Slay Undead Poll: Dev requested feedback

[Abazzagorath]

[Opfor]

[Abazzagorath]

Slay undead was originally a secondary check that happened after a successful critical hit check, which them added a multiplier to the critical hit value.

I.e., if you were going to crit for 500 dmg, using a weapon with 40 damage bonus, and had slay3, you'd get ((500)*10)+40 = 5040.

So it was ((crit formula)*(slay mod)+DB).

This means that slays were modified critical hits and, when parsing the real "value" of slay you couldn't just compare slay dmg to total other damage, you had to *take out* the damage that the crit itself would have been.

Originally, the probability and scale of slay was:

Slay1: 10% chance to convert a crit to a slay, slay mod of 4.0
Slay2: 30% chance to convert a crit to a slay, slay mod of 7.0
Slay3: 50% chance to convert a crit to a slay, slay mod of 10.0

This meant that Holyforge resulted in an increased number of slays, due to the 200 mod on crit frequency it had, so it should have tripled the number of crits (in reality, it was a 2.4x increase, no one ever gave an explanation as to the disparity).

Our critical hit rate (converting a regular hit into a critical hit), with Combat Fury 3 (a requirement before you could buy slay undead) and max dexterity was approximately 3%.

This meant that with slay maxed, slays made up approximately 1.5% of our melee hits (outside of holyforge). Our critical hit rate was lower than 3% with slay maxed, because some crits became slays.

Slay Undead was going to be nerfed with the release of Planes of Power. The impending nerf was announced in the same statement that told us about the complete heal and mod rod nerfs. This led to furious debate among paladins, with a lot of suggestions given to keep slay as is.

The change to slay was to make it a "toggle" on ability, where, when active, we'd take a lot more damage (I think it was 25%? something like that), and when it was off, we'd tank like normal but could not perform a slay cleanse. I know all this intimately, because I was the one that originally laid out the solution that sony ended up taking. Iustus and Galidin threw their support behind that idea, as well as a lot of lesser known paladins, and its what they ended up doing.

Basically, slay was argued to be too powerful in the upcoming PoP expansion because of two factors:

1) Far too many undead in PoP (which most of us considered bogus after the expansion came out), and
2) The new alternate advancement ability: Fury of the Ages

Fury of the Ages was later turned into "Combat Fury" ranks 4-6 when aa tabs were consolidated. Basically, more crits = more slays so that was a problem.

The solution that was enacted, was that our chance to slay was DECREASED when you purchased those aa. A concommittent scaling where the slay/hit ratio stayed the same, while the crit/slay ratio increased.

That was the first big change to slay.

Then we had the issue with cleave when it was introduced. Cleave meant more slays, and so the introduction of this focus in Gates of Discord caused an issue. The issue came to the fore very quickly when cleave was broken (instead of a 40% increase in crits, it was 140% increase) and paladins with the Tipt bracer were slaying like mad.

The cleave effect was fixed, and months later, slay was changed completely from a modified critical hit, into a separate check. This means that we no longer lost crits to slays, and slay frequency no longer increased with higher crit rates. It also "broke" holyforge, in the sense of it no longer affected slays, which led to its revamp in December 2004 where the the "Slay Undead (140)" line was added.

It is interesting that the line was 140, when it had been known for years that HF only increased our crit/slay rate by 140% instead of the 200% show in the data, not sure if that was just a coincidence or not. You can still find the threads on the original paladins of norrath forums, including posts by Brenlo and Ashlanne about some of the issues around this time.

So 2005 rolls around, and we get vanquish undead from DoD. And paladins rejoyce! The probability of slays going off increased significantly, as did the scale of the slay itself. Years later, Nodyin told us that the frequency increase was a bug they decided to leave in.

Then annihilate undead comes out and we have 3 more levels. We say a small increase in scale, but could parse no changes in frequency. Nodyin also later stated that those levels *did* increase the frequency, but we never saw it.

One thing that Elidroth's numbers make me curious about, is the 51.5% chance to slay. I am curious if that number is a legacy number that has no impact on anything in game right now. Why do I say that? Well, we obviously don't slay at 51.5% rate, or anywhere close. Our slays are independent of any other type of hit now, so its not like its a value set against crits anymore. But at slay 3 our chance to slay was 50%. Vanquish (which increased our frequency) was *after* slay was changed. And what if we never actually got the frequency increase with annihilate we were supposed to, because whoever coded it stuck it in the old data, changing 50 to 51.5?

