Devs: Dark Charge: Why doesnt it scale with health

[Faytte]

Easy question for BW.

 

Dark Charge scales with level, which is awesome while your leveling, but as you start tanking its value becomes less and less aparent as you stack more and more health.

 

Since I do not think the level cap is going to be changed soon, I have a concerns about the usefulness of the heal mechanic in the long term. Right now the healing (against incoming dps of Y in an operation) makes up X% of our mitigation. However as we go into new content, Y will likely increase (as gear will be increasing) but the healing from dark charge will not, so its effective mitigation will become less and less.

 

So the question really is, why was Dark Charge not made to scale with health instead of with level? All other tank heals scale with health, and even spells and abilities all scale with another stat. Force Lighting does not have a locked in damage amount, it instead has a base + a coefficient.

 

Why is dark charge not treated the same?

[Sabbathius]

It doesn't even scale with CHARACTER level. It scales with SKILL level. As in, between 24-28 your charge heals for 146 or so (if I remember right). At 24, it's a lot. By 28 it was peanuts.

 

Now, maybe for now at 50 it is OK. What happens when 2-3 more tiers of gear get added, and average HP gets to 25-30k?

 

I don't know why developers keep repeating the same stupid mistakes every single time. Over and over. Blizzard did it - Eviscerate damage being static, regardless of weapon equipped or stats. Huge problem when game came out when it was too strong, huge problem 2 years later when gear scaled past it. FunCom did it, NCSoft did it. Everyone does it. LEARN, PEOPLE!

[Faytte]

I'm actually very surprised they managed to make a game that does not scale properly. This is game design from 2005-2007, not 2012.

 

Dark Ward is something we click every 8-10 seconds in operations, second it falls off so does most of our tankyness. Similar mechanics (Paladin Holy Shield from Wall, Shield Block, Aion Warriors Shield mechanic, etc etc) were all changed because it was deemed that it was a poor gameplay mechanic, taxed players actions for no real world benefit and was frankly just dumb.

 

But Dark Charge Healing is going to fall behind very fast I feel, with how much health jumps between gear levels already, and how dps will have to scale with tank health and healer healing to remain a challenge.

[Astarica]

If you have a skill that did a million damage it doens't need to scale with anything else to remain effective.

 

Although Dark Charge heal no longer scales with gear, it is likely to remain relevent unless your HP pool becomes 40K HP. Also, better gear means better armor, which means the same heal is more effective because the same amount of HP lasts longer. Dark Charge heals used to scale with gear, but you're talking about healing for 50 or 52 here, which is still striclty inferior than its current incarnation. Even if you have enough gear to double the old heals, it's still considerably less than the current Dark Charge.

[Faytte]

If you have a skill that did a million damage it doens't need to scale with anything else to remain effective.

 

Although Dark Charge heal no longer scales with gear, it is likely to remain relevent unless your HP pool becomes 40K HP. Also, better gear means better armor, which means the same heal is more effective because the same amount of HP lasts longer. Dark Charge heals used to scale with gear, but you're talking about healing for 50 or 52 here, which is still striclty inferior than its current incarnation. Even if you have enough gear to double the old heals, it's still considerably less than the current Dark Charge.

 

Kitru has some math showing that vs current ops incoming damage, dark charges self heal amounts for 5% effective damage reduction. This is a quantifiable number and 5% is not something to ignore, but unlike what your saying its not 'a huge value' and thus does not nee to scale.

 

Since dark charge does not scale, as we go up through tiers of content, its value means less, and because this is mitigating incoming damage for us, this means our mitigation is going down through levels of content (or if you would prefer, imagine any gains you would make in defense, shield block or shield absorb, and then reduce it by the fact that dark charge is offsetting less % of damage).

 

No other tank has a static value like this that directly correlates to their survivability. All survivability effects are % based for a reason, or have a coefficient.

 

To repeat it more concisely, in a raid situation dark charge offsets damage taken. It is a form of mitigation for a Tank. It is however a static form of mitigation which accounts for between 4-6% of our 'tankyness' in an operation on a boss. As boss dps increases, this value will not increase, meaning that it will account for less and less of our ability to sustain ourselves. This means that any other increases we get from gear are infact going to be diminished by the difference here when compared to other tanks, whom have no such static mechanic.

 

Effects in increased healing from healers are a moot point, since any tank class will enjoy those benefits.

[Kirkaz]

Basically, what we're saying is make it scale and not static.

[Snaex]

If dark charge scaled any better, it would be insanley oped.

[Astarica]

I guess people must have thought Dark Charge was great when it scaled between 50 to 52 healed depending on gear.

[Faytte]

Basically, what we're saying is make it scale and not static.

 

Right. By my napkin math, 3% of health would be about right. Means someone with around 15,000 health will heal for about what it does now at 50.

[Faytte]

I guess people must have thought Dark Charge was great when it scaled between 50 to 52 healed depending on gear.

 

 

50 to 52?

 

And no the coefficient was junk on it. The current values are great, but do not scale, so what is good NOW wont be good in the future. Tiers of gear will mean bigger numbers and inflation of values (incoming damage in an operation is about 2K per second AFTER mitigation for most assassins). So another tier level with higher incoming damage is going to quickly start diminishing the role of the nice big static value.

[pinkfreudHC]

Easy solution: Have it heal X% of your HP per proc, and have X remain the same for every ability rank. They can take the coding from the Madness tree and tweak it a bit.

