What the title says. With so many threads dealing with rants about the damage of class x and guild y being too high, I figured we might as well gather ideas to change it.

I really don't think that nerfing the damage of skill x is going to help, because next month it's going to be skill y whose damage will be too high! And the month after.. can you guess? RIGHT!! It's going to be skill z! It's a vicious cycle ain't it?

My personal idea is to change most (if not all) attacks to have a set base damage (say 500-1000) and the large part of the damage scale to the max health of the target. Depending on how strong the attack should be both parts or only one part should be reducable by armour. People with higher health would still have an advantage as the base damage part would hurt them less.

What this should (hopefully) address is the issue of the VAST health differences we face in Lusternia. We have classes that have damage kills as viable option. But how much damage in one attack is too much, and how much is too low? If you have an opponent with 3k max health, doing 2k in one attack is A LOT. But if your opponent has 10k health (aka every second warrior) then a 2k attack is barely going to tickle them.

So yes.. have most, if not all attacks, scale majorly to max health. Give them a cap perhaps. Prevent attacks (any attacks unless there is a GOOD reason) from doing 90% of someone's health in one swoop.

Make combat interesting and stop the 2-3 hit damage insta kill train! Give faelings, mugwumps and level 80 people a bloody chance!

Amen

Hear hear!

I also think this would make being an affliction based class more fun, and as viable as it once was.

I knew there was a reason you're a goddess.

This is a thought...but there are so many forms of attack, should Psiblade = Mindblast = Manever Perform Headshot Head x2 = Symbol Strike? The differences are there for a reason, we just have poor balance of them. Standardizing won't fix that, it'll just make Monks/Guardians the uber Class, since we have Rushing/Quickening

I don't think she meant for every attack to have the same base damage. Using her numbers, for example, a symbol might have a base of 500, but a class that relies on a damage kill might have a base of 1000, or something like that. Those numbers have not been thought through at all, I'm just giving an example. Then, based on the health of your target, those numbers would scale, with parts of that scaled damage reducible by armor.

What we need is a Damage up on Meteor

Sticking enough negative spheres makes meteor an insta, basically. And it's not like the 5 step, you can't do anything while this is going on insta. You can still hinder while the flamingrocktoface is coming down.

4 spheres is roughly 4000 damage, so it's -not- really an Insta. Takes too long to set up, and you NEVER have 6 negative spheres for a REAL insta.

It's essentially an insta, by sheer virtue of doing a ton of damage. 4k is a probably more than most players below 80 will have, and you may not have that much even after 80. I have 16 CON and at level 71, I have about 5.2k hp (some of that temporary hp from staff twirl) so meteor and a few cosmicfires would kill me easily. And I have a high-con race (EDIT: and L1 fire resist, which I'm guessing would be Meteor's damage type).

All the while your angel/demon will be afflicting, you'll probably be webwhoring or something, or you could just quickening + cosmicfire/sun to chip away the rest of their health. Depending on the spheres, you could also be tacking on a CON penalty or damage vulnerability. And unless you're fighting another astrologer, those spheres aren't going to be cured.

Kira's got the best thing going. Sphere one person, Meteorstorm, Sphere one person, Meteorstorm...does 2.5K per meteor or so, so it's great.

Just a question, but what would the point of surging be if attacks scaled to a significant degree?

I guess if NPC ones didn't, then it'd still be useful for that, but it wouldn't really be worth the downsides in PvP. Especially with the numbers you suggest (500-1000 base damage and the rest a percentage), there's very little point in getting +health (9000 to 12000 health won't really make you any more survivable at all).

Examples with 500 + 10%:
5000 = 1000 (20%)
7500 = 1250 (16.666%)
10000 = 1500 (15%)

As you can see, there's very little difference in damage taken over a 2500-health range over the last bit. There needs to be some tangible benefit for high health, or things like Surge, Life blessing, all +con skills and effects, etc. become essentially worthless. I mean, I'm getting up into the 7500 range as a Faeling warrior surged-- I'll take as much a percentage of damage as the really 'tanky' races, with a sip bonus on top of that.

For me, it would be about a quarter, which is alot better than the 3/4 to a half some people get. In one hit. Xiel's minorsecond damage + passive would be an instakill for me.

Just because they would work the same way behind the scenes does not mean they would feel the same in the actual game. There are many things that make attacks different, damage type would be just one example.

Example AttackA:

Base dmg 500 + 10% of targets health.

Would do 800 on a target with 3k max health.
Would do 1500 on a target with 10k max health.

And then work armour reductions into that.

The idea is to balance it somewhat around the max health of the target, and as such the attack does more damage on someone with high health. The base damage ensures though that people with low health will -still- suffer more than people with high health from it. It will just prevent low health people being insta killed from about every damage attack certain classes manage to output right now, while high health people don't even break a sweat.