Slay 9 is a ~17% increase to the size of max damage from Slay 3 (after taking out damage bonus). The rest of the huge difference between now and then using the same weapon is from the effect of leveling.*BUT THAT INCLUDES THE EFFECTS OF MIN HIT*. What I mean is, the real increase from slay 3 (old) to 9 (new) is higher. The difference in damage is smaller if only looking at min damage from both abilities (~15%). I no longer have the formulas for determining hit and crit sizes from player level and weapon dmg. But I suspect, if we could look at the code, that the "230%" value elidroth is talking about, is a variable that was used in the "new" slay calculations, however they did it, such that it mirrored the damage we were doing with slay at level 65 when slay was changed. And that value was increased with vanquish/anihilate.

Right now, outside of holyforge, we perform slay undead cleanses about 5 out of every 100 melee hits against undead (assuming slay maxed).

There is around a 70% increase from live to undead dps from slay, which means that the average slay is 15x greater than the average of all other hits combined (so average in crits, which is why its lower than the difference between max normal hit and max slay).

So there's a bunch of history, some speculation and some raw data for people to keep in mind.

- - -

So here's my question for Elidroth:

You keep talking about things like "3 slays at 1/3rd current power instead of 1", and my response is, why? Why would you waste time on that if it doesn't change the ultimate effect of slay? All that does is make it more regular dps and less prone to spikes up and down.

What relative dps % of tank versus melee dps do you guys want us to do in the following:

passive sustained (aka autoattack on dummy)
active sustained (aka, actively using all your abilities as they refresh over long periods of time)
active burst (aka, raid parsing)

I mean, we gain 70% boost from slay, but its only on pure melee portion of our damage. Doesn't include procs, doesn't include nukes, doesn't include other things like crit discs/buffs which make slay a *smaller* portion of our total melee damage.

Take active sustained.

If warrior is 100%, and zerker is 150%, then what's wrong with the paladin doing 80% live and 136% undead? And thats just the pure melee portion. See where I am going here?

In order for paladins to be "just" behind warriors/sks, and "significantly ahead" of melee dps, then slay (along with a combination of things like undead nukes) *needs* to be a massive % increase in dps. Otherwise, what you said the goal is, simply won't work.

I have far less a problem with you guys deciding to rebalance melee dps, and as part of that re-envisioning, our slay dps % bonus over live is reduced. But all I have heard so far from first Nodyin, and now you, are things which are not incompatible with the current mechanism of how slay works. So what is the problem? I mean, in order to accomplish your stated relative comparison, you'd have to actually INCREASE how much scaling we get against undead, not decrease it.

[WaringMcMarrin]

[Abazzagorath]

[WaringMcMarrin]

[Thebobo]

Eldiroth just give us some better nukes now until and if SOE can ever allocate the resources to actually do some serious work on our DPS.

[Abazzagorath]

[WaringMcMarrin]

[Elidroth]

Yeah.. so the coder that looked at the Slay code with me came to me this morning with a correction to his numbers..

The chance is Effect 1 / 10000 to do base damage * Effect 2.

For Slay 9, that works out to a 515/10000 chance to do base*2300/100. FYI.. we have to divide most numbers by 100 because nearly everything in EQ was originally developed using Integer variable definitions.

Or more accurately, 5.15% chance to do Base Damage*23. The scaling is insane. THIS is the real problem we need to fix.

Short version.. multiplicative modifiers are Bad(tm).

[shiftie]

[Letarus]

Seems more insanely low chance to me.

[Abazzagorath]

[Abazzagorath]

And I do want to say I do appreciate you actually taking the time to look at the code.

I still wonder about Nodyin's comments on the frequency increase with annihilate undead ranks, I wonder if whoever did that back then was looking at the % number the same way you originall posted it, and thought he/she was adding 1.5% total chance increase from the 3 tanks, rather than the 0.15% increase it probably was (which would explain why parses couldn't distinquish it).

Honestly, I don't mind if slay is changed somehow to be a "flat" value, so long as the value itself does scale with weapon damage, and so long as we gain new ranks every expansion to keep the relative value of it. But, if that would be ok, I still don't see what is wrong with how it functions right now.

[Normy]

[knytul]

[Abazzagorath]

[knytul]

in tower raids in a tank group (no dps boosts at all), with Intensity and Spiders byte VIII and all my toys using Corrupted SOul piercer (FULL OFFENSIVE), i hit between 2000-2500 dps. If i had a shammy, bard or chanter that would be insanely higher, but im never that lucky. Thats realistic numbers to me atm, and that sucks donkey balls when you have every other melee class doing 4k-10k.

[Normy]

[Hulkling]

[knytul]

These are strong possibilities, but now im curious about the formula of slay undead on the possibilities of how it can be changed, so devs have the ability to manipulate it, Without nerfing it. Basically wanna see ALL our options.

[Abazzagorath]

[Hulkling]

[Letarus]

What about removing streakiness from slay and just making it a separate damage bonus on every hit that only applies to undead. Would that fix our issues undead DPS?



