Wizard Love

The problem with Wizards is they are design flawed the DPS they would have to generate now to be where they should be would need to be insane.

There is only a few ways to fix it

One is percentage based nukes + damage in the past this was suggested and rejected.
Adding either Dot like damage or animated elemental attacks at higher levels to nuke effects.

Phoenix nuke animated fire bird nuke damage + mele? + nukes for x time then poofs
one for each element?

AA to create temporal clone it copies your spell casts.
different levels add more copies


Wiz definitely need something hope devs aren't ignoring it.

Wizzies need some love. But they still shouldn't be top DPS due to their utility and debuffs.

If you are going to troll a thread, at least make some claims that are semi-reasonable.

Not saying wizards should be better than the current top tier dps. But Wizards shouldn't be behind them either. I have stood by for like 6 years watching that dps pendulum planted firmly up certain class butts thinking that it would one day swing back. If anything it has just gotten lodged up there even deeper.

I can't molo anything in CoV*. Other classes with a merc can not only kill stuff for quests and what not in CoV, but they can Molo named. I can't even kill a damned drake?

Crits - one way wizards stink is because crits in this game are too big. When we aren't critting, its like nothing happened at all. Non-crit nukes can be 50k and critted for 2million+. So then the only time we are any good is when we are burning crit discs. Discs should make us burst yes, but that doesn't mean we should be absolutely crap dps otherwise. Make us crit more - make HInt increase our crit-rate like you did for melees. Make crit/non-crit be less jeckyl and hyde.

Or leave the crit design flaw be and just increase our nuke sizes. Make manaburn as good as the stuff you did for other classes. I dunno, but someone over in the dev department needs to get over that time a wizard stole your girlfriend and stop nerfing wizards.

Rogues have more utilities that wizzys these days.

Wizard Utility:

We can port/tlc to selected zones, saving people the hassle of gating to the guildhall and port from there.
We can buff people with invis, ivu, levitate and a spell-rune.
We can root, snare, debuff fire/frost resist and the occasional stun.
We can evac a group, but no longer evac a raid.

I think thats it...

Snare and root many classes have. Same with invis/ivu and lev. Spell runes from an enchanter are far superior and ours is single target with a refresh long enough to be annoying. Lower element isn't so much that it is super exciting. Stuns - meh. Especially the AE stun that ports you in a random direction. What is up with that?

Basically, ports and evac are the utility that wizards bring that is (almost) unique.

Yep, we can evac just like druids, and we can imitate guildhalls just like druids.

Well, generally the only thing they don't need to do vs melee is the find the sweet spot to avoid ae rampage death game.
I have seen Wizards putting out solid numbers but not very often & you can tell a class that is difficult/lacking by how many play them & wizards are pretty much the least played class in my experience.

Wizards don't really need a large revamp. AA consolidation over the past few years have been very good and we still have a good set of base spells to work with. All I really want it something to compensate for the proc change, some upgrades to make our single target burn a good 25% better, and something to improve our AE lineup and/or just have it do more damage. If we have to have the most complex/difficult AEing lineup then it should do more damage. And ideally we could salvage a few more spells/abilities which currently have little value.

This list is actually pretty conservative but it would be a good start imo and all are easy to implement changes. Except maybe the wiz crit fix.

1. Increase Fury of the Gods from 4500 to around 7000.
2. Increase Arcane Fury to 35%.
2. Fix the 'wiz crit' so it works like a regular crit.
3. Increase base damage of Cloudburst so it fits in our main spell lineup again.
4. Remove the AE restrictions on Improved Familiar's SPA 124 focus
5. Increase Destructive Adept to give a worthwhile improvement. Remember SPA 124 does very little for nukes. I'd make max level 100%.
6. Change Manaburn to be usable every 20m and increase damage of nuke component to 12 million.
7. Make Composite Fire useful during a burn. Give it at least 250k base damage to actually be good and not just something to fit in to get an extra 1% DPS sometimes.
8. Add -100 fire resist check to Self-Combustion line of spells.
9. Change Robe Focus to work on all three ethereals. (this would only improve burns)

What'd I say?

Triplecast; and/or separate each source of Twincast to work independently. So you could get an extra cast from AA, enc aura, and twincast spell buff all on one cast. add a twincast worn effect (or lucky twincast?), give wiz an extra aa to increase it by 20-40-60-80-100%

So that when everything aligns you can hit a mob with 4-5 crits at once.

From Kizants list a couple of posts above, you could implement 1, the first 2, 3,4,5,6,8 in one day by the keyboard. EASY programming there.
The others (second 2., 7 and 9) might take a little longer but you can do it rather quickly when you see that it doesn't need additional team meetings to decide wheter they are good ideas too.

If you cannot be arsed to fix your embarrassing game problems that are low hanging fruits, at least get this right asap: BIGGER NUKES!

