unsustainable because at some point you hit 100% crit and all of a sudden you have invalidated a ton of abilities. Eventually they will be forced to discontinue expanding on crit AA lines and at that point why even have them. The Focus AAs in EoK were really cool until we started running out of room for new ones. Now every class has a bunch of AAs that don't really add anything to the game except confusion. Imagine a new player trying to understand how that nuke with 20k base damage just hit for 500k. Makes infinitely more sense to just put all that damage into the spell itself. It is really not that hard to balance its just a bit of math.
Because it makes spells more powerful as you earn more experience and level up? Besides that extra calculation is trivial for a computer and just happens once on each cast and you would still have to do it for any AA that increases it regardless of it being a flat amount or percentage. Sure it would have been nice if they had been designed differently but at this point it would be a massive amount of work to redesign the entire system and update everything to reflect the change. As for you complaints about 100% crit rate it is unlikely that they are going to give that and we are still a good ways away from that anyway.
Necros have been able to it 100% crit rate during burns since TSS or maybe earlier. I hear Berzerkers and Wars can as well. We are already there. In addition the type 3 aug and AA set up has already shown its ugly side. How long was it that people didnt use the new xpacs spells because they didn't have the AAs for synergies? Why should New players be stuck behind a wall of AAs so their abilites are actually useful? This is not a hard overhaul you are making it out to be its just some number manipulation. Idk maybe you think math is hard but let me tell you this math is not that hard.
Yes, they hit 100% crit rate during burns which isn't a problem, there is a big difference between being able to hit 100% crit rate for a time and hitting it all the time. Yes the system has issues and could have been designed better but that doesn't mean it is a good idea to throw everything away and have to rebalance everything. You keep making claims that it wouldn't be that hard to do but lets look back at the druid, shaman and necro dot revamps and how much they messed those up even though it is simple math.
This isn't a choice its inevitable. They cannot keep this scaling indefinitely. Changing over to Bonus damage is a long term solution. Sure 20 years from now we may be hitting for a billion damage but it wont cause gross balance issues like they have now. They have already had to make the same concession I am talking about before. I think it was SoD when they realized they could no long keep giving crit chance on Cleave and started just adding bonus damage to future ranks of Cleave. Ferro went the same way. Its time for the rest of the focus effects and percent modifiers to follow suit. Think how many new AAs we could have if we didn't have all these passive bonuses taking up space.
You just showed how they can work to prevent the issue from getting to far out of control. They stooped adding crit chance on cleave and started adding other things. They have already reached caps with several focus types and they stay the same from expansion to expansion with only the level cap on them changing. There is nothing wrong with a focus reaching the end of expandability and them finding different ways to improve it from that point on.
Exaclty so why when EoK rolled around did they make the exact same mistake????? why did they give every class a ton of %mods that were doomed to be replaced. They make so much work for themselves with poor game design over and over.
Every time I play an actual RPG, I’m reminded how much EQ lacks interesting ways to allocate stats and change the way a character plays.
This is a problem and I'm not sure why anyone would pretend otherwise. Berserkers and Warriors do crit 100% of the time all the time because Heroic Dexterity got bumped every expansion, each time leading to a passive crit chance bump. Other melee will hit that 100% threshold, it's just a matter of time. % modifiers in many cases don't need upgrades. Mathematically, gear doesn't ever need to have more heroic dexterity for people to want heroic dexterity. Each year the raw DPS value of a set amount of heroic dexterity increases with weapon upgrades/changes to other modifiers. Nonetheless, the amount of heroic dexterity is scaled at the exact same rate as heroic strength, despite that being a flat damage addition (and a paltry one - but that's besides the point). This scaling of % modifiers is a big part of the balance issues in EQ. In ToL Beta, the scaling expansion over expansion on damage over time spells got cut from the standard 21% to 10% to try to rein in revamped DoTs that were seen as overperforming. At the same time, because AAs are just copy/pasted, the AA dev gave every DoT class more ranks of Enhanced Decay, et al., pushing the effective increase on some DoT lines as high as 50% and most at least beyond that standard 21% that was deemed too powerful by the spell dev. Another good example of the problem is the strength of ADPS, which creates large performance gaps between perfectly composed/coordinated groups and what most guilds bring on average. Most ADPS modifiers that matter are % based, and many of these get bigger each year (or every other year). This is made worse by the fact they're in many cases multiplicative, meaning the cumulative scaling of a fully supported/coordinated group has been substantially higher than an "average" or unsupported group over the past many years. As Shakara said, all of this is just math. It's not hard to see the compounding effects of imprudent scaling over multiple expansions, and it's not hard to stop scaling % modifiers and create worthwhile "flat" modifiers that can be scaled expansion over expansion. The problem thus far is "flat" modifiers are also made extremely small (look at robe clicks, bard songs, belt foci, spell damage, heroic strength, etc.). There's no reason they need to be so small; I think in practice people implementing abilities often don't realize that "40%" is in many contexts far more impactful than something like "+200K."
I support the balancing and normalizing of percentages which have been identified by the OP and Sancus. These can be targeted improvements or fixes, and not overhauls. I am skeptical of the tedium of maintaining more bags of gear and augments (on top of chasing and fitting Type 3 and Type 5 augments) for boosts.
I think it was Eldiroth that said years ago using % to increase effects was bad. I think that was when Cleave stopped getting further % added to it. There comes a stage when they cannot add anymore % to it.
EQ has so few resources dedicated to gameplay development that % modifiers are better suited than flat value changes, which require continuous tuning.
I'd be afraid of how sweeping the changes might be. Past efforts to tune various parts of the DPS equation have almost never been .... ' smooth ' .
