Dark Legacy MUD Forum

EDIT: If this is implemented, mobs, especially epic mobs, will probably have their damage lowered so that they are no harder than they are now. Your resistances will be lower, but the mobs damage will be lower too. Players will be NO weaker against mobs; resistances have changed many times over the years and the mobs are always adjusted(courteousy of Isabelle) to be balanced with the current resistances available.


As many of you know, physical attacks are currently worthless in PvP and against supermobs. Magical attacks are worthless against most decent characters. The only reliable way to kill players are elementals, which ignore every defense in the game.

What causes these problems?

Physical attacks are useless because everyone easily gets 90% physical resists + sanctuary and many easily get high armor class. 90% resists + sanc = 5% damage, plus many of your attacks don't hit because of armor class. This also makes damage reduction useless since it's calculated before resistances, for example: 10,000 damage - 100 dr = 9900 damage, - 95% for resists = 495 damage. Without the damage reduction, you would have taken 500 damage; meaning your 100 dr is only preventing 5 damage.

Magical attacks are usually useless, as there are a variety of ways to raise MR but few ways to raise complexities. A certain item in the game gives 20 MR, Psychic armor can easily give 15ish, epicbuy easily gives 20, pixies get 20 bonus, gnomes get 50 bonus, and epicbuy keeps giving it with epic levels. So that means that a low-epic-level pixie can get 75 + antimagic shell, and a gnome of similar level can get 105 + antimagic shell. An e1 pixie with psionicist only has 85 in his highest complexities, which raises to 90 at e100 with crowning. With these high MR ratings, you don't need many fecs in your antimagic shell to be immune to magic from similar-level opponents, so you can put many durs in it and get a fairly long duration. That makes offensive magic not terribly useful against well-designed characters.

Elementals deal prog damage, which means they can attack from any range, use no mana, ignore resistances if you don't add an elemental rune, ignore all damage reduction, ignore AC, and ignore MR. On top of this, elementals get 6,000 hp and very high AC, making them very difficult to kill. Typical elementals will deal around 1,000 damage per shot and ignore all defenses, so chances are they will kill you before you can kill them, and even if you can kill them they can just be resummoned. If you consider that physical damage is reduced to 5%, then roughly halved by AC, an elemental effectively does 40x damage, or the equivalent of 40,000 physical damage per shot. Higher level elementals deal even more damage.


What can be done about this? Well, the main problem with resistances is that they exponential returns for increasing resistance values. What does this mean?

With one resist enchanted, you get 10% resistance. This means you now take 90% damage, and your opponent has to deal 11% more damage to kill you, so you effectively get an 11% bonus to your hp from your resistance.

With two resistances enchanted, you get 20% resistance. This means you now take 80% damage, and your opponent has to deal 25% more damage to kill you, so you effectively get a 25% bonus to your hp from your resistance.

With three resistances enchanted, you get 30% resistance. This means you now take 70% damage, and your opponent has to deal 42% more damage to kill you, so you effectively get a 42% bonus to your hp from your resistances.

With four resists, you get 40% resistance, which is a 66% bonus to your hp.

With five resists, you get 50% resistance, which is a 100% bonus to your hp.

With six resists, you get 60% resistance, which is a 150% bonus to your hp.

With seven resists, you get 70% resistance, which is a 233% bonus to your hp.

With eight resists, you get 80% resistance, which is a 400% bonus to your hp.

With nine resists, you get 90% resistance, which is a 900% bonus to your hp.

With nine resists plus sanc, you get 95% effective resistance, which is a 1900% bonus to your hp.


What can we do about it? See this post: http://forums.dark-legacy.com/viewtopic.php?t=642


How will this benefit you?


Everyone: this makes damage reduction useful, so the higher dr and lower AC of higher level armor is actually worthwhile. You can also tailor your resistances to suit your tastes, instead of being almost required to enchant two-three resistances per item and max all physical resists. You can even enchant no resists if you want, since they won't be so vital with this change. Additionally, all of those different elemental runes that each of your classes gets become far more useful.

Mages: You can actually use elemental runes in your offensive spells for the bonus from Empower Augmentation, since you don't have to worry about out-of-hand resistances

Melee Characters: Your attacks are no longer a joke in PvP or against supermobs; everyone will not have such high resists that you can't kill them with your physical attacks.

Druids: Your elementals are no longer "overpowered", and no one can rightfully complain about you using them in the arena. Also, you can feasibly use elementals other than magic elementals.

