Guess TBL class features: Mage (game, silly)

Discussion in 'Casters' started by IblisTheMage, Oct 15, 2018.

  1. kizant Augur

    1. Mage DPS on raids is currently much much better than wizards. Post-nerf mages should still be better overall but wizards may actually have a small advantage for crypt robbers and possibly hoshkar. But that remains to be seen.

    2. Sustained vs Burst are poor attempts by players to make distinctions where there are none.The only reason wizards used to hold back at all is because we'd generate too much agro too fast. That's it.

    3. It's already far too easy to maintain the number of swarm pets you need on a raid for Volley of Many. There may as well not even be a swarm pet requirement.... All it does is hurt raid DPS by forcing mages to never leave 1 target the whole fight.
  2. Brohg Augur

    I do remember when the full elimination of key frogs in Lower Guk was only two Ice Comets away. Having a high impact mode like that available is something I miss.

    But I'll echo Kizant on the bulk of that post - magicians going from "typically double" to just "significantly more" than wizards in nearly all raids is hardly a loss of role, and I've had higher group dps playing my (EoK Cohort's geared, barely AAd including no focus tab stuff) magician in groups than playing my (RoS raid geared, full AAd, eyes & , whole deal) wizard since the addition of Chaotic, Orb, and especially /pet swarm command. The hottest burn scenario definitely favors wizard, that lasts 2 minutes. There's several missions where that totally matters, so it's nice. And that wizard dps can be easily redirected away from bosses in raids is, again, a nice feature.

    I just disagree with the overall woe-is-me tone of that post very much.
    kizant likes this.
  3. Sancus Augur

    You should at least wait until we see our post-nerf parses to say something like this, and all of the data I have from test, modelling, and your web app contradicts this claim. We're already pretty close on Crypt Robbers unless it runs long because someone screwed up their hails. We're taking a thirty percent DPS loss for 180s, and Crypt Robbers often takes <180s for us. I don't see how you can call that a "small advantage." Same thing on Hoshkar and OT, which are also both just outside the duration of EU. You should win on both fire immune fights in T3 given your non-fire lineup is significantly stronger than ours. We'll probably still win T2.3, as we should. I'm not sure on Skyfire yet, but we'll take a pretty large hit there. T2.2 isn't very dependent on EU, but that's also a special case, and an ADPS ability that Wizards cast contributes 40-50% of my damage on that fight if they actually get around to casting it. No one cares about Gorowyn.

    As such, the conclusion that "Post-nerf mages should still be better overall" seems pretty baseless. We won't be in a bad place, and we are in too good of a place currently. Stating that we're better than Wizards still is pretty disingenuous, though.
    Nope. The developers have a long history of making distinctions between burst and sustained, and also emphasizing that no class should excel in both areas. The best example off the top of my head is from when swift DoTs were nerfed (full thread here). This was posted by Aristo (emphasis is my own):
    This isn't the only example, it's just the easiest to pull up off hand. The distinctions between sustained and burst have become muddied over time, and perhaps the devs have intentionally done so. They have not told us that, though. As such, it's pretty reasonable for players to adhere to the logic we do have from the devs on class design, which pretty clearly create that distinction and further specify that certain classes are supposed to have an edge in certain situations. No class is supposed to be the best at both. That also makes a lot of sense if you don't want to homogenize every DPS class into X% of the top DPS class as we've sort of done in recent years.
    This is inherently contradictory. If it was easy to maintain the number of swarm pets needed for Volley, Mages wouldn't be averse to changing targets. It's like saying it's too easy for Necros to ramp up their DoTs, and the ramp up time should be removed because all it does is hurt the raid.

    Mages aren't intended to compete with Wizards on adds. Even with EU, outside of AE situations, we didn't. People like to ignore that and just look at the final number on a parse, but there are actually a lot of limitations on Mage DPS. Many guilds need Mage DPS on adds despite those limitations, and those Mages perform much worse relative to classes that lack those limitations. We're very lucky to be in RoI where we can target whatever we need to to maximize our damage, but it creates a fallacious comparison to disregard limits that exist on one class but not the other. More specialized forms of damage will be stronger when used in the area in which they specialize.

