Undocumented cast, reuse and recovery speed adjustments?

[Lemilla]

As of yesterdays game update, there has been a general nerf to the way cast speed, reuse speed and recovery speed adjustments work.

Previously, the formula was: time = base / (1 + %adjustment) - adjustment; capped at a 50% reduction.%adjustment would be things like ability casting speed, while adjustment would be AA that reduce the time by a number of seconds.

Currently, the formula is time = (base - adjustment) x (1 - %adjustment / 2)

This is a double nerf. Making the %adjustment lineair is a nerf to anyone who is not at either 0% speed or 100% speed. Making the adjustment apply before the %adjustment means the %adjustment reduces the effectiveness of the adjustment.

This graph shows the first nerf, with the formula being made lineair. For a spell with a base cast time of 1 second it shows the actual cast time on the vertical axis for the percentile cast speed on the horizontal axis.

This graph shows the second nerf. This shows the change of making second reductions apply before percentile reductions instead of after. This is with a 0.2s adjustment on a spell with a base cast speed of 1 second.

And this grapth shows the two nerfs combined. As can be easily seen, this is a huge nerf.

Is there any explanation of why this change was made?

[Banditman]

There is ALSO a nasty bug that sometimes occurs when your casting speed gets to ridiculous levels whereby it resets to ZERO.  This used to happen a lot in Shard of Hate on the Sisters, but we were seeing it intermittently last night in Spire of Rage.

[Nevao]

Banditman wrote:

There is ALSO a nasty bug that sometimes occurs when your casting speed gets to ridiculous levels whereby it resets to ZERO.  This used to happen a lot in Shard of Hate on the Sisters, but we were seeing it intermittently last night in Spire of Rage.

Hmmm... that explains a lot. I thought I was getting "new release" lag (i.e. more people than usual logging in) but was definitely noticing something.

[threat111]

Nevao wrote:

Banditman wrote:

There is ALSO a nasty bug that sometimes occurs when your casting speed gets to ridiculous levels whereby it resets to ZERO.  This used to happen a lot in Shard of Hate on the Sisters, but we were seeing it intermittently last night in Spire of Rage.

Hmmm... that explains a lot. I thought I was getting "server hardware can't support the player base" lag (i.e. they collect as much money as possible and spend the absolute bare minimum to keep people from quitting) but was definitely noticing something.

fixxed

[Nrgy]

Cerium@Nagafen wrote:

Nevao wrote:

Banditman wrote:

There is ALSO a nasty bug that sometimes occurs when your casting speed gets to ridiculous levels whereby it resets to ZERO.  This used to happen a lot in Shard of Hate on the Sisters, but we were seeing it intermittently last night in Spire of Rage.

Hmmm... that explains a lot. I thought I was getting "server hardware can't support the player base" lag (i.e. they collect as much money as possible and spend the absolute bare minimum to keep people from quitting) but was definitely noticing something.

fixxed

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=501013

[Removed for Content], you're goning to need a new one-liner!

[carpe_caminus]

Would love to hear a dev response to this.

[Proxopid]

carpe_caminus wrote:

Would love to hear a dev response to this.

Seconded.

[thegriss]

Proxopid wrote:

carpe_caminus wrote:

Would love to hear a dev response to this.

Seconded.

It was reported the patch on 4/15 broke the crit chance debuff on beneficial spells in raid zones like TORZ EM. Causing healers using reactive based healing spells to need 320% crit chance to crit 100% of the time on reactives.  Today 6/01 over 45 days later Kander said he is going to forward the info to the raid Dev.  It is obvious the raid dev doesnt read the forums or he would have been aware of this a long time ago.  

Good luck getting this new issue looked at.  We should have some info on a fix by GU61.

[Ge'Sar]

Who the hell isn't capped anyway?

[thegriss]

GeSar wrote:

who the hell isn't capped anyway?

In nearly full EM and x2 raid gear my Inq is not at his reuse cap.  Cast speed yes but reuse no.

I noticed this last night because I had to switch to healing stance a few times which is never usally the case.