[Faytte]

Easy solution: Have it heal X% of your HP per proc, and have X remain the same for every ability rank. They can take the coding from the Madness tree and tweak it a bit.

 

Well i think that is exactly the solution. Having a 3% proc would keep it even at most ranks and health levels, but allow it to scale as health levels grow.

 

At 3% every 4.5 seconds + delay for it to proc makes it about a proc every 5 seconds. The value for a fresh 50 would be slightly nerfed (by like 10 healing a proc) but buffed a bit for folk with much more health (Its about a 50 health per proc proc at 18K health). Regardless, its always going to remain a consistant 3%.

[Dhariq]

If dark charge scaled any better, it would be insanley oped.

 

Just go away if you do not even understand or care to read what is discussed!

If something scales or not have nothing to do with if it's OP or not. That depend on what values it scales with. For example if the heal would be 1% of your hitpoints; then it would heal less than now but gear would matter and it would scale all the way up to the highest raid gear possible. Just because we want it to scale better, and continue to scale even after level 50, does not mean it needs to heal more. So if you have nothing but completely and utterly wrong things to say please just go away and troll somewhere else. Yes I give you the benefit of the doubt here and call you a troll instead of just plain stupid.

 

Regarding the scaling; it is sort of a no-brainer that this system is bad. I mean what developer would consider giving some dps an attack that does 500 damage flat at level 50 and did not care about your weapon, stats, gear etc? Ofc not, they scale.

So just fix it. The only issue is the actual values and I do not have the data to come with any perfect suggestions, but I hope bioware can work that out.

Edited January 25, 2012 by Dhariq

[Talyn_Rahl]

Well i think that is exactly the solution. Having a 3% proc would keep it even at most ranks and health levels, but allow it to scale as health levels grow.

 

I've been saying this since frakkin BETA but it seemed to go unnoticed

 

Make it 3% of total health per proc, make OCS 100% increased heal in addition to it's current 1.5sec of ICD, that would mean Dark Charge scaled well with gear and OCS returns (roughly) 15% of our total health per use(that's 15% of our health extra, compared to what it would usually return in that time.), same as the Bounty Hunter mirror skill.

[Jedikillar]

sorry to necro and this is a bit off topic, but i noticed that around level 18ish it heals for about 100, but that when i enter wzs, where your stats and skills etc are boosted, that it heals about 200. idk, maybe its upped by a talent or whatnot, but that doesnt seem like much of an increase after 49 levels and about 9k more hp. or am i just missing something really important that ups dark charge...or am i just QQing when i prob shouldnt be?

[tynt]

make this ability heal for 3% current health. why is that hard to see how it is supposed to be?

[Astarica]

It's funny people bring up fancy concepts to what amounts to an argument of 'this should heal more'. You wouldn't be too excited if Dark Charge healed for 0.5% of your health, but that scales with your health too.

 

Honestly Dark Charge probably heals a bit too much right now.

[tynt]

I agree at lower lvls and maybe recruit gear, however I fully believe an assassin in tank gear with 24k hps should receive more health than a tank in dps gear at 17k hps.

[Astarica]

I agree at lower lvls and maybe recruit gear, however I fully believe an assassin in tank gear with 24k hps should receive more health than a tank in dps gear at 17k hps.

 

When Dark Charge scaled with gear that meant it healed for 152 instead of 148 for a well geared character.

 

So sure if you want it to heal for 155 now instead of the flat 425 go for it.

[tynt]

Ok so old way was worst so we can never ask for it to be balanced? 3% health isn't asking much.

[CornBreadtm]

From a PvE standing point scaling it sounds great but then BW tries to balance everything with PvP so we get this mess of abilities that don't scale properly for PvE environments.

 

I've given up on asking for proper scaling for abilities because of the old PvP balance snick.

 

And they refuse to make abilities do one thing in PvE and another in PvP since that would let them balance everything separately and allow class balance to actually appear.

 

Dark charge scaling with endurance in PvE but with skill level in PvP would be fine. but noooooooo.

[Maestrodomus]

Because it would make us even more OP?

[Maestrodomus]

And they refuse to make abilities do one thing in PvE and another in PvP since that would let them balance everything separately and allow class balance to actually appear.

 

Guard, tumult, heal debuff. I'm sure there's more.

[Astarica]

Ok so old way was worst so we can never ask for it to be balanced? 3% health isn't asking much.

 

3% is a lot to ask for actually when you look at how weak self heal effects are for other classes.

 

At any rate I'm more amused by the fact people try to make this a design issue even though the old Dark Charge effectively did scale with your health. But it was basically 1% so it wasn't really all that useful.

[Varicite]

3% is a lot to ask for actually when you look at how weak self heal effects are for other classes.

 

At any rate I'm more amused by the fact people try to make this a design issue even though the old Dark Charge effectively did scale with your health. But it was basically 1% so it wasn't really all that useful.

 

The old way being worse doesn't make the new way perfect either, though.

 

Asking for the ability to scale in preparation for later tiers of content seems intelligent. Obviously the static values from the heal will fall behind in 2-3 tiers.

 

It won't matter that the armor value and stats from gear will be higher, because boss mobs will also be hitting harder. The only thing that will change, in theory, is that tanks would be seeing less mitigation from the healing portion of Dark Charge, while maintaining equal mitigation from gear vs the new tier of enemies.

 

The other tanking classes won't see this fall-off of mitigation, as they have higher natural armor values and don't rely on self-healing to make up for the loss.

Edited May 18, 2012 by Varicite