Three Specializations

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Barugon, Nov 29, 2021.

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  1. Coswald_Dirthmire

    Coswald_Dirthmire Bug Hunter

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    I think it would unlock incredible amounts of power that would dramatically unbalance the game. There are a number of builds for which unlocking the Draw Speed bonus from spec'd Flurry alone, perhaps in conjuction with Wicked Caster gems, would seriously increase the damage output with no appreciable downside. Being able to add spec'd Air's Embrace to Tactics/Blades build or Heavy/Bludgeon build or many other combos would allow for characters that were tanky as could be while also achieving monumental DPS. Adding a Life spec to almost any build gives heals that turn a rough situation into a walk in the park. Bonus Bard spec turns what's already largely a "free power" tree into a veritable perpetual motion machine. Dropping a bit of XP into a tamer side-build is great and often useful, but let someone have an extra spec for it and all of a sudden their DPS may well double with a relatively minor XP investment.
     
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  2. Echondas

    Echondas Bug Hunter Bug Moderator

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    I think originally they lowered XP from your pool, like the death penalty -- then if you didn't have the XP in your pool, like the DP, it would lower skill(s) to compensate.. I think you're right maybe they changed it to lower virtue? Not 100% sure tho.. but if TimeLord is looking for an "XP sink" this could be it (again) ?
     
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  3. Anpu

    Anpu Avatar

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    Getting the reagents for these are basically a complete waste of time. Like for the Scepter of Dread…. You have to go through the *entire* Grannus Colossus just to get one reagent for it. One.

    That’s not a sink. That’s Futility.
     
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  4. Time Lord

    Time Lord Avatar

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    *(Disclaimer that everyone here should already know, TL is not the sharpest pencil in the box and has a hard time even keeping up with the dull ones) o_O but...

    We have not married or conjoined hunting skills with crafting skills yet.

    A player with 160 amounts in combat skills + specialization = more power, x2 skill trees = even better combat abilities

    A player with 160 amounts of crafting + (if given 2 "crafting specializations") = should be better crafting

    Yet if an Avatar had specializations in both crafting and hunting, then the more evenly those skill amounts (combat & crafting) are to each other, this should make for the better all around Avatar.

    You get the general idea. It's not a new one, but one which could bridge the two exp pools so crafting enhances combat and combat enhances crafting. I don't think we have that yet, but it seems a logical way of encouraging more rounded "top level content contenders". The Avatar is supose to be a well rounded individual and I think have yet to achieve that unless we make that bridge between crafting an combat.

    I know many think we have tanks in the game, but all our tanks use many levels of magic. If a blacksmith could specialize their crafting in a weapon or two, then those weapons then gain power in a much less magical way.

    But that's just me, I lean all my characters away from magic as much as possible and thus allow the world to be more powerful than my characters are.
    :rolleyes: I only mention that because there's always a ceiling where each tree meets it's match, without furthering the characters abilities, through adding more skill trees. That's why I see reason to at some point in the top levels of our game, encourage more trees from both crafting and combat to become nessesary.

    If we are to have a "class (not classless) dicussion", then we need to see each tree and how far that single tree can go, before marrying it with others and saying we need more in any.

    Specialization means it's special. The more specializations a character has, then the less that description apllies.
    Just thoughts on what an "Avatar" should be :)~TL~
     
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  5. Barugon

    Barugon Avatar

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    How so? Are you talking about the bonus critical chance? That actually translates to like ~1% critical bonus. You actually get a lot more more critical chance bonus from the dexterity.

    Anyway, since most people seem to be dead-set against this, in the words of Jar Jar Binks, my give up.
     
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  6. Dead Donut

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    Never give up a good opinion!
     
  7. FBohler

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    All Coswald stated can be interpreted as less attractive builds becoming viable.

    Let's say the min-maxer player uses the 2 top specs.
    They'll be limited to pick the 3rd most powerful one.
    Now the regular guy who uses 3rd and 4th most powerful specs... now they can pick the 1st and even things out.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2021
  8. Leucian

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    I think we should allow three specs... I really think a heavy, focus, fire mage would be off the chain.. I mean damage resistance, mass daamage, and the fizzle decrease from focus... What else could you want.. Oh.. A chaos, fire, air mage for rapid fire mass damage... Ohhh or a Air Tactics Archer spec for insane damage....

    Na i'm being sarcastic. I agree 2 is more than ample, it makes you think about builds.. Though i think having the ability to "unlock an alternate pair" That you can activate would be interesting. but its either a Dis or Dat setup.. Another not so popular opinion would be to allow a third spec (but only benefit from two) to be leveled for subscribers.
     
