Base more stuff on % of HP rather than fixed values - saves rebalancing again later

[Troxxor]

Just an idea; I'll admit I haven't thought it through a huge amount.

It seems to make sense though; if done right it could stop some things from becoming broken again after this balancing, as HP and other stats march ever higher.

I'm thinking potentially for all kinds of things:
HoT ticks
DoTs ticks (in PvP)
Heals
Nukes (in PvP)
HD
ND
Layers
Specials/normal hits even? (in PvP)

OK for some things it's not appropraite, but for others I think it opens up some interesting possibilities.

[Obtena]

It's done to calculate caps in PVP ... so there is no reason percent-wise calcs can't be put on other effects too. I always wondered why FC kept away from that concept.

[Moonbolt]

if they made the dmg % based it wouldnt matter at all how much HP a Character would have.
cause the char would still die in exactly the same amount of hits .

[Livesangry]

if they made the dmg % based it wouldnt matter at all how much HP a Character would have.
cause the char would still die in exactly the same amount of hits .

QFT, however i think HoT's are an diffrent story

[Looke]

% is what got us in the mess we are in today Instead of actually fixing FA / AS they got lazy and put a stupid 40% cap which made AO into the only RPG I know of where getting more hp could make your toon weaker.

Caps in every form in every game is bad and nothing but cheap way to try balance things. It makes no sense what so ever that a twinked agent and a support prof is doing the same DD with AS on a low/mid hp prof.

[Moonbolt]

ya not saying theres anything wrong with the suggestion. just pointing out that %based dmg would remove any difference in max health between players.

[Obtena]

ya not saying theres anything wrong with the suggestion. just pointing out that %based dmg would remove any difference in max health between players.

For some things, that's OK ... like nukes from bosses for instance, or orbital strikes. It makes alot of sense for DOT's from Docs I think.

[Eseb]

I don't really agree. High HP fixers whose HoTs and HD all heal a certain % of HP would be well too well off defence-wise. Docs, NTs or any other nuking prof would make the high HP of enofs, kippurs and solds an issue instead of it being a bonus. The same applies with regular hit dmg.

[Gatester]

%based healing and damage would only work if they were coupled with static amounts or situational tools.


2k damage +5% damage rather than 3.5k damage or 15% max health damage. Static %based heals are easier to manage than damage, but they require long lockouts. For DoTs, % based damage could work only if the intention was to introduce a tool for profs that have difficulty with high health toons. I would see a doctor having a %health based DoT to use vs enforcers for instance, that would be weaker vs fixers.

[Hacre]

Gah no more % based stuff. More HP should always be a good thing, always always always always.

Instead FC really need to sit down and look at how the big specials really work.

It should, in reality and fairness, only be possible to 30% cap on low HP gimps. Someone wanting more HP should have the advantage of that extra HP = they can take more damage.

Once % caps are fixed, things like absorbs can be put back to how they worked before, instead of being in the mega nerfed state they are now. The entire absorb using playerbase shouldn't have been made to suffer for what, two years now for a few low HP idiot NTs. That change was one of the things that rooted Keepers firmly at the bottom of the melee tree for so long.

Specials like Burst/FA/AS/SA/Backstab and whatever the new AS special is going to be should have their mechanics totally revamped when target = player. Applying the 50% PvP reduction -after- the hard 13k/15k cap would be a good start.

[Xtremtech]

There's a difficulty with the scaling on %age based tools.

Let's say you're level 50 and you get a DoT that does 5% damage. The same nano should be just as powerful at level 220, because the actual amount of damage it does has scaled with the amount of HP your targets have. That means that the basic AO concept of nano-lines with increasing requirements for casting would be severely undermined.... or that the relative balance gets messed up.

The essential quality of the AO skill system, is that as you level you invest in higher skills, that allow you to cast more powerful versions of your nanos or equip and use better weapons etc etc.. It's a major part of the motivation behind levelling and of the balancing that the AO skills system uses.

Another key issue with percentage based tools, is that balancing between PvP and PvM can become much more difficult.

Mixed effects, where an absolute value is the base and then a small extra percentage is added can reduce the issues and gets around some of the difficulties in character progression and balance, but on the whole it's probably better to try to avoid percentage values where possible.

