by Abazzagorath » Thu Sep 10, 2009 3:56 pm
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.