Initiatives fix???

[Psikie]

In a way, all this sounds kinda interesting, but at the same time it seems like it could all backfire if team wipes occur faster than mitigation measures can get established.

Instances like vortex where the boss hits frequently and hard will be technically challenging, especially with the synch/lag between chat and the little fear resist things. In general it seems like stuff that is moderate difficulty will go to insane difficulty, and stuff that is difficult will go to impossible mode. Not to mention trying to find the profs/people to do this stuff.

This I think was the actual goal of the rebalance. I want to give the devs the benefit of the doubt type of credit in planning here. If the goal was to eliminate the holy trinity of 3 man raids this may have done just that. It also seems to scale back "some" of the power creep of the past few expansions. It is going to force new ways to tackle the older content. If a wider variety of profs are needed and/or are useful I am for that change.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

This I think was the actual goal of the rebalance. I want to give the devs the benefit of the doubt type of credit in planning here. If the goal was to eliminate the holy trinity of 3 man raids this may have done just that. It also seems to scale back "some" of the power creep of the past few expansions. It is going to force new ways to tackle the older content. If a wider variety of profs are needed and/or are useful I am for that change.

I feel exactly the same.

Props to the devs for making BIG steps in eliminating the 3 man trinity, and it will start to really encourage diversification in groups to tackle content.

I hadn't thought of the power creep but you're right that it is a good by-product of the changes I've seen so far as well.

[Traderjill]

The realist in me thinks that rather than bring in some of the currently considered useless professions, people will just dual log an extra doctor. If you really think about it, you can do most content in this game without init debuffs already, its just a lot more convenient to have someone debuffing... but it certainly isn't a necessity.

But we'll see. Maybe less experienced players will bring in something besides enfo/doc/crat/flects because they won't have any other choice. That's assuming there's going to be an influx of people due to a Steam release.

Have you guys done endgame raids on TestLive? Besides a failed 12-man where the crat claimed his debuffs wouldn't land (not why it failed btw, none of the people knew how to do 12man except 2 of us, for some reason)... I haven't actually tested endgame raids on TestLive.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

I have not had the chance or inclination to try to make a team. I have a hard enough time making teams on live in my timezone, let alone try out test (unfortunately).

I've only played a few toons on live and mostly just PVPing in duels and running around in whatever instance/area is level appropriate because it's pretty hard to find more than 1 person around at a time.

I've played 220 MA, advy, engi (same as live), 150 trader I think and that's all. Only played one of my accounts on test so far.

@ Jill, I've done several instances without a crat and you're right - it IS possible, but it really requires a very good understanding of what mitigation measures are available - even if they are hidden (i.e. red dusk+incap on MA, doc procs, etc.), and you certainly aren't afforded that luxury of - oh, the doc is afk for a minute.... we'll be fine!

[Psikie]

Yes I have and I have found that enfo's are biggest adjustment so far. Having about 1/2 max health as Live. It's a huge adjustment for doctors to heal more often. However with the +heal modifier you "can" substitute advy, or ma IF you have more supporting cast for reflects/ward.

That was doing sides in pande.

Soldier other than deflect knocking out a few full autos (DD) not much change. Engi nothing to report, NT totally blows now, Doctor can no longer heal forever, Crats won't be soloing and or tanking anymore, and Fixers seem not much worse for wear.

[Traderjill]

Yes I have and I have found that enfo's are biggest adjustment so far. Having about 1/2 max health as Live. It's a huge adjustment for doctors to heal more often. However with the +heal modifier you "can" substitute advy, or ma IF you have more supporting cast for reflects/ward.

What do you mean by 1/2 max health as live? I'm doing this from memory because my enf account isn't active but seems like I have something like 65k+ hp on Live and I believe with the changes to 18.7 I lost about 15k so that would still put me at 50k+ hp.

[Wakizaka]

Yes I have and I have found that enfo's are biggest adjustment so far. Having about 1/2 max health as Live. It's a huge adjustment for doctors to heal more often.

Losing 14k on MUIB, and 5.1k on iMongo, is not even close to 50% unless you're running some seriously super low HP setup.
For my Enf it's less than 30% drop in total max HP.

[Psikie]

New behe - is like 15k, ultra behe was 29k, should have said half max health buff.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

I got a feeling evasion is going to become a pretty significant option for enforcers. There's a lot of evasion available in game currently that isn't being used to it's potential.

Generally speaking, WW> immi (210AAD)
Advy wolf form extra 100 evades if in wolf form+mother wolf
swapping to greenhud (from purple/health) plus a more evasion oriented setup (say +300AAD)
Trader debuffs continuously on mob -300AAO (I think?)
engineer using DVP religiously -1210 AAO
Reduce inertia 120 Evades
12man buff+predator +175 AAD

I'm not counting crat buffs because those are already usually available, as is mother wolf base buff

But all in that's an extra 2515 effective evasion, not to mention highway (200), overrule (500), and insight (126), as well as symbiotic bypass (140 EC) for temp gains of 900+ evades.