If so, what would be an acceptable reduction in slay damage to compensate for it being guaranteed on every hit?

[vawen]

Hulking, do you know if the dps changes will be up for the UF beta (whenever it start)? Would be great if we could use the beta for make some good parses while the devs are around.

[Hulkling]

No idea....I know as much about the slay undead revamp as the rest of ya. That said, I do expect them to be in UF Beta, but don't quote me on it.

[Cellan]

they could also look at Veteran's Wrath type of abilities that do increase DPS but have no effect on special attacks/abilities.

[Thebobo]

Despite all thats been prsented here they still are intent on a Slay undead revamp? Why?

Seems such waste of time to try and increase our DPS through melee. Please just give us some more dps through spells, AA, etc. Again it worked for SKs. Why not for us?

Its an obvious and reasonable answer to our needs. Not to mention I would think it would be a lot easier to implement.

[Normy]

[WaringMcMarrin]

[knytul]

the current interpretation im getting from elidroth is that the current Slay Undead code leaves no room for change at all. Its fixed. Say if they wanted to boost something, they couldnt without a mass change. This is where ALOT of bugs come about in code. What they want to do, is take the current code, and break it down into its individual pieces. Creating the exact same result, but the method of getting there is different.

Example:

Current: (A + B + C + D) = E
New: A + B + C + D = E
basically, anything in that parentheses is altogether and unchanging, where as the new will have each area of our dps separate, but the end result is still the same. THEN...if they want to say boost Live dps (Say boost A), it doesnt affect the other aspects of our dps, its independent, but the result will be the old + changes to Live. Its really hard to explain without typing out example code, but i hope i make sense

Some of these factors include stuff like Spells, passive melee, active melee, AA's, discs, etc. While common sense wise it may make sense, some parts of it wont work like that. Code is stupid, u gotta treat it like a child. If elid is going down the road im interpreting, i would expect UF beta to at least have a new version of Slay undead, where the result is the same we have now, but new cleaner code. Then Later on in beta, introduce new dps ideas. Itd be the smart move anyway

[Opfor]

Knytul hates kittens, true story~

[knytul]

*mumbles to himself* dead kittens dead kittens dead kittens dead kittens...

[Thebobo]

[Klixarr]

There's always the multi-part option.

Halve SU's passive effect (but not probability)
AND some of the following: (at least 3)
Move Paladin pure melee dps up a bit. (To be on part with SKs pure melee dps)
Add in a spell/AA/disc line that temporarily increases the effectiveness and probability of slay hits with a reasonable duration and recast. (So no 30s duration 1 hour recast bs, something like 1min duration, 3-5min recast.)
Add spell/AA/disc line to increase paladin DPS. Preferable something like the cleric damage shield ward, make it do extra damage to undead.
Add in AAs to enhance the functionality of the Crush nuke line.
Add undead bane damage to paladin only weapons.
Add some sort of special damage type (like backstab for rogues) to knight 1handers and give paladins and SKs an ability which uses it. For Paladins, "Rebuke Evil" that tacks on an extra flat damage bonus to any melee hit that hits an undead creature.

Mix and match. But don't nerf.

[knytul]

nobodys saying its being nerfed atm. The way Elidroth is wanting to do this atm, 99% of the playerbase shouldnt even notice a difference. On Change 1 that is. Change 2 is where the real #'s will be seen. But Change 2 cant happen until Change 1 does, and thats what some of us are trying to motivate Elid into getting done faster.

[Thebobo]

I would perfer and seems a few others here do as well they not mess with any change to SU. Pretty sure they could increase our regular dps with out doing so keeping it line with thier target DPS for us, and there have been suggestions here to do so. I don't think folks have come to a consensus as to how this should be done as such I don't think any one idea should be pushed. Other then as every one says we would like to have something done soon. Also I would think that all the designers/devs would have their time allocated by a manager as to what they will work on.

[knytul]

[AbyssalMage]

[Thebobo]

I never saw a concrete plan laid out for us just some rough ideas and a target DPS.

And as far as just adding some spells etc to our dps I don't see how would be a cluster ##. I see it as a simple, if a temporary solution to increase our dps.

A little story and forgive me if you were there.

We went through a similar situation with SoE back during the Anguish days this with stun agro. We were in dire need of more agro. At the time there as a some problem with stun agro, with either high level and/or high Hps mobs. For those that were there correct me if I m wrong.

There were many ideas but it basically came down to two, for the lack of a better word, camps. One camp was asking the devs to re-write/change the complicated code on how stun affected mobs. Others suggested a simpler solution, adding some hate to our current stun spells.

In the end they just added extra hate to our stuns and that effective and adjustable system remains today.