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  9. Cora Cuz'avich

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    Personally, I think specs should just go away, and the spec bonus for each skill just becomes a GM bonus. Hit 100, and you get the spec bonus at level 1. Though, that becomes mainly a nerf for everyone, so it'd probably cause riots.
     
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  10. Coswald_Dirthmire

    Coswald_Dirthmire Bug Hunter

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    Oh! Alright, I know you've basically dropped the point but this is too much fun to pass up. The TL;DR of the following is basically that I enjoy nerding out about this stuff, and couldn't resist an opportunity to ramble. It's a really fun subject.

    So, the Melee and Ranged Critical Hit Chance bonus is mostly what I was talking about with spec'd Air's Embrace helping these builds. I'll go over why it would be a huge advantage, trying to explain in both a general way and also using the specific example of the Tactics Blades build that I mentioned earlier.

    The first thing to clear up is how effective is the Melee and Ranged Critical Hit Chance bonus (we'll just call it Crit Chance bonus from now on). I'm not sure where your 1% effective boost number comes from, perhaps a build that was already pushing very hard into the diminishing returns on crit chance? That would still be an extreme min-max edge case. +20% nominal Crit Chance bonus, say, does not translate to a 20% increase in effective crit rate. If you are at 45% effective crit rate adding that 20% nominal might only bring you up to 46% or 47% effective/observed crit rate, sure. But if you are at 5% effective/observed crit rate that 20% nominal boost might bring you to, say 22% or so. This is a very, very powerful stat.

    So let's consider this from the perspective of a Blades/Tactics spec'd player. A two-handed sword has a rating of "Strength Bonus: High". This means that adding strength to a 2h sword build does a lot more for the damage output than adding it to a bow build or even dual spears build. So it's reasonable to build a swords build that is, say, 300 Str, 50 Dex, 50 Int. Right?

    Ah! Perhaps not. Look at out Tactics Spec, and specifically the advantage granted by spec'd Berzerker's Stance. Let's say it's at +100% Ranged and Melee Critical Damge bonus. That's an amazing boost! It's a ton of extra power for that build, but we only get it when we crit, and we're not critting much with our measly 50 Dex. So how do we boost this up? More dex! Alright, how do we get it. Well, we're using Strength of Earth currently, it's giving us say 50 Strength bonus. If we drop that for non-spec'd Air's Embrace we'd get 50 Dex instead. Hmm. So now we're 250Str/100Dex/50Int. Well, we've increased our crit rate, and might even have higher DPS because of it, but we lost Strength, and that's out primary stat!

    Alright, so maybe compensate with a gear upgrade. We could have put the Dex on our gear, but we're mostly in Heavy Armor, so that is only going to come from the Enchant side. It's a lot easier and cheaper to up the Strength gear-side than the Dex for us. So upgrading a piece here or there we made it to 300Str/100Dex/50Int. So we got a good crit rate boost, by upgrading our armor by 50 points of primary stat, all of them in Strength, and swapping our primary stat buff from Strength to Dex. Cool! Our crit rate has gone up, say, 15% effective and that Berserker's Stance is really shredding! We're at, call it a 25% effective crit rate overall.

    Note: Chest pieces offer a Strength of Earth Power bonus that may call into question our 50:50 equivalence for Dex/Str from the spell buffs, but remember that forgoing that frees up a chest gem, gives more durability for direct stats from enchants and masterworks, etc. So for the sake of simplicity (too late!) we're calling that a wash in this case.

    That's a legitimate strategy for boosting the DPS of out Tactics/Blades build. But now imagine instead if we were also spec'd into air at a 20% Crit chance bonus. Sure, that's a nominal bonus so we won't see every bit of it, but since we're only at 25% effective we're going to see a heck of a lot more than 1% of it. We'll boost our crit rate to maybe 35% effective. 20% nominal translated into 10% observed, let's say. Might seem like a raw deal at first glance but we were anything but ripped off! That extra 10% effective crit rate is going to multiply the power of our Tactics Spec enormously! It's a major DPS boost for this example. It's something I've seen demonstrated in game time and time again, and something I've demonstrated on stream multiple times.

    And of course this isn't just an isolated example. There are builds where having spec'd Air's Embrace keep you pressed against the effective soft cap on Crit Chance means you can swap out pieces of supple leather for hardened leather to get a damage boost, means you can drop Dex rings for Brittle Brawn and get huge increases in power, means you can eschew Elven Strings for Hardened Leather and get a major range advantage in PvP, means you can crop a Cautious Precision neck and move between mobs and loot faster than before, and the examples keep on coming.

