Outdated Spellcraft

[Anomandaris]

My comparison to flat-earther is valid. I dont know what's so offensive or whatever. If a person refuses to acknowledge logic and responses with innter-conflicted, paradoxial or detached from reality opinions, then the analogy to a flat-earther is valid, even if the arelith player isnt actually a flat-earther. It was a metaphore.

As for my trust of the devs.
I do trust the devs, but people are people, and it's a very complex game with many classes and interactions that no one should be expected to get it all correct without community feedback, and if the forums are filled with bad feedback (not saying this is always the case) without good feedback offered as a counter - you can bet that the devs will make more incorrect decisions than they otherwise would have. It's our responsibility as informed players (when we are in fact informed in the subject at hand) to offer pushback on the nonesense. Or that's how I view it anyway. I dont need to make an effort to keep my 'secret tech' secret because it is never brought up on the forums, hence 'secret tech'. Maybe, and yes I know it might be a shocker, but maybe I'm simply concerned with the health of the server. I dont need powerful builds to stomp casual low pvp exerperience arelithians, I just want the game to be a fair game.

The lack of vocal and thorough enough feedback from the community has led us to things like Monk Summer, the TimeStop nerf, the WM buff, all of which were later reverted after few months, leaving players salty that their character got ruined and this whole cycle could have been avoided by good feedback.

This basically reads as: “ I can call people stupid it’s not rude because they ARE stupid. It’s important for me to do this because my perspective is informed and valuable, more so than many others.”

I’m not sure personal attacks on people‘s intelligence add any value to the discussion or are in line with community rules. I don’t agree with a lot of what’s written here, and yes… not all feedback is equally useful, but we don’t need to disparage people for their opinions. Just disagree, state your point and keep the rest out.

It is a quick way to get a thread locked though!

[AstralUniverse]

This basically reads as: “ I can call people stupid it’s not rude because they ARE stupid. It’s important for me to do this because my perspective is informed and valuable, more so than many others.”

I take no joy in hearing that this is how my words read to you, but there's little I can do about that since it's not at all what I said, meant, or implied even indirectly in any way.

I just placed a set of conditions that if one were to meet all those conditions then my statement applies to them, otherwise it does not, and I did not name a single player in the process. You can disagree with the set of conditions placed if you want, but I dont really think you do.

Do I ever just treat people as uninformed before they open their mouth? I dont think I do. I normally derive my superior and experienced standpoint from the discussion itself. Do you think saves are an issue? Yes? So bring proof, and if your 'proof' isnt really a proof of anything or you refuse to give one, then you're either uninformed or you argue in bad faith. Simple as that. And for the record, I do change my mind due to finding out I was wrong in a discussion more often than you think.

[-XXX-]

"This is/is not fun" is often the most important feedback any game designer can get. People don't need a PhD in contemporary Arelith specific NWN character builds to give that feedback. Furthermore, this is a very old game which means most people still playing it have at least some rudimentary grasp of the game's mechanics & can identify when something's not quite right.

There are multiple angles for addressing a problem & "gotcha" numbers game suggesting there's no problem at all - in direct contradiction to lived experience - might be percieved as gaslighting, which can escalate the conversation in a rather unhelpful direction.

The asymmetry between spellcasters (especially arcanists) and melee builds exists. The saves currently are what they are because somebody once pointed out that DC spells were too oppressive and "this is not fun". OK, that's valid and following the different angle approach to this problem for DC spells to be effective and power through increased saves multiple spellcastings are assumed.
Now I ask: If a fighter's sword swinging getting reliably disrupted by a single CC effect is considered too oppressive and "not fun", why a spellcaster's spell getting reliably disrupted by a single hit to the face while they are trying to string multiple spell combos together is fine?

Sure, let's keep saves the way they are but address concentration checks instead, because the requirement for sequencing multiple spells in combination with still dealing with the same amount of limited resources in combination with getting rooted in the same spot by spellcasting animations in a world where instant sprint exists puts the caster on a compound disadvantage which "is not fun" & should be balanced out somehow.

[AstralUniverse]

"This is strong, nerf it" is not the same as "this is not fun", at all.

for the former you relay on math, and performence on the live server, and if a certain build at the hands on more than one player, continuously out-performs it's counterparts, you're basing your desicion on math and statistics at that point, not someone's emotion.

That said, "this is not fun" is as good feedback as any, because it doesnt implay mechanical imbalance it just implies personal preference but even then I think the team looks at the play rates (and they see actual builds with level spreads, they see how many take feat X or feat Y, etc etc) more than they put weight on the opinions of the forum, which is like what.. maybe 10% of the playerbase or something like that? I wouldnt hang my hopes on the forums to express personal preference too often. It doesnt mean a whole lot on it's own and it's not something that is open to debate either so I stick to "this is too strong" debates.

