Why have you changed your intention on the critchanges?

From the initial anouncement the intention was not to change average damage. Additionally the initial change also did not change the possible spike-dmg.
After a really short live-time of the change it has now been modified and is a huge nerf in potential spike and a nerf in general of the RA.

I don't want to ask/discuss which playstyles this effects the most or which classes are impacted harder.

My mainquestion is, why the change of mind and such a 180° turn-around on the announcement?
A 50% crithit-spike was possible before but suddenly it is too high?

Tue 7 Apr 2020 2:16 AM by

gruenesschaf

The crit chance was the main driver of what should be changed, the secondary part was the randomness especially coupled with the lower chance. At a 49% chance you don't really care as much about each individual crit as it just happens all the time, even in rather short fights, however at a reduced rate each crit becomes a lot more important at least in short fights and hence each crit should become noticeable.

I did quite a bit of testing before going with leaving the average damage unchanged, however, I made a mistake in that I used a way too high value of what would be a lethal spike when testing the frequency of those in typical group combat scenarios. Using this too high value showed that there wouldn't really be an increase whereas in practice it was a lot more frequent and after retesting it with a more reasonable lethal spike value the testing also showed that lethal spike frequency would increase by about 5 - 8 times (depending on the value / scenario) which is also what was seen in practice.

Tue 7 Apr 2020 3:23 AM by gotwqqd

gruenesschaf wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 2:16 AM
The crit chance was the main driver of what should be changed, the secondary part was the randomness especially coupled with the lower chance. At a 49% chance you don't really care as much about each individual crit as it just happens all the time, even in rather short fights, however at a reduced rate each crit becomes a lot more important at least in short fights and hence each crit should become noticeable.

I did quite a bit of testing before going with leaving the average damage unchanged, however, I made a mistake in that I used a way too high value of what would be a lethal spike when testing the frequency of those in typical group combat scenarios. Using this too high value showed that there wouldn't really be an increase whereas in practice it was a lot more frequent and after retesting it with a more reasonable lethal spike value the testing also showed that lethal spike frequency would increase by about 5 - 8 times (depending on the value / scenario) which is also what was seen in practice.

So what’s with all the “toning down” or elimination of rng?
This is one of the thing that make mmorpg games great

Tue 7 Apr 2020 3:45 AM by Ashenspire

RNG in any kind of PvP game should be minimized as much as possible.

There's nothing fun about losing a fight because of a random resist, or miss, or literally anything that is completely out of your control and not a result of something your opponent did.

That being said, crits have always been a part of MMOs, and are a result of what you or your opponent gears or specs for. They should happen rarely enough, but should be noticeable when they do. The old MoP made them common, but less impactful most of the time. The 2nd MoP made them rare, but impactful. This new one makes them both rare and less impactful, which is doesn't really address the original concern.

Tue 7 Apr 2020 3:57 AM by gotwqqd

Ashenspire wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 3:45 AM
RNG in any kind of PvP game should be minimized as much as possible.

There's nothing fun about losing a fight because of a random resist, or miss, or literally anything that is completely out of your control and not a result of something your opponent did.

That being said, crits have always been a part of MMOs, and are a result of what you or your opponent gears or specs for. They should happen rarely enough, but should be noticeable when they do. The old MoP made them common, but less impactful most of the time. The 2nd MoP made them rare, but impactful. This new one makes them both rare and less impactful, which is doesn't really address the original concern.

Like I said in many threads.....

Tue 7 Apr 2020 5:17 AM by The Skies Asunder

Ashenspire wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 3:45 AM
RNG in any kind of PvP game should be minimized as much as possible.

There's nothing fun about losing a fight because of a random resist, or miss, or literally anything that is completely out of your control and not a result of something your opponent did.

That being said, crits have always been a part of MMOs, and are a result of what you or your opponent gears or specs for. They should happen rarely enough, but should be noticeable when they do. The old MoP made them common, but less impactful most of the time. The 2nd MoP made them rare, but impactful. This new one makes them both rare and less impactful, which is doesn't really address the original concern.

I agree with this statement in regards to most competitive games, such as actual fighting games for example. I disagree that it applies to a game like DAoC though. Having a range for your damage just makes sense, as does a range for your crit damage. There isn't much logical explanation to make every attack do the same damage to begin with. Especially when you have so many things you *aren't* doing going on in the back ground, such as evade, parry, block, and every proc. Those aren't things you have control over either, yet they are a huge part of the game. If this was a twitch style game where you actually had to operate the shield, or dodge at the right times, then sure I get your point. Since it is a pretty slow game, where those things don't happen though, the RNG on attacks, cirts, and all the other things you don't actually do intentionally help the game feel more balanced. If you never missed, or never did less/more damage on attacks it makes it much more difficult to beat people who are higher RR than you, or a tough matchup for your class, assuming equal player skill, and to me that just isn't exciting at all.