[Dahmer]

This is mostly affecting healers (in a big way) Gesar because we are not capped on reuse.

I am fully adorned for reuse with a mix of EZ mod/HM gear and as a templar i am not nearly at capped.

It looks like this may be a bug similar to off hand MA issue.

However~ I would love to hear a response from a dev, and hopefully we will get a quickfix tomorrow along with the off hand problem.

[Undorett]

thegriss wrote:

GeSar wrote:

who the hell isn't capped anyway?

In nearly full EM and x2 raid gear my Inq is not at his reuse cap.  Cast speed yes but reuse no.

I noticed this last night because I had to switch to healing stance a few times which is never usally the case.

and scouts, and fighters...why was this change made?

[Terrius]

Still no red name? Would be nice even if they just dropped in to say oops or working as intended.

[Ryai]

Interesting. So SOE effectively made all second reduction aas/adorns completely useless. 100% cast speed/reuse trumps all now. Good job SOE.

[Seduce]

Seriously want a response to this... Unacceptable!

[Nevao]

I'm honestly surprised we haven't heard anything on this. The silence is starting to make this look intentional instead of accidental. That or something leaked early and they don't want to give it away by commenting.

[Drumstix]

Probably should have been linear from day one. Makes more sense for percentage based stats IMO.

[Juravael]

amazing.

[Ryai]

Nevao wrote:

I'm honestly surprised we haven't heard anything on this. The silence is starting to make this look intentional instead of accidental. That or something leaked early and they don't want to give it away by commenting.

This is an alteration of a basic equation. There's nothing unintentional about rearranging a + and * and (). That's a deliberate change or there would be all sorts of ridiculous results like reuse of spells being instant.

MA not working offhands? Crit bonus getting nuked on PvP servers? Thats unintentional.

The players are SMARTER than you. At least acknowledge the change and don't act like it didn't happen. Nobody really cares(Well, some people will rage and be upset. /shrug) if its going to stay that way or not, but we need confirmation so we can gear for this change.

[profe]

As much as it may feel like a nerf, it makes "adjustment" AA valuable again.

[Lemilla]

Not really Profe. It makes it so you need more of it for the same effect, making it seem like it's helping more whle it's actually doing less. And if you are close to or at 100% cast/reuse speed, it's still just as useless.

[slippery]

This hits my Guardian really hard. There is a noticable difference, especially over the long term, when suddenly everything takes .05 longer to cast, and longer to recover. Basically every 10 seconds I lost an ability, and have to be even more careful about auto attacks. It's just going to make my auto attack/proc dps an even larger portion of my dps and my already pathetic ca's even less of it.

[steelbadger]

Drumstixx@Blackburrow wrote:

Probably should have been linear from day one. Makes more sense for percentage based stats IMO.

Well, mathematically speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever.

If person A runs a race in 100 seconds while Person B runs a race in 66 seconds then person B has run that race 50% faster than person A (1/1.5 * 100 = 66).  They did NOT run 66% faster (The new system).

That's how percentages work, if you're going to mess with that then you have to stop calling them percentages and make them simple mods.  Because this is no longer a percentage based stat if it doesn't work by the common rules of percentages.

[Drumstix]

steelbadger wrote:

Drumstixx@Blackburrow wrote:

Probably should have been linear from day one. Makes more sense for percentage based stats IMO.

Well, mathematically speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever.

If person A runs a race in 100 seconds while Person B runs a race in 66 seconds then person B has run that race 50% faster than person A (1/1.5 * 100 = 66).  They did NOT run 66% faster (The new system).

That's how percentages work, if you're going to mess with that then you have to stop calling them percentages and make them simple mods.  Because this is no longer a percentage based stat if it doesn't work by the common rules of percentages.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. If half of a total number is a 100% increase in speed (such as 100 seconds), then a 50% increase would be 25 seconds faster. That would be 75 seconds, not 66 seconds. 66 seconds would be 68% faster than 100.