Back to topic, sort of. Not sure if it's related to saves enough or it needs it's own thread but I think there should be discussion about concentration checks. Yikes.

[Scurvy Cur]

A good chunk of casters doesn't even hit DC of 40s, so reaching 40 in your saving throws is not even necessary to force your opponent to fish for 1s. A caster without an optimized race (of which there are not that many for casting stats, really) will generally hit a maximum of 39 in their DC. Assuming they are using level 9 spells - which are severely limited due to level 9 often featuring other desirable spells - those casters will already need to fish for 1s if their opponent features a saving throw of 37.

Why are we assuming that the caster is building unoptimally but the opponent builds optimally?

The Discord Build Compendium currently lists all optimal Wizard builds as Human

I don’t have the patience to slog through another saving throw thread at the moment, but this is one thing I want to pop in to offer context on.

When we were putting together a precursor to the build compendium for the first time, the primary contributors (Peppermint, Hunter, Jack, me, a few others I’m probably forgetting) made a conscious choice to default to human for most of our builds, because it was the most commonly requested race, and provided a fairly clean baseline that was broadly applicable to every archetype, even if it were the best option in few or none of them. It also avoided what we collectively saw as a problematic position for a primarily roleplay environment: advice from community members to pick a race purely for mechanical advantage. The build compendium is and always has been a place to go for general purpose templates to adapt to your concepts, rather than a carefully curated selection of the most ruthlessly efficient corpse generation engines. Or to put it another way, it’s there as a starting point, not an ending point.

So rather than providing a cookie cutter grenadier rogue using an air genasi dex gifted halfling (possible at the time) for +6 dex and the small stature 1 ab and ac, we provided a template that used human and iirc indicated which feat to drop if you wanted to play it as something else.

In no way was this intended to be a statement that human was the best choice for grenadier rogue.

I assume this spirit still largely guides the compendium, which is mostly a tool to help players navigate the many complex deviations from the base game without having to take a seminar class in mechanics for a custom server for a 23 year old video game.

As an aside: a number of people took it that way, and we had a very spooky week in late 2020 when human almost went to ECL 1 and lost a gift because the interpretation by some staff members was that the compendium was a list of pvp optimized builds, and it looked like human was showing up in enough of them that it needed a nerf.

[AstralUniverse]

To clearify a few things about the compendium in relation to the topic.

First of all it is far more feasible to expect a caster to reach 42 DCs than it is to expect, say, a paladin to afford lightning reflexes. This isnt an equal sided equation. So in many cases a build is more optimal with a bit less than 42 DC because it means it can afford stealth max or dip loremaster or whatever, but it is a fallacy if one would than say "so a paladin can drop 1 ab for save feat" and we've been through this many times over the years. So even if one were to assume the compendium is as optimal as possible, it isnt necessarily wrong just based alone on how the min-maxing is approached.

However, the compendium is in most cases not optimal at all. There are a few optimal builds there but certainly not all and it's not the goal. The goal is to help new players. An experienced player who cares about building will know how to build and only need build examples as benchmark indicators and general guidelines. These builds in some cases focus a lot more on survivability and pve qol than necessary in order to be more beginner friendly and it is intentional.

The other thing is, as Scurvy correctly assumed, we do indeed still try to remain at Human or close to it. Sometimes maybe elf or horc, and you have to be certain races for certain classes sometimes (ekd, aa...) so we do stray from human sometimes but never go as far as monstrous, outsiders and major awards for the most part. We're also less likely to post builds who relay on mechanics that we think might get nerfed, so it rules out a lot of niche gimmicky stuff you might see performing well for a while in game but wont see posted at the compendium regardless. It's usually the best to stick to generalized versions of builds who are more time proof and can fit more RP angles.

tl;dr,

The build compendium is and always has been a place to go for general purpose templates to adapt to your concepts, rather than a carefully curated selection of the most ruthlessly efficient corpse generation engines. Or to put it another way, it’s there as a starting point, not an ending point.

this sums it up well.

EDIT: oh and we (the builders who review builds for the compendium) are currently at strong concensus that we should avoid spy classes builds altogether because they make real characters on the live server far easier to meta-game.

[better than a fool]

EDIT: oh and we (the builders who review builds for the compendium) are currently at strong concensus that we should avoid spy classes builds altogether because they make real characters on the live server far easier to meta-game.

Spy classes builds?

[Subtext]

Harpers and Zhents

[better than a fool]

Harpers and Zhents

Oh, thank you.