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I did read through some of the more recent posts and noticed a few posts by Awakening staff about your intent to make this game harder than pre-CU. I think that is a great idea, however I think you are going about it the same way SOE did by increasing time to kill monsters rather than decreasing player’s survivability and output. SOE was never able to keep up with players cleverness and players always found ways to do things solo. For example, DWB was supposed to be super hard, but it required constant tunes as players figured out ways to get around it’s difficulty. Of course SOE also had to balance not scaring people away because they needed the sub money, and you don't have quite that same fear of shareholders here allowing you the freedom to "be at odds" your player base a bit more. I still think there is another and better approach.
I’d like to keep this simple, and just outline where I think are the main reasons we can solo so much of default pre-CU content. Then as you all comment if you have questions I’ll gladly expand. My alternative was an even more hastily and poorly written 10 page post no one would ever read.
The main culprits that have allowed us to solo everything is armor effectiveness, buffs / pharmaceutical effectiveness, speed cap via tapes, and then the multiplier effect all three of those have when combined that completely negates entire features of the game and offsetting any semblance of balance originally intended.
- Armor’s base effectiveness cap probably needs at the minimal a 20% reduction, 90% -> 70% base, and I’d even argue bumping up encumbrance a bit so people think about using different types of armor with lower encumbrances but similar protection.
- The main issue with buffs is the secondary stat buffs. They should be capped so you have to use one of the variety of ways to maintain a net zero SAC cost (Food, lower SAC costs on weapon, lower SAC cost specials, lower encumbrance on armor, etc.).
- Pharmaceuticals are too strong (item wise), and healing effectiveness should receive more weight from the skills. The items effectiveness provides too great of a benefit making 0040 medic all you typically need to heal “effectively”. Sure a doctor with Stim Es will heal a lot more as is, but you are almost never going to let someone’s health get that low in the first place so it’s all wasted in over-heal. A doctor/CM should be making the one in a group that can provide 75-100% max health heals and medics should be throwing out 10%-50% of max health heals. I think that can be more easily adjusted by making the required items to be weaker, but medical knowledge multiplier to be stronger.
- Speed capping has two major negative effects on this game. First, it offsets the strength of swordsman & rifleman so much from the other combat professions that they become required choices for PvE. I did the calculations a long while ago and if I recall correctly speed capped rifleman is 400-500 DPS above median dps of all classes with base weapons (all speed capped) and swordsman was 200-300 DPS above the median dps. Every other class was within 100 DPS of the median. When I removed the possibility of taped speed caps all classes were within 150-200 DPS of the median with Rifles and Swords still at the top, but that was mostly due to their armor piercing. Speed caps make speed slices always hated, vast majority of WS never even consider their weapon’s speed, and just throws shit off.
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