Important info on slows

[Fenier]

[Funi]

[WaringMcMarrin]

[Sowslow]

[Veril]

[Kanamori Hitatomi]

[Kumudil]

Tier 1 mob
a ‘wind nymph' a light blue con in dragonscale hills to a level 80
[Fri Dec 07 09:19:10 2007] Your spell was partially successful.
The bash / kicks attacks are 14.5 seconds apart (as opposed to 8 seconds on a unslowed mob)
8 / (1 - 0.45) = 14.5 seconds
So today on this particular mob a 75% slow would land as if it was a 45% slow
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Tier 2 mob
a yellow con to level 80 'A Kirathas villager'
[Fri Dec 07 13:21:24 2007] Your spell was partially successful.
The bash / kick attacks are 11.5 seconds apart (as opposed to 8 seconds on a unslowed mob)
8 / (1 - 0.304) = 11.5 seconds
So today on this particular mob a 75% slow would land as if it was about 30% slow
.
Tier 3 mob
a yellow con to level 80 'A fan mechanic' in The Steam Factory
[Fri Dec 07 13:55:31 2007] Your spell was partially successful.
The bash / kick attacks are 10 seconds apart (as opposed to 8 seconds on a unslowed mob)
8 / (1 - 0.20) = 10.0 seconds
So today on this particular mob a 75% slow would land as if it was about 20% slow

Rashere
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Against most group content, a mitigated high end slow will reduce DPS by roughly 45%. The attack debuffs are an interesting problem. The large values in the debuffs were required to see much change when NPC attack was tuned too low. Now that NPC attack is tuned properly, those same large numbers can have a large impact on DPS, about as much as a high end slow but without any ability on the NPC to reduce the impact short of either inflating the NPC's attack values (in which case, anyone without the debuffs would be in a world of hurt) or making the NPCs resistant to spells (which obviously impacts a lot more).
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Most single group NPCs mitigate slow by 40% at high levels. A 75% slow at 60% efficiency is a 45% reduction in attack speed, basically.
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I'm not really sure. The main difficulty is that there's nothing to offset the reduction like slow except making it hard to land the spell (and thereby all similar spells). With slow, we can make an NPC more difficult to manage by increasing his slow mitigation so bosses and named mobs aren't trivial with a slower and impossible without. With attack, that doesn't exist, so unless we add something, the damage reduction needs to be a somewhere in the middle whereby it provides a noticeable reduction without being required to defeat the encounter. Off the top of my head, a 2 point shift on the damage scale (or about a 20% change in average DPS) would probably fit that bill. That's about how much of a difference slow makes on high-tier SoF content where the mitigation level is higher.
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The big jump is only really in the new content. In the past, the swing was significantly less since the NPCs tended to hit low in the damage range already. And yeah, in SoF against a fully outfitted tank with level appropriate gear, you tend to shift the damage by 10% for every 50 points of attack. Realistically, we'd probaby want to look at the old impact (which I haven't measured enough to pinpoint right now) for a baseline.
That being said, establishing a nice, solid baseline would make it easier to tune healing spells. If we can realistically look at the situation and say "a druid is going to mitigate 20% of incoming damage for most NPCs", we can use that as the tuning point for druid healing abilities. In that light, a lower number is actually better since that means baseline heals would be closer to cleric levels. If the druid is averaging a 50% incoming damage mitigation, for instance, their heals would need to be that much less to be on par with cleric healing overall and they become a lot less capable of dealing with situations where their debuffs won't land...which is basically where shaman fall right now.
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The group level is what I need to concern myself with first and foremost. Despite the raiding bent of these boards, actual raiders are a distinct minority of the playerbase of EQ. The vast majority of play takes place at the single group level and that's where we need to look at impact first and foremost.
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For raids, the answer to the attack debuffs is pretty simple...you can assume that there will be at least one druid on any raid and if the NPC allows the spells to land, you can assume they will be debuffed so you can build the NPCs attack rating to be high enough that they are "in balance" once debuffed. If you do that at the group level, you essentially force every group to have a druid (or for us to share the attack debuffs across a lot more classes).