See my example above. There would still be a point to having high health, however it's significance wouldn't be as crushing as it is now. (Just to make this absolutely clear: Yes, part of the point is indeed to make high health less significant. It would still matter - your own example shows that - but it would not be the only thing that matters. Additionally, things like high sip and high regeneration would suddenly gain in significance too. Right now they are utterly dwarfed by high health.)

Can you really say that a 4k health person can actually participate in high tier combat right now? Perhaps if they are a kephera but even then they'd be dead soon. Not because of them being unkilled but because of sheer -damage-. Yet most people that aren't warriros with surge have nothing more than 4-5k max health at level 80. As faeling at lvl 100 without buffs I have barely 4k health (just as an extreme example).

I simply believe that warriors and their high health shouldn't be given such a big emphasis in this game. Additionally, you will always issues with damage attacks if you -don't- make them scale to max health to some degree. -Because- we have such high high differences in the max health people can achieve. Taking some of it's emphasis away does not mean surge would become useless, but it -would- mean that warriors may not be utterly dmg kill immune anymore.

So it looks like you intentionally did examples with a really low-range and a really high-range to show that there "is indeed a difference," but ignored the 7500 <-> 10000 example where there is essentially no difference in terms of percent-damage taken (and that's all that really matters, since healing itself is percent-based as well to a large degree).

Yes, it should scale a bit more to max health than it currently does, but it should not be to this degree. With this suggestion, there really is no point to getting over 7500 health, ever. Don't bother with Tosha, don't bother with life blessings, don't bother with surge... if you can hit 7500, you're set. You'll be taking pretty much the same percent-damage as anyone with higher health anyways.

And, as I said, I can easily hit 7500 as a Faeling Warrior. With a sip bonus. This will make me far tankier than any other warrior out there in terms of damage, simply because health no longer matters past that point (and as a Faeling, I would still have a use for surge-- it's mostly every other warrior race that'd be getting a heavy-handed nerf). It's far too much.

You're exaggerating. Obviously, the difference is biggest between low health to high health. Obviously, it will not be as significant anymore at high levels. I said before that part of this idea is to indeed lessen the crushing significance of extremely high health.

I've also used numbers only as examples. How much of an attack eventually scales, depends on how much emphasis you put on the base damage, and how much you make scale.

The more scales the less the difference between low and high health will matter. However, even if it scales slightly more than it is now (if it scales at all) the effect high health has will be reduced. You criticize that while in the same sentence agreeing that it should scale more? Think over what you really want to say, Xenthos. You obviously can't have one without the other.

I did not specify details in this suggestion. It would be stupid to do so. Details are up to the envoys. Additionally, if envoys decide the matter is unimportant to them, the Administration won't twitch a toe either. However, with the entry level of combat having moved to demigod / ascendant AND / OR 7k+ health I figured the situation can't get any worse or more idiotic, so I threw -my- idea out there. You are all most welcome to come up with your own. This is an idea thread after all, not a rant.

You could also have non-regenerative recovery simply scale on the same kind of level that damage does.

And, for those concerned about a change like this making high health less valuable, that's what the base part of the damage is designed to address. With no base component (all percentage based), it would make the damage have the same result no matter what the target's health (i.e., an attack would take the same number of hits to kill a person who's not healing...).

I've said it should scale more than it currently does-- and, at the same time, I point out that making it scale to the degree you seem to want it to scale will make high health past an easily-achievable point worthless. No, Zarquan, not "less important," but worthless when there's a very low base. It's not exaggerating, either, when the difference between 7500 and 10000 health would be a whopping 1.6% change in damage taken. It is also something that needs to be kept in mind in discussion, hence my pointing it out-- simply making most of the damage scalable will break numerous other aspects of the game (especially when it comes to warriors). Pretty much all of the +health stuff, including the +health artifacts, become nothing but baubles if you can already achieve the threshold without them, whatever that threshold may be. As such, it needs to be something that is not easily reached.

I'm not sure what's so wrong about pointing that out.

I hope you are aware that the "threshold" you are talking about is something achievable only by warriors in the very first place.. as such I don't see it "breaking various other aspects of the game" but rather only taking significance from high health at levels that only ONE archtype can reach.

I have also, above, explained the difference a high base and a low base would have.

And to end this discussion about your 1.6%: I personally feel that health beyond a certain point should be useless anyhow. People just become unkillable, and then we have situations again where one person tanks 20+ guards. High damage insta kills people throwing balance out of whack. Just as too extreme health leads to other consequences. There should be more than one way to make yourself more resilient and tanky. Ways accessible to more people than those with surge. Such as regeneration and sip boni which would become more important if high health would lose significance.

So you think we should just remove surge from the game?