Personally, I am not sad to see rains go. They were a nice flavour, but they have the drawback that they are AoE. Yes, that's a drawback, as it limits the number of applicable scenarios. Mezzed Mobs? No rains for you and your best DPS spells can't be used. Charmed players? No rains for you. Bellycaster? No rains for you unless you want to hit yourself with every wave. Next thing mages got a "flavour" which does impact gameplay rather severly is spell traveltime. Our bolts and spears as well as our "of many" line of spells travel at ~60 ft/sec. A bolt casted at 300 range takes 5 seconds after being finished casting to impact the target. If the target is moved behind a wall in the meantime, the bolt will impact into the wall and do no damage. If the mob dies before the bolt impacts, it will do no damage. In both cases, our mana is wasted. In the rare case that a runspeed-buffed mob decides to run for his live ... well, a goblin type mob in PoW actually managed to out-run my range 300+ bolt after he took his leave ... Our RS is even slower. It travels at ~40 ft/sec. There are a few spell lines for a magician that have instant impacts after being cast, but they lack in damage, so most mages ignore them for the most part. During TBM beta, Devs offered magicians an AA called "Heavy Rain" that gave the rainspells a (toggleable) chance to twincast at the cost of higher manacost. Two problems of these were that it didnt stack with out innate twincast AA line (first rank would thus have been a downgrade from innate twincast chance from 6% to 5%) and especially after the recent rain nerfs, mages were ... displeased. Plenty of input was offered on how to change the heavy rain AA or substitute it with something more practical, alas, Heavy Rain was removed from the beta without anything else being added to magicians.
This is the main problem here, the lack of communication. A drastic, fundamental change to a longstanding mechanic (PCs always tanking over pets) deserves more than a throwaway line in the patch notes. The pet change should have had its own announcement, with thorough testing and discussion before being pushed live. It's more than just that, though. For some reason they decided to launch both a new expansion and a server with a brand new ruleset at the same time, when they clearly weren't finished with either one. On top of that they decided to rush the pet change out the door, while they still haven't finished dealing with the above two projects. I think people have very good reason to fear fixing pets is going to be a low priority right now, seeing as how the devs already have their hands full with two projects that are both a "focus for the team". Even assuming they work quickly on the pet change, it most likely won't go in until the next full patch, so that's a month of broken pets. It also seems unlikely they're going to get it right with the next fix, considering how rushed and untested the last two changes were, so this is probably going to be an issue for a decent amount of time.
I believe that this is a good time to reevaluate pet dps. Pet dps has stagnated over time. Mages are in need of a DPS increase after the rain nerfs. Mages always wanted more dps through their summoned companion. When will there be a better time to improve pet DPS than when you are also adjusting pet agro?
There is little benefit for mage pets tanking for melee. If you argument is for TLP, than consider this: The server population is largely unhealthy - not a good balancing of classes. At first glance it sounds like a good idea to allow pets to tank for melee. However, in reality, most people play pet classes for farming purposes. These people are not looking to form groups. Besides, tanks are not really needed until SoV/PoP. They only slow experience down. Even in PoP, my choice of tank was the original paper tank, the ranger. There isn't anything experience wise, in PoP that cannot be tanked by a ranger with a decent healer and there DPS is much better. The idea that pets need to tank for melee because mercs do not exist on TLP is silly one. Again I solo'd my way through much of everquest, and when I grouped I hardly ever grouped with a tank.
Anything DBGs does to make players of *any* class feel less powerful, is a very bad move in a 16 year old game. The last possible thing you should be doing right now is futzing around with game balance that's been in place for ages. Fixing bugs, adding features, those are good ideas, changing long standing archetypes is a great way to tank your game in a hurry. You really need to stop gutting things when people have invested hundreds or thousands of hours into a character. If something has been in game for years, bug or not, overpowered or not, leave it alone. People have invested far too much time to have the rug yanked out from under them.
"Soloing warriors" is as easy as applying the recent buffs they got at the higher levels to the lower levels, specifically No Time to Bleed and Combat Proficiency. Warriors can already solo at the higher levels, though of course, their preferred way of "solo" advancement should be moloing, because the class is designed to work with a healer. The issue for warrior soloing/moloing is primarily DPS especially at the lower levels unless you are more twinked than a twinkie. Unfortunately it's not going to happen because "progression servers must be kept as close to old school EQ as possible." Even though the pet nerfs are a complete betrayal of that. In fact, I'd say that progression servers in Everquest are a huge detriment to general improvements in gameplay because of the way they force developers to adjust 10-15+ years old balance. The game as it was 10-15 years ago is very different from the way the game is now, and changes they try to push through for the lower levels & older expansions frequently create massive problems for live. The solution of course is to create a new set of rules for the progression servers but then that'd require, I suppose, separate computer servers and no one wants to make that investment for such an old game. Don't kid yourself, the pet aggro rules were not implemented to help mages tank for groups. They were implemented because they wanted to completely shut down/control pet tanking in raids. That's why the change directly mentioned raid mechanics. It's not a "here's a nice buff to pets guys, but we have to tune it down a bit because otherwise tanks be mad" change. It's a "pet tanking is breaking what we want to see on raids so we're going to make this massive change to shut it down permanently, but at the same time, we want to sell it as an improvement to pets so pet classes don't all quit."
