I wanted to give a head's up on one of the balance changes we made with SoF NPCs since it has a positive impact on the usefulness of some areas that have been losing their meaning over the years.

In SoF zones, NPCs have been given new offense values that are balanced against the AC values of modern players. Prior to SoF, NPC offense had been pretty stagnant and hadn't really increased much since Planes of Power while player AC values have made tremendous gains. This led to the situation where high end players were generally hit for minimum damage values by baseline NPCs. In turn, adding more AC had diminishing returns and debuffs that reduced NPC offense (such as attack debuffs or strength debuffs) also lost some effectiveness.

To correct this, NPC max hit values were lowered and their offense values were raised so that the overall DPS of the NPC was unchanged, but the average player will now be hit for about half the maximum amount of damage on average instead of being hit for the minimum amount of damage most of the time. This change has two main effects:

1) Additional AC is now more meaningful.
2) Debuffs that target offense related abilities are now more meaningful.
This only applies to NPCs in Secrets of Faydwer zones. All previous NPCs retained their old offense values.

Rashere
<!-- Edit Notes --><!-- Attachments -->

I don't think debuffs will take the average hit to minimum, which would put us back in the same state as before where additional debuffs have diminishing returns. If you take a fully raid geared tank against easy basepop, they might, but you're fighting trivial content at that point anyway. Debuffs will significantly reduce the average hit, though.


Rashere

NPC hit value was reduced, so they inflict less damage per hit.
NPC attack value was raised, so they connect more often.
While the NPC's overall DPS will roughly remain the same, the damage spikes will be more severe and frequent.

Sounds like debuffs are about to become a permanent part of the grouping spellset once again.

To make this easier to give an example, understand that the damage distribution ranges from a 0.1 to 2.0 modifier to the base damage done by the attack. Previous to these changes, a raider in single group content would see his average incoming damage be at the 0.1 distribution. A casual player would be closer to 0.4 if fighting appropriate content.


For tuning purposes, I set the values such that an appropriately geared casual paladin is being hit at the 0.8 distribution.


A top tier SoF-outfitted warrior with max gear, AAs, and buffs would be hit for around the 0.2 distribution if fighting tier 1 NPCs and about the 0.4 or 0.5 when fighting tier 3 or 4 NPCs. So, even against a tier 1 NPC, which is trivial to that player, there is still some room for debuffs before they start to hit diminishing returns and against higher tiers, which are more appropriate to the character, there should be no problems.


Also, this is exclusively group-oriented basepop numbers. Raids tend to have much higher values as appropriate to the raiding characters fighting those events.


Rashere