AOC - General Discussion II

[TwiNCannoN]

LS does more damage to Honorguard, not sure if he has funky resists but I constantly slam him for like 3k+ damage, it's pretty sexy. So does our lightning specced demo.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by TwiNCannoN

LS does more damage to Honorguard, not sure if he has funky resists but I constantly slam him for like 3k+ damage, it's pretty sexy. So does our lightning specced demo.

Everyone hits him for roughly double damage. Not sure where the bug is. If he really does have double the HP he presently seems to it may be quicker to just farm the trash.

[Darus Grey]

Originally Posted by Flight

i) Your numbers are way off; its certainly not hundreds of DPS extra from its innate DoT. Typically in the majority of existing parses FoG will account for around 85% of a Conflag Demo DPS.

ii) You are also talking about before yesterdays boost to ToS LS damage.

True, I didn't think the patch was that huge a difference.

iii) I should also point out that the damage stat I've quoted is the average hit per spell cast. FoG depends on constantly being spammed to build up Amassed Flames and other feats, which massively increases its DPS - this is the figure I've quoted for FoG average damage to be equal to LS. LS is doing that same damage per spell over an extended period of time.


iv) The insta cast spells you mention (being Shock and Hellfire Stream) don't do even half of the amount of damage you are suggesting. You cannot afford to use them constantly. In theory, on paper, you can. In practise a Conflag Demo has to be very careful to keep up the full 5 charges of Amassed Flames, or their DPS plummets. The reason for this is if you choose to cast one of those instant cast spells then get a resist on your next FOG all 5 Amassed Flames points drop and you have to start building them back up at one point per FoG cast. Detonation is a no no for the same reason.

Wait...WHAT??. An instant cast spell interferes with FoG casting *how*?

You cast FoG...Queue Hellfire Stream or Shock...and then immediately cast FoG again,and you get the same amount of FoG casts you would otherwise before amassed flames drops. I don't see how you could possibly gain more DPS not doing this. If you get a resist on Hellfire or shock you don't stand there spamming it again...you move on and cast FoG again(and then queue it after that cast).

I agree that ToS don't need a major nerfing...but I wanna see some actual parses before I get uppity about this change.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Darus Grey

You cast FoG...Queue Hellfire Stream or Shock...and then immediately cast FoG again,and you get the same amount of FoG casts you would otherwise before amassed flames drops. I don't see how you could possibly gain more DPS not doing this. If you get a resist on Hellfire or shock you don't stand there spamming it again...you move on and cast FoG again(and then queue it after that cast).

I understand what you are saying but try it for yourself in a raid situation.

Like most of what has been discussed - use of Detonation and Hordish Imps - its great in theory but not in practise. The 'instant cast' spells cause a (very) small amount of delay between casts; to maintain Amassed Flames you can't have a resist and one of these times - you also lose a small amount of time by not having FoG queued for the second cast if you get a resist. To maintain it if you have a resist you need to have queued FoG twice.

You will find that the vast majority of competent Conflag Demos have 80-85% of their raid damage directly attributed to FoG, not including its lingering DoT effect in existing parsers.

We may have hit on something together; maybe the fix that Demo needs is simply a very small increase in the time before the Amassed Flame buff drops without a successful hit from FoG. I'm going to suggest it on the EU Demo feedback thread.

[Vehn]

offtopic

[Darus Grey]

Originally Posted by Flight

I understand what you are saying but try it for yourself in a raid situation.

Like most of what has been discussed - use of Detonation and Hordish Imps - its great in theory but not in practise. The 'instant cast' spells cause a (very) small amount of delay between casts; to maintain Amassed Flames you can't have a resist and one of these times - you also lose a small amount of time by not having FoG queued for the second cast if you get a resist. To maintain it if you have a resist you need to have queued FoG twice.

You will find that the vast majority of competent Conflag Demos have 80-85% of their raid damage directly attributed to FoG, not including its lingering DoT effect in existing parsers.

We may have hit on something together; maybe the fix that Demo needs is simply a very small increase in the time before the Amassed Flame buff drops without a successful hit from FoG. I'm going to suggest it on the EU Demo feedback thread.

I'm not sure this is entirely true. Yes it does add a tiny delay, but I just logged in to do some testing. Amassed flames lasts 6 seconds, however I couldn't get it to continue(at 5) on the 3rd cast(FoG being 2sec cast).

I had my G15 set to spam my FoG button nonstop and would step to interrupt at the last moment,and immediately recast, there should be no difference here between that and queuing(i.e. So in the 6 second sequence, it'd be hit. Cast(but cancel), Cast(but cancel), Cast(hit. amassed flames 1). I'm thinking the buff running out takes precedence over the buff being renewed at the 6 second mark. If that's true then the maximum number of FoG casts inbetween amassed flames ticks is 2 and not 3. Which leaves you a 1second window.

Really need to test on a raid target which method results in more over-all DPS(or if you have seen parses comparing the two please share!).

[Gilgamel]

How people are killing Champ now:

[Golbez]

What is really pissing me off the most is the fact that you can single pull any fucking mob in this game via an exploit. If its not using Charm, use one person to pull (Suicide it) in a corner, but before he dies have someone else tag a mob during the pull. Congrats you have a single mob.

Also, what the hell is up with full plate itemization. Have a breastplate out of Aztel Fortress that has 0 Heroic Bonus mitigation. Is this intended? I've seen greens having better heroic mitigation than blues.