Big bump for water/fire pet dps imo, and stagnate earth/air dps wise. I liked when they said they were going to make the pets really functionally different, and being able to have a high dps but squishy water pet in raid or group with a tank situation and then take a reasonably large dps hit when having to use the "tank" pet solo/molo seems like a fair trade off and within the logic of the class. As to the aggro changes - agree with Ben a lot, I think it's pretty obvious that these changes weren't intended to have the drastic effect we're seeing (thanks again, TLP), and that they'll be addressed in the near future.
I'd rather have DPS tied to my nukes, not my pet. We already know pets are hard to balance for both raid/group/solo. However, I would like to see new types of pets added that are usefull
They should add a COOKIE MONSTER to the mage pet line up for us. I mean why stop at wrecking the mage pet as they were --- before the nerf, to the pre-nerf, to the post-nerf, to the nerf...... Need a DEV to pop in here and tell everyone everything is working as intended then all will be right as rain.
Just double the amount of agro increase on provocative demeanour and i'll be happy, so I can go back to actually dpsing on my wizard while the pet tanks.
That wasn't a troll, that was my opinion of your ability and skill. After your snot-nose response, I went onto Bristlebane and made the crappiest mage I could: a human female; lowest INT and stupid-looking walk/run. Then I played for a total of thirteen hours with no pet and no merc. I killed blues and whites and a couple of yellows. I didn't die once. Yeah, they're not as OP as they used to be, which I like. Sounds like you just need to learn to play (L2P) the new version of mages. I doubt that you will consider that useful, but since I have as much right to post as you do, I will continue to do so.
Go back to the TLPs, Steampunk, or try doing the same with just a heroic character. You could have probably sat down repeatedly to get hit for maximum damage and still pulled it off from first to tenth level, but that's not relevant to this thread at all. Try again with an 60+ level character and you'd be singing a different tune.
Low level is totally comparable to higher level. Every class is totes the exact same at 105 as they are at level 5.
Lotta ****-hurt kiddies here, upset that their mega-OP mage walls can't run roughshod over everything in sight. At level 60+ there isn't much that you should be able to solo, so sounds to me like things are pretty much the way they are supposed to be. I'll just continue to play where I want to, how I want to, what I want to, cause I can.
Apart from your idiotic TLPs, no-one is even trying to petwall anything, raid, group or solo. People on live servers actually use their brains for more than just to wear their funny hats on them. Go back to your TLP and shut up when grown ups are discussing things you are obviously neither interested nor able to even try to understand. I am sick to death of having my Everquest be "adjusted" whenever the kiddies on TLP find a new way to exploit something. Better just remove the TLPs and gift all TLP players WoW accounts. Perhaps, some players that moved to WoW will return then, because they want to avoid the TLP players as well.
Without the progression servers, I doubt the Live ones would still be up. They're paying for your game. And, too, it wasn't TLP players getting your beams changed, nor was it TLP players who caused the first three rounds of pet mitigation changes. You made your own bed. Now you have to lie in it.
Your phrasing of "they're paying for YOUR game" makes it sound like you are speaking from the particular bias of a person that plays mostly progression. How much does it cost to keep a Live server up? I mean really. Let's say a live server somehow only had 100 players that were paying on it that you could really attribute to that server. That's at least 10 dollars a month from each if I'm being way too generous. So that's $1000 a month, and $12,000 a year. That's not even including people that buy things with station cash that came from money like name changes, server transfers, ornamentations, housing items, heroic characters, exp potions, novelty items, familiars, mounts, etc.. etc.. Do you have some kind of actual metrics on this, or are you more or less just guessing the costs? I'd be genuinely interested in knowing the facts on this one, especially if it's going to be used as a way to justify things to people en masse as you are currently doing. With the lack of numbers that I assume we all have, I could easily flip this one in the opposite direction. It doesn't cost $1000 a month to keep a server up if you consider the quality of service here. Things go down all the time. There's virtualization. Technology just gets better making the process cheaper. This is a company that runs several games, so they have the advantages of scale. Subscriptions have cost about the same amount from the beginning (what? from ~$10 - ~$15?). You notice how they don't go up very much? It's because it's advantageous for them to keep them lower in hopes of getting more players/not losing current ones. Heck, there are people doing servers and I'm sure most of those are just "for donations" in a guy's basement. Additionally, there's the expansions. If they weren't making some money off of live including expansions and subscriptions, you'd just assume that they would have stopped making expansions. It sounds to me like live servers have been profitable all along, and maybe due to a degradation of culture, the progression servers popped up en masse because people care more about short term profits than long term gains... But either way, neither of us should be going about it either way without solid facts that I really assume we both don't have.
Hu no they don't. You can't really compare 3 servers vs the rest. There are also a lot of people that play on both and would just play on live if there wasn't those progression servers. They're for sure popular but they're a bonus for the company not the main source of money.