Pkers/duelers: These changes will make pk as feasible as it was two years ago, so you can effectively fight other players without being a druid. Also, with more characters being feasible for PvP, you will find more people willing to duel you and make PvP characters.


Please comment on this idea; Celeborn and I have discussed this and want YOUR opinions. If no one supports it, it won't go into effect. If this idea meets with support, I'll write up a fix for Complexities vs MR, so that oracles, conjurers, etc will be feasible in PvP once again.

So please tell me what you think, and if you don't understand it, just ask and I'll try to clarify ^_~

i think this is a good idea ,keep up the good work

well, i.. dont understand it... umm. i get that youre saying that eles are overpowered, and until recently in a convo with you, i thought you could make eles useless, but apparently not, so... yes?

I'm watching this thread closely. Your votes decide if I put this in or not.

Chilli - ele's aren't useless, keeping elementals in play is a contest between the druid and his opponent. Experiment and you'll be rewarded ;)

Everyone else - If you're going to vote, especially if no, please post at least a quick reply saying WHY you're voting


By the way, I think I forgot to post this part: resistance cost will be increased to 1000 per resist, and it will not increase with consecutive resists. I thought I put this part in the old post, but apparently I didn't. Sorry.

Wow, Torrim has obviously put a ton of effort, thought, and number-crunching into this idea...
Although i'm sure this change would result in me having to completely redo all the eq on my chars, Caerina's chars, and several others in my guild, and keep me busy crafting and enchanting all that eq til the end of time(thanks Torrim *grumble*), i'm going to have to agree and vote yes on this

This means that those slackers that cant fight for themselves and only have elementals do it can finally get killed, I voted yess definitely.

Voting yes.

Definitely want to see this in place. (Now that I've figured out what it means )

I've noticed that NO ONE who has voted no has given a reason for their vote. If you don't like the idea, say WHY.

Do you just vote no because you enjoy being immune to physical characters?

Are you not able to beat anyone fairly and want resists to stay broken so that you can beat everyone who uses physical attacks?

Do you not understand the proposal and just vote "no" for the hell of it?

It took me a lot of time and effort to come up with this. It takes a while to read and understand this whole proposal, so if you have taken the time to read and fully understand it, you can take an extra minute or two to write a quick reply about WHY you voted. If you don't understand it well enough or don't have enough time to read it fully and reply, don't vote.

They probably don't see any flaws or have any reason to say no other than a preference for the system as it is now.

Talas wrote:They probably don't see any flaws or have any reason to say no other than a preference for the system as it is now.

Well, they could say that then.

hehe, even tho im rather a newbie, i agree with this also. I mean if you just want to have someone kill you with overpowered eles, y not just try and kill something bare handed?! lol, nice suggestion.

I voted yes.

Shrowder

what about bounce while we're at it?

Bounce will give a certain number of resists(probably a fraction less than 1)per fec added. Ward will do the same. They will stack with resists enchanted on gear.

What about runes in armor? It seems a bit overpowered to get 1,000 enchant space per socket.

Actually, the way I presented it to Celeborn, they still give a flat 1% bonus to resist, added on top of whatever other resists you have.

That makes them no more useful than they are now at low levels of resists, but the higher your resists are, the better they are.

For example, if you have 40 resists enchanted on your gear/spells, you get 80% resistance, which is 400% bonus hp. If you add an elemental rune, you get 81% resistance, which is about 425% bonus hp.

If you have 90 resists enchanted, you get 90% resistance, which is 900% bonus hp. Adding an elemental rune raises this to 91%, which is about 1000% bonus hp.


At higher resistance levels, this makes them MORE than 1000 space. If you have enough enchant space to have such high resistance levels that these elemental runes are much better than +1 resist, chances are you are sacrificing quite a bit to use socketed mob eq. The only mob items I can realistically see higher-level players using for sockets are earrings, robes, and chokers, and those don't get many sockets anyways. As far as I know, crafted armor never spawns with sockets.

Nuitari wrote:Actually, the way I presented it to Celeborn, they still give a flat 1% bonus to resist, added on top of whatever other resists you have.

I think I was sleeping when above was presented to me. Since it circumvents the whole point of changing the resists in the first place and it complicates things for me too much, above is not under consideration at this time. ALL percentages will be adjusted.

To clarify, as a player you will experience like this:
(To avoid confusion, nuitari is using 'number of resist enchantments' as a unit, whereas i'm using the old percentage that you are all familiar with in spells and otherwise.)