Ontop of that I don't even think armor mitigation is even working properly. Champion of the Honorguard was hitting the casters just as hard as it was hitting me (Guardian)

Another exploit to clearing, don't feel like killing the trash? NP have them kill themselves. Have a HoX hit them with their bugged as fuck combo that transfers npc damage to other npcs. Than sit back, grab a mountain dew and watch the raid mobs fight each other!

FIX IT

[Inconsiderable]

You do not really want heroic defense anyway.

[spronk]

I think funcoms gonna have to pick a side, pve or pvp, to balance/further the game around, so not really sure worrying about who is highest single target raid DPS is that important...

[Golbez]

Originally Posted by spronk

I think funcoms gonna have to pick a side, pve or pvp, to balance/further the game around, so not really sure worrying about who is highest single target raid DPS is that important...

Well there are rumors floating around (Not sure how true it is) that half their team went to work on an expansion and the other half to finish polishing off the game during release. If that truly is the case, pull those fuckers off the expansion and put them back on the game or the expansion will be a waste of money and time.

Heres a big fucking hint, theres a reason why companies don't throw out 2 patches a week. ITS BECAUSE THEY ARE DOING INTERNAL FUCKING TESTING TO THE SHIT THEY CHANGE/ADD.

Sorry if it sounds like im ranting. The game really does have a lot of potential and I'd like to see what they can do with it.

[spronk]

funcom is working on another MMO, Secret World, a lot of the dev staff was pulled off that game a few months ago to work on AOC. I would guess many of them went back to work on SW.

[TwiNCannoN]

Agreed Golbez. This is the first time I've ever been mad at an MMO developer for having this huge wad of potential on the table and just completely failing. I don't know if maybe it's some kind of budget issue where they can't hire enough QA/CS people but fuck that, get some more money and hire them. Having 12-hour long petition queues only for the GM to come and tell you to fuck off is unacceptable, not to mention getting in touch with them outside the game is a story of legend (which doesn't bode well at all considering they have major account issues). And of course pushing out 2 patches a week means shit when they're half-assed and create more serious bugs than they fix.

Sadly, in a lot of ways it's becoming clear to me that many things in AoC are already fucked, not counting the stuff that isn't implemented yet. Crafting/resource harvesting is absolutely terrible and is tied into the crappy and horribly bland city building system (which is also tied into the siege system and sadly gives sieges a stale pre-generated feel). While the melee combo system is one of the selling features, it's pretty bad itself and has a lot of flaws. Spellweaving is a total joke for something that was supposed to make spell casters as "interesting as melee" (quoting that because the combo system really didn't turn out to be that interesting anyway).

Loot is another huge one, it boggles me that not only did they go with WoW loot but they went with an absurd "make your own loot" system that's completely non-interesting and just based on generated modifiers * item level. How much cooler it would've been if pvp was a focus from the start and corpse looting was in and crafting was a primary focus for fueling the pvp economy. Equipment is basically a non-concern as it is while leveling, and even at the level cap it's hard to really care about your gear; especially so when it's broken to the point of having +mana on full plate gear (which, even though it'll eventually get fixed, does nothing to one's faith in having cool and interesting gear as it again shows off how generated the content is - even WoW's is more interesting and that's pretty pathetic as far as I'm concerned).

Raids, again, boring as shit... could've had some interesting shit happen, imagine getting to tier 3 city and periodically a raid boss will attack or something and you'd have to use siege weapons in the fight... and instead of just "killing a boss for loot" it'd have the added component of not wanting him to fuck up your city. Unfortunately instead of making city building dynamic and interesting it's just shitty pre-placed buildings with a "farm resources until your eyes bleed and then you're done forever" approach (whatever happened to npc hordes attacking anyway). Even if you were naive enough (which I was at first) to want to show off your city you can't except for the other 2 guilds who are in the same instance as you.

/rant off

A lot of this was promised to be fixed or is "in the works" but really, how can they change a lot of it when it's so integrated into everything else? I'm not sure if it's worth calling it a "fatal flaw" but it certainly is depressing to think that loot really isn't going to get any better anytime soon, the economy for some servers is already fucked (they STILL haven't fixed the raid loot bug yet which warrants a hotfix), and city building is and basically always will be a completely boring resource grind.

[Tolanin]

the only problem with crafted gear is you need armorsmith III to make most of the lvl80 stuff and the gems are broken on the AH so its like impossible to get enough gems, and the gem system itself is a bit funky. A properly gemmed crafted item is imo still better for pvp than the raid loot.

[TwiNCannoN]

I'm not saying it's bad stat-wise, just implementation wise. Crafted is definitely the way to go for pvp.. and probably pve as well considering I think you can get something like +38% evade chance from gems.

You need tier 3 city to craft tier 3 stuff, so right off the bat you have the upper hand if you're in a zerg guild. Past that the gem system is fairly idiotic and given the only restrictions are size (uncut vs flawless) it only limits having less or more of a given stat - whichever stat you want to stack the hell out of, whether be it immunities, evade chance, fatality (barbarians running around with 100% chance to fatality is just amazing), or +magic damage... and this only covers about half of the gems, the rest are basically useless. Also most of the desirable stats are a random chance to get along with anywhere from 4 to 12 other attributes so it's a total crapshoot each time, and you need 27 to full up a full suit of armor.

Oh plus anything that's % based doesn't pay attention to the level of the gem, a level 40 flawless is the same as a level 75 flawless... woo