I think other's have mentioned it, but was Arcane Fusion always so suxx0r? The chance that it goes off seems to be ridiculously low for the AA cost of ranks 2 and up. The log of my most recent run through The Darkness Howls showed that Arcane Fusion III did 1.7% of my total damage.
The proc rate was always low, but the damage used to crit at our normal rate. It still accounted for only a tiny % of our overall DPS, but most people that play this game are idiots and they cried and cried and cried how unfair it was that it crit for such a high number, despite the fact the proc rate was very low. So, the previous AA dev use a little known feature* which he thought would only cap the critical rate to 15%, but it actually capped the critical rate AND the critical damage to 15%. When we explained that this made the ability really bad, he refused to change it and it went from being "meh" level to "really bad." Then, sometime later they (programmers) finally split critical rate and critical damage into separate SPAs and it started to crit for the normal critical damage amount. However, it still has the 15% critical rate cap applied. Thus it went from "really bad" to just "bad." What Arcane Fusion really needs is to have the critical rate cap removed. The entire purpose of the AA was for it to be a really, really big hit, but to only happen rarely. Instead it's a bad hit the vast majority of the time and very, very, very rarely it's a good hit. *This is the same thing that was done to Rains a while back.
I did notice in the parse that its crit rate was low as well. That explains it. Well, I guess I won't bother with rank 4 until they do something to fix it then. I've got other things I can spend 100 AA on, like tradeskill mastery ranks to try and get to 350 in each someday.
Something else I was thinking about. As a crafter, I spend a fair amount of time AE farming old content. Our AEs are so all over the place. I can remember getting together with a mage and an enchanter back in Luclin and doing all out AE battles. I loved the Jyll's spells because they cast fast, could cycle them to be constantly casting, and that there was one of each resist (fire, cold, magic). I died a bunch, but it was a blast. (Pun intended.) I didn't think about it until recently, but we haven't had a cold-based PBAE since Winds of Gelid at lvl 60. And our magic line of PBAE does no damage, but stuns, and then sends you like 90 feet in a random direction. That's just annoying. Seems like a purely defensive move to me and we already have something like that with AA. The fire and cold beams are nice, but share timers with each other and with our instant cast DDs. The pillar spells seem to have way too small of an AE range, as they won't hit all 4 mobs unless they are bunched pretty close to each other. Basically, is it just me, or have our AEs been relegated to farming for tradeskill drops in old content? They just don't seem worth a spell slot in normal group play. One of my wishes for the next expansion are to get a decent cold PBAE again and a useful magic AE that actually does some damage without flinging me around.
I was camping VT at one point with my wizard and it worked fine, obviously, but I started to get annoyed by standing around waiting for spell gems to refresh. Plus I still managed to take damage. mostly from our own spells but also from just being hit, and I was still using a decent amount of mana. Every so often I'd have to click a heal or actually bring out a merc and eventually I decided to try another class just to see the difference. So, I brought in an old mage box and then proceeded to just walked around while the pet killed everything 10x faster than I could AE. All while not having even a split second of downtime or standing there thinking I'm not get anything done. And I can't imagine just how fast/easy it is for any melee class or necro with their OP auras and pets. I'm guessing clerics, druids, and wizard might be the worst classes to farm tradeskill items with? But on paper you'd think our AEs would be great for doing something like that. I wouldn't tune our spells around this fact for raids but it is kinda telling that even for doing the easy things they're not that great for.
2 words for you: 1) Resists 2) Interrupts I've been gearing up my warrior and good god what a difference it is as a melee/tank class. He simply autoattacks for what I have to spam multiple spell and AAs for. I can run through any old zone and mobs simply explode from riposte while he takes no damage and I press no buttons. It's like playing a different game for real.
I've noticed this too on my Berzerker alt. You have something like 100% riposte rate and you just have to get proxi agro for NPCs to charge you and instantly die.
This is how it should be, as old areas mobs do have low amount of hps, and hitting powers go up, and you riposte more. You have chosen your powers to be spell casting which takes time. Go to a high level area, and the situation will be different.
Since next expansion is Velious based and our best spell at the time was Sunstrike maybe the new ethereal fire could be called Ethereal Sunflare? Or maybe Ethereal Solarstrike.
Hey, if the next expansion is Velious then we should get a break from fire immune/ fire resistant mobs right?
You funny Reno I'm all for wizard improvements, while at it though, could you make their synergy spell 12s recast like magician's too please, oh, and also proccable by fire nukes, for the love of Inny?
Magician synergy spell procs off of fire spells? I mean I know I have been taking a break from the game and all, but..... say what??? One of us is wrong, and I do not think it is me this time...
Wut? [51005/49725] Conjurer's Synergy II Classes: MAG/254 Skill: Melee Target: Caster Group, MGB: No AE Range: 100' Resist: Beneficial, Blockable: Yes Stacking: Conjurer's Synergy 2 Focusable: No Casting: 0s Duration: 12s (2 ticks) Song, Dispelable: No Max Hits: 1 Matching Spells 1: Increase Spell Damage by 60% (Before Crit) 2: Limit Resist: Fire 3: Limit Resist: Lowest 4: Limit Max Level: 250 (lose 100% per level) 5: Limit Effect: Current HP less than -100 6: Limit Effect: Current HP Non Repeating less than -100
Wizard synergy - did say their. I don't always have a non-fire proc fire, every spell. Irritating to see wizard synergy buff last through 2 casts. And I want more of 'em. 30s recast is too long, make their spell that procs it their best dps spell, and have only a 12s recast timer
Ideally, they could make the change to Braid mentioned earlier and lower its reuse time by a lot. Then switch that to be the spell for synergy. They had done that prior but we asked them to change it back to vortex since the recast time on Braid is so long. At the time we pointed it out and suggested increasing the damage of the proc if they wanted to keep it on Braid. They chose what they did. I can understand if they want to keep the recast time on Vortex aligned with the max length of the vortex effect buff so switching Braid around makes more sense to me.
So I must have read the initial post wrong. I knew (obviously, I mean I have not played in awhile but geez Sancus) that Conjurer Synergy makes the next fire spell do more damage. I interpreted what he said to mean that casting a fire spell procs Synergy, which is false- Synergy is made after casting RS. So I was challenging the thought that a fire spell procs synergy, which is how I read it. A fire spell is benefitted from synergy, well conjurer synergy...
