Wizard Love

Speaking as a venerable Wizard toon player of 22 years I understand the frustration being the last picked team member in gym (raid). Same difference but lets face it the class is weak beyond compare.

What I suggest is that DBG plan for and setup a round table type of discussion twice a year in say Discord to discuss class balance and playability issues where the veteran board falls short. Either open the discussion to civil moderated discussion or nominate a couple of representatives from each server and class to represent the players in general.

Obviously, DBG is reading our comments but in doing so is unable to respond as quickly as the community is willing to endure. Hence the expectation mismatch. The year is 2021 and we are still using ancient and out of date technologies to communicate when we have all become accustom to near instant gratification. In this case, lets drop the clay tablets (Veteran's Lounge) for a more modern discussion forum but limit some of the inputs.

Teams, Zoom and Discord are all moderated if discussion can be civil, I see why not.

- Coag

Since the devs showed me theirs, figured I should show mine. Public signature added.

@Aristo very much appreciate the response, and hope everyone on the DBG side sees the value of communication in matters like this. I don't think any of us wanted to go the direction we did, but asking wizards to just sit back and 'trust' in the process after being left behind for a good couple years, well that's a pretty heavy lift. Especially in the absence of concrete information.

I see 3 general routes for making adjustments to wizards DPS and SDPS.

1) further changes to procs
2) removal of restrictions on certain AA's/Spell lines that were put in place to tune DPS many expansions ago
3) tuning base spell damage

So what are some specific changes that could be made in this context? Well since we don't know where procs are going to end up given the changes devs are working on server-side to address lag, it probably makes most sense to address bucket 2 first, and then bucket 3 once we see how the class looks after some of the restrictions are lifted on our spells and AAs. I have to imagine that reducing the amount of checkbacks to server from client re: things like twincast restrictions on wildmagic line, AOEs, etc, would also help with lag, but I'm a programming novice so feel free to correct me.

Here are some suggestions of what I would start with as far as modernizing the class while still emphasizing the complex / fun playstyle that makes all us wizards stick with the class we've loved for 20+ years:

step 1: forces line of AA nukes; either make them 0 mana cost, or keep the current mana cost and reduce cast time to true instant like our other instant cast spells, and boost their damage a bit if mana cost is kept. this would allow wizards some baseline DPS when LOM or recovering from a death in raid environment. Weaving in forces btw regular casts also adds another fun layer depth to the wizard experience, imho.

step 2: timer harmonization; reduce reuse time on Spire to match twincast rk 3 spell, possibly reduce Arcane Fury and Fury of the Gods timers as well to match ITC

step 3: twincast/claw restrictions; remove all twincast restrictions from wildmagic lines, reduce twincast penalty on AOEs, and remove twincast restriction from claw spell gem refresh


I think changes that emphasize our core skills, while upping their effectiveness, and somewhat simplifying the calculations behind it all, is the way to go. No reason to leave old class tuning restrictions in place when Mob HP has quintupled or more since most of those 'adjustments' were initially made.

While its great to see the devs engaged and articulating what is going on with the class, at this point, I believe its still a SHOW ME story with wizards.

Devs, don't be afraid to engage with the wizard community. History would suggest that pretty much any wizard you saw comment on that thread would be MORE THAN HAPPY to assist in the class balance changes by providing feedback, parses, and suggestions as long as it meant a road back to relevancy for our wizard brothers and sisters.

The lore has always been clear. When it has to die fast, call a wizard. Lets make that true again.

-Alahanis

I wouldn't worry so much about baseline DPS. You need to recover mana ASAP. If you want to compete in a parse you're going to have to maintain far far higher DPS than force nukes would ever give you.

Looking at parses I don't know if we need Twincast to refresh from claw procs. Even in a 20 minute raid I managed a 65% twincast rate with direct damage spells. They are trying to reduce spell casts and not increase them. If that change was made I'd probably be twincasting 90% of the time in a long raid..

And for wildmagic spells, I don't think they'd be useful even if they could quad cast again without the ability for additional procs. Plus it also goes against reducing spell casts. If the spell line is intended to be a super efficient spell that's worth using with low mana it just needs more base damage.

It would be nice if Arcane Fury and Fury of the Gods matched ITC and could be re-used in 15 minutes. Helping us sync our burns up better with other casters would make things easier in general.

Spire being 1/2 the time of ITC is perfect imo since I can use it twice each time but I wouldn't argue against reducing it to 5 minutes either. It would definitely help at this point but when dealing with spires you need to be consistent with other classes. So, always consider that. If a change helps us knowing that it likely be applied across the board. Does it help other classes even more? If so then it goes against the balance problem you're looking at fixing.

so...
1. halve proc rate - triple the damage (less server load, more damage vs now) (sustain/burn)
2. raise base damage significantly of spells, not just claws and ethereals
3. raise non-crit damage via AA's (sustain/burn)
4. lower mana cost of spells via AA's (sustain)
5. raise crit chance above ALL other classes for DD spells (burn)
6. raise "gathered mana"/lower recast on "gather" (sustain)
7. lower recast time on long recast spells (sustain/burn)
8. lower reuse time on burns (burn)

All good points and worth discussion, my thought with increasing the utilization of twincasting is that it rewards best practices for novices wizards as well, which is to keep Claw on refresh as much as possible.

