It is well known that their design choices are weird and make no sense. I don't care how they fix the issue, I just want them to do it so I can enjoy the game. If they can achieve it without destroying the necro class in the process then all the better, but I am prepared for the eventuality that they are going to screw it up, its like they have a flow chart and all decisions end in disaster.
It's remarkable that an item created so many years ago kept its value until today. Necro epic should stay.
This problem could have been solved years ago and fast! All they have to do is make an AA for it. I saw someone say that they wouldn't get 18% crit chance for whatever reason but that's not true. If they make an AA for it they can set the value to whatever they want, including 18%. I have no idea why this hasn't been done yet, it's not like the Devs can't tweak the value later or even remove the AA if it's to powerful after they do their DoT revamp. I can't see a single good reason as to why this shouldn't be done and now. As for the DoT revamp, Obviously they can't do to necro / sk what they did with druid or shaman and just double their DoT damage or they will trump everyone's DPS. So I understand why the DoT revamp is taking forever to get done. That is a tricky one but the Epic is a fast n easy fix that should have been done FOREVER ago. Get Jackie Chan to karatesize that code and let's get this done!!
W When does the Necro community NOT freak out? It's not good enough they were easily the most OP class for most or EQ's history. I say nerf their DoTs again and watch the floodgates fully open.
When does the Warrior community NOT freak out? They have been shining in the spot light for far too long and can tank dozens of NPCs at a time, allowing AE groups to just burn them all down. I say nerf warrior Mitigation again and watch the floodgates fully open.
The necro epic focus effect should cap out at level 75 spells like every other epic. This should have been addressed years ago, I hope the devs in their current 'nerf em all' state will look at this and finally do it.
Blame your class as a whole. The Devs have made multiple attempts to fix the Necro 1.5/2.0/2.5 but each and every time the Necro class as a whole have completely rejected even the most sensible of fixes. All because, the Devs' solutions would not allow the bonus to continue past the point that it would be fixed. The Devs offered (back when the cap was 100 going to 105) such things as making the focus hard capped at 100 with the spells starting at 101 to have most of the benefit that the focus gave innately built in but not to the amount seen presently. Another option was that they could give it a normal focus cap and degrade with the focus again not working after 100, but in this case all of the spells between 80 and 100 would be adjusted to keep the current total damage output with the ones after it receiving slightly less. There were a few more options mentioned as well, but the necros of the time would not honestly consider them because their future damage would be less than if current focus remained. The Devs have been against granting an AA version of this bonus, explicitly because they do not really want the existing focus to remain. Additionally, that is a lot of the reason why the Necro, and by association SK, DoT revamps still have not happened. The Devs have to find a solution to this Epic focus issue before they are willing to revamp those dots. Originally, the Necro revamp was going to be the first, it was only after they rejected all of the 2.0 focus fixes that their revamp was put off.
You sure do act like you know what is going on behind the scenes. Do you have a bat-phone to the devs too? The epic proposed changes was in TDS beta. About 1.5 years later, after the TBM expansion was released, the devs announced they were going to do the "DoT Revamp" with the goal of fixing the debuff issue on raid targets. That is a long bit of lapsed time. Oh and necros are so selfish too. We wanted our OP effect because we wanted to be supreme DPS. Not because of how nerfs always overlook how to truly solve problems, and the devs terrible track record of actually balancing classes correctly.
The TDS beta was not the only time devs looked at dealing with the necro epic issue. Only the most recent.
The Devs actually announced in TDS beta that they were planning to do the DoT revamps and were going to start with Necros if they could get the necro epic focus issue settled. They spent all of the TDS beta trying to get it resolved as well as a considerable bit of time after TDS came out before they announced they were going to put off doing the Necro Epic and DoT revamps for now and move onto other issues; which ended up being the mass DoT revamps, with Necros being last as they still had to solve the Epic issue. Also, there is no special knowledge needed for this. These were all things that were announced to us at various times either in threads, interviews, podcasts, or Beta discussions. Though the Beta discussions are lost to time as they are not archived anywhere to my knowledge.
In TDS beta, the devs tried proposing options for the nerf of the Epic. They increased the base damage of DoTs in Beta ONLY, and their justification was to balance out what the loss of an epic would be with increased base damage. Let me note, the DoT revamp is completely different. Don't get these 2 changes blurred. The DoTs in TDS Beta did not become consolidated (ie only 1 spell within a line of DoT on the target at a time). The revamped DoTs received a completely different change than what you saw the necro get in TDS Beta.
Apparently the devs do everything we say! Mighty Necro Club has spoken, we don't need no stinking revamps! It's good to be Necro.
The dot revamp and the epic are not separate. In tds the devs treated them the same. And really, we all no that no dot revamp will happen without a epic nerf.
We seem to have deferring memories of what happened in TBS beta. First there was massive increase in DoT damage along lines of other DoT class received. Second was spell focus no longer critted for DoTs, though it was announced as a bug and not tended. Third all the extra damage that DoT's received in TBS beta was reduced as well fixing the spell focuses and the necromancer epic focus was limited in level along with a more moderate increase in level 101 to 105 DoTs. Along line of initial RoS DoT increase that other classes recieved to their DoT's coming out of RoS beta. There were several options available. I forget what they all were. The capping epic and increase of level 101 to 105 DoTs did nothing for those DoT's below level 101. Fourth necro's had no idea about dev's desire to prevent stacking of older DoT's. In fact we have every indication that they were completely fine with it. They had gone out of there way to make almost all of are DoT stackable even one that had been non stackable like ignite line. We only found out about their desire to make DoT's in same line unstackable when they started the DoT over haul mid TBM. Necromancer were happy with the intail changes to their DoT's. To say they were opposed is not accurate. It was other classes that were opposed to changes. The missing information by Dev's is source of most of the conflict in regards to necro epic nerf. If they had been forth right and told necromancer their plans to remove the ability to stack DoT's with in lines, if they had been honest that the spell focus bug was working as intended. Then the outcome could have been different.
>Second was spell focus no longer critted for DoTs, though it was announced as a bug and not tended. Not quite. It was a bug that SPA124 (focus) crit. It was also a bug that SPA286 (psalm) crit. They went to fix 286, but actually fixed both of them. Then they asked me to test it, and I told them it cut your damage by about 50%, so they reverted the change to 124. You're welcome.
Also, the huge increase to Necro DoT base damage (it was 250-300%) was a (badly calculated) test as compensation for the lack of the epic. The epic nerf didn't go in so the massive increase was reverted to a normal increase. There was also a bug where any buff with AC in Slot 1 of a spell made DoTs hit for like 700% extra damage. That one was fixed pretty quickly, but it returned a few times during beta.