    As someone who has played many many builds, who has built several characters from the ground up without power-leveling, free gear, or and advantages, I can say that a 3rd spec would an incredible amounts of power that would dramatically unbalance things.
     
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  11. Coswald_Dirthmire

    Coswald_Dirthmire Bug Hunter

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    Ah, this seems to be largely built on the assumption that the power of spec's is additive, and it's not, it's often multiplicative. We can go into examples (I love to nerd out about this stuff) but to just give give a quick one, let's say we wanted to do a Chaotic Feedback Blades build. The check on Chaotic Feedback is the self-harm. This can be mitigated by spec. Choosing this spec means you can spec, say, Tactics for the Berzerker's Stance bonus, but nothing else.

    Or instead of mitigating with Chaos Spec you can choose Earth Spec and mitigate with Torpor's heal while also getting extra strength from spec. But Torpor has major downsides that make it difficult to cast in battle, and also slow down the rate of attack thus acting on a check to DPS.

    Blades Spec would add some nice advantages with Rend's Healing Debuff boost, and Coup's higher cutoff point, and man, you could go to town with Riposte! So much power, but gah, can't take Blades Spec because we'd kill ourselves with Chaotic Feedback before we killed the mob.

    If you throw in a 3rd spec you eliminate all this compromise. It doesn't just add a little extra power to this build, it comes through like a bulldozer that clears all roadblocks and balances. A Chaos/Tactics or an Earth/Tactics build that does good damage but is tricky and involved to play becomes a Blades/Chaos/Tactics build that plows through mobs with ease and ruthless efficiency.
     
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  12. Barugon

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    I don't know where you're getting your math for this, but Melee and Ranged Critical Hit Chance is a multiplier for your effective critical chance, so, unless you have craploads of dex to begin with, it's inconsequential. If your current effective critical change is 5% then applying a 15% bonus will increase that to 5.75%.
     
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  13. Enfo

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    How about we look at specs that rarely anyone every invest in outside of RP.

    Why would you every go subterfuge over tactics? Light armor when you could be air or shield? Can you even spec water?

    What would be some buffs to other trees to make them more competitive for the Meta without making them solo ice giants?
     
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  14. Spinok

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    Tactics+phys dmg+air or fire+death+chaos ? Too unbalanced imho.
     
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  15. Time Lord

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    ((somewhat unrelated to the video))
    Things we lost or grew away from...

    One of the things we don't hear allot about in our forums anymore, are the best card decks, which I'm guessing don't matter as much anymore when it comes to adjusting power to be more powerful.
    It now always seems to fall on needing more power desired within the trees, instead of stacking the cards in a more proper or powerful order.

    Another thing I've noticed over the years, is how large decks have become, so much so that smaller decks cannot compete. That is to say, concentration power has been replced by intricate power. I remember using a 5 card pop-up and how much more powerful that was than any fixed. That is to say, the power of the small was replaced by the power of the many. Less does not mean more in our game, not any more.

    We loose players when we continue the increasing complication of power while sacrificing the consentration of power, which should be equal.

    That's just something to think about into how we've evolved as a game.
    Remember when Ultima Online made the mage more powerful than the tank or the archer, or when the tamer mage became the most powerful? Those were all social changes made, which caused different elements in party diversity ro become obsolite as Ultima Online catered that game to what the crowds were wanting, without reguard to elements of play being lost under that player mob's footprint, who were all striving not to have to play with each other.

    Powerful through true specialization, I think we've lost that, but it's never too late to get it back into play through the power of refinement.
    Adding more isn't always the answer, but currently it just seems to be the only answer we accept on the subject :)~TL~

    In many ways we elaborate ourselves out of a larger audience.
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2021
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  16. Coswald_Dirthmire

    Coswald_Dirthmire Bug Hunter

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    Despite the tooltip the stat actually being applied by Spec'd Air's Embrace is Weapon Critical Chance.

    This is by no means a percentage modifier to your existing crit rate, which can be easily demonstrated (and also easily confused, since the numbers will often work out to make it look like it is). Start with a very low crit rate and apply spec'd Air's Embrace, and observe the percent change. To use exact numbers from a trial I've just completed, adding a 17.9% Weapon Critical Modifier from spec'd Air's Embrace gives a 17.6% increase to my dummy crit chance, moving it from 23.3% to 30.4%. Seems pretty close, right?

