Please Return Damage Resistance Back To Pre-53

Mine was cut in half. I'm not sure why yours wasn't and mine was. But I was severely effected by it.

 

Friend you did not even bother to read my post. I have NOTHING against the change at all. As I have repeatedly said, my issues are the way it was communicated to the community & with this significant change, there needed to be a skill refund option.

You are wrong about a very important point as well. The developers have a responsibility to explain to their paying customers all changes... 100% of the changes, they do that with patch notes. In addition on significant changes to combat mechanics they have a further affirmative obligation to clearly communicate the change so there are not 13 page forums posts about these types of issues... because the community was not adequately informed.

 

I'm curious to know that as well. What are all of the factors that go into DR and Max Resist?

 

Golly gee, guys! Could we get some programmer time scheduled to dive into the health bug mathematics first before tweaking stuff like this again?

Experiencing five releases (or more) of recurring health bugs (which I don't recall like this since UO 1997) while stuff like damage mitigation is getting tweaked is .... discouraging.

Need to sort out the 'must haves' vs. the 'would be nices' of priorities here. Health bugs are big uglies, and I sure don't have trouble replicating them.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/health-bug-earth-skills.122221/

 

Tonight's patch is in.. as is the DR update.

 

Cool! I’ll have to try Tier 4 again...... carefully...

 

The patch notes indicate that max DR on gear and skills would be effected.
Skill max DR is unchanged as of 769.

While I'm grateful that we got a little something back, I still feel that the max resist is way below where it needs to be at grandmaster level, particularly the skills, one of which is a hefty 4.8m xp cost gm:

R52: @ GM
Deflection: 16.5%
Sympathy of Stone: 12.5%

R53: cut in half - Deflection 8.3%, Sympathy 6.3%

After the "fix"
Skills are still exactly the same, but resist from armor appears to have been buffed slightly, but not back up to where it was previously. I'm still down about 12% from pre-100% era.

While that in itself isn't a huge deal, a cap of 80% should actually be attainable if someone is going for pure defense.
I don't understand why this was simply not 'fixed' back to what it was before the 100% bug, instead of using this as an opportunity to do a global nerf to defense.

In full meteoric platemail plus shroud of the avatar, I can get max resist to 75.1% broken down as follows:
(note, armor style does not affect max resist, I'm stood in crafting museum playing dress-up)

Base bonus - NONE
Deflection LEVEL 120 - 10%
Sympathy of Stone LEVEL 100 - 6.3%
Plate helm 8.8%
Plate gloves 6.8%
Plate boot 6.8%
Plate legs 8.8%
Plate chest 12.8%
Shroud 4.8%

Total 75.1%
And this is with deflection at 120.

With the current 'skill bonuses' reaching the 80% cap is not remotely feasible

27 MILLION EXPERIENCE into sympathy of stone would bring me to 76.3%
46 MILLION MORE into deflection (the cheaper skill to level 140) would bring me to 77.9%

This is on top of the 13 million experience I already have invested in passives for max resist.

Shields do not currently add max resist, nor does jewelry
There are no active skills that up max resist, defensive stance does not affect it.

I'm not saying it should be easy to reach the cap, but going heaviest armor and investing over 100 million into passives wont get you there. This seems ....wrong.

Alternatively, putting the skills back to the pre-r53 values of 16.5% and 12.5% gms would effectively let someone reach the 80% max in full plate with the skills at reasonable levels. Or it would let someone in almost-full plate, or potentially a plate/chain mix, feasibly reach it.

Since most things seem to be benchmarked at level 80, I'd suggest the sweet spot you want to go for is a full plate wearer with level 80 skills should be near the cap, and gm'ing them - AT the cap.

I don't think we're quite there yet, and the passives particularly sympathy is pretty expensive for a sad 6.3%.

 

Adapt

 

You may have been invincible in Deep Ravenswood, but had you went to K’rul, you’d take plenty of damage.

 

does someone know if combat dodge modifier is working on clothes (leather straps)?

 

I can understand why the change was made, but I sincerely believe it was too much. I wear higher-end plate (paid over 100k for the set from a reputable smith) and am speced in heavy armor. I’m adventure level 72. I’ll arrange this into a before and after list to make it easy to compare:

Before:
-Had 102+% max damage resist (clearly not intended), with a DR value of 35 with all defensive skills I use active.
-Could take no damage from enemies who were green to me (meaning between defense and regen from buffs damage was net zero over time, fairly normal for a defensive spec in an MMO)
-Could solo groups of siege engineers in tier 4 sieges if I chugged potions and self-healed the whole fight and come out barely alive.

After:
-Have 62% max damage resist with a DR value of about 18 with all defensive skills I use active.
-Lose about 1/4 of my health per 10 seconds fighting groups of green enemies.
-Absolutely can not solo groups of siege engineers in tier 4 sieges, I am dead in seconds no matter how fast I kill chug and heal.

