Critical hits, bad behavior & "end game" content

[ErDrick]

I see a lot of people saying that they were "one hit" killed, but not much more in terms of details. If possible, please give specific examples and the full details involved. Character specs, health, armor, etc. What mob killed you? What were the specifics of the encounter? The more information, the better. Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming.

Any elite mob in Gazluk Keep can potentially one hit kill you ( while you are wearing lvl 70 legendary armor from this dungeon, that has been transmuted / augmented/ and possibly infused) besides tacticians( and possibly mages / mutterers..don't quote me on that part), if you are not specifically using one of the 4 or 5 tank builds that are extremely focused. Even an instant kill from 80% health and armor is kind of unacceptable, 50%? maybe. I would imagine that almost any elite mob in any dungeon will do the same thing to a person who is actually geared 'at level" for the content. If you have the tools to give yourself something like 500hp regen per tick, you could easily test this by wearing level appropriate gear and stand there waiting for a rage attack to critical on you, and see if you survive, this assumes you also have level appropriate armor and health of course. And by level appropriate I mean 1 tier of gear below what drops in the dungeon you test it in..as in, you are a regular person running it for your gear...of course in gazluk keep itself you can wear whatever you want as long as it's normal shit available to players and you will still die, but keep in mind that a lot of people are there to GET level 70 gear.

The non-elite mobs on rahu plateau... not the debilitators and not the ones wearing heavy plate mail..I want to say Onkara super soldiers? can one hit kill a person with 935 armor / 600 health, their rage attack may be bypassing armor however, also there is something strange going on with the debilitators in the same area. I notice them hitting me for like, 30 health and armor, and doing a small DOT ( 9 damage or so) and a few seconds later I'm suddenly dying so fast i can't really tell what's killing me.

I'm also pretty sure General Prask hit me for 1600 damage today with those same stats with a rage critical. However much it was I was literally at 100% health( 600) and armor ( 935) when it happened, I know this because during the fight with him I became bugged with the bard bug and had insane regeneration( not intentionally, incidentally I have reported this bug and sent the output_txt thing to PG's email a few days ago).

This is about the best I can do now since we don't have a combat log to go over what is happening and give you real specifics, you have to understand.

[poulter]

Some thoughts:

This question might ignite a few explosions, but does Citan even want to design a game based on the holy trinity of tank, healer and damage?

Regarding GK 'speed runs': I view these as aberrations caused by the absence of new high-level content. Geared players have run GK so often now that groups are deliberately doing multi-mob pulls to keep themselves entertained.


Soloing in GK: For consideration with respect to balancing

I frequently do this for entertainment & just to prove I can. I am not the only one doing this.

With one specific build, I can even reliably solo 2 patrols at once. Still get hit by crits, but if I can prevent them them the patrols die. (I use gear with 58 to 60 mods fitted, so the gear is not representative of the main player base).

I also have 4 other skill combinations & builds (none of them using immunities) that can reliably solo single GK patrols (using only food & snack buffs).

By soloing in GK, I can test out various skill combinations & builds, but the end result trivialises grouping. Grouping reduces deaths, speeds up the run & allows boss fights, but is (sadly) optional.

[Mbaums]

I think ErDrick’s comment talking about Winter Nexus and DC helps bring some of the conversation back into focus, this is not just a GK issue. The current appropriate preparation for GK and DC is the 20% fire vulnerability buff. Citan at one point has said he does not expect players to unlock every skill, so what non-combat skills should players have? If an unarmed player wanted a combo-attack-buff in GK, I think his group would do everything they could to talk him out of it. Some of the damage outputs to an un-mitigated player are absolutely brutal. I don’t shut people out from group if they don’t have something but I absolutely push people to get meditation up to 39, and 2 rez abilities on their sidebar (1 and switching when on cool down is fine). From EQ-days an MMO staple of balance-theory became “if one item becomes absolutely required for a class/players to be present, it’s not balanced” per their manastone fiasco in 1999. Having said this, the 20% Mediation buff is the right way to play (this line was intended to be a trigger for Citan).

The devs wanted details: When I tank I use the thick armor potions and meditation buff and about 660 HP. My unarmed/psych build is low armor by most standards (572) needs time to get started, and absolutely needs me to get off ‘but I love you’ and ‘tell me about your mother’ for -25% and -32 dmg to the big hitters. I’ll restore my own armor whenever I fall below half. I aim for 3-mobs of any type when I pull. Troopers are more dangerous than infiltrators here. This build avoids mages because I can’t get agro and run around a corner fast enough for them. My staff/shield is looking at 875 armor. With troopers/mages I don’t blink at 5, but infiltrators are dangerous. Their rage venomstrike is brutal and I never want to pull more than two infiltrators at once. The issue is not necessarily me dying, but other players picking up agro from an add when my taunt is down and being melted before anyone realizes they have agro (I’ve blown some taunts on non-elites and it’s painful).

