Wizard Love

I agree with this, less "spammy" but harder nukes. I miss the days where you could throw a single nuke on a mob, and see a sizeable dent in their HP. I don't mind longer cast times, if thats what it takes.

I would also prefer if our non-burn dps got a little buff, maybe increase our passive crit-chance, our non-crit damage is small enough as it is.

Agreed and that was one of the points I was trying to get at. The nukes are too many to be practical for most situations. Consolidate spells - this will reduce the number of focus AA and would make it so the focus AA can have a higher % increase to the base damage of the spell.

Twin-cast or Triple-cast will only increase spike damage, which should be for burns, but for day to day groups, base DPS needs to be fixed. Twin-cast is relied on too much for DPS as it is.

what is a wizard ? I dont think ive ever seen one ..

I would also like a way to make it easier for wizards to solo/molo. I don't box, and without a group Im fairly limited in what I can do in newer expansions. I can manage the easiest mobs in ToV with kiting/root-nuking, but thats it.

Are there any wizard-friendly targets in CoV I can do without a group? Im not talking about nameds, just a way of farming tradeskill mats...

I tried to cover that some by making Destructive Adept useful. If it got increase from 10% to 100% it increase the average Ethereal Brand cast by close to 9%.

But really, there's some core class aspects I don't think we are likely to get changed or should want to get changed. Wizards DPS without AAs/burns running is just going be fairly low. And I can't even say that it's *bad* when we have vortex to use.

Also, triplecast and all those other ideas sound interesting but it would be better to try and limit additional hits/procs to make sure they don't just create a new lag problem.

The other thing with slow casting nukes is that they are just impractical on raids. We need to move around too much and anything longer than 2 seconds is really too much. I also don't consider what we currently have as *spammy* especially if wild* spells are now off the table. And we definitely *are* able to take a lot of hp off mobs quickly. You just have to use your AAs. That's what they're for. I get the impression that some people think you should be saving them for some reason.

Force of Ice and Flame should be reduced in recast time to equal force of Will, and remove the mana cost while you at it.

You don't want procs, going off as often, change them back and have those procs add X damage to the spell cast.

You don't want us to have tripple cast give us 3 X the spell damage on spells cast for X amount of time.
Change twincast to to work the same way for double damage.
Have luck added as additional damage instead of an extra cast.

Just over 2 years ago you gave us slot 18/19 augs that added yet more spell procs, just over a year ago you added even more, why were more procs added if they are so much of an issue? You give us these things, did no one think of the consequences of having so many things casting at once?

I don't need 10 lines in my log telling me what damage was done by 1 key press.
The only downside of having these things in 1 cast is resists, so that needs to be taken into account when the damage is decided.

They probably didn't fully realize that procs were the main problem and whether the log file shows individual hits or not doesn't change the fact that the calculations still need to be done. At least if we see them in the log we can better determine for ourselves what to use/what gives the most benefit. From what I've seen I'm not really getting client side lag from all the proc messages.

A thing that is also causing lag is the implementation of LUCK.

Each time you melee/cast spells, heals, and defend your self, requires a lot of calculations.

They should remove the luck.

As I see it, they have a department who thinks out new ideas
But they forget the consequences of the ideas.

Like makes items get new augs slots type 18/19 and the augs have procs on, but forget that now they multiply the procs/calculations by a larget amount.


My list of what they have made that is causing lag:

Procs
Luck
Links of the spells that is cast/melee effects, is this actually needed at all ?

They need a seperate person who is not into the process of the development, but should be there to raise a red flag, saying this is bad, and have the power to say: Stop that, it will stress the servers too much.

As I see it, we have gotten far more lag in the last few years, and imo, the cause is those implementations

I get what every one is saying related to procs, luck etc causing lag but others have mentioned this is a cross game issue. Unless all games are sharing resources and/or one game bogs the others, that points to a more global issue. Also, while reading through the wizard damage calc posts that Kizant et.al have done makes my head spin trying to figure out the best combos to use, in terms of computing power, they're not that complicated. More than likely they're just an indicator of underlying issue that needs to be addressed.
That's what's concerning to me about this whole approach to fixing lag through developers coding different game mechanics. While it might be a software issue that developers can fix, particularly the way data calls are made or message queuing is managed, if they aren't looking at databases, app and web servers configs, firewalls, network configs etc. they are probably going to be fighting this going forward. Even if changing the way procs helps, it's probably not solving the underlying issue.

Maybe they are working all angles or maybe I'm off base and its a pure computer power problem, but having been through this at multiple companies with multiple legacy platforms, we've never solved it by removing functionality in the code.

Unless there is something really horrendous in the code, Luck isn't the cause of any lag.
Luck comes down to basically:

1) If spell is a crit && Luck > 0
2) Roll Luck chance
3) If roll succeeds
4) Roll Luck bonus
5) Add bonus to damage

These are all very simple operations that take nanoseconds. Even with 10,000 spells going off every second this wouldn't cause a slowdown.

3 calculations and 2 random rolls is:
3 calculations + 2 random rolls * number of luck items affecting this base roll * number of people in the zone this tick MORE than no luck.