Tue 7 Apr 2020 7:12 AM by Sepplord

gruenesschaf wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 2:16 AM
The crit chance was the main driver of what should be changed, the secondary part was the randomness especially coupled with the lower chance. At a 49% chance you don't really care as much about each individual crit as it just happens all the time, even in rather short fights, however at a reduced rate each crit becomes a lot more important at least in short fights and hence each crit should become noticeable.

I did quite a bit of testing before going with leaving the average damage unchanged, however, I made a mistake in that I used a way too high value of what would be a lethal spike when testing the frequency of those in typical group combat scenarios. Using this too high value showed that there wouldn't really be an increase whereas in practice it was a lot more frequent and after retesting it with a more reasonable lethal spike value the testing also showed that lethal spike frequency would increase by about 5 - 8 times (depending on the value / scenario) which is also what was seen in practice.

Thank you for the more detailed explanation, i understand where you are coming from now.

In that regard i can understand why going the original route would have been problematic. Same average dmg with more lethal spikes would be a huge buff.
But now we have the same amount of lethal spikes with less average damage and that is a huge nerf that is just as problematic if there was no need for a nerf before.

As it seems now there was a not really neccessary change, buti fully agreed with your philosophie of making the feel of crits better again. I really like the idea. But because that lead to problems now the change is left in, despite it coming with an unwanted nerf to all crit RAs. And some classes do not have other offensive alternatives to pick from and are now just stuck with a nerf that noone (including you) wanted in the first place.
I am not sure how to "fix" the problem, without introducing variance back to crit-damage, but as of now you have reduced the potential of max-crits which is the opposite of making crits feel good again, imo. Max-crits (or near max-crits) were not happening often before, but worth a screenshot when you hit that sweet 48-50% bonusdamage.
Now the best crit you can hope for is only 30% which means all crits are just average now with no chance of having nice and huge crits at all

The more i think about it, it seems that instead of making crits feel better and not changing average dmg, you have now made it impossible for crits to give you that oompf feeling AND coupled that with a nerf. It's the absolute opposite of the initial intention.

Tue 7 Apr 2020 7:33 AM by Gildar

Sepplord wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 7:12 AM
.....
But because that lead to problems now the change is left in despite it coming with an unwanted nerf to all crit RAs. Andsome classes do not have other offensive alternatives to pick from and are now just stuck with a nerf that noone (including you) wanted in the first place.
I am not sure how to "fix" the problem, without introducing variance back to crit-damage, but as of now you have reduced the potential of max-crits which is the opposite of making crits feel good again, imo.

......

The more i think about it, it seems that instead of making crits feel better and not changing average dmg, you have now made it impossible for crits to give you that oompf feeling AND coupled that with a nerf. It's the absolute opposite of the initial intention.

Good point.

Completely agree.

Tue 7 Apr 2020 7:45 AM by

gruenesschaf

The Skies Asunder wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 5:17 AM
I agree with this statement in regards to most competitive games, such as actual fighting games for example. I disagree that it applies to a game like DAoC though. Having a range for your damage just makes sense, as does a range for your crit damage. There isn't much logical explanation to make every attack do the same damage to begin with. Especially when you have so many things you *aren't* doing going on in the back ground, such as evade, parry, block, and every proc. Those aren't things you have control over either, yet they are a huge part of the game. If this was a twitch style game where you actually had to operate the shield, or dodge at the right times, then sure I get your point. Since it is a pretty slow game, where those things don't happen though, the RNG on attacks, cirts, and all the other things you don't actually do intentionally help the game feel more balanced. If you never missed, or never did less/more damage on attacks it makes it much more difficult to beat people who are higher RR than you, or a tough matchup for your class, assuming equal player skill, and to me that just isn't exciting at all.

Rng is quite good in games, however, too much rng is a negative.

We pretty much from the start eliminated or at least limited lots of rng. Basically all combat related first order rng is subjected to streak reduction, a not small reason for this were the constant posts on other servers of people wrongly claiming that their rng is broken after hitting another resist streak and we just didn't want to deal with that at all and at the same time know that actually streaky rng is pretty frustrating for miss / resists or just not blocking / parrying / evading at all.
The next part started off as a way to properly test / adjust style damage: the removal of melee variance, however, that one was never enabled again as unlike spell variance there is nothing you can do to influence this melee variance and it literally is just another random roll. Melee variance is also unlike all the other combat rolls as all of them can at least be altered by you (or your opponent) be it via to hit bonus, mopain, moblock or shield spec and together with streak reduction become a bit mrore managable.

