Feldon Big changes to Mechanics and Itemization have coincided with the last 2 expansions and Destiny of Velious is no exception. Today we delve into changes to:
- Procs (Item Effects)
- Adornments
- Critical Chance
- Critical Avoidance
- Primary Stats (Stamina, Intelligence, Agility, Wisdom, and Strength)
- Health
- Power
- Melee Range
- Multiattack
- Ability Mod
Too Long; Didn’t Read (TL;DR) Version:
- 7 of the Class Foci (plural of focus ;)) which were previously available as Red Adornments (some of them date back to effects on Kunark raid gear) are now included in the Velious Raid Armor sets. The rest of those effects, plus about 35 others, have moved to a new type of Red Adornment called War Runes.
- Most of the popular Sentinel’s Fate effects/procs which used to be on items are now available in Velious as Yellow and Red Adornments.
- All mobs in Velious require some degree of Critical Mitigation. Battlegrounds gear (with its Toughness stat subbed in for Crit Mit) won’t cut the mustard here, even on solo mobs.
- Critical Chance is now contested against the mob’s Critical Avoidance. If a mob has 50% Critical Avoidance, then you will need 150% Critical Chance to crit 100% of the time. This applies to healing too.
- Stamina is now the primary source of the players Health. +Health is no longer being itemized on Velious gear (although still available as player-made adornments).
- Your Class Archetype’s Primary Stat (STR for fighter, AGI for scout, INT for mage, WIS for priest) is now the primary source of your Power. +Power is no longer being itemized on Velious gear (although still available as player-made adornments).
- Melee Range is now 5 meters. Generally, mobs will no longer “close the gap” to melee. This is a substantial boon to Rangers who will be able to use Ranged combat arts when toe-to-toe with the mob, however the change has led to innumerable pathing problems which remain unresolved.
- Agility no longer has anything to do with Avoidance or Critical Mitigation. Avoidance has been added to Scout buffs to compensate.
- Wisdom no longer has anything to do with Resists.
- Multiattack (formerly Double Attack) allows you to hit multiple times. With 250% Multiattack, you have a 100% chance of hitting twice, a 100% chance of hitting a third time, and a 50% chance of hitting a fourth time.
- Ability Mod, formerly known as +Spell Damage and +Combat Art Damage, is now being phased out as something that is itemized for. However you can still get player-made adornments, it makes an appearance in the new Heroic AA tree.
Whence Item Score?
If you have heard leaked information from Velious beta or read between the lines here on EQ2Wire, you are probably wondering where Item Score went? Actually, Destiny of Velious was not the first beta to see point scores on individual items either. And like last time, it looks like cooler heads prevailed and so this feature was taken out. The main reason it was not implemented is that only new items (Velious) would have had these item scores.
On the Destiny of Velious beta forums, Silius posted a detailed explanation of these changes and why they were done. Unfortunately, due to the NDA conditions, we’re not able to post these developer quotes.
people have been listing the new AA’s and class changes in detail in the official forums too
Yeah, I could sit down and transcribe the contents of all the screen shots I took. But why should I have to spend 4 hours doing that when I already spent 2 days making a Javascript AA browser for the new AA tree? At some point, doing all this work to cover a game managed by people who just don’t give a crap is just not rewarding anymore.
sry feldon . i know you worked hard and hard on this for them to just do that.
First time poster. Just had to say your work is appreciated by your readers.
It’s beyond retarded how SOE handles things and it’s heart breaking to see the effort you put into this go to waste.
Thanks for all the hard work in keeping this blog relevant and fresh. Also big thanks for being honest how you feel unlike all the other EQ2 sites that get great access yet offer no real insight into the shambles EQ2 is in, only shiny screen shots and BS corporate text they’re told to post.
Thank you!!!
A damn shame that your hardwork on this is going to be seen. Their community relations team seems to have gone downhill since Brenlo left.
Confused on the healing bit…
Do mobs heal less then since they are competing with their own critical avoidance? Do players get healed for less because of their own stats?
*dons Devil’s Advocate hat*
With any expansion, the sky is always falling and the devs have always forsaken us and on and on. Sure. I’m no fanboi, but it’s tiring. It’s part of an mmo. Otherwise, the day before it released, /quit knowing you won.
If all of these sweeping changes WEREN’T made, how long would player interest be kept without a level cap raise? They’re doing what they can to make an aged game last. THAT mentality, at least, is appreciated…
That being said, I think this is a load of horse crap. It’s insulting to players’ intelligence. Are we so impatient of a culture that we need everything handed to us? No risk, no reward… it’s been beaten to death for a long time for good reason. No risk, no reward = no magic.
I feel for you, Feldon, truly. If I had put that much work into something and then WHAMMO, can’t even show anyone, people would be learning some new words.