    I'd also note that we absolutely don't always get 5 lines of Volley on raids. A lot of the time, even when we have a boss up, enough people are focused on other targets that we drop down to 4 lines. It's also rather difficult to get all 5 lines on the first few Volley casts of a fight, which contributes to our ramp up times.

    I'm not saying Mages were fine pre-EU nerf. I've agreed with you since RoS came out that EU was too strong. I think the current EU nerf goes a little bit too far, but we certainly aren't in a terrible place. I am getting a little tired of the resentment, though, especially after we've already gotten the nerf you wanted.

    Edit: Also, we were not doubling Wizards. That's ridiculous. My best nightly combineds were ~15-20% ahead of Kizant's.

    Edit 2: This post isn't aimed at the group game, but since it was brought up, I think Wizards should sustain more there. There's an insane gap between a Wizard, unless they're AEing, and most DPS classes. Not just Mages.
    Evurkvest likes this.
  4. IblisTheMage Augur

    1) you play with Pie and Sancus. Us average/bad mages do not beat the best wizards in our guilds by a factor of two, Jumbur beats me every time. I am not complaining, and I am not claiming that you are wrong, not at all, but just saying that other experiences exsist. I do beat some wizards, some of the time, and the other mages in my guild perhaps a little bit more often than that. Of course it says something about lack of aptitude, if the mage class is 15%-100% better than a wizard, and we are still beat by one! If this is indeed the case, I would argue we should keep mages as is, since we obviously need quite a bit of help to keep up :-D
    Evurkvest likes this.
  5. IblisTheMage Augur

    Wizards struggle in groups, got it. I didn’t know, I assumed they kick but.
  6. kizant Augur

    It's just my best guess at the moment. I did say 'it remains to be seen' since the change isn't in place yet. The thing I don't know how to quantify at all is the benefit you'll get from the Theft of Essence improvement going in at the same time. However, I do find it difficult to believe that a periodic 30% loss will put much of a dent in the often 20 to 30% difference in the nightly parse.

    I don't disagree that DoT classes, really just necros, have needed to be tuned differently due to the high ramp up time of DoTs. But that's solely a problem with how to handle DoTs. Generalizing that into some burst vs sustained rule and putting everyone into a special bucket because 1 class had to be handled differently doesn't make any sense. And if they were doing that on purpose then there should be a pretty big distinction between all DPS classes based around that concept. I can't say I've seen that?

    It hurts when there's an incentive to stay on a target solely for DPS reasons even when that target is HP locked or isn't of high priority. Necros can't turn off their dots so it's expected that they continue to do damage whether they want to or not. Also,adds with low hp may die before a single tick of damage has been done. Traditionally, necros have had valid reasons to avoid adds in many cases. The problem I tried to point out is specific to volley and mages. Mages are capable of doing good quick damage to adds but may avoid doing so solely because DPS will go down by having to avoid their highest DPS nuke. While there's nothing with regard to game mechanics which prevents good damage from being done. It's the players who do that and I think a bad incentive to have in the game.

    Ok. That's fine.
  7. Brohg Augur

    Sancus, using the RoI example of 3 minute raid events in one part of your rebuttal to explode the impact of losing a burn AA, and apocryphal other raid forces that need magician dps on adds in another part to diminish the reality of magician sustain, and treat the add killing power of a chain-able beam separately besides, is - to be generous - very poor form.
  8. Sancus Augur

    Well Theft is pretty easy to calculate. 25% Haste brings us from 125% with bard aura to 150% for swarm pets. That's approximately 10-16k DPS depending on the event. It's a nice change, but it isn't large enough to skew anything significantly.

    As far as the "periodic" loss, in our raids it has a very high uptime. I used our raids from September 9th both for the above estimate and this b/c I happened to have it saved as a single fight log file. Dividing my EU uptime by the time on your nightly combined (given mine is a bit shorter as I only self parse), I get 41.2%. It's worth noting that Twincast/ITC, Glyphs, IoG, BW, and various other activated abilities multiplicative with EU are used in conjunction with it. As such, significantly more than 41.2% of my nightly damage is done under the effects of EU.