The crit bonus % roll is another roll entirely outside of anyones control and also the only secondary rng (only happens when some other rng, a crit in this case, already triggered). Anyways, I'd like to see the effects of the latest change for a bit and afterwards it's possible that this imo useless rng might be voted on, a crit chance reduction would remain however.

Since it's somewhat related and also shows what streak reduction does, here one of my posts from another thread that shows just that:

Here is an example run of 1 billion tries with a chance of 43%, like a crit or proc:

Success after 0 failures: 98_856_009
Success after 1 failures: 152_257_974
Success after 2 failures: 123_375_933
Success after 3 failures: 51_045_908
Success after 4 failures: 4_463_322

That's a total of 429_999_146 successes.

Just for comparison, here is a run with straight up rng without prd / streak prevention:

Success after 0 failures: 184_896_503
Success after 1 failures: 105_394_599
Success after 2 failures: 60_071_135
Success after 3 failures: 34_237_857
Success after 4 failures: 19_516_533
Success after 5 failures: 11_128_792
Success after 6 failures: 6_347_166
Success after 7 failures: 3_613_738
Success after 8 failures: 2_059_804
Success after 9 failures: 1_172_757
Success after 10 failures: 669_228
Success after 11 failures: 381_347
Success after 12 failures: 217_600
Success after 13 failures: 124_566
Success after 14 failures: 70_759
Success after 15 failures: 39_931
Success after 16 failures: 22_925
Success after 17 failures: 12_996
Success after 18 failures: 7_437
Success after 19 failures: 4_334
Success after 20 failures: 2_427
Success after 21 failures: 1_413
Success after 22 failures: 775
Success after 23 failures: 461
Success after 24 failures: 237
Success after 25 failures: 139
Success after 26 failures: 86
Success after 27 failures: 48
Success after 28 failures: 29
Success after 29 failures: 13
Success after 30 failures: 7
Success after 31 failures: 3
Success after 32 failures: 1
Success after 33 failures: 2
Success after 34 failures: 1
Success after 35 failures: 1

Tue 7 Apr 2020 7:46 AM by Salidry

I agree with Sepplord. What was initially an adjustment turned all of a sudden into a hard nerf of WP. I dont understand it.

Tue 7 Apr 2020 1:42 PM by Eoril

As always, they wanted to benefit Midgard.
Mage crits are real target here.
In order not to see this too much, they made you believe in a gentle modification in first place.

Ashenspire wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 3:45 AM
There's nothing fun about losing a fight because of a random resist, or miss, or literally anything that is completely out of your control and not a result of something your opponent did.

yeah but Phoenix ADORE random, that's why we are stuck with stupid 10% base resist instead of 5%

Tue 7 Apr 2020 5:02 PM by Sepplord

Eoril wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 1:42 PM
As always, they wanted to benefit Midgard.
Mage crits are real target here.

Caster have loads of other great RA options though. They also have MoM that they can spec more heavily into

What can melee-dps spec in alternatively? Seriously look up bm/merc/svg/zerk in the charplaner. There is no alternative.

Tue 7 Apr 2020 9:37 PM by Ashenspire

The Skies Asunder wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 5:17 AM
I agree with this statement in regards to most competitive games, such as actual fighting games for example. I disagree that it applies to a game like DAoC though. Having a range for your damage just makes sense, as does a range for your crit damage. There isn't much logical explanation to make every attack do the same damage to begin with. Especially when you have so many things you *aren't* doing going on in the back ground, such as evade, parry, block, and every proc. Those aren't things you have control over either, yet they are a huge part of the game. If this was a twitch style game where you actually had to operate the shield, or dodge at the right times, then sure I get your point. Since it is a pretty slow game, where those things don't happen though, the RNG on attacks, cirts, and all the other things you don't actually do intentionally help the game feel more balanced. If you never missed, or never did less/more damage on attacks it makes it much more difficult to beat people who are higher RR than you, or a tough matchup for your class, assuming equal player skill, and to me that just isn't exciting at all.

But you ARE speccing in parry, block, deciding on which procs to put on which piece of armor, making sure the stats that determine how often you block/parry/evade are maxed out to make them as reliable as possible. It's why games like Magic or Hearthstone work. You build yourself to reduce the impact of RNG on your performance as much as possible.