    Applying the same 17.9% Weapon Critical Modifer to a 36.7% crit chance build resulted in a 10.9% increase, to 40.7% against a dummy. This is because as we move up we're getting diminishing returns on the skill. Yes, eventually we could get to the point where it's only applying a 1 percentage point increase, but that is only on a nearly crit-maxed build. That would be the very power of this skill were it to be allowed as an additional spec; it makes it so that you can get to the point of those hard diminishing returns partially through the Embrace skill, freeing up gear slots to have, instead of dex, more strength. Weapons to have, instead of crit chance, crit damage. Supple armor swapped to hardened, etc.

    As for this tactic requiring a lot of Dex to be effective in the first place, I did another trial.

    Spec'd Air's Embrace (17.9% Weapon Critical Modifer) at 267 Dex: 40.7% crit chance against a dummy.
    Spec'd Air's Embrace (17.9% Weapon Critical Modifer) at 001 Dex: 33.1% crit chance against a dummy.

    Of course Dex is important for crit chance, but if you stack other means of increased crit you can get very high numbers with low or no Dex. This is another demonstration of why adding spec'd Air's Embrace on top of existing builds is so powerful.
     
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  17. FBohler

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    You're wrong, I didn't assume any math.

    Let me try to use your mathematical assumption to see what happens with the case I was talking about:

    Strongest spec power = 5
    Second spec power = 4
    Third spec power = 3
    Fourth spec power = 2

    Min-maxer pre change power = 20
    Min-maxer post change power = 60

    Avg player pre change power= 6
    Avg player post change power = 30

    Ratio pre change = 0.3
    Ratio post change = 0.5

    So the average player will have 50% of the min-maxer's power post change, moving up from 30% pre change.

    So the gap went from 70% to 50%.

    Please note that you suggested the basic math there.
     
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  18. Barugon

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    Your assumptions about this are incorrect. Air's Embrace provides a large amount of dexterity, which modifies the critical chance. The bonus you get from dexterity is, I believe, based on a curve, so you get less of a benefit from adding 50 dex to your already existing 300 dex than if you added 50 dex to say 100 dex.

    Also, there are two different critical chance bonuses: Weapon Critical Chance and Weapon Critical Modifier. These are actually backwards; Weapon Critical Chance is multiplicative and Weapon Critical Modifier is additive. The only sources of Weapon Critical Modifier, that I know of, are Armor Weak Points and Vital Points.

    The only way to accurately test the effectiveness of a Weapon Critical Chance bonus is to eliminate any change in dexterity. I'll demonstrate this later.
     
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  19. Coswald_Dirthmire

    Coswald_Dirthmire Bug Hunter

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    I'm not making assumptions, I just quoted you actual numbers from an actual trial. My Air's Embrace was leveled to give 32.8 Dex allowing me to use a Potion of Deftness (31.x Dex) as a control for the Dex difference.

    Look at my last two lines. Adding 266 Dex in the most linear region of the curve that you mention increased by crit rate on a dummy from 33.1% to 40.7%. I was already at 33.1% with 1 Dex.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2021
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  20. Coswald_Dirthmire

    Coswald_Dirthmire Bug Hunter

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    This has absolutely nothing to do with anything I suggested an I am sorry for the confusion. I wasn't trying to say you "assumed math", I was trying to illustrate why talking about the "top two specs" and "third most powerful one" and whatnot doesn't skew with the reality of how the game mechanics work.

    There is no "strongest spec". Specs largely get their power because of the other specs you can pair them with. And... why would the "Second Spec Power" be 80% of the first? Where does that number come from? That's.... that's not how any of this work, and it's not at all what I was trying to imply.

    Thoughtfully combined specs are more powerful than the sum of their parts, that is my point. They don't just add power power as you add more of them. They work together to multiply that power. That is really the only take-away, that is the important thing to realize here.

    To demonstrate why the ranking of specs by power thing is a bit silly, let's say you have Strongest (1st) spec, 2nd spec, 3rd, spec, 4th spec. If 1,2,3 makes sense as a combo, that doesn't mean that 1,3,4 does. It could be nonsensical. What if the strongest spec is death and 4th is life? Life/Death/Sun spec? It's.... that's seriously not how this works. Maybe 1,2,4 works, but 1,2,19 might actually be more powerful. Maybe you've used Waning Fizzle gems so that you could spec 1,2 as fire,heavy and be a super tank mage and you're absolutely destroying things (yes, that is a real and legitimate strategy, Joe Z does amazing things in PvP with this principle). So for you the best 3rd spec to take is Focus so that you free up not just 3x jewel slots, but you are able to use Epic fire rings and Warlock Chain. That 3rd spec just got you 55 attunement. Focus spec effectively giving 55 fire attunement? That's incredibly powerful.
     
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