Upcoming changes on Test- July 2015

Well new update coming, maybe our discourse has enlightened them and they are removing or redoing the rain changes.

You don't need classes to play the same to get the same results.

Well update notes are here and I am saddened by the lack of explanation of rain crit caps, but at least they did clarify the DD changes. Someday....

Has anybody actually parsed the Rain differences on Test? I'm not generally one for parsing, but I just did the following quick comparison, alternating Coronal Rain and Rain of Cutlasses on a test dummy until I ran out of mana. All controllable variables were the same (same dummy, same buffs, etc)

Live
16,943,319 dmg in 955 seconds = 17742 dps
407 damage instances (3 instances per rain, barring resists)
125 Coronal Rain crits (60871 dmg per crit)
114 Rain of Cutlasses crits (59498 dmg per crit)
239 total crits = 58.7%

Test
16,739,374 dmg in 923 seconds = 18136 dps
397 damage instances (3 instances per rain, barring resists)
80 Coronal Rain crits (82717 dmg per crit)
76 Rain of Cutlasses crits (80852 dmg per crit)
156 total crits = 39.3%

I know that this is nowhere near long enough a parse to be significant on its own, but it does appear to show that, whilst the crit rate has definitely dropped, the actual damage per crit has increased to the point where the overall dps has remained the same (17.9k, +/- 200dps)

That's because they're screwing with caster critical damage mods at the same time. For some reason they decided to add the 100% built into all mods passively, which is a boost to passive DPS. However, if you compared the numbers with, say First Spire, you'll get very different results. And on a full burn you're losing ~38% of your DPS after the bump with today's patch.

Edit: and to be clear, every DD caster got the same boost, not just Mages.

You should try that with IoG on both and let me know what you get since they both should get an equal 250%

If you just tested that may be because they pushed the change today for crit damage, and yes others parsed before, and extensively.

A +100% overcrit mod was added into AAs to cover the removal of +100% overcrit mod from all spells like Black Wolf and IoG.

So all your normal nukes on test will also have their crit amount increased.

Repeat your test while under Black wolf, on live you'll have a +200% overcrit from BW. On test you'll have +100% from BW, and +100% from the AA change.

Casuals shouldn't be allowed to raid TDS.

Oh no... TLP logic is seeping into the Live servers. Although if that's the case... maybe we'll get dedicated 'guides' to actually be useful on Live. Then they could deal with all the class change petitions!

Guides are fine on normal servers, they do neat quest things, and hand out cool ornaments!

Too bad they got banished to the generic SOE DBG forums.

So Iila, how's my second favorite class (druids) doing?

when do all these things (rains nerf, proc changes, etc) actually go live?

According to Roshen there will be a patch tomorrow for live. The patch notes won't be posted until tonight, but based on basically every other patch ever, it will include all of these changes.

Glad these changes are going out after just a week of testing and absolutely no dev communication outside of patch notes. Cause that always works out so well.

Generally live gets patched a week after Test.

However, with the new changes that MAY push it back to next week. Not likely, but who knows.

Looks like the new changes are live, and mages rains are still reduced per patch notes. Guess it's a good time for a vacation anyway.

This little guy got added to the live notes:

Well, now that magicians have their rains quasi removed from the equotation, when may we expect the significant boost needed for our single target lines?

Who am I actually trying to kid? *sadly shakes head*

Or the pet damage increase so that our 105 pets aren't doing less than half the DPS our level 100 pets did in RoF. Or the upgrade to our main mana pump which did not recieve an upgrade in TDS because of the mana efficiency of rains. Or the 6% base damage on our 105 spear that is currently missing because its focus AA has been "waiting on a code change" for 9 freaking months.

But I suppose no developer time for those with all these nerfs and seemingly arbitrary other changes