Again, I understand the change, I just think it was too much. I haven’t tested it but I firmly believe that now if I had the same number of skill points in light armor and a comparable quality leather armor set I would take far less damage in a tanking situation with damage avoidance skills from the light armor tree active.

 

welp even after the latest hotfix. .I went from being able to solo T5 zones. to not being to solo t4 zones.. I have to go back down to t3. keep in mind all these mobs are green to me. Adventurer level 74. I went from having fun as a new player. to not having fun anymore. Do you guys even consider how this effects lower level to mid level players? It seems like no consideration has been made at all.

 

My build is heavy armor, sword/board. AL 44 and Im trying to do the quests for the gauntlets of courage. Now i cant even kill the beasts for this quest. Pre update i was able to kill corpions without constantly dying <_<

 

the current math is max(dmg - DR value, dmg - DR percent). The higher damage of both is applied (or the lesser reduction). That means the armor is less effective against mobs with little damage output. Fast attacking wolves with their little damage are more dangerous then the same amount of mobs dealing higher damage per hit.
As a tank you are more sturdy against rockets as against paper bullets. May this is a logical error.

The past 100%+ only means that the DR value was fully apply able. Not more not less.

By the way i am not a tank or fighter, do not know how it feels now. From the logical side of view i would use a high speed dagger in PvP because that renders armor less effective. (less damage less damage reduction)

Light armor does not help as much. One can raise the DR value, but as longer the DR percent is used. Dodging is seldom seen. (Dex. 80, dodging 80). Mostly i use parry, that is working. (until chris has read this).
Additionally it does not seem that leather straps (combat dodge modifier) are helping. They are (the bonus) also not shown in the light armor tree. Thats why i have asked it.

 

The fix did practically nothing. @kaeshiva has it right. It should be possible to attain 80% with all of the necessary things GMd and full plate. I patched up, went and played a bit, and just figured they had not fixed the DR issue, because things do pretty much exactly what they did to me yesterday. I'm not really sure this is fixed yet.

 

Why do the cloth/leather users keep glossing over the fact that heavy armor users are severely penalized on spell casting ability (fizzle chance is through the roof especially in full plate)? All I've been hearing from them in this thread is how it wasn't fair before because they had 0% resist (a gross exaggeration or lie) and we had 100% resist (also wrong in many cases).

It's supposed to be a trade off which equals balance.

Cloth wearers get a bonus to spell damage and criticals as well as practically no chance of fizzle, but in return they are more susceptible to physical damage; they have magic shields to counter.

Leather wearers get a bonus to ranged damage and subterfuge skills, as well as minimal physical resistance. They also get a lot of dodge/damage avoidance. They also get magic shields to counter.

Heavy wearers get a bonus to physical resistance, but have almost no capability to cast spells aside from pre-buffs where we have to unequip half our armor set, or equip an alternate set, and then re-equip it before charging into battle and hope the battle doesn't last longer than the buffs. Forget about trying to cast fire spells or the other high offense spells.

And the worst part is, their reasoning seems to stem from them getting steam rolled in PVP. I'm not sure why the mages are complaining. The change shouldn't have affected them at all. As Chris even said, they weren't doing physical damage anyways, so this change has nothing to do with their ability to inflict damage in PVP. It really only impacts archers, and it only impacts archery skills that would deal like 60 damage or lower. That may be a significant portion of archery shots in PVP, I don't know. I do know that the high-end archery videos I see, it's crit city where they are just hitting for 400-700 damage a pop. This change doesn't impact that at all.

That said, I'm fairly content with the change now. I just don't get the whining from the light armor users.

 

While we appreciate the need for the change, this significant change in how DR works effectively means the Experience points invested in order to get our previous defensive abilities have now been reduced considerably.

65 Achievable with no skills over 100 just plate (New)
90-100 Achievable with skills pre change (old)
75-80 Not achievable by most people having the spent experience in these skills (New)

Players invested their experience in these skills after weighing the benefits between the previous existing skill choices offered to us by developers, now the benefit from those choices have changed (for the good of the game). What we reasonably are asking for is not a return to the unbalanced problem you needed to correct, but a 100% skill unlearn to allow players to once again make choices based upon skills offered to us by the developers.

Many of us players are casual (with limited play time), have not followed the back and forth between light/heavy armor, were not abusing this DR "bug", returned for launch after a long absence, and have not previously had the opportunity to take advantage of any skill unlearns pre-launch. All many are asking for is the same opportunity of 100% unlearn our characters skills as offered to players pre-launch after previous significant skill changes so we can choose freely to reconfigure our builds.

I hope you take into consideration this request in the spirit it is being proffered, thank you

 

Yep. I noticed absolutely no difference since the patch. I'm a gm in everything with damage resistance with the best plate armor you can buy.. and i'm still at the same DR I was before the patch.

 

I'm 76, full plate, sword and shield and no magic and doing fine in T5s. It's very doable.