As far as forces go, something to consider are the plethora of mana drain mechanics in modern raids. There are situations where you come back from a death, druzzil, gambit, modrod forceful reju, etc, can all be down, and we're stuck with not much to do until we can scrape mana back together. Retuning the forces would give us an equivalent to melee jumping back in with autoattack and getting DPS back on track after a death.

As far as wildmagic restrictions, I'd just like to see the spell lineup have some usefulness again. Someone needs to do the math on total spell casts over a parse period of additional twin quads of wildmagic spell vs the number of procs generated from the old setup. If that is the case, no reason to hesitate on the change, total spell damage for the line can be tweaked once there's additional data. I do generally agree with the sentiment that wildmagic needs higher base damage.

My gut says that net/net, we'd still reduce total server load as a function of number of spells cast, even with twincast refreshing from claw proc.

Well it wouldn't hurt. I would agree that their cast time should be lower since due to lag they're often not worth using with the current cast time. And the mana cost never really made a lot of sense unless they were just running out of things to apply costs to and saw Wizards had too much. So, if they did reduce the mana usage to zero I'd want/expect them to increase costs someplace else.

Also, one potentially easy adjustment, could be to automatically reset the AA Harvest on death. It's not like anyone is going to die on purpose to get an extra harvest and then you have at least a minimal amount to work with all the time.

Plus, weaving forces in is kinda fun!

Love this change, I don't think any wizard is like "I should always be at full mana no matter what" but getting that key 10-15% back after a death so you can jump back into main weave / alliance rotation is absolutely critical.

Didn't adding mana to them mean they could now trigger some of our other abilities? I much prefered it when they cost no mana for those times when I have been rezed and can't do anything. I'd like to see them reduce the cast refresh on Force of Ice and Flame to match Force of Will, even if we have to pay extra AAs for it to happen. It would also be nice if the cast range for our AAs used our range foci, pretty annoying to be at range and have to move closer just to cast AA pets and Forces..... I hate that rat!

Since my days of commanding the masses at graffe.com, the powers that be, aka, Absor, have deftly said "no" to anything wizardly. So it is written, so it shall be.

There was a short time that they were focusable after the mana increase where it triggered ITC but that was fixed quickly after complaints. Right now, I can't really think of anything that benefits the force nukes because they have mana.

Maybe if they replaced all spell procs with the mod2 stat "spell damage"?
Could it be done fairly, if various class-AA's got adjusted to make up for the difference?

Sancus went over the details in one of his posts. But there wouldn't be one set value you could use to estimate what procs were doing. Each class has different weaves with spells of different cast times and proc rates. Plus we have Fury of the Gods and things that modify proc damage. So, if 2 procs turn into an extra 5000 spell damage to an existing spell. Fury of the Gods would only get added once to that spell cast instead of 3 times, etc.

If they did take a simple approach like that it would still be doable but they would probably need to also look at how each caster class is currently doing and make additional adjustments per class just to keep their overall expected damage inline with expectations. It may be too much work to handle more than one class at a time. Plus it depends on getting reliable information from players which isn't always easy to come by.

This may have been brought up already or may just be a bad idea but from playing a little on my baby wizard I've always felt that the vortex line, when cast, should apply the buff to damage as a recourse effect on the wizard, not a debuff on the mob.

That depends on what would result in the maximum total damage, if it is a personal recourse you might not be able to use all 24 counters. If it is a debuff, all the counters are much more likely to be consumed(maybe from lesser spells, but it might still be higher total damage).

Dont confuse the damage that shows up on your parse with the total damage that you contribute. Parsing has its limitations. Just like manaburn doesn't give you a much higher parse, but it still gives a high total damage(on raids), if you take the debuff into considerarion.

I wouldn't hate it if vortex were changed but it is also a good reason to have a Wizard in a caster based group. It's a very strong buff and our best form of ADPS.

You know for some reason I thought vortex was limited to wizard nukes only. Either way, I just remember it sucked when you'd kill a mob with vortex on it and do good damage and then the next mob or two you couldn't cast it because of the cool down and your damage just kinda blew until vortex is back up.

With how fast mobs can die now in group setting especially I'd feel pretty useless on most mobs without vortex but I haven't played the baby wizard since ros so unsure how things really go now

It could still be a group recourse buff. This won't change anything for wizards in the group game, and possibly benefit the raid's total DPS more in the raid game when the wizard is in a full caster group.

Well if it goes in the group's song window it would have to work differently for sure. It's only supposed to have 24 counters to be used by everyone. If everyone got 6 then wizards would lose out solo while twincasting. We'd probably need at least 12 per player and that might be too much.