Defensive buffs, and R53

So, I understand there were some issues in which the defensive buffs like Defensive Stance, Fortify Defenses, and Glancing Blow were perhaps doing more than they were intended to for a few releases there. There was a change in R53:

• Damage Absorption: Damage Absorption, the cap to how much damage resistance can be applied in a hit, was reduced significantly.

This seemed to make the defensive buffs almost completely useless from what I can tell. I used to take very little damage from normal non-boss mobs with 2 or 3 of these things active, and now, I am just completely ROCKED by things even with the buffs active. I have to constantly throw heals. Is there a bug that made these swing too far the other direction? I have them all GMd, and they seem to do pretty close to nothing now.

Need input from other players, and devs on this. Seems like this could cause general outrage.

I have not tried yet, but are the bosses even tank-able now? This must make most bosses impossible to kill, because even with Valiant Warden, I can't see this happening.

Please chime in if you agree, or think I am doing something wrong!

 

You are not wrong, in fact @By Tor created a post here about this as well: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...esistance-back-to-pre-53.121560/#post-1013672

I wear almost full plate (cloth helm), sword and board at AL 83. I get completely eviscerated by mobs that are green to me. THIS IS NOT FUN! I really hope they fix this quickly because it makes the game untenable to play currently.

 

NOTHING is tankable now, Nikko.. not even the greenest of green creatures. This change is horrible.

 

so now that you can't reduce 100% the little mobs are gonna hit you for something small where before they'd get zero'd out so you could wade into huge amounts of weak mobs. It shouldn't have as dramatic effect on big hitting mobs as they were already getting past your max resistance. Now the death by 1000 cuts is a THING.

 

I saw that post in the feedback area. Thank you for pointing people there.

 

Wow.. why would they do this? Tanking was one of the only joys I get out of combat with my current set up.. and I am FAR from invincible, I still get ROCKED by archers AND mages (because the magic resistance system is broken/not implemented) so now you are telling me that I will get rocked by everything else too? I cannot fathom why they would implement a change like this :-/. AL 70/Heavy armor skills mostly 60-80.

** TO CLARIFY **

The way the monsters spawn in this game is RIDICULOUS you get mobbed and aggrod from obscene ranges, this has been a problem since the earliest of earliest days and all I can picture is that image of the dog sitting in the fire saying "this is fine" when I think of it. The idea that I have managed to finally become strong enough to survive the broken AI/coding only to have it ripped away by a "fix" to damage mitigation from physical sources is a joke. In many ways I wonder how much of the decision making process has to be based on the people who have the best of the best skills/items. When a majority of players are saying "hey we can't kill this stuff" but 2 or 3 guys come into the thread and say "oh but I can do that solo and in 3 minutes" it just makes you ask yourself the question "who was this built/balanced for?" I understand you can't just abandon those power gamers but you also keep widening the divide by increasing the amount they were able to accomplish through "broken" or "unfix'd" means and every single time we tick the scale closer to that side of "balance" we kick lower tier/new players in the teeth.

/end rant

 

I'm sorry to say you'll be considering rage-quitting when you experience this change. Tanking has been nerfed - hard!

 

Just went into an area where I would normally go for EXP/Loot and I could not hunt there any more. This patch has broken the game for me completely. Way to go.

 

Yep. You're not alone.

 

The change will have little to no effect on big high damage hits. It will a huge impact on small low damage hits.

Previously you could basically stop all damage from small hits. This means you could go get something to drink and take a bathroom break while weaker mobs tried to kill you. This changes means that part of the damage from small hits IS going to hurt you.

Upshot: Now if you run into the middle of a bunch of things it IS going to hurt (ALOT). Even if they are weaker than you.

They may need to tweak the numbers a little but in general I think its a good change. I don't care who you are, you should have to think twice before you run into the middle of a group of 10+ enemies. You can still tank a group of enemies... but you are going to need a healer.... and I'm okay with that.

 

You are ignoring the fact that many of us are telling you that we ALWAYS had to be careful before.

There is a HUGE divide between 'oh hey I need to be careful here' and 'oh hey, I absolutely cannot play here anymore because the monsters use telepathy to warn one another that my foot touched the soil on the other side of this stone palisade and now they have all ran into me/surrounded me - good thing I can only absorb about 53% of the damage from every single monster in a 40 mile radius'.