I hate suggesting things that require extra programming. However I like danger and here are my recommendations, the goal is to make more engaging game play:
Greatly increase mobs HP for elites.
Dis-allow the Rage+Crits interaction.
Create a rule that causes elites to deal more damage the longer they stay alive in combat(maybe capped at 250% after a minute). This makes kill order important, and should kick mez-refresh waiting solorers to the curb. I see this as a trade-off from the crit nerf above.
Allow elites to rez their friends and mez their foes. This should further nullify the dreams of any solo player vs elites.
Allow cure disease to put out burning damage/trauma/root/snare (and make it in the tool tip). This will make cure disease a requirement, but it’s better than requiring players to rez. It’s to throw a bone at the players melting in DC.
Allow players to break his/her own current stun with unfetter like abilities. Because… c’mon!
I think this could correct the “Citan falls asleep in groups” issue.

[spider91301]

There are some good discussions going on here and I'd like to keep them going! But I'd like to ask for more specifics. I don't get to participate in a lot of group combat recently. I don't have time -- I'm working 12-ish hours a day on the game, so even having time to solo is hard. So I rely a lot on feedback for group combat, and we really don't get a lot of feedback about grouping that's in a format I can act on.

I say I don't group a lot, but I've managed to get in enough pick-up groups to know that grouping wasn't particularly difficult or engaging before we added monster crits. It was basically a cakewalk. (And it can still seem too easy, depending on the level range and group composition... but the crits at least make people pay more attention!) In fact, I do think the monster crit system has been good for the game because it changed the equation from "grouping is too easy" to "grouping is frustrating because it's too hard to control X, Y, Z things." This seems like a step forward to me. Maybe we can dig into more fundamental problems, the kind that we very rarely get feedback on.

Monster crits were added because monsters were too predictable and they dealt too little damage. This solution addresses both problems! It's a first attempt at a solution, and I could fine-tune it (lowering crit damage, reducing the chance of chain crits, etc.), but I'm not sure that's the thing to do right now -- it really was added as a quick-fix so that I could look for other underlying problems. I'm not sure if we'll keep monster crits at all: we may want other solutions to the underlying problems.

If you're unhappy about crits, the questions to answer are: Who was involved (levels, general combat skills type info), what did you fight, what did you do to counteract all that the surprise damage (I assume your team had sidebars full of healing/support abilities, for instance... so were those not good enough? Not fast enough to use?). I need to know how you tried to adapt to the problems, and why it was still unfairly difficult. Help me to understand the issues.

And yes, there are situations where I won't be sympathetic: if you're trying to solo-kill a large number of monsters at once with a CC-mitigated "AoE pit", then I want the monsters to kill you a lot -- a lot more than they probably do now, actually. That's insanely dangerous and should generally result in your death. Were you trying to solo-kill (or duo-kill!) an Elite? Again, I actually want that to result in your death most of the time -- and will probably make those types of scenarios MORE difficult, not less.

But if you're talking about a full group that gets wiped repeatedly because of crits, that's something I don't want to see. Maybe I just need to add a cooldown-timer so crits don't happen too often in a row... but I really suspect that'll hide deeper problems again. I want to dig in. Could you have countered the crits if you'd had more healing available? Are you carrying a bunch of weaker players in the group, and we need better group-composition tools? Or are you not focusing damage well, and the group needs better coordination tools? Better de-aggro? Is taunting just completely useless? Is healing too weak? Is monster detection too good?

This provides an opportunity to improve the game's full-group issues... and I'm not even sure I know what all the fundamental full-group issues ARE. But if you have some clues, I would appreciate your insights!

tldr: I can tweak the "band-aid fix" of crit damage -- but first I need to know it's not bandaging over a more serious problem.

------

Thanks for your feedback. Also, I've mentioned this before, but since this is a contentious topic, I wanted to remind here: I really appreciate people who are able to separate their emotions from their feedback -- it makes it a LOT easier for me to process it if you aren't outraged at the same time. I'm only human, the game is made by humans, there are lots of mistakes and some of them are stupid mistakes we should have fixed a long time ago. But it's not too late -- we can fix them.

The more you can give me info in a format like "my group did this thing, and we expected this result, but got this other thing", and the less "only a crazy idiot would think X is working", the more practical help you're giving!

With how armor mitigation and crit spam is now I foresee my future level 120 with level 120 pocket gear 24/7 in gk
when you have 750 health and 1k armor and die from health lose and still have 500 armor that says alot

But on a serous note the only thing I can see fixing the instant kill is having a set amount of damage crits give you like if crits only took 25% of your total of armor and health then maybe that would fix it better then instant dying then healers would have more leeway to fix it and heal you also maybe make it so no matter how many times you get hit with crits you can only take 3 crits before it just goes back to the enemies default damage which in turn would be 75% of your armor and health which is alot better

[Silvonis]

Thanks @ErDrick and @Mbaums. These type of details help, a lot.

