Soloing

[JustinSane4]

Some of these posts make me want to resub, but I know the same things that drove me away before would drive me away in record time. Namely, no one playing, being an MP, terrible leveling experience for alts, and not having anything to do.

Server merge could help quite a bit with some of those. And if you like solo play, I still contend MP is one of the most fun professions (even if we can't match Doc, Crat or Shade for solo PvM prowess).

[Esssch]

Server merge could help quite a bit with some of those. And if you like solo play, I still contend MP is one of the most fun professions (even if we can't match Doc, Crat or Shade for solo PvM prowess).

I do enjoy some solo play...but there's nothing left for me PvM-wise, and I loathe PvP. I could go farm rare items, but none of them would be an upgrade. I could farm items to sell, but I'm already cred capped on Jutu and have nothing left to buy.

The only real things left are raids, which rarely occur, and leveling alts, which becomes excruciating around ely.

[Psikie]

Well, the initiative bug fix does still impact us in that big monsters hitting faster hurts us as much as anyone else .

From a solo perspective, the big things we're losing are SoZ, 100% uptime damage debuffs and NSD (which works on a lot of soloable but difficult mobs).

We're gaining better nukes (not useful solo except for speed), better attack pet (particularly if it's got lots of health and can keep agg this will be useful), DtP nano (this should replace most of the reflects we're losing, 20% DtP to 30% reflect on SoZ), a better evade nano (250 duck/dodge/evade against 60), a pet proc that debuffs what the pet hits by 200 AAD and 150 AAO, a tougher, AOE mezz pet, and better healing (a bit more than 4x healing on players, 8x healing on pets when using creation weapons and with soothing spirits 10 perked).

Assuming that a current SoZ 220 MP goes to Red shield/1hb creation and runs the debuff proc, the proc and better evade nano almost exactly cancel out the loss in AAD from current SoZ to nano doc SoZ. 20% DtP is worse than 30% reflect, and the 1/3 uptime damage debuffs stop slightly less incoming damage than our current DD debuffs. However, we'll have 4 times the healing, and we'll be taking significantly less than 4 times the damage. This character would also have markedly better DPS than a current SoZ MP, due to better nukes, some dps from the creation 1hb, and better pet.

On paper the jury is still out because a LOT is riding on how this new pet will perform. But taking the pet out of the equation, here is what I see as reality. Overall we are losing defense in aad (shield) even with the pet proc. No reflects and dmg debuffs (dmg migration) so we will get hit more for more damage. DtP in no significant way will compensate for that with our low base hp. Now the heal pet is supposed to heal for more to make up for most or all of that, but again the jury is out until we see it perform as far as how often it ticks an interrupt-able heal. More nuke dmg = more dps but that was really never how MP's killed solo anyway. It's always been about the balance of defense/dmg migration over time so more dps would have to be exponentially increased to off set that.

Pvp wise I've won a LOT of fights because I could dmg debuff and prevent being capped and then at times evade more than 90% of reg hits. Top that with reflects when I did get hit there were times I literally held off 3 toons at core in BS that couldnt kill me (no small feat for MP). My duel record is even better. With each expansion/patch upgrade the AR totals are rising but our avoid defense will be decreasing. I see that as bad.

The balance changes will greatly benefit bow MP's more than any other setup from what I see. Again this is just on paper because concrete numbers on how or what effect creation weapons will have on pet abilities is not set in stone.

I'd much rather see dmg debuffs expanded at LEAST duration wise in line with those ridiculous crat debuffs. Alas that does not seem to be a possibility. In closing of course this is all hypothetical on my part.

[Xtremtech]

I'm not sure what this analysis is really supposed to achieve. Essentially, we end up saying "we don't know" - because we haven't seen the pets (which should always be a major part of the MP tool-set).

It's perhaps fair enough for us to be a little sceptical about the pets, given that we've had some pets in the past that weren't too great, for various reasons. But we can't really completely discount them in our analyses.

I'm not sure whether it really makes a great deal of sense for us, to try to work out what the overall effects of the changes will be on soloing - until we know more about how the pets will turn out. There's just too much uncertainty really.

I'd agree that the damage debuff changes should be looked at. Since the nano documents came out, we've had pretty much universal condemnation of the changes - especially since the Doc/Crat Init/Dmg debuffs didn't seem to get the same kind of heavy handed treatment.

There are a bunch of other things that I'd like to see looked at from the documents we've seen so far, but my understanding is also that a lot of things will have changed before the next load of documents get released... so we're pretty much in wait and see mode at the moment.

X

[lainbr]

Well, we know 3 things about new pets: they will have more HP, they will have more AR, they will do more Damage.
And about HP we can have a really good idea because, with the cooldown on pet casting, devs said "If your pet dies in less than 60 seconds, we are doing something wrong"