X

[Doctorhyde]

Let's say you're level 50 and you get a DoT that does 5% damage. The same nano should be just as powerful at level 220, because the actual amount of damage it does has scaled with the amount of HP your targets have.

I call bull.

You're making the assumption nothing else is variable. Resistance and defense checks can be used to make sure a L5 nano isn't competitive against a L220 nano. So for instance the NR check for defense of a nano doesn't have to be %-based to make the damage the nano causes based on %.

You can have built-in resistance based on
* Stats (Psychic in the case of crat charms)
* Level (many snare/root nanos have this)
* NR, etc etc

None of those have to be %-based. Or if they are you can add things like absolute level (ie, not %based) into the calculation to keep them scaling with player level.

And not everything has to be %-based. Some perk action damages -should- be, to allow certain profs a better chance against high HP players. Other things like basic weapon damage probably should not be. This would allow profs who have things like DoTs to have a reliable damage from that high-cost nano on all profs ... while high HP would still protect against super-twinked weapons.

Plus you don't have to allow the max % at the beginning of a line of nanos. Doctor's big heals could scale from 25% at L1 to 100% at L220. BAM! You have a reason to improve. HoTs can last longer as the nano gets better.

Properly done, making some mechanics %-based has the ability to do things that would make AO much more appealing to the average player (the player that has mostly disappeared from AO in favor of other MMOs):

1) Give all profs a form of reliable, consistent damage and also give non-Doc/Advys a form of reliable, consistent healing.

2) Make it so that twinks don't WTFDOMINATE at lower level PvP ... they'd still have an edge but "normal" toons would have better effect

3) Remove the need for game mechanic abusing super-low or super-high HP setups

The world isn't black or white. You can mix things in without making everything %-based -and- you can craft things in such a way that even if the % is exactly the same there is a way to have improvements as you level. The real problem here is these changes would be systemic ... requiring a LOT of work ... and the rebalancing work FC has been proposing so far is just some tweaks and tunings here and there.

PS. % isn't what got AO here in the first place ... bad usage of % is what got us here. We got %-caps on damage but no %-caps on healing. We got an order of magnitude more buffs on HP but we didn't get equivalent +healing to most profs -nor- did we get a %-based +healing for those profs. % itself wasn't the problem, the way it was applied was.

[Dancingrage]

MPs have explicitly requested that a percentage based heal (alongside the normal one) be added to our healpet via Soothing Spirits, and the reason is specifically because of our problem healing both our SL demons/Rihwen (Rihwen tops out at 55k HP, Morti ain't healing that up soon) and also for utility in raids.

For instance, a 1.2-1.6k heal won't do a whole lot, but coupled with a percentage heal, say 10% that is 1.2-1.6k plus 10% of your health. For the MP, this won't be a tremendous amount, usually another 1k. For Rihwen, this'll be 6k-7k, and a useful heal to help keep the pet standing. More valuable when you consider that FC is considering making this pet pull it's tanking weight, healing it is something to consider.

Obviously with a heal like that MPs would be excellent assistant healers in raids, able to opt in on those moments where a doc simply wasn't available but a high HP tank was. Even with that kind of healing power, it still wouldn't be overpowered when used on the MP in say, pvp, since as before, it's only a heal of another 1k, and not the 6-7k numbers used above.

[Xtremtech]

I was examing the choice between fixed value effects and percentage based effects, so yes I held the other variables constant. That way the balance on the effects is retained. My argument was also that the basic paradigms in AO would be broken - which is essentially the point you make at the end: that you'd have to deeply change the game systemically in order to make it work with balance.

There are without question other ways to create progression in nano-lines, many of which though just create other problems (and indeed have in the past in AO). Essentially, if two tools have the same effect, then we expect them to be similarly easy to land. More powerful effects should be more difficult to land. That's governed to a great extent by the skills budgets available in the attack and def skills. A lot of balance is controlled in AO by managing those skills budgets in the framework of the att/def skills.

The special thing about percentage effects is that they should scale as the players and their targets scale. So if 5% damage on a level 50 target is balanced... then 5% on a level 220 should be broadly just as balanced. If you increase the power of the effect (more DoT ticks, longer durations etc) then that scaled balance is lost. If the effect becomes easier for X profession to land... then the other professions will kick up a fuss about it being unbalanced that it's much harder for them to defend against it, despite the effect still being just as powerful.

