Oow concerns / innate "...." aa / melee fest

So? The reason had nothing to do with these servers they were tuned for lvl 105.

Pick an encounter in the "meleequest" era. Make said encounter more resistant to melee damage (or just give it a melee damage rune that has to be burned through).

Judge the results. Is the encounter difficult enough? [Most encounters on progression raids are not, certainly not in era]


Pick a different encounter. Make it weak to fire-based damage.

Pick an encounter, make it resistant to dot damage. Or make dots hit way harder.

Pick an encounter, add a damage shield to the NPC. Maybe it can't be dispelled?


Lots of situational tweaks to try, without any widespread nerf needed perhaps?

Didn't all casters spells get their raw dmg tuned up 50% or so in 2008ish?
I was under the impression spells were amped up in their raw damage the same time Melee got their +% dmg.

Additionally, I haven't witnessed any of this content from a wizard point of view, have you made sure you have your best +% focus's? In a bards group? best mana pres focus? Subelty AA's? Spell haste, focus haste, and the overhaste belt click? (I was under the impression the craigbeast queen belt is over-spell haste clickable on anyone)

Another mechanic you are seeming to overlook when you are going 'The melee are doing all the dps, not fair' is that Melee also have to be careful of wild rampage, and positioning, and quite a few more AoE's, Riposte if a mob turns, etc.

These AAs really should have been locked to the TDS expansion, when they were implemented on Live servers.

Casters got several increases as well, Specifically they got:

• Destructive Fury is flagged Luclin, which is a 3x modifier to critical Nukes instead of the base 2x modifier without this AA. The AA actually came in during Omens of War iirc.
• DoT revamp changes to Shamans/Druids/Enchanters was a decent DPS upgrade because you don't have the ramp up time or the time sunk into casting multiple tiers of the same DoTs (sorry necros)
• Focus Degredation changes, original focii didn't have the ability to degrade, around LDoN it was added in but at a 10% penalty per level over, later reduced to a 5% penalty per level over.
• Spells 1-60 mostly all got some level of increase in damage or efficiency. Many of these changes come in around a 20-25% increase in raw damage. Some like wizard rains got any ven larger increase. However most 61+ spells have not changed, with a few key exceptions... for example Shock of Magic. It's PoP value was a random 1200-3000 DD for 600 Mana. It's current live value is a random 2400-3000 DD for 550 Mana.

I think the difference however is Melee got similar improvements to what I've listed above, but on top of their improvements they got these out of era TDS Innate Melee AA. Some examples: Monk fists, different ATK and hit calculations in general, haste rounding changes, heroics on PoP+ gear (and AHR neck).

Without the Innate AAs, Melee would likely be behind wizards... but that's how Balance should be. Rogues, Rangers, Berserkers and Monks would still be crushing Tanks/Druids/Shamans/Enchanters no problem, and Mages/Necros would fall somewhere behind the pure Melee amongst the hybrids I imagine.

I know people say it would just make fights take longer... yes, but there's more to it than that. In EQ, fights taking longer makes them harder in many cases... but certainly not all cases. Lady Nevederia, would not be any harder just 100x more annoying (what a dumb AE). However Jelvan on the other hand, becomes a bit more challenging when you either can't burn out one of the minis as quickly or you are having to balance all of them for a longer duration.

High DPS, especially the absurd levels we see on Phinigel (from both Melee and casters alike), allows you to burn through many event mechanics to the point that they aren't even relevant. Another more current example would be Barxt in Uqua. Being able to just blow up the golem and Barxt allows you to skip a ton of the adds/deactivation+activation parts of the fight. Endurance fights sort of lose their challenge as well when they're falling over in half the time and you don't really have to stretch your mana to defeat them.

