Well, read and discuss.
By the way, the bold and highlighted items are things I wanted to emphasize, not in the original post.
An Overview
EverQuest II is a complex game containing 24 classes which all need to have their own personal identity. This results in a number of spells and combat arts which when put together make players very powerful. One aspect where this is very noticeable is with fighters. The goal of the fighter is to deal with incoming damage from an NPC while also making sure the NPC keeps focus on the fighter instead of his or her allies. This was once true and the fighters did just this holding aggro with taunts and absorbing the damage through mitigation or avoidance of the attacks. Overtime, this morphed more into the fighter holding aggro through certain buff combinations and by maximizing their damage potential.
In short, these changes are about getting back to those roots. Fighters continue to focus on taking damage but now we need to refocus the fighter on holding aggro through their taunt abilities instead of purely through damage.
From the damage class perspective, things are equally troubled. Most damage classes can freely go 100 percent with little risk due to certain spells they have or may receive. This gives little risk to the damage class and makes certain spells which reduce your aggro have little to no value. Aggro is a two way street. The fighters need to gain as much as they possibly can but the damage classes need to watch what they are doing. This is why the changes are not restricted to just fighters because we want to emphasize this fact.
Aggro Changes
The most noticeable thing about the aggro mechanics in eq2 is that hate generation has scaled linearly since inception. Damage however has progressed exponentially as new effects and spells have been added to the game. This resulted in reduced threat output from taunts and detaunts. In addition, it was found that aoe based spells and combat arts were adding excessive hate when cast on groups of npcs. Not only did the npc gain hate from the damage applied but a small portion of that hate was added to the npc’s party members. Most of the time you will hit all of them with an aoe based spell so this extra hate spreading was removed so as to not penalize or benefit certain classes more than others due to their spell makeup. For example, take a warlock using Armageddon. This spell can hit up to 5 targets. Hitting all 5 targets would then penalize the warlock with approximately 20% additional hate for all of the targets instead of just adding the damage as hate to each target.
One of the first things completed was reworking the scaling a bit. To properly scale with other effects taunt criticals, base taunt amount and normalized taunt amount were added similar to how combat criticals and bonuses work today. Aggression has also become more important since it impacts taunt based spells. Aggression will increase the amount of threat added to taunt spells. In addition, higher threat values relative to your target increases the resistability of the fighters core taunts.
We also expanded on the concept of the single target and aoe tanks. The single target tanks are the guardian, paladin and monk. The aoe tanks are then the bererker, shadowknight and bruiser. The designations are about where the classes excel the most but are not absolutes. A guardian can tank single targets efficiently but they are still quite capable in situations with multiple npcs.
The single target tanks gained additional efficiency to their single target taunts while the aoe oriented classes improve in gaining aggro in the group encounter settings. In general, the aoe classes have a slight disadvantage in the single target fights by having to use higher power and higher casting time spells. The single target tanks then have higher values and improved efficiency when it comes to single target creatures. Single target tanks should still be effective when multiple npcs are encountered but the aoe tank will be more efficient in these types of encounters.
As stated above, aggro is a two way street between the fighters and the damage based classes. Certain spell combinations were effectively leaving high damage classes with no risk of pulling aggro even though they were going all out. So the adjustments to abilities like hate gain, hate reduction and transfers were made.
Hate gain and hate reduction were plentiful from a small number of spells. This made it easy for many players to hit the 50% cap and have little risk from their action. Thus the values were toned down or removed from these spells in favor of new methods. This will in turn allow us to grant these effects sparingly on items and have a meaningful effect. In the past this was not possible due to the ease of hitting 50% through certain spell combinations.
Hate transfers had similar issue to the hate gain and hate reduction. Hate gain at least allowed for improved hate from the players actions while hate reduction was just removed completely. Hate transfers on the other hand moved hate from one player to another. In limited use, this makes for an interesting gameplay element. However, once again the values often hit an extreme amount. It was decided though to shift the emphasis from the damage classes more to the fighters though. The shift resulted in several transfers like Amends being changed to something more appropriate.
Stances and Spell Consolidation
When the stances were analyzed several things stuck out. First was players tended to favor the offensive stance for tanking over the defensive stance. This is largely due from the fact that damage is the preferred method for holding aggro. The second was that a fighter essentially ran one of the stances along with several other buffs. A common complaint from all of the classes is time to rebuff after dying. So instead of casting multiple self buffs they were merged into the stances. Third, the skill bonuses and reduction of the stances was changed slightly. Skills have a relatively low cap allowing for a few buffs to quickly get the player there. Thus the skill gains stop in the level 40 range now instead of their continued linear increases. The reductions also have a similar cap and no longer continue a downtrend which in the past made lower level stances slightly more effective due to reduced penalties. Also the skill penalties are much less than they were previously.
The offensive stances have been altered slightly to give the fighter viability when they are not tanking. It allows them to do decent damage which keeps them viable as an extra in a group or in a raid. Slight damage improvements come with penalties though. In the offensive stance hate gain is reduced, damage taken is increased and taunts actually reduce your threat.
The defensive stances on the other hand give improved viability to tanking. There is additional hate gain, defensive skills and variety of other effects you would expect from a class built to hold aggro and take damage. Like the offensive stance, these bonuses come with penalties. In this case, defensive stances reduce overall melee damage while also making it more difficult to hit.
The object of the stances is then to give the player a decision to make. Do they need to tank or are they better off doing damage? The choice is theirs based on the situation. Tanking for a group would make the defensive stance a better choice. Soloing or clearing raid trash might make the offensive stance a better choice.
In Closing
Hopefully, this gives everyone a little insight into why these changes have occurred. They can be quite shocking at first glance. However, we feel if you play through them with an open mind you will see things are not quite as bad as they may seem. We would encourage people to make use of the Test Copy server and try things out there with their normal group if possible. Using this play data, then submit feedback using the /feedback command. We will then read and evaluate the feedback and make adjustments as needed.
Although oddly enough I found myself wishing for a few more hints of what-is-to-come.
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