- To start, the balancing caps and the 90% max resistance cap are removed.
- 'resistance percentage' is renamed 'resistance points' (So if you have 90% resist in the old system, you will have 90 resistance points in the new system).
- the resistance points give you a certain percentage resistance. A small table:
- Since this leaves certain mobiles pretty defenseless and too strong in the attack region, Mobile attack power will be tweaked down and resistances tweaked up where needed.
- I would like to note that I consider ellies doing non-resistable damage a bug. Elly damage /will/ be put under one of the damage types, if this patch goes in or not.

"Score" will still show your resistance percentages, right? As in, if you have 10 fire resists, your fire resistance will show up as 50%. This way looks the best and is probably the easiest for players to understand; they don't need to see the mechanics of the new resistance system in-game.

Also, for enchanting, resists need to be kept in 10% hp bonus increments; 1% would make looking at your equipment extremely spammy. Putting immunity drainables for each damage type would help with the spam as well; immunity can grant 4, 10, or whatever times as much resistance at 4/10/whatever times the cost.

Alright, for starters, I'd like to say I voted yes. I think a tweak to the way that resistances work is a good idea. However, I think some of the numbers are a bit unreasonable. Consider the following "chart" if you will, which contrasts the espace needed for the old system to the espace needed on Nuitari's proposed system.
The column espace1 represents the cost to enchant the given resistance percentage on a single item [the formula is 400 x 2 ^ (n - 1), where n is the number of enchants placed on the item]. The column espace2 shows a more realistic enchant cost, that of enchanting on (n) number of items. For example, under the old system, enchanting 90% resist would cost 204400 espace on a single item or 3600 espace across a total of 9 items. The right side of the table shows the espace progression for approximately the same percentages of resistance for comparison. The purpose for this table is to show how much more espace would be required on the new system for the same amount of resistance compared to a multi-item enchant on the old system.

Consider another example. If you wanted to enchant slash, pierce, and blunt to 90% across 9 items on the old system, the total espace cost would be 3600 x 7 = 25,200 espace. On the new system, however, this same amount of resistance would cost a whopping 270,000 espace (90,000 x 3). My proposal is to use a static 400 espace per resistance point, instead of 1000. This would still require more espace than the old system; in fact, at 50% resist, it would still require more than 90% on the old system, and at 90% would require 10 times what 90% was on the old system.

I also have one other concern. In order to enchant 90% resist on the old system, you would have to have 9 items to drain from. On the new system, this number would increase to 90 items (if each item gives 10 rp). While this is certainly doable, it is a significant increase in the amount of work needed to enchant resistance onto crafted eq.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I know it was long and probably boring. If you have comments or questions, I would love to hear them, but please don't just flame me if I have shown ignorance. Bear in mind that my highest character on this game is in the neighborhood of e17.

-Ralf

Nuitari wrote:"Score" will still show your resistance percentages, right? As in, if you have 10 fire resists, your fire resistance will show up as 50%. This way looks the best and is probably the easiest for players to understand; they don't need to see the mechanics of the new resistance system in-game.

I'd just like to make a quick response to this. As an example, if you see my chart, above, you'll notice that there's 500 rp of difference between 80% and 90%. If you display only the resistance % on the score, you will enchant several times in between that range without ever seeing an increase on your score. I think this would be quite a bit more confusing (or confounding) for players than showing rp on the score.

Ralf wrote:
The column espace1 represents the cost to enchant the given resistance percentage on a single item [the formula is 400 x 2 ^ (n - 1), where n is the number of enchants placed on the item]. The column espace2 shows a more realistic enchant cost, that of enchanting on (n) number of items. For example, under the old system, enchanting 90% resist would cost 204400 espace on a single item or 3600 espace across a total of 9 items. The right side of the table shows the espace progression for approximately the same percentages of resistance for comparison. The purpose for this table is to show how much more espace would be required on the new system for the same amount of resistance compared to a multi-item enchant on the old system.

Consider another example. If you wanted to enchant slash, pierce, and blunt to 90% across 9 items on the old system, the total espace cost would be 3600 x 7 = 25,200 espace. On the new system, however, this same amount of resistance would cost a whopping 270,000 espace (90,000 x 3). My proposal is to use a static 400 espace per resistance point, instead of 1000. This would still require more espace than the old system; in fact, at 50% resist, it would still require more than 90% on the old system, and at 90% would require 10 times what 90% was on the old system.