For a point of reference look at these values of overnight parses performed on Al'Kabor (Mac server) years ago when it was still up, done by several level 65 Rangers, Monks and Warriors using 100% Haste (AFK Bard Bot rolling Warsong of Zek) and 250 ATK worn (cap) against a stationary target (generally Thelin pre-walk or Katta banker were used because they didn't fight back or move) you are looking at:

Ranger - Featherwood - 151 DPS
Ranger - Stonewood - 153 DPS
Ranger - Primordial - 157 DPS
Ranger - Obsidianwood - 166 DPS
Ranger - Time Bow - 176 DPS
Monk - Reparm 2hb - 195 DPS
Monk - Xegony h2h+Cursed h2h - 190 DPS
Warrior - Bloodfrenzy+Blasphemous - 164 DPS
Warrior - DBoW+EoE - 171 DPS
Warrior - Blade of War - 175 DPS

Now compare those to what your Melee DPS without burns or bard overhaste were putting out during PoP. Sure cut down the 5% mighty buff and you're still talking about double or more DMG output from Melee. Casters on TLPs undoubtably are doing more than casters on Al'Kabor were, but nothing close to double.

All that being said, the problem I have with these discussions is Devs see it and instead of sort of playing with the numbers and seeing how they want things to go they will likely instead go with the easy fix and just throw more penalizing Mighty Buffs on mobs and totally screw over pet classes on raids because of the pet shared hate nonsense that should have ended in Velious or Luclin. Instead it just drove every main Beastlord and Magician crazy on raids and forced them to sit on their hands because they could not manage aggro while actively playing.

On live I remember dps casters having mana issues as well, which you never see now. They are doing rains, which would not have been heard of on live, in era, as they were not mana efficient / dmg efficient at all. I remember wizards using Lures as they were low mana cost, low resist, in order to make parses.

I think a huge chunk of what you are seeing for DPS is just the plethora of gear amplifying other smaller changes. Yes 50% dmg increase on melee is Huge, but pair it with all of your melee having BIS or near BIS weapons and now it is astronomically high.

Truthfully, with the rate of speed of unlocks on this server, I think the balance is fine.

Not all guilds are going to be splitting raid instances as much as the top end guilds, and thus the boosts right now will help keep loot flowing and guilds and casual raiders experiencing the end game content.

Everyone plays the servers for different reasons, and I think those looking for '100% True Mimic of Classic / Live Feel' are much lower than those who want to re-live or live for the first time, raid mechanics with a bit of power creep at their hands.

They aren't going to pour in the resources in order to properly balance out classes on these TLP servers. Right now they are busy working on the live expansion so I doubt you are going to see them do much for the TLP servers until around anniversary time next year.

Not even close to how much melee got, and only nukes got re-tuned.

Darchon's post (using data) is really interesting.

Part of this is "what tunes it to retain the replaying player interest?"

Melee being strong does that (without upsetting 105 balance). Especially for group content and casual dabblers.

Retuning raids (i.e., motm) to be challenging in era does as well (again a moot thing to 105).

Maybe some of the raids need their HP buffed to rebalance the individual encounter to "take as long as it is supposed to"... though be wary of the "Luclin content has too much HP" trap as that did turn people off.

Totally skipping fight mechanics on half the raids in GoD because of ludicrous dps isn't even fun. The melee passive AAs are so out of era and over the top, its insane. Without MoTM, raids are a joke at this point. Bumping. Hopefully these can be expansion locked, or at least more gradually introduced. Having melee at the 25% increase point vs. the 50% we have now would go a long way towards not trivializing content.

Sure, and then give us back our dps disc nerfs.

I would like to see the parses from the next 3-4 fights. I put up those same numbers as your #1 Monk on 1 fight. But all my buttons are on cool down. Discs for 25 ish mins, AA for 30+ mins and vet reward for 4 hours. Those numbers are just not possible for every single fight. You get 2 maybe 3 good burns per raid as a Monk.

And need maybe 1 good burn per raid, if that.

Give back nerfs? That'd be awesome, then maybe we would only be at 2-3 times higher dps than we should without the passive melee boost, AND re-nerfed melee discs. Then we could keep rolling our faces on the keyboard but skip half the mechanics, rather than the 90% we do now in GoD!

I like your thinking!