I’ve /quit several times now, never expected to come back. Glad I did, as there were some people I truly missed seeing on a semi-daily basis. Not sure if that’s worth it anymore, however. Maybe it’s maturity, maybe it’s a rebellious streak against the times. Maybe it’s one person trying to keep a clawmark on the world from slipping into something akin to Idiocracy. Who knows.
At the very least, your efforts (Feldon and the rest of the EQ2 people) are appreciated immensely.
It’s more like it reduces the Crit Chance (Heal, Spell, Melee, Range, Taunt) of the entire group by a percentage. If your group goes up against a mob with 50% Critical Avoidance, then your group will do crit damage 50% less and also critically heal other group members 50% less. So your healers are going to need 150, 200, or even 250% Crit to heal properly against the hardest dungeons.
Ouch.
Is there a mechanic in place in game to show what a mob’s given critical avoidance is? Or guess/check type ordeal, or set to a rough range for a given zone?
I think this element more than anything else worries me. But that’s just me.
Yes, click on the mob and read their detrimentals. It’s there in black and white.
It’s also not uncommon in some instances for the group to be hit with an uncurable detriment that shows the conditions. (-75% crit chance, for example)
Glad it’s at least in black and white…
I was hearing something about mobs curing dots off of themselves a lot as well in DoV. Since I play a warlock, has me concerned…
Anyone able to confirm? And if so, is it EVERY mob, or only some nameds/zones?
got a question, did stat caps go up? so for soft/hard diminishing returns? Or are Sta and your main ability still capped at whatever, without having the extra bonus for HP/MP being on armor?
The loss of ability mod did make me wonder, I don’t think this is the first time we’ve seen it disapear from the game, there is a point after level ~40 where it seems to disapear until back in the 70’s on gear.
Overall I think the stat changes will work. I dont like losing the non-prime stat values, but in reality no one made a choice of gear say as a fighter based on how much AGI an item has. It was always STR, STA but even then blue stats were the priority.
So in some sense a lot of these changes were no changes (ditto for health and power, they were always there in amounts depending on the prime stat on offer, so now they are just given by the STA and prime stat).
The crit avoidance is a little clunky imo, but it does work, and it does make crit a useful stat and something we again have to consider when gearing up – which makes gearing up actually a little more complex (especially the way they’ve implemented it).
The way you’ve written about Item score it sounds like it’ll be back when they get around to revamping all the gear (as they’ve said that they want to do). Personally I think it’s a total waste of space for gearing up, as we either care about something being a higher level item first, or at the level cap we’re trying to pick the right stats – not caring about the itemlevel.
But I think the real reason for it being there is due to the eventual plan to put in a dungeon finder, and have players assessed by their itemscore. Again a dumb and lazy idea, WoW uses this same method when they could instead be looking at the players actual stats and make intelligent decisions (a tank in cloth isn’t much good!).
My main guild’s leaders left in October to take a break. Some of the changes since then have put them against wanting to come back. I fear what i’ve found out about velious changes will only fortify that decision.
Feldon, your efforts are very much appreciated. This is the first site i go to before flames and players to get info. Thank you.
This makes it sound like casual players using solo quested armor from sf are going to have a tough time solo questing in DoV, am I mistaken or is that the case?
Starseeker i believe i read STA is also uncapped, so both your main ability and STA are uncapped.
@Evlpacman
Its harder solo questing in DoV then SF, mobs hits harder, have more health and have some nasty abilities that we should really interrupt when possible. The only experience I have though is with my Froglok Guardian in mostly BG gear. There I was fine (and could handle multiple mobs).
I suspect that squishy classes will want to dust off their root and kiting skills as going toe-to-toe and just slugging it out for non-tank classes is going to be a bad idea.
(I suspect a lot of people who had trouble were trying to handle the mobs like they would in SF, but its purely my own guess and I won’t know myself until I take a healer, scout or mage in there).
Murfalad,
It’s hard to draw any conclusions about soloing in Velious because when beta launched, we were all getting slaughtered in what I consider pretty good heroic gear. The mobs had major DoTs and knockbacks. In the last week or so, this got nerfed to oblivion. Comments from devs fluctuated from “we know it’s too hard” to wanting to tune it back up. I don’t mind a challenge, as long as I have more than 3 seconds to pot cure before guaranteed death.
Murfalad – you’ll replace any non-fabled armor almost instantly in DoV with the quests you get right off the bat. I agree with Feldon though, they are changing some things at the last minute, so we really don’t know how much health or damage output world mobs will do next week.
•Melee Range is now 5 meters. Generally, mobs will no longer “close the gap” to melee. This is a substantial boon to Rangers who will be able to use Ranged combat arts when toe-to-toe with the mob.
Only beneficial in solo not effective while grouping or raiding. The rest of melee gets a 150% extension to thier hit box. Ranger gets 0% change. Thier reasoning “Making the weapon fit the CA’s!!! Unless you are a Ranger then you get the the same lame too close, too far crap trying to use melee CA’s in your CA rotation.
I think they changed the range of some of the melee CAs to be the same.