If it could be done in a balanced way, I think it would be great to look into hInt as a way to get more spell crits - this would also add a path to continually upgrade dps, like accuracy and crit rates via hDex. Someone already mentioned this.
As I understand it, the benefits from the spell damage modifiers are relatively small and unaffected by crits and focus effects, so maxing hInt gives a tiny damage increase and a larger mana pool to work with.

Of course this would not fix the balancing issues between the int casters as the formula would likely not take class into account.

I could also be entirely wrong as I only box a pet mage and didn't learn all the nuances of caster play.

you can't buff Hint without overbuffing the already overpowered necros

I think there are a lot of ways Wizard DPS could be improved (and it does need improved).
Just throwing a few more ideas out there to add to the collection:
1) I like the idea of triple cast for Wizards only (similar to how Chanters can maintain two aura’s), but Wizards need a boost to sustained DPS, whereas twin cast already has a long reuse timer and I suspect tripple cast would be the same, unless they are put on separate cool-down timers and could be used back to back. Tripple-Cast would help burns and “spike” dps, but not overall consistent DPS per fight, which is what Wizards really need, more consistent DPS per fight.
2) Wizards don’t need more Focus AA or more ranks of Focus AA, but each rank should be a higher percentage - for example the last rank should be like 50%, instead of 22% or 25% (can’t remember what it is off the top of my head). Future Ranks just make it effective to the new spells.
3) Personally, I think Wizards have too many lines of spells to be useful on a day-to-day basis, so they either need consolidated or most of them should be changed to half second casts and put on all separate timers. Just look at all of the different Focus AA they get, there is no way they can use that many spells per fight.
4) Add a PASSIVE ability that’s like twin cast, but adds an extra 50% to all spell damage. Personally, I think I’d rather see their Focus AA percentages increased, but again - sustained, consistent DPS is the thought behind this.

I hope Wizards do get fixed, as my mage regularly out-parses my Wizard. Honestly, if I didn’t have 6 characters and need to get them around easily, I’d replace the Wizard with another Mage. Make me the proud player of a Wizard again and give them the DPS they deserve.

That's why I wrote "in a balanced way". So, assume hInt affected crit rates, you could adjust the base crit rate (with AA's) so necros with, say, 2500 hInt (or insert different number if I'm being unreasonable) would end up where they are today on the spell crits.
Are you against the idea of providing a better avenue to progressively improve your dps? It looks like spell focus + rk3 spells + some aa's is pretty much all you can do, with everything else providing negligible improvements.. Melees can progressively improve their dps by adding ATK, accuracy and crit rates via heroics, and tanks can progressively improve their tanking through hSta/hAgi/hDex (depending on their religion)

I've never played a wizard, and even I've noticed that they need help.

The first time I noticed them taking a sizeable hit - was when we raided Plane of Hate for the Maestro raid (not the original one!)

Our guild was hurting for numbers but we found we could beat the Maestro with around 20-22 players.

I can only guess this came to the attention of the powers that be, maybe in an even more distilled manner (I wonder if ROI 1-grouped it?) and the next thing, Bard dicho was nerfed - and Wizards AA nukes which were previously mana free/very low cost got a mana cost. Both of these factors meant that with such low numbers we couldnt continue with the raid.

The next big thing to happen to them was the dot revamp. I realise that Wizards dont get (many??) dots, their forte is the big nukes, but all of a sudden there was a new sheriff in caster DPS town. Necros have always been high dps, but now they were by far the better class for dps. A previous post mentioned the utility of wizard, well perhaps you should take a look at the caster class that has eclipsed them? DPS, tank, puller, rezzer - pretty sure there's alot more.

Wizards were always one trick ponies, and suddenly they didnt do their trick so well.

I cant go into specifics into fixes but their performance could use a review/re-vamp. If you are taking procs away, why not boost focus in gear for them?

I think those asking for triplecast , twincast, etc are going the wrong direction. They should be reducing the number of spells, procs, swarm pets, pet procs, etc so there is less of a load on the server.

Longer casting time with bigger base damage should be the way to go.

If the crit multipliers make that too big, then scale down the crit multipliers and make the base damage on the wizards spells go up across the board. Kind of like the focus AA's that someone pointed out above. Simply boost those up until you get the DPS values in line with zerks.

I ran a wizard back in TBM and they parsed fairly well, I gave up on the wiz a rolled a zerk later because they are just so much easier to high constant DPS

I like Kizant's list. It's a good start. An addition I would make, albeit minor, would be to make our robe click something worthwhile. We almost never have mana issues, so the recovery weave that has been our click for quite some time now is almost an afterthought. Pretty much the only time I ever use it is when I'm in a ridiculously fast pulling group.

A few suggestions for click updates:

A twincast proc
A very large nuke, something on the order of the manaburn levels Kizant was talking about, like 12m.
Similar to a robe click from before--adding a Vortex-like additive to our next X amount of cast spells that would make both our burns and non-burn states more viable.
Something that can't be clicked while ITC or spire is active, that adds damage so that our non-burns can keep up.
A swarm pet that....ok, can't even finish that one, hah.

Anyway, just some thoughts. Yes, fix us....please.