Dev Diary Feedback: Combat Changes

[Clover]

Looking at the combat system as it has grown over the last year, the Systems team has learned a lot from player behaviors, playstyles, and how they interact with all the different types of monsters in The Lord of the Rings Online™.

Read more about the upcoming combat changes and post your comments here!

[Grampsaz]

Good diary, better change.

The days of a lv 50 Tank with 70% avoidance is thankfully, over.


Little to no adjustment in game play is needed. Learning and understanding the new UI and point ratings is what took me the longest to understand.

[Benedor]

Nice diary, however you used "then" instead of "than" in several places. Not to be a stickler for grammar and spelling, but....

Feel free to delete this post after you have made your corrections to the article.

[ararax2]

Defence Ratings (Mitigations) are heavily influenced by your Armour values. In Moria, armour now contributes to non-common mitigations, like Shadow and Fire. This means that every character who absorbs damage will care about gaining the highest amount of armour they can find, since it will contribute to all of your Defence Ratings .

FINALLYYYYYYYY

Overall looks like a great job hakai

[Sildamor]

- tiny fractional percentages just aren’t fun (...) over 10+ years
That makes sense. Oh I just got a uber new shield, now my mitigation is 54%... wait... with my 10 levels old shield it was 53.7%.... hum... it does hurt... even as it will be the same, big numbers make people happy lol

- reduce the penalties for fighting up-level.
What I take from that is: go fight white mobs, lower mobs will be easier to kill and higher level than you will be harder. Go do white quests, stop doing purple/red quests! I hope they give us enough white quests... =)


- “overcharge” their points in order to gain all new partial avoidances
Oh well... at least the hard cap is not the end of the road... you gain extra mitigation (if I understood that right, if you have like 40% mitigation + 30% parry mitigation, you will avoid 70% of that attack damage)

-new Devastate chance
Cool... but where is the rating (%) for normal crits??? 3% tactical crit cant be right... and HOW BIG IS the devastate change?
Auto-attack crit: 125%
Skill crit: 150%
Devastate: ????

- (Mitigations) are heavily influenced by your Armour values
So finally people can say: hey ask that dude in heavy armor to tank, I am just a hunter in medium ^_^. It was really funny how little influence the kind of armor did on fights before.

[CU5]

Nice to get a dev diary on this. It's one of the things I've been most curious about. Of course, the real proof will be in how it actually plays, but extra info never hurts.

[farnorthYP]

Just want to state that if you cared about understanding how to play your best with the old combat system and wish to continue that trend into moria, then you are in for an inital shock. The new combat system is a major shock to the system and takes a bit to get used to. However, if you are willing to adapt and open to change then you will get a handle on things and be able to be as successful a player in Moria as you are in SoA currently at lvl 50 just give it time folks.

Learn to love your tooltips as you mouse over agi/vit/might etc in your character journal. They will give you the new percentages (just try not to be so alarmed by how low they seem.) From what i have seen explained in the forums and what I have experienced myself there seems to be a number of new checks built into the system in terms of hitting a mob and being hit as opposed to the old system of just a few checks. You'll especially not want to ignore things like partial B/P/E percentages and new devastate crit percentages as well.

[farnorthYP]

Originally Posted by Sildamor

- reduce the penalties for fighting up-level.
What I take from that is: go fight white mobs, lower mobs will be easier to kill and higher level than you will be harder. Go do white quests, stop doing purple/red quests! I hope they give us enough white quests... =).

If you do all the quests in Eregion and then enter Moria you will consistently be doing dark blue and sometimes ligh blue quests from one end of the mine to the other. The quest rewards are still quite good even though they are blues. I was able to go from 50-60 in just under 9 days and still had a ton of quests left to do. If you insist on doing quests that are yellow or even orange you'll find that you level much slower since stuff is that much harder to fight.

Originally Posted by Sildamor

-new Devastate chance
Cool... but where is the rating (%) for normal crits??? 3% tactical crit cant be right... and HOW BIG IS the devastate change?
Auto-attack crit: 125%
Skill crit: 150%
Devastate: ????.

If I remeber correctly the devastate perc. and the partial B/P/E perc. are roughly half of what regular crit and B/P/E perc. are. Someone please correct me if i'm wrong but pretty sure thats right. That may sound like a very small amount considering you have a 13% ranged Crit your Dev. Rng. Crit. will be 6.5% but it all really seems to proc quite often and dev. crits are waaaaay juicy

[Hammerfast]

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[Ayrolen]

Originally Posted by Grampsaz

Little to no adjustment in game play is needed. Learning and understanding the new UI and point ratings is what took me the longest to understand.