-Ralf

90% resist is SUPPOSED to cost a boatload - it's not supposed to be feasible to achieve with currently available gear. The whole idea of this patch is that people having 90% resistance to physical attacks makes them worthless. At 400 space per resist, I could load one of my rings up with over 100 resists without any special or exceptional successes, which gives 91% resist, and my rings aren't even all that good. That means that for 120,000 space, even less with exceptional successses, you can be 91% resistant to all physical attack types. That would totally defeat the purpose of this patch, as every single caster in the game would enchant 91% resistance to every physical damage type in addition to their max int/wis. The only thing it would change is that melee characters would lose out on some of their AR and damage to pay for their resists.

You also have to calculate in sanctuary, armor class, and damage reduction. At 90% resistance; you take (10% damage - damage reduction) * .5 for sanc * (whatever your hit rate is). This always comes out to less than 5% damage, often far less.

Ocardus and I discussed this extensively; we already considered leaving resistance cost at 400, and decided 1000 was more reasonable. Leaving it at 400 accomplishes very little other than rendering everyone's gear obsolete.

Also, the resistance figures are not completely accurate, I know. I rounded the hp bonus per resist downward by approximately 10% - you get 11% hp bonus per resist while I use 10% in my calculations here. This is done for simplicity; what is presented here is to convey the idea of the changes, not run the game.

I'm not sure what kind of rings you have, and like I said, I'm not very experienced with very-high-level characters and equipment. However, it amazes me that a ring with 44444 espace is not "even all that good". Doing some quick math, that would mean you'd need an e400 obsidian masterpiece ring (44800 espace). Or, if blue diamond is more your flavor, that's still e160 mp. At 1000 espace per enchant, it would take 2 mp obsidiean e500 rings to have enough espace to make one (1) resistance 90%.

Even if these rings are a dime a dozen for high epics, I still hesitate because of the negative effects that this will have on low level characters (pre-triav) who could never amass so much espace.

it's not supposed to be feasible to achieve with currently available gear

Does this mean that we will get new gear, or that we will never get 90% resist anymore? I understand that having 90% resist to a given damage type makes that type of damage worthless, but if you are trying to make all damage types feasible, why not just cap the resistances at something lower than 90%? Besides, what is the point of being physically able to get 90% or more resist if nobody could actually make it happen?

Again, these are just my opinions. I rarely go epiccing and virtually never do any pvp. My desire to have high resists lies in whipping the crap out of mobs, which I'm sure you'll say I could do anyway without high resists.

-Ralf

Ralf, just out of curiosity, but did you miss the part where Celeborn said that mobile damage would be lowered?

Nuitari wrote:EDIT: If this is implemented, mobs, especially epic mobs, will probably have their damage lowered so that they are no harder than they are now. Your resistances will be lower, but the mobs damage will be lower too. Players will be NO weaker against mobs; resistances have changed many times over the years and the mobs are always adjusted(courteousy of Isabelle) to be balanced with the current resistances available.

Celeborn wrote:- Since this leaves certain mobiles pretty defenseless and too strong in the attack region, Mobile attack power will be tweaked down and resistances tweaked up where needed.

Caps are a clumsy, inelegant, and usually poor solution to problems. Take inner peace for example: everyone has a +25 balance inner peace; whether they're a level 50 non-paladin or an e1000 paladin. What, then is the point of inner peace? Everyone gets exactly the capped amount, so it's just as if there was no inner peace at all.

If we cap resistances at any given number, everyone will get that level of resistances and everyone will be the same. My way of fixing resistances opens more options to players and allows for a wider range of strategy in character design.

Ok, I didn't intend to create a big argument over this... if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I just wanted to explain my perspective on this issue. What you said in your last post about everyone getting the capped amount of Inner Peace makes a lot of sense. I for one have never used inner peace. I don't have any characters that are Paladins, so maybe that's the reason. I guess I have to beg the excuse of ignorance again. When it comes down to it, after you peel away all the complication, the math, the espace, and even really this issue, I just don't want to see Dark Legacy become the kind of MUD that is tailored to the high-level, the pvpers, or any other single group for that matter. I'm just afraid that this change will be something that is not that big of a deal to high level people, a blessing to physical pvpers, and woe to "newbs" like myself. Probably my fears will be put to rest when this change goes in, as I'm sure Celeborn knows far more than me about keeping the balance. Anyway, most of what I wrote here and above comes from my gut feelings about this proposed change. Does anybody else have any comments about what I wrote?

-Ralf

P.S. Yes, weems, I did see what Celeborn wrote. I have tried to read this whole thread carefully, because it's a fairly important issue to me.