Cap/Background

               ==In Detail:  "Why these things?"==
* <span style="color: #cc6600">Cap issues for avoidance skills, casting skills, mitigation, stats, and haste:</span>
**Many players spend most of their time with maxed out stats and skills.  This creates a few problems:
*** The game is not as satisfying to play when there is a diminished sense of progression as people gain new and more powerful items and spells.
*** Equipment doesn’t feel as interesting when it’s “just a different way to hit the cap I’m already at.”
*** Encounters have needed to be designed with the expectation that caps are always reached
* <span style="color: #cc6600">Increases in Mitigation and Avoidance as one comes closer to the cap cause characters in that range to become exponentially stronger</span>
**This created a huge gap between the well-equipped and poorly equipped characters, where small increases in mitigation and avoidance had little impact on the lower end of the spectrum, but made huge leaps in power at the higher end. This causes several other problems:
*** It contributed to the effect that getting better gear does not make much difference in success.
*** It forced raid encounters to have incredibly high damage,output along with special abilities that overcome all mitigations to negate those large gains. This leads to a lot of one-shot kills against classes with low mitigation (mages primarily).
*** It forced named raid encounters to have increased melee attack skills, which unfairly affected classes that rely more on avoidance.
*** Cloth and Leather armor wearers were effectively double penalized because increasing their mitigation values gave less benefit per-point than did Chain/Plate.

* <span style="color: #cc6600">Casting Skill bonuses were not balanced in relative benefit that is granted through Melee and Avoidance Skills</span>
**Casters did not have as much incentive to increase their casting skills as melee classes because they did not receive as much benefit when reaching their caps. This resulted in bonuses to skills that favored melee classes much more than casters, which is more apparent in raid situations and fighting overcon encounters. Some of the specifics:
*** Offensive casting skill increases were only half as beneficial as the increased chances to hit offered by melee skill increases.
*** Debuffing casting skill was also only half as effective as debuffing melee skills.
*** The Fizzle mechanic filled a gap where beneficial spells did not need a resist check, so Fizzle became a ‘beneficial resist’ chance that could be mitigated with increased skill. It ended up being more of an annoyance than adding any interesting gameplay.
*** Focus skill had very little impact on damage interrupt rates, and the sources of most interrupts were unavoidable in the form of spell interrupts, stifles, and stuns.
*** PvP combat became heavily skewed towards melee classes because of non-damage interruptions, fizzles, and resist mechanics.
**To address many of these issues, we re-evaluated how mitigation, avoidance, stats, and other systems could be modified for better progression and game balance. Some of the general changes are listed below:
*** Most caps have been increased by 50% to 100%
*** The use of diminishing returns curves has been added instead of using a linear progression. This provides greater benefits at the low end and slows down as the player nears the cap.
*** There was a re-evaluation of what casting skills affect.
*** Characters that have mitigation, stat, or skill values that are around 40% of the new cap will not experience much change for that particular system. That is the typical break-even point where the old linear line and the new diminishing returns curve intersect. Players above the break-even point are often raid equipped and will see less benefit initially, but the new maximum caps yield the potential for achieving even greater benefit than before.
**A diminishing returns curve is not a ‘soft cap’ because there is no point on the curve where there is a sudden shift in how much benefit is returned. The break-even point can be used as a reference to how these changes will affect your character.