This is GOOD RNG that the character has control over.

Having your spells resisted, or missing a melee swing, neither of which you or your opponent have any control over, are BAD RNG, and is why almost every modern MMO that's tab target based has forgone the idea of any kind of Accuracy stat.

Some characters can have 40% block, 30% parry, and 5% evade. Throwing in a miss chance that you can maybe sometimes bypass with certain styles that you may or may not be able to use at this time is just anti-fun at that point.

Wed 8 Apr 2020 5:49 AM by Razur Ur

Sepplord wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 5:02 PM
Eoril wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 1:42 PM
As always, they wanted to benefit Midgard.
Mage crits are real target here.

Caster have loads of other great RA options though. They also have MoM that they can spec more heavily into

What can melee-dps spec in alternatively? Seriously look up bm/merc/svg/zerk in the charplaner. There is no alternative.

yeah plz remove MOM this is a joke and do it caster to strong!!! and plz introduce dex breakpoint! the cast speed from high rr castern is inhuman :-).

Wed 8 Apr 2020 3:09 PM by joshisanonymous

Sepplord wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 7:12 AM
Thank you for the more detailed explanation, i understand where you are coming from now.

In that regard i can understand why going the original route would have been problematic. Same average dmg with more lethal spikes would be a huge buff.
But now we have the same amount of lethal spikes with less average damage and that is a huge nerf that is just as problematic if there was no need for a nerf before.

As it seems now there was a not really neccessary change, buti fully agreed with your philosophie of making the feel of crits better again. I really like the idea. But because that lead to problems now the change is left in, despite it coming with an unwanted nerf to all crit RAs. And some classes do not have other offensive alternatives to pick from and are now just stuck with a nerf that noone (including you) wanted in the first place.
I am not sure how to "fix" the problem, without introducing variance back to crit-damage, but as of now you have reduced the potential of max-crits which is the opposite of making crits feel good again, imo. Max-crits (or near max-crits) were not happening often before, but worth a screenshot when you hit that sweet 48-50% bonusdamage.
Now the best crit you can hope for is only 30% which means all crits are just average now with no chance of having nice and huge crits at all

The more i think about it, it seems that instead of making crits feel better and not changing average dmg, you have now made it impossible for crits to give you that oompf feeling AND coupled that with a nerf. It's the absolute opposite of the initial intention.

I think you're mistaken about there being a nerf here to average damage. gruenesschaf has explained several times that average damage hasn't changed with the crit change. Maybe you're focused too much on the >30% dmg crits and forgetting about the <30% dmg crits that were possible before?

(Not sure how I feel about the change personally, but it's probably good to take a wait-and-see approach here.)

Wed 8 Apr 2020 8:34 PM by Sepplord

joshisanonymous wrote: ↑
Wed 8 Apr 2020 3:09 PM
Sepplord wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 7:12 AM
Thank you for the more detailed explanation, i understand where you are coming from now.

In that regard i can understand why going the original route would have been problematic. Same average dmg with more lethal spikes would be a huge buff.
But now we have the same amount of lethal spikes with less average damage and that is a huge nerf that is just as problematic if there was no need for a nerf before.

As it seems now there was a not really neccessary change, buti fully agreed with your philosophie of making the feel of crits better again. I really like the idea. But because that lead to problems now the change is left in, despite it coming with an unwanted nerf to all crit RAs. And some classes do not have other offensive alternatives to pick from and are now just stuck with a nerf that noone (including you) wanted in the first place.
I am not sure how to "fix" the problem, without introducing variance back to crit-damage, but as of now you have reduced the potential of max-crits which is the opposite of making crits feel good again, imo. Max-crits (or near max-crits) were not happening often before, but worth a screenshot when you hit that sweet 48-50% bonusdamage.
Now the best crit you can hope for is only 30% which means all crits are just average now with no chance of having nice and huge crits at all

The more i think about it, it seems that instead of making crits feel better and not changing average dmg, you have now made it impossible for crits to give you that oompf feeling AND coupled that with a nerf. It's the absolute opposite of the initial intention.

I think you're mistaken about there being a nerf here to average damage. gruenesschaf has explained several times that average damage hasn't changed with the crit change. Maybe you're focused too much on the >30% dmg crits and forgetting about the <30% dmg crits that were possible before?

(Not sure how I feel about the change personally, but it's probably good to take a wait-and-see approach here.)