    The gap in our nightly combined doesn't seem to be 30% to me. I pulled up two of my best that I had saved, and they were 17% and 19% ahead, respectively. 15-20%, which is the range I used, seems pretty spot on. I generally don't parse bad combineds, so there are definitely some nights with <10% gaps, but that's generally because I made a mistake. 20-30% seems a bit high, though. 30% DPS decrease * half of the damage I do gives a 15% decrease for my nightly combined, which would put us about equal. I think it would be notably more than that except for T2.2, which won't change too much. Like I said, though, Mana Burn is quite literally adding like 200 million to my nightly combined if it actually gets used on that event, so that really has to be factored in.

    Does all of that mean Mages are bad or broken? Nope. We're still in a good spot (until we get to fire immune fights). But like I said, I'm skeptical of your initial claim, and at the very least I don't really see any evidence for it right now.
    It depends when you looked? It was absolutely true for the melee "burst" classes pre-TDS; you can go back and see some of the rolling DPS graphs with massive 60s peaks. They smoothed that out a lot intentionally so the differences were less severe, but I still think it's manifested in the massive short term burst of some melee classes. It's been true for Mages outside of RoS and maybe some times with Rains. Wizards have had some weird fluxes in burst and sustained for a while, but they've definitely been more burst oriented than Mages. It isn't the same drastic chasm as it was, and IMO the devs have gone too far to homogenize DPS classes. That's subjective, though, and you're certainly welcome to disagree with how the game should be. I think it presents a balance issue if Class X is just objectively better than Class Y in the vast majority of DPS scenarios, though. I'm not saying that's the case, but just from a theorycrafting standpoint of not differentiating between burst and sustained, you move closer to that. That's a large part of what's happened with recent boosts/nerfs. It's not just that one class has become better in burst/sustained, they've just simply become the best DPS class on the vast majority of the events. Differentiation is a way to avoid that.
    The same incentive exists for Necromancers to a greater extent. There are a lot of incentives that exist to pad in various ways (remember people padding lich's in Arx 5?). I'm not going to say they're great, but I think focusing in on them misses the larger design philosophy of the spell.

    Volley exists in the way it does for two reasons. First, it's not easy to max outside of raids. That allows for differentiation between group and raid DPS. That's important because Mages have utility in the group game that they lack in the raid game. There needs to be a larger gulf between the two because of that. The second reason is it creates ramp up time and makes us bad at short fights. Not being able to use our best spell on adds that die quickly is intentional. Not every class is equally as strong in every situation. This is a lot more applicable on events without bosses like Vault. EoK had more of those, where events had a lot of phases that lacked a live boss and in which we couldn't use Volley. We lost pretty handily on those phases to classes more oriented towards that.

    Mages aren't as bad as Necros on adds, but we also don't have the relative interchangeability of Wizards. Beyond the above issue with Volley, the travel time on our spells definitely causes issues when adds die quickly; at 60 ft/s plus cast time, it's pretty easy to lose casts here and there. Swarm pets also lag and have pathing issues. /Pet swarm was huge for their strength on adds, but on ones that die quickly they contribute less than they would on a single stationary target. On top of Volley it's significant even though we're better than Necros. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just how the class is designed. It has some limitations. There are some debuffs that matter for all casters, but Wizards actually benefit from using Vortex on adds if they live long enough so they can get more counters for themselves. You could call that a "bad incentive" because you don't follow MA, but I think it's a cool feature of the class.

    In general, I don't really want Mages homogenized. I like having a niche in sustained moreso than burst, and I like being stronger on bosses than adds. It makes the class more interesting to play that I have to think about how to deal with what I'm targetting. There can be nerfs/buffs to our balance in various areas, but in general I don't want that to be changed about the class. Then we could just load up one spell lineup and spam it on anything not fire immune. That would be pretty disappointing.
    Evurkvest likes this.
  9. Cicelee Augur

    I am just happy I saved my best parse for T2.1 for right before the EU change that happens this week. Perfect timing...
  10. Sancus Augur

    What a strange way to oversimplify what I said. I never diminished the reality of magician sustain. Magician sustain is really good and the part of my post you're referring to had nothing to do with Magician sustained. It was very clearly about the performance of Mages on adds in relation to Volley. It was very clearly in a response to the claim that the pet requirements were too easy to meet. Nothing to do with how you seem to have interpreted it.