/nodnod I still get a bit confused sometimes, but I've definitely adjusted. It helps that when you hover over the numbers, it gives you percentages since that's what I'm so used to. I welcome the change, though, even if I was quite put off by all of it at first. I just have to try even harder to be uber now.

[Wisdomandlore]

You could at least be fully honest. For example, this quote stuck out to me:

We were literally giving out tiny bits of effectiveness for our characters, and generally, although some may disagree, tiny fractional percentages just aren’t fun.

That's even MORE true in the new combat system. Wait till you get items with +220 Evade rating an realize that is .1%. Or wait until you realize 400 Tactical Crit rating is .6%. And stats like Might, Agility, and Fate influence these numbers even less than in the old combat system.

Oh, and wait till you level up and your mitigations and BPE go down.


There are a few traits that give out huge bonuses, but not many.

At least be completely truthful and say "We needed room to grow. Players were already reaching the upper limits of avoidance and mitigation."

[Kentelyoo]

I'm sure this will be cool.. even if I don't understand half of it.

I've never understood those numbers in the current system. I admit I never took the time to try because I did not really care. The only thing that mattered to me was: I'm a Guardian, I'm expected to tank and keep aggro, its working fine, my new armour and mace are certainly better than my old ones because the numbers describing it are higher (whatever they mean) and because I just got them as a reward for those new quests, I can solo mobs at my level and have a hard time killing higher level mobs and I find it logical, and I'm happy with all that.

Will I ever need to understand it more than this ? I mean, how the new system will affect my way of playing ? I don't mean to be critical, I'm just curious.

[CU5]

After actually reading the diary, I think I like it. It seems like they're replacing the old "here's a percentage, and we tweak it up or down depending on what level monster you're fighting" with a simpler check that (all numbers invented) "OK, a level 50 monster will have 5000 points, a level 60 monster 6000 points, a level 70 monster 7000 points, and you roll your number against their number." (And if it's rolling one number against another, there's no way you can ever reach 100% success, just like they wanted.)

So let's say you have the average amount of points at a given level, then you can expect to take on on-level mobs. But if you have much more points than normal, then you can expect to take on higher-level mobs without an additional penalty to avoidances, for example. (Conversely, if you have less points than average, you're in for a world of hurt.) That'd be great if true; it really would mean cranking up your ratings higher and higher would have a measurable effect on gameplay, instead of being diminished into oblivion when you try to take on a mob 2-4 levels above you, and so make gear with lots of points more desirable.

The other thing I like about the new system is the partials and devastates. That should add some more flavor to combat, especially since I tend to gear for criticals. I am a little disappointed to see that partials seem to just be another fixed value event, rather than having a range of effectiveness (for example, if you get a partial parry event, your character might always mitigate 30% of incoming damage, rather than maybe 20% one time, and 40% another time). I guess it keeps things more understandable, though.

Armour changes are also nice, although it seems armour does much less mitigation against non-common types still, so it remains to be seen how useful having lots of armour will be. I'm used to pretty much ignoring my armour value right now, because it was "good enough" and so many other stats gave much better bang for the buck. (Also, there never seemed to be a significant difference between light and medium and heavy classes; my minstrel in light armor + shield has as much armour as my burglar. I hope the difference is more exaggerated in Moria...)

[darkchronus]

Originally Posted by Sildamor

- reduce the penalties for fighting up-level.
What I take from that is: go fight white mobs, lower mobs will be easier to kill and higher level than you will be harder. Go do white quests, stop doing purple/red quests! I hope they give us enough white quests... =)

I took this to mean that your mitigations won't be penalized as harshly for fighting harder things (if you have appropriate gear). In context the line is "This enables truly daring players to reduce the penalties for fighting up-level". Truly daring players implies that you're fighting harder things, eh? ><

Poor wording. Any chance on clarification?

((EDIT)): I'd also like to add that I like this change Didn't mean to not comment on it at all lol ^^

[Eavis]

Good diary, very helpful, however... I play a Guardian this isnt to complain about no more 100% B/P/E I think that it is good there will be a bit less, however two questions on my mind are parry and Guardians Ward

As a Guardian I personally find parry a tough avoidance to grind, and at the same time I find I prefer its reactive skills the most.

I find block easy to get and not just that you get it with great stats (e.g Etched Beryl Bracelet) where as parry is tough requiring you to sacrifice stats. Will parry be brought somewhat to par, or balanced with block? or will it still take a backseat?

The second question is concerning Guardians Ward, currently with the advanced trait it gives 5% b/p, 5% common mit, and -10% armour wear, will Guardians Ward still give these nice values or will that also suffer a blow?