but then it can be brought down to the original value, with an item value reduction no?
Basically, and please tell me if I'm understanding this correctly, you're suggesting that we increase the enhancement of weapon and armors because you believe it will be easier to do than to readjust every spawn as a fix to allow non-casters to solo?
Changing your AC/AB won't do anything akata. As you said, the rogues with 7 attacks eventually roll enough 20's to kill you.Decrease spawn size to a max of 4. Think it through. Done deal.
XP compared to time spend online: I'm here assuming that spawns currently are build to reflect the teams view of xp earned vs. risk. If you remove +50% of all spawns you'll need to look into the xp you get from them as well, Or script a system that place spawns compared to people in party. If you mean taken the same size spawn and just splitting them up into smaller groups in the same area (a la what was done to the screeching in the great forest)then that only increase the number of spells needed for a caster to solo.
Yes I left out devastating critical, from the simple fact that there isn't a player that has achieved the feat yet, secondly you can't get the feat till level 28 as a half-orc and 32 for races with a starting strength of max 18 in short meaning your utterly depend on caster or quests from 15ish and up.
I'm not going to comment on the idea itself, at least not right now, but it's important to point out that raising the enhancement on weapons and armors will also increase the level requirements for them as well.
As for Mithrils... make it Damage Resistance Piercing/Slashing/Bludgeoning /- 10... right across the board.
An Dwarven defender at lvl 32 will have 22 lvls in DD thats 15 damage reduction + 9 from epic damage reduction + 10 resistance from mithril.Thats 34 points of damage that he will ignore. Pretty much immune to mele since he also is immune to sneak attacks. At lvl 40 he can shrug off 40 ponts of damage. Its not many creatures on Layo that deals 50+ damage whithout sneak so with his 800 HP he could do anything You might think that what big of difference is the last 5 points.. 10 instead of 5? The difference is HUGE! The DD at lvl 32 that is fighting foes that dealing in average 40 points of damage can take almost twice as many hits. He looses 6 instead of 11 HP every time he gets hit. And the 32 lvl DD have like 600 HP so there wouldn't be many creatures that could kill him.
That is a naive way of looking at it, sure. First of all, I've aimed for something like this a long time and yes, a damage reduction build is powerful when surrounded by hordes of enemies or when AB is so high that AC doesn't matter. However going for damage resistance requires heavy investment and basically makes you a one trick pony because of one serious flaw that melee characters of a tank archetype (DR builds) have - no CC. They have no way of keeping things hitting them, sure they can go in first, but after a few seconds the mob dissipates on your groupmembers and beyond KD there's nothing you can do.So in this respect, every build is powerful is built to the extreme as per your example, however limiting your character like this is far from rewarding given the long pay-off period. That's also the reason why I think we've seen no Dev Crit yet, it's not worth limiting your character so severely for it.
Yea I doubt we will ever see an Dev crit on Layo.I'm not sure I completely getting what you are saying sOulz, what do you mean they have no CC and having no chanse of keeping things hitting them?Anyway the way I see it getting to the higher ends of damage reduction is the most powerfull thing for a mele fighter type. High AC is good but as Akata earlier stated she got an PC that have extremly high AC, especialy buffed due to the double int AC modifyer.. She will eventually get hurt and hit anyway because of all the 20s they will roll will tear her appart. The more regular build for example pure fighter or fighter/rogue splitt have neither High AC or damage reduction. So I think that armours that could be for better bennefits for those types but that will not help DD would be more balanced.Lets say the fighter have an 10 soak armour and also There could be items that grant /-5 resistance. Totaly he shrugs of 15 points of mele. This wan't be extremly powerfull but it would be helpfull. The 10 soak armour wan't help the DD but he can instead use an /-5 resistance armour. This will prevent the DDs getting so extremly high mele toleration but still help the regular fighter types to stand a better chanse in battle
I'll try to be clearer.What I was trying to say is that a melee lacks the tools to keep mobs occupied. He has no skill or feat to use to gain and keep the attention of a hostile creature.Sure while soloing it doesn't matter as much as you'll be surrounded anyway, but all melee builds cannot be expected to perform equally good while soloing.DDs have DR if built for it, but without a tanking mechanism they're actually sub-par companions, because they've sacrificed melee prowess (STR -> AB) to gain those few points of DR. Anything with rogue will be much more helpful in a party and even limitedly in soloing, a more vulnerable offensive build might just outlast through elimination.So my point was that DD's have one thing going for them: Sneak Immunity. But even that is limited and can easily be negated.Fighters in general would gain a lot from damage negation increases and given that there is no real mechanism to keep mobs on a DR stacked PC, there is no danger of overpowering any specific build either.