I mean, ya a lot of these are in use some of the time, but in terms of potential mitigation... these could really slow down the rate of damage delivered.

[Wakizaka]

If I get to pick the people in my tank team, I normally get to run around with ~4k static def. It's always been an effective route to go.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

Yes.

But it's getting into the 5.5k effective evades that I think may become a more sought after approach. Not to belabour a point, but the value of DVP is highly underrated.

Furthermore, direct reductions to damage may become much more feasible as well.

I did a writeup on this recently actually for an org enforcer guide, but if you pair up, for example the obvious pairing: crat init debuffs and watch ward, it's one of the most effective damage mitigation methods in game because WW becomes so much more powerful when the attacks are spaced out (to the point that you can go nearly an entire fight without getting hit on occasion)

But here's one we really only use a small part of:

Lets take a base weapon damage of 8000 damage (say, a standard hit by beast)
now add 5000 AC's, and we got base dmg reduced by 500 for 7500
now add DVP (-1210AAO) - I don't know how much this will reduce the actual weapon damage by, but lets say it's 600 damage for 6900
now add in MP damage debuffs desecration of will (-294) and desecration of resolve (-589) for ~900 dmg for 6000 dmg
and add in trader drains -300 AAO for another loss of 150 damage for 5850
add in trader AC drains/team boosts for another 2k AC's which reduce dmg by a further 200 dmg for 5650
and, reflects which drop damage by 3%+28%=31% for 5650*(1-31%)= 3898

And finally, nano absorbs, which further directly reduce damage taken by 1371 3898-1371= 2528

Now, this is the direct damage reduction method, and it works quite well, basically if your tank is getting hit for only 2500 dmg, hell, you wouldn't even need a doc in team to keep the tank healed up.

2500/8000 = ~70% damage mitigation

[Wakizaka]

Yes.

But it's getting into the 5.5k effective evades that I think may become a more sought after approach. Not to belabour a point, but the value of DVP is highly underrated.

Yeah, I spam DVP whenever I'm on my Engi in raids. It's helpful for certain.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

Yeah, I spam DVP whenever I'm on my Engi in raids. It's helpful for certain.

Back before MB, I used to play enf and alt tab to engi and I found it was the single most effective tool for reducing trash add damage.

mongo/alt-tab/DVP

It was beautiful! And it was so much more effective than if you have an uncoordinated enf/engi since mongo used to break DVP. I wonder if it still does now that mongo doesn't do 1 dmg anymore.... I haven't checked.

I remember one pande raid back a few years ago where we had only 4 people or so and a 6 man team and somehow we pulled nearly every mob after TNH and we managed to tank them all for a solid 10 minutes or so while we slowly whittled them down, using that method of course to keep the enfs effective evades up really high.

[Brofist]

Yes I have and I have found that enfo's are biggest adjustment so far. Having about 1/2 max health as Live. It's a huge adjustment for doctors to heal more often. However with the +heal modifier you "can" substitute advy, or ma IF you have more supporting cast for reflects/ward.

That was doing sides in pande.

Soldier other than deflect knocking out a few full autos (DD) not much change. Engi nothing to report, NT totally blows now, Doctor can no longer heal forever, Crats won't be soloing and or tanking anymore, and Fixers seem not much worse for wear.

You don't even need a healer for sides when tanking on an enfo. Currently crat debuffs+aura+engie blind aura and you will evade tank 95% of zod hits. Which you can then out heal with natural HD, and absorb spam.

[Dogtrauma]

DVP is however, slated for a huge nerf. It was one of the big Engi gripes back in the days of rebalance documents if i recall.

[Brofist]

DVP is however, slated for a huge nerf. It was one of the big Engi gripes back in the days of rebalance documents if i recall.

Just accept that the rebalance is never actually going to happen. Or at the least, not in the form it had so many years ago.

[Dogtrauma]

Yeah, that's true Bro, but i would not be at all surprised to see it set to the same amount as the trader drain and put in the same line.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

That iteration of the rebalance (with DVP getting the nerfbat) was something from 2-3 GD's ago. I think there was sufficient outcry from engies to leave that 6 feet under.

[Psikie]

This is what I was talking about in OP. Initiative Fix

I am not sure how this is going to play out. For sure it will make end game more challenging, but will this make a 2 team APF raid require 3-4 teams?

[McKnuckleSamwich]

For me psikie, the obvious issue is this:

If the boss mob inits have been tweaked so that they can hit at 1/1, and governed by the same mechanics that govern human players (i.e. all weapon lines can charge while charging, all paused while recharging) then the mechanics of the system are known - AND what do we know about the system?

* we know that if you have more inits than needed, the weapons do not exceed the max hit speed; AND,
* we know that if the mobs inits are greater than 1500 inits higher than whats needed to hit at max speed....then the init debuffs aren't worth casting.

The second point is what scares me most.