Without deeply changing some of the basic paradigms that make AO the game it is, it is difficult to change from absolute to scaled effects and maintain the skills system, character progression and balance. It's not impossible - but there'd be many people who wouldn't want to pay the price that may be necessary to make such things work.

X

[Xenotric]

% based damage makes health ammounts redundant, the only damage effect I'd agree that a % based system could work ok in a decent manner for is DoT ticks, but not for doctors theres are already plenty lethal when stacked and NT's dots already allow a lead into a rather strong % based nuke.

So that leaves agent and adventurer (because they'd so be given these if they came into game! [/sarcasm]) dots, which might actually cause more agents to use them, although the % they deal would have to be fairly low to stop them being seen as over powered and if it was a rework of the entire line would keep them all at similiarly low ammounts (would not say more then 3%) but vary the defense checks, the total tick amount and the tick speed.

Oh and maybe change the rage dot to a % based so its not just spammed with little to no regard to the dot?

As for healing, hots would again be the only % based things I'd agree to (and not just because im a fixer) as hots tend to be left behind heal wise simply due to the fact they dont gain from healing efficiency the regular heals do, so a % based system would make hots valid again while not making them obsolete regular instant heals.

Normal hits doing % based damage made me cringe...

[Coffay]

this works on perk heals. other than that, need to see it happen.

[rakhabit]

Gah no more % based stuff. More HP should always be a good thing, always always always always.

Instead FC really need to sit down and look at how the big specials really work.

It should, in reality and fairness, only be possible to 30% cap on low HP gimps. Someone wanting more HP should have the advantage of that extra HP = they can take more damage.

Once % caps are fixed, things like absorbs can be put back to how they worked before, instead of being in the mega nerfed state they are now. The entire absorb using playerbase shouldn't have been made to suffer for what, two years now for a few low HP idiot NTs. That change was one of the things that rooted Keepers firmly at the bottom of the melee tree for so long.

Specials like Burst/FA/AS/SA/Backstab and whatever the new AS special is going to be should have their mechanics totally revamped when target = player. Applying the 50% PvP reduction -after- the hard 13k/15k cap would be a good start.

^Truth

More HP should never be a bad thing.

If you want % based stuff it should be something like Nuke X does 4000 damage+3% bonus for every 250 MC skill.

[Troxxor]

Well DrHyde pretty much summed up what I was thinking.

Take an example; enfo absorb layer nano line (because I'm familiar with it & think it's nowhere near as useful as it used to be when HP was generally lower). There's 10 RK nanos, useful/useable for/by tl5 & 1 nano for tl7. You could structure the progression of the line something like this:

First Nano: 5% absorb, 15mins duration, 5.4s/3.33s cast/recharge
End Nano: 7% absorb, 23m20s duration, 6.92s/4.65s cast/recharge
DB Nano: 8% absorb, 25min duration, 7.05s/4.65s cast/recharge

The % are just for example btw, to give an idea of scaling a nano line. Lol so please don't cry OP

Answering the "more HP should be an advantage", I agree. With % specials/normals, I was just kind of throwing that out there... Maybe it is a bad idea.

As for dots/nukes/etc, I don't see why the appropriate profs can't have a/some line(s) that work on %. You've got to remember these would be going up against % heals, % HD, % HoTs and % layers so imo HP would still be an advantage. It'd be about picking a tool for a job, "horses for courses" & all that.

So an attacker with these tools rather than spamming every target with the same dot/nuke line 1, then 2 then 3 or whatever, it'd require a bit more intelligence & knowledge of your toolset. Example: Oh that's a high/low hp target cast line 2 (because it's more effective aginst them), then the others.

[Moonbolt]

well... if u make DoTs % based ......

imagine DoTing an enf for 5% health... well on an average enf this would be around 1500-2000 dmg.
now imagine throwing same DoT on beast.... dont know exactly how much HP beast has but i can imagine the DoT doin around 40K / tick minimum... it just wont work to make dmg % based.
its frankly a quite dumb idea to even consider in AO.

[Troxxor]

DoTs ticks (in PvP)

l2r