You are looking at it from the perspective of someone on the absolute high end of the scale, you can't balance the game around those people.. I just can't be done they are always going to find a way to push past your scales.

 

Without knowing what type of armor and skills people are using its hard to know whether these are cases of "nothing the player can do" or cases of "the player isn't doing what they need to do".
From what I have seen the biggest change will be for heavy armor types (Light armor types are used to taking damage from everything. Now they will just take a little more)

For example, before this change in full plate in defensive stance I was at something like 38 resist (105%) That means that if somethings was hitting me for less than 38 points of damage I would take 0 damage in full plate. Now I am at something like 38 resist (60%). That means that if a mob hits me for 38 points I am still going to take 15 points of damage (38 x .4). That's a NOTICEABLE difference. Especially if I just ran into a group of 10 things. (That's gonna be around 150 damage per attack cycle instead of 0 damage per attack cycle)

Maybe I could:

• Use a shield to mitigate some more damage
• Use regen potions to help me heal faster
• Use a water elemental pet to help heal me
• Use any type of melee pet to help off tank some of them while I kill a few (Don't use a ranged pet... it will just aggro more mobs like an idiot)
• Use some crowd control
  • Mez some of the mobs and try to split the groups up
  • Stun some of the mobs
• Kite the mobs and use ranged attacks until some of them are dead and the numbers are a little more even.
  
• Run some of the mobs off if too many aggro on me at once
  
• Get some friends to help (or use the new group finder)
• Go hunt in a lower tier zone

Maybe people are already doing all of these things maybe not. (Hard to know without more specifics)

I agree that it is a pretty drastic change in solo survivability for heavy armor characters. I just think heavy armor types may have been a little too comfortable vs large groups of enemies

 

Or maybe stop making such drastic changes.

 

This change has me on the brink of ragequitting. I'm a casual player, slowly leveling my plate/defensive skills since persistence. I could barely hold my own as it was with a couple of yellow mobs. Now, greens eat me alive.

Such a change negates my year+ of slowly building my tanky avatar. What a slap in the face.

 

Hang in. This is surely going to be adjusted. There is no way it stays like this.

 

I always thought it was pretty questionable seeing people in heavy armor with a shield going all over the place at end game when light armor high levels are running for their lives. Perhaps some of the folks that were farming high level areas like this were unwittingly taking advantage of a bug that has now been fixed. Or perhaps its been fixed too much. Time will tell.

ex. I was a level 90 archer in the rise alone and the dropdown room was HARD even with archery skills leveled really high(100-110). I trained a tiny bit in blades, put on full heavy armor and picked up a shield and it was an immediate cake walk thru that room. This may not have been by design. And this change has probably changed that room quite a bit thou I haven't tried it yet.

 

Alright, so I've been running around the Rise for the past ten minutes. So far, it hasn't seemed to be too much of an issue. The fighters seem easier to kill, the archers and mages do not. I'm level 91 and most of my bladed, tactics, and heavy armor skills are in the upper 90s. I wear an obsidian plate suit and my resist is 21.6(max 59.5) avoid 52% while using Glancing Blow, Fortify Defenses, Inner Strength, Parry, and Shield of Ice. I'm still able to kill at least 3-4 fighters with an archer or mage on me. So, so far if you are at my level you should be fine. Thankfully, it seems the fighters resists have gone down too. Maybe the others as well though they hit me pretty hard.

 

The archers seem to hit a bit harder but otherwise they are fairly easy to kill. The fighters die quickly.

 

I think you might be slightly exaggerating here. I am a GM blades, heavily invested in heavy armor skills and defensive buff magics and the Rise has never been a cakewalk for me. Granted I'm only AL 83, but what you are espousing, I believe, is more the exception than the rule. I am constantly taking damage in plate, these purported individuals who were taking 0 damage probably represent less than 1% of the entire player base. Let alone those of us plate, sword and board type builds.

 

I was already struggling at adv level 60 in most zones... this comes across as a slap in the face to all casual players.

I've played countless hours, and I have accumulated 16k gold (I can't even buy ONE good armor piece after years of casual playing)... thats is thanks to the fact I was able to solo most easy zones. It was already very hard... now it seems like it will be impossible. I will also quit playing if this does not change.