MAybe you missed that they reverted from their initial idea... 30% is the average dmg of the spread 10-50%...but the critchance-scaling of the Crit-RAs has been changed from a cap of +39% for lvl9 down to +25% for lvl9. That's a huge nerf and the reason i made this post. I don't understand why they go from a cosmetic-like change and make it into a heavy nerf instead of just reverting the change and planning a different solution

Wed 8 Apr 2020 10:15 PM by joshisanonymous

Sepplord wrote: ↑
Wed 8 Apr 2020 8:34 PM
MAybe you missed that they reverted from their initial idea... 30% is the average dmg of the spread 10-50%...but the critchance-scaling of the Crit-RAs has been changed from a cap of +39% for lvl9 down to +25% for lvl9. That's a huge nerf and the reason i made this post. I don't understand why they go from a cosmetic-like change and make it into a heavy nerf instead of just reverting the change and planning a different solution

Ok, so here's what I understand to have happened:
[list=1]

Crit chance capped at 39% from RAs, crit damage variable between 10%-50%

Crit chance capped at 20% from RAs, crit damage fixed at 30% but increasing at same rate as crit chance from RAs, leading to a 2% damage increase on average from the previous system (1) (Saturday)

Crit chance capped at 25% from RAs, crit damage fixed at 30% and no longer increasing, no word but presumably losing that 2% damage increase from (2) (Monday)

[/list]

Wed 8 Apr 2020 10:24 PM by Sepplord

joshisanonymous wrote: ↑
Wed 8 Apr 2020 10:15 PM
Sepplord wrote: ↑
Wed 8 Apr 2020 8:34 PM
MAybe you missed that they reverted from their initial idea... 30% is the average dmg of the spread 10-50%...but the critchance-scaling of the Crit-RAs has been changed from a cap of +39% for lvl9 down to +25% for lvl9. That's a huge nerf and the reason i made this post. I don't understand why they go from a cosmetic-like change and make it into a heavy nerf instead of just reverting the change and planning a different solution

Ok, so here's what I understand to have happened:
[list=1]
Crit chance capped at 39% from RAs, crit damage variable between 10%-50%
Crit chance capped at 20% from RAs, crit damage fixed at 30% but increasing at same rate as crit chance from RAs, leading to a 2% damage increase on average from the previous system (1) (Saturday)
Crit chance capped at 25% from RAs, crit damage fixed at 30% and no longer increasing, no word but presumably losing that 2% damage increase from (2) (Monday)
[/list]

Afaik that is correct. And since a 10-50%variance is comparable to a fixed 30%, the overall endresult is a -14%critchance nerf.

Thu 9 Apr 2020 6:05 AM by gotwqqd

If you wanted to ease up on the spike damage why simply average it out?
Instead change it from a system where the damage from crit was rnd(0-40)+10
To
4d(rnd((1-6)+4)

Both of these average 30
But the second on is a hump where the extremes are less likely

FLATTEN THE CURVE!!!

Thu 9 Apr 2020 7:17 AM by SlowMo

The Skies Asunder wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 5:17 AM
Ashenspire wrote: ↑
Tue 7 Apr 2020 3:45 AM
RNG in any kind of PvP game should be minimized as much as possible.

There's nothing fun about losing a fight because of a random resist, or miss, or literally anything that is completely out of your control and not a result of something your opponent did.

That being said, crits have always been a part of MMOs, and are a result of what you or your opponent gears or specs for. They should happen rarely enough, but should be noticeable when they do. The old MoP made them common, but less impactful most of the time. The 2nd MoP made them rare, but impactful. This new one makes them both rare and less impactful, which is doesn't really address the original concern.

I agree with this statement in regards to most competitive games, such as actual fighting games for example. I disagree that it applies to a game like DAoC though. Having a range for your damage just makes sense, as does a range for your crit damage. There isn't much logical explanation to make every attack do the same damage to begin with. Especially when you have so many things you *aren't* doing going on in the back ground, such as evade, parry, block, and every proc. Those aren't things you have control over either, yet they are a huge part of the game. If this was a twitch style game where you actually had to operate the shield, or dodge at the right times, then sure I get your point. Since it is a pretty slow game, where those things don't happen though, the RNG on attacks, cirts, and all the other things you don't actually do intentionally help the game feel more balanced. If you never missed, or never did less/more damage on attacks it makes it much more difficult to beat people who are higher RR than you, or a tough matchup for your class, assuming equal player skill, and to me that just isn't exciting at all.

I totally agree on that one and want to add that a big RNG Element is already non existent on Phoenix -> there are no Damage variances on Style damage.

This game is great after all these yeasrs because RNG can win you fights and loose fights. Taking one more bit away from the unpredicable is taking away a bit of the daoc feeling. And thats why we still play, right?