[Sasho]

My combat loadout is Sword/Arch. I don't use any resistance potions, damage mitigation potions/spells or evasion armor.
My stats are around 790 health and 800 armor. Endurance is max with all synergy bonuses (level 86 or something) if this even makes a difference.
The only trouble I've gotten from crits is from bears. I was in Eltibule and I afk'd for a second to turn my head away from the screen. There were only 2 bears on me (neither were The Mauler), just 2 regular level 30 Eltibule bears. One did a rage attack crit and hit me for 500 damage, the other did his regular rage attack and killed me.
Granted, dying in Eltibule isn't a set back by any means. But holy s***! 500 damage from a level 30 bear is just plain stupid. Even the critical attacks of a raging GK officer don't hit me for 500.
So yeah, the bears are broken. Outside of that I haven't had any trouble with the crits. Lucky for me, bears aren't a common mob I deal with.

----

What OP didn't specify is what mob is doing a one shot? I'd like to know because I've never encountered a one-shot death.

Edit: my mistake, OP talked about the troops in GK. In my experience I've still never been one shot by them, but I have taken a big burst of damage and had to eat a lot of bacon to heal up before their next regular attack. That alone can be pretty costly.
To be fair, I also have a near perfect rolled, level 70 gear and GK still tramples my butt any day of the week, so I do agree with OP that GK can be pretty frustrating.
BUT! And this is a big BUT!... GK really is all we have right now as our current end game, and I do in fact like that it's a challenging place. So I'm still happy leaving it as it is for now until we get a higher dungeon to deal with.

[Yaffy]

So just to give people an idea of how strong crits are, I went and threw myself at some enemies to see exactly how much damage they do. Instead of talking about specific situations, I think it'll just be easier to look at the raw numbers and see what players have to do to survive them.

Here's General Pask:


Here's a Gazluk Trooper:


Pask's normal attack crits hit for 740, his rage crits for 1400.
Trooper's normal attack crits for 448, their rage crits for 1028
Infiltrator's normal attacks crit for 496, their rage crits for 920 (Plus 222 in poison).

So outside of percentage based mitigation, a player needs to have a combined total of health and armor equal to the crit+1 with at least half of that being health. That means to survive Pasks' rage crit you need to have at least 701 HP and 700 armor, for troopers you need to have at least 515 HP and 514 armor, and for Infiltrators you need to have 461 health and 460 armor (And then be ready for the poison).

Don't even bother considering flat damage mitigation, as you can see vs the trooper I had almost full armor, and all it did was reduce the damage by 16. That's a 1.56% damage reduction. Compare that to the 20% damage reduction you get from Meditation 39 and it's easy to see why every tank needs to be running it.

So now I'd like to ask the devs, are those numbers around where they should be? Those life/armor values are the absolute bare minimum to survive one single attack. If you consider a second attack, then depending on the mob you need to add another 125-300 HP and armor to survive two, depending on whether it crits or not. Otherwise you need to be healed for 125-300 HP and armor right after getting hit by a rage crit or you risk death.

Also, just in case if some smarty decides to point out that I was naked vs Pask and of course I should die, I would like to point out that unless if I had over 1725 armor AND full HP I would have died anyways because 700 of that damage is going towards my health even with armor.

[ErDrick]

Yaffy just won the forum, I think.

[INXS]

Yaffy is the king of PG mechanic break down, thanks again for your dedication in this tests.

[spider91301]

My combat loadout is Sword/Arch. I don't use any resistance potions, damage mitigation potions/spells or evasion armor.
My stats are around 790 health and 800 armor. Endurance is max with all synergy bonuses (level 86 or something) if this even makes a difference.
The only trouble I've gotten from crits is from bears. I was in Eltibule and I afk'd for a second to turn my head away from the screen. There were only 2 bears on me (neither were The Mauler), just 2 regular level 30 Eltibule bears. One did a rage attack crit and hit me for 500 damage, the other did his regular rage attack and killed me.
Granted, dying in Eltibule isn't a set back by any means. But holy s***! 500 damage from a level 30 bear is just plain stupid. Even the critical attacks of a raging GK officer don't hit me for 500.
So yeah, the bears are broken. Outside of that I haven't had any trouble with the crits. Lucky for me, bears aren't a common mob I deal with.

----

What OP didn't specify is what mob is doing a one shot? I'd like to know because I've never encountered a one-shot death.

Edit: my mistake, OP talked about the troops in GK. In my experience I've still never been one shot by them, but I have taken a big burst of damage and had to eat a lot of bacon to heal up before their next regular attack. That alone can be pretty costly.
To be fair, I also have a near perfect rolled, level 70 gear and GK still tramples my butt any day of the week, so I do agree with OP that GK can be pretty frustrating.
BUT! And this is a big BUT!... GK really is all we have right now as our current end game, and I do in fact like that it's a challenging place. So I'm still happy leaving it as it is for now until we get a higher dungeon to deal with.

Christ dis is some ol bullshz