Critical hits, bad behavior & "end game" content

[Golliathe]

My comment about the cake was referring to unarmed combat currently. Much of your mitigation comes from buffs and the icing is the magic 18% that never goes away.

The danger with a flat % mitigation system is that you dont have to bother fixing your armor. Why would we want the game to be like that? We have skills that restore armor and it would be far more interesting if you needed you keep your armor up.

Yaffy pretty much showed perfect evidence of what's wrong with rage criticals, so I'm not sure that aspect needs much more feedback. Keep in mind that just because he showed these examples in level 70 content doesn't mean it isn't an issue at every level though , I'm fairly certain it is! So, we really don't need more proof that this is bad, but can definitely use some possible solutions which will still maintain a challenge.

I think rage criticals might be fine as they are with tweaks if:

1) armor values were based on type (cloth having value 1.0, leather 1.5, plate 3.0 - or some variation)
2) % mitigation based on armor values were added to the game
3) monsters lost rage when out of combat for 10 seconds


This could alleviate much of the snooze function citan sees in groups. DPS types need to be careful or they pull aggro and get hit. If they take a crit on a rage attack they die. I think I can live with a dps character dying from a rage crit but having tanks be beefy enough to survive them. In fact I kinda want the DPS to die. Why? Because specialized damage characters should not also be tanky. That creates problems where you have the best of both worlds. This is why D&D wizards/rogues (the highest dps classes) don't get to wear plate.


I think we need to backup and ask questions:

A) Does Citan intend for us to prevent strong boss mobs from using their rage attack in order to succeed in certain tough encounters?

Right now the answers is - who cares if the boss has a rage mechanic. I find that boring honestly. That being said WOW went overboard with this and each boss fight was - ok here's the song and dance you do for this boss. That was stupid and boring.

Likewise it would be shitty if you NEEDED an ice mage to make a boss fight smooth to make his rage bar stupidly long with the double +66% debuff thing.

B) Should tanks be the only ones who live through strong hits? (tank definied as specialied armor+ mods for classes like shield or unarmed)

C) is it ok for people to solo in places like GK at the level of the content (last part being very important).

If not then please make the first room be a linked all or nothing pull. Anyone who figures out how to kill 4 mobs at once deserves to solo there.
If the answer is no then as I said before certain skills probably need a rework so you cant stack crazy amounts of dmg reduction.

we might as well discuss armor while were discussing crits, because their relevant to each other. And a lot of people that understand game mechanics solidly can (probably?) agree that armor in it's current state is not working well. It does something, but it doesn't feel like it does what it's supposed to do, or so many people wouldn't wear pockets. Armor is great when you have it, but after it's depleted it is not so great.

I like the idea of armor being worth %mitigation instead of flat mitigation, but that would be insanely hard to balance not only now, but all the way to level 125. The best ideas are probably the ones that will require the least amount of work for the developers.

I don't think it would be as hard to balance as you think. Level 50 armor would count up to X value total offering a % to damage and mobs at that level could be tuned based on changed resistances.

Armor if based loosely on how it is now.... you have 2 options.

1. Unarmed is initially tankier but has no ability to restore armor so you become squish much faster.
2. The armored guy has less base mitigation but can use multiple abilities to restore armor.

I see the game needing to progress so that these are equal options - not one being 5 times better than the other.

Increasing base armor values on heavier armor types would also be another possible solution, but also has it's own problems ( and doesn't touch on the problem of depleted armor leaves you a sitting duck waiting to be one hit killed anyways). Having too much base armor would make you take so little damage you'd be in very little danger of losing it though ( aka boring aka what Citan wants to avoid).

If the tank has to worry about using abilities to restore his armor instead of spamming damaging abilities that makes the fight more interesting. If the DPS needs to maybe back off OR possibly try and steal aggro form the tank to keep the tank alive that keeps the fight more interesting.

Right now an unarmed tank has pretty flat % mitigation and that's boring. I feel THAT is what citan wants to avoid. Dynamic % mitigation based on fluctuating armor values would make combat spicy.

The most successful groups in GK are boring. Pull mobs- kill with cheap tricks - repeat. There is very little danger except from the super rage criticals. People are usually rezzed mid combat.

To me, this (my idea of mostly removing the armor bar from being part of the health bar) seemed like a decent middle-ground solution that requires less dev time. Also since several people are in favor of increasing mob health...this does that both directly and indirectly through mitigation( since they keep their armor).
.

I think it's neat to have an armor bar but it would be so much better if it meant something. Imagine for example if your character sheet told you that at 1000 you had 50% mitigation. If your armor is 50% full then that means you lost half your mitigation (no matter how much armor you have).

Skills that restore armor become way more valuable and combat becomes way more interesting - keep your armor up and be safe or ignore it and potentially die.


One last closing thought that will probably be extremely unpopular - why do animals get to use a shield as an animal? Ok sure fine let them use the mods or whatever but it seems like a cheat to be able to use the armor from a shield while playing an animal (this of course would assume that we change armor to a % mitigation system).