Rashere

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from this I understand that the following dps-reduction would be possible:

Druid (theoretic)

Cast Hand of Ro Atck -100 approx. 20%
Cast Fixation of Ro Atck - 67 approx. 12%
Cast Gelid Frost Atck -119/124 approx. 24-25%
Approx: 55% Dps-Reduction

but realistically there would also be necessary some resi-debuff, making it very unlikely that all of those will be used
Hand of Ro + Fixation of Ro combine nice, as Hand of Ro delivers the fire-resi-debuff for Fixation of Ro .... so we may assume 32% dps-reduction with 2 casts


Cleric Vie 10% mitigation, as its a buff, done before inc. of mobs


Shaman
Slow approx. 20-45% (depends on Tier)


I went over to this huge thread on EQLife and extractet the statements of Rashere and some parses
From what I understand of this: the design goal was (is?) that the slow should land "in high levels" for 60% efficiency resulting an an dps-reduction of 45%.
The parses telling me, that it looks like what we got is 20% or less Dps-Reduction Tier 3+.

The harder the mobs, the worse we get, even assuming no Slow-resists.

_______________________________________________________________________________

If we put this together:

Cleric 10% DPS-reduction
Druid 32% DPS-Reduction
Shaman 20% DPS-reduciton

difference in Heals
Cleric-Druid: approx. 25%
Cleric-Shaman: approx. 35%

difference in dps-reduction
Cleric-Druid: approx. 22%
Cleric-Shaman: approx. 10% (with an reliably slow landing for 60% efficiency it would be 35%)


It looks like we got an MR-check on our new Turgurs-AA which helps on reliably

If now the Slow would land on all (or atleast most) mobs for 60% efficiency things may work as Rashere presumes it does.

[Tronc]

[Lathdrinor]

[haxot]

[Unmei]

[Ughbash]

[Kianor]

[haxot]

[Unmei]

[haxot]

[Funi]

[Macnair]

[Kanamori Hitatomi]

[Lathdrinor]

[Kumudil]

[Veril]

[Kilgaroz]

[Macnair]

[Kanamori Hitatomi]

The answer to fixing the healing is either make the slow actually reduce mob dps by 45% at Tier 3/4, or give us a quick heal. The cast time on our normal heal is balanced with the rest of the healers slow heals. We do not currently have something to allow for a quick heal, both of which the druid and <s>shaman</s> cleric have. To balance the spell verus our mana regen advantage (or what's left of it in today's game), the spell would have to be inefficient. I'm ok with that, what I want a quick heal with more healing power than our normal heal is to allow for healing sufficient enough to deal with damage spikes, to allow us to get ahead enough to do the rest of the things that we're supposed to be also doing to reduce mob dps, which is what our healing versus a cleric is supposed to be balanced against from the beginning.

As for the druids answer to balanced MH'ing versus a cleric, I have no idea, but I'm also not a druid. But something does need to be done with them too.

[Veril]

I do underestand your arguements Macnair. I agree Clerics should be the best a pure healing.

What I am looking at is a far more nebulous concept, one of "effective damage mitigation". That is what shaman+clerics+druids do for their groups, and it's much mroe complex than just healing. That's what the developers are trying to make sure is balanced.

All three of the priests should be able to deal with the incoming damage of mobs with equal ability for their groups though different methods (both for basepop and named mobs).

The problems for shaman come because the damage reduction mechanism Shaman use (slow) is also available to other classes (bards, chanters, beastlords, weapon procs etc). Those other classes when groupd with a Cleric use that slowing ability and it magnifies the Clerics "damage mitigation". These other classes cannot add their damage mitigation to a Shaman and so Shaman fall behind in "damage mitigation" ability.

For Druids I think it is different. Druids provide damage mitigation through direct attack debuffs which all stack. The damage mitigation from slow also stacks with their abilities, again magnifying what they can do.

Fixing this situation requires a massive change to the game.

[Lathdrinor]

[Funi]

[Lathdrinor]

[Macnair]

[Kanamori Hitatomi]

[Macnair]

[Unmei]

[Veril]

[Samanna]

[Lathdrinor]

[Kanamori Hitatomi]

[Macnair]

[haxot]

[Kanamori Hitatomi]