I'm not sure why that doesn't make sense. I realize this is a nerf of sorts, considering the game's content wasn't adjusted to fit. But I still think a linear percentage system makes more sense.

[Nevao]

From the patch notes this morning (which while are up I don't think the patch has actually been pushed yet, I did not download anything and my MA was still off)

Fixed an exploit with the spell casting speed, reuse, and recovery formulas. The formula has been changed to be a linear growth granting 1% gain for every 2% of the mod given resulting in a cap of 50% when any of these modifiers are at 100%.

If there's always been a cap in place of 1/2 of the original value I'm not sure I understand how there was an "exploit". Stats worked a certain way, now they want them to work a different way. Annoying as hell since I believe that formula has been in place since KoS, but that's their call.

I wonder if they are going to revisit any existing abilities like Dance of Metal that were time limit to get x effect and tweak them. Or are we just going to get thrown under the bus in the name of "exploit fixing".

[Proxopid]

I wonder if the devs realize the entire ramifications of changing this curve. It's a fact that this lowers the actual casting and reuse and recovery numbers on everyone but those who are at 0% or 100%.

Just from the perspective of a Monk, this means extremely reduced survivability overall - a high increase in reuse on all the long-recast temporary abilities like Tsunami, Bob&Weave, Brawler's Tenacity, Will of the Heavens, Provoking Stance, Inner Focus, Outward Tranquility, etc etc... Monks will also have even less time to hit the Combination aa Ability now thanks to the increased recovery times. This will also affect auto attack timing.

I'm sure what I listed there hits every class just as much - an inq I know already complained about her self-cc-cure having increased from 45 secs to 58 secs reuse.

The lower you are on the curve (i.e. the lower your stats), the more you lose.  This means that fighters and scouts are probably hit the hardest by this, and casual players in general.

In my personal opinion this is a much worse hit than - as an example - the fighter heal crit nerf last year. Not only does it affect everybody, it also affects every playstyle - not just some people in raid gear soloing heroic instances. But it is the same type of cracking nuts with a sledgehammer, although this sledgehammer has the size of a tank.

[Cannibalize]

So basiclly what they're saying is the new cap is 200% of cast/recov/reuse to bring us back to original values prior to this "nerf".

Since they have no where to go with new gear except bonus/pot/cast/recov/reuse/crit mit.

[Nevao]

Cannibalize@Permafrost wrote:

So basiclly what they're saying is the new cap is 200% of cast/recov/reuse to bring us back to original values prior to this "nerf".

Since they have no where to go with new gear except bonus/pot/cast/recov/reuse/crit mit.

No, you never could get 100% reduction. It was always capped at 50% reduction. So it stays the same end result with 100% casting/reuse/recovery, but the path along the way is now more linear.

[Karelyn]

Drumstixx@Blackburrow wrote:

Probably should have been linear from day one. Makes more sense for percentage based stats IMO.

The old system was essentially linear in terms of spells cast/dps increase.

Suppose you have a spell that takes one second to cast (and has no reuse/recovery for simplicity) then you can cast it 10 times in 10 seconds.

With the old system a 20% increase of cast speed would mean that cast time and recovery time would both be 1/1.2 = 0.83333

Allowing you to cast 10/(0.8333) times per 10 seconds , which is 12 times in 10 seconds , or a 20% increase in spells cast for a 20% increase in cast speed.

With the new system a 20% increase of cast speed equates to a 90% multiplier to cast time , which gives a cast time of 0.9 seconds.

This allows you to cast 10/(0.9) times per 10 seconds , which is 11.1 times in 10 seconds , or a 11% increase in spells cast for a 20% increase in cast speed.

[kahonen]

How was this possibly an exploit?  They provide gear to equip and a mechanism to use it, totally miscalculate how that mechanism (and the formula behind it) will work and then justify nerfing it by calling it an exploit!

Remarkable!  Given the recent debacle with the servers, SOE don't seem to be going out of their way to impress the customers they managed to retain!  Combine this mega-nerf with the clearlyl inadequate/incomplete testing of some of the GU60 changes to end-game content and it's SOE back to business as usual!