Just sayin'

The devs looked into it and it's perfectly reasonable that spell procs are a much bigger concern than something like luck. All your buffs and worn modifiers have to be checked for every proc/spell cast. And they all have rules like max level, duration, resist, etc to go through. Hundreds of checks are likely being made every proc just to see if the additional damage or bonus calculations needs to be done. Not even counting the time it takes to make the calculation. Which is probably the fast part anyway.

I'm just a firm believer it is not one thing, but everything.

Hearing they've looked at one specific thing, is good though.

Yes the way it works, procs are obviously more server intensive than luck.

All I'm saying is, every calculation for every thing contributes to the server's calculation load.

Sure. This one change likely won't solve the problem but after this they can see what the next highest impact thing is.

they could make overseer a stand alone game that is accessed via smartphones or tablets and not in game .. the rewards via xp, currency can all be added to your account once you log in-game .. also
an out of game auction house ..
also like was stated in a previous post add buff bots to pok shaman, cleric, mage,enchanter .. then if you are in Pok or GL and afk you auto get booted from server .. if you want to stay in game you need to be not afk or in another zone GH perhaps..

You're too conservative, really.

1) They should remove MORE procs and then increase Fury of the Gods to 25k

2a) Arcane Fury should be at 60% now, not 35, and it should have had more reductions in recast time.

It was 15% @L100.
L105 it should have been 30%.
L110 it should have been 45%.
L115 it should have been 60%.

Even if you adjusted it to 2 ranks of 5% per level cap instead of 3, it should still be 45%. (15/25/35/45).

That Wizard abilities have been constantly stagnated instead of increased is why we continually fall behind everyone else.

Likewise for the recast time. The game has shifted towards a 10-15 minute cycle of burns, yet Fury of the Gods and Arcane Fury sit at 20 minutes.


2b) Fixing the innate Wiz crit is one step, but we also need Fury of Magic brought into line with ALL the other priest/silk classes. Wizards are supposed to be the "Crit" class, and we haven't been for over a decade now. Likewise for Destructive Fury, Wizards have LESS than the other silk/priest classes. It's unconscionable that it's been in this state so long.

3) A LOT more spells than Cloudburst need base damage increases. What happens is every few expansions when spells lag behind they should get large increases to compensate, but not all of them do, it is usually only Ethereals and claws. Everything else is generally left to languish.

4) What needs to happen to Improved Familiar is to CHANGE the focus. It STILL conflicts with Bards' focus songs despite the fact there have been multiple SPAs added in recent years to FIX those types of stacking conflicts. Change the familiar focus SPA to something like 507 at the least, or even a better one like 461 or 413 (though that would require lowering the %). Removing the AE restrictions is fine, but that's not the major issue imo.

5) If they really want to address the gaping chasm between crits and non-crits, Destructive Adept needs a lot more than 100%. At minimum it needs to be 200% with a better range being 300-400%. And before people freak out because they don't understand the math: Caster mercs have 400% damage focus and we all know how badly they suck.

6) Manaburn needs more work than that. Making it hit for 12 million still just barely brings it up to Harm Touches' level. HT will go over 12 million if the SK is burning, AND it uses zero (0) resources whatsoever. What should happen is to change MB it to be similar to Harm Touch:

A) 2.5 million base damage.
B) Crit mod of 100% like Harm Touch has.
C) Remove 1m blocker as Harm Touch doesn't have any similar restriction.
D) Remove mana cost.

7) Composite Fire needs more than just a big base damage increase. What it needs is to twincast like every other classes' Composite spells.

8) I'd argue we need a -100 on all our spells. We are long past the time where -20 / -50 is acceptible when other classes have -100 / -250 / -500 / unresistable on theirs.

9) It's not just a Wizard thing, but focii on items in general need a revamp. Ngreth started re-combining detrimental/beneficial focii again in TBL (this is how focii were originally implemented back in Luclin/PoP, they were only split later) but it needs to continue / more work.

A) Consolidate ALL damage focii into a single damage focus.
B) Remove the "fixed" focii that haven't changed values in 10+ years. (e.g. range, mana preservation, spell haste) and make them AAs instead.
C) Start adding NEW focus effects to items. The stuff on the Type 18/19 TBL augs should be on the GEAR, not augs. Add other existing focii that aren't on items: 302/413/461/507.

10) Vortex needs a Focus AA line. It doesn't have one.

The number of luck items you have should be irrelevant. Whether you have 1 item with luck or 22, the game should be caching your total luck and using that number, not recalculating your total luck every time.

Likewise, 3 if statements, 2 rand() calls and 1 addition calculation is nothing. Modern CPUs are capable of tens/hundreds of billions of these calculations per second.

Luck is not the cause of lag*. Just Sayin.


*Again, this is assuming there is nothing stupid/broken in the luck code that causes it to take longer than it should be.

Back in the day when my ice comet was my big nuke and it always made people in my group take notice those were the days. But i agree we need bigger nukes.

Andarriel

And this is key to tracking down and solving the problem. Making a change at a time and seeing how it helps/hurts the problem will hopefully let them get a better understanding of exactly what is going on faster. Just need to hope at the end of it they do some class balancing to fix what was messed up or made worse because of these changes.

until a dev plays a wizzy yer not gonna get any lubzin~