I was wondering what affect gear has on dps for pure casters. For the purposes of examples, I'll speak specifically about Wizards. Aside from the following factors, I can't really seem to see why being fully raid geared adds any value once you have the basics: 1. + Spell dmg effect on gear 2. Focus effects (spell damage for different types of dmg) 3. Mana & Mana regen (which allows you to cast more spells etc.) 4. Health/AC (which allows you live, to be able to cast more spells etc.) I guess when it you boil it down my question is, once you have your Rank 3 spells, and your focus items, and a reasonable amount of mana/hp, what good does max gear do for a caster class like a wizard for maximizing dps? My understanding is that +spell damage is fairly negligible when looking at group gear vs. raid gear in terms of total damage. Is there another factor? +int seems to just give more mana and some dot/spell shielding, vs. +STR and +DEX that have a meaningful affect on melee dps.
If you wear gear as a caster you're doing it wrong tbh (So no, after focuses and such it really doesn't matter).
This happens for melee too, to an extent, once you have your weapons and the basics. EQ is a game of tiny, incremental and often laughably small bumps that have a lot less to do with dps than what the player does. For example, a dead dps class does 0 dps while they're dead (and do varying degrees of less dps after being rezed), so having some other stats to survive things (adds, rampage, ae's, dots, etc) is not a bad thing - unless you're a RoI Mage and raiding naked for the challenge, apparently. For the rest of us poor schlubs, a lot of times in less optimal raid environments, the folks that are higher up on the sustained parses are the ones that paid a little more attention to their survival and "outlasted" the others via a well balanced toon and/or paying attention.
Don't necessarily agree here. Each piece of gear melee get (at least for berserkers) increases crucial stats, eg) dexterity that increase our crit rate, which directly affects our overall dps. Yes its a game of inches, but for us melee each increment is an equal inch, where casters seem to have a few yards at a time, and then it drops off to inches for the last 90%. The whole dead toon not doing dps is absolutely true, but the OP seems to be talking more about the marginal benefit you get from gear after getting focuses and rank III spells. Seems way more important for melee than for casters to me. Would be interesting to see a wizard parse when they're in full raid gear, and then take off everything except their focuses (arms, legs, helm, hands etc.), and weapons
Yar - why I said "to an extent". The extra heroics on a melee make the gear matter more imo, coupled with the higher risk of death from a variety of sources and heavier penalty once dead.
I don't think this happens to melee, even to a smaller extent. Melee seem almost completely dependent on gear (and obviously skill, before someone jumps on that comment), where Casters seem to not be dependent on gear at all, aside from spell focus items.
Increasing your dps by "something" isn't the same as increasing it by "something useful". What place value digit in your DPS is being increased by each piece of gear? The weapon itself helps the hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands places. A couple important focuses will help the tens of thousands. A few more will increasing the least significant digit we care about, thousands. After that, what place value do the random gear slots help? Hundreds? Tens? Ones? Sure, 10 slots of something that helps the hundreds slot will do something noticeable. Do you have 100 or 1,000 slots to make those tens or ones of dps upgrades noticeable? Would you want to upgrade 1000 slots of single digit increases to get 1-9K dps? 30 slots of tens or ones value dps increases is a rounding error, not an upgrade.
Well some people standing in front of a raid mob nude would be so awe and fear inspiring said mob would be rendered defenseless. For others, standing in front of a raid mob nude would kill it from suffocation due to uncontrollable laughter. As for the difference between raid gear, about 10% more DPS in full raid gear/rank 3s vs full group gear and rank 2s for Necros.
It's over 9000!!!!!!! and Arc has a point, but he's forgetting grp TBM gear has the same type5 slots so overall heroic gain from TBM grp to TBM raid isnt as massive as TDS raid to TBM raid which is probably why he's noting the gains per piece as "large". WHAT 9000?!
I agree with this - type 5's aren't really the issue, but more the dependency on gear in general vs. casters.
On a positive note... at least all of the TBM foci are extended to Lv 110 already. No more completely obsoleting and replacing every slot ASAP. I'm sure new items at Lv 110 (whenever that increase may be) will be superior in terms of from +X% - Y% but at least they're avoiding the horrible concept of focus decay (for now). Slightly off topic but speaks to the power gains from gear in the future.
Sancus is one of the smartest players I know. If he feels nude is the way to win raids, and he adopts my mod rod only technique, I'm sure this hybird, brazzer's, style will prevail.
I need all the 100s and 10s I can get so I can wreck Behelit. And the group gear has no base heroics.. raid items have 20ish base + the type 5's on top.