    If you want me to use an example from RoI, Vault is a perfect one. I don't cast Volley once on the entire event. I do really badly on the opening adds relative to some other classes as there aren't enough grouped to AE. Doesn't have anything to do with Mage sustained, but it does show the limitations that Volley has as a spell. On Overthere there are absolutely times I have to swap targets to adds and actually cast non-Volley single target spells because we've gotten behind. We kite burgeonings, and when we're behind it's actually actively detrimental to AE. And remember I raid on a Wizard in a mid-tier guild. Mages there absolutely do have to swap to adds on OT and other events (T2.1 too) or we flat-out wouldn't have enough DPS to win. There's nothing apocryphal about it. It's the reality that I play in.

    As to why I gave those event times, they're accurate for both RoI and Valhallah. I'd hope the rest of the top 5/10 have at least the DPS of Valhallah and would therefore have similar fight times, although perhaps I'm being too generous. Kizant and I are both in both of those guilds, and I'm continuing under the impression that his claims are somewhat grounded in the environment in which he actually plays, just like mine are. Lower tier guilds will see far less impact from the EU nerf, but they also saw far less gain from the introduction from EU. The low tier guilds I play and have played with don't have Wizards losing to Mages very often, but without Kizant, Pie, and I transferring to some mid tier guild I don't really know where things would stand. Mages would sustain well, but the variation in duration, strategy, tanking ability, etc. all have a pretty significant impact on how we could play to maximize our DPS given the constraints. I don't think either of us are commenting on that hypothetical situation we aren't in.

    Beams are good, but they absolutely are separate from Volley's limitations. In RoI, the times I get to consistently use Beam are Skyfire and the raptors on T3.3. Tonight, for example, those are the only two times I used Beam. There are times you can use them on Cactus, T2.1, and T2.3, but they require enough adds actually grouped together in one spot to beam. It's not a replacement for consistent single target add damage, or a replacement for a lower threshold Beam like the Wizard one. The ability to Beam in pure AE situations is really strong, but it certainly doesn't encompass the majority of the situations with adds in EQ raids.

    It basically seems like you're unhappy I didn't list any advantage Mages have DPS-wise, no matter how unrelated to the topic at hand, when discussing the Volley swarm pet limit. I'm sorry? But what is actually both poor form and apocryphal is claiming that Mages were "typically double" Wizards prior to this change. That's just not true, and I'd love to see whatever parse you're talking about. I actually get the best Mage parses from your guild, and if your Wizards are doing half of that, it has nothing to do with balance. Ridiculous exaggerations are bad, so I'd appreciate it if you avoid them in the future.
    Evurkvest, IblisTheMage and Piemastaj like this.
  11. IblisTheMage Augur

    Not switching targets is not an option for us either. Only Necros stay, and I don’t know if they always do so.
    Sancus likes this.
  12. kizant Augur

    Pre-TDS but starting at what expansion? For wizards, the first time I can imagine anyone calling us a burst class is after Twincast, and we got some version of havoc, and our abilities got some shorter cool downs. That puts it around Underfoot/HoT which was shortly before I stopped raiding on the rathe. So, what for 4 years or so everyone was divided up into clear distinct roles of sustained or burst?

    Like I said, I wasn't playing during this time frame so maybe things were different and this is a really important distinction in which all DPS should be balanced around. It's just confusing to me as to why or when it was a thing outside of the necro/DoT problem or special one time burst abilities like HT or mana burn. Were there melee classes similar to necros where damage increases over time and they were competing for total damage while losing badly in 60s? Who fell into what bucket? You'd think it would be divided up evenly and in some obvious ways if this was a design goal instead of just special cases for balancing necros or zerkers or something.
  13. Sancus Augur

    Well I was going to try to look through old dev posts, but it seems they've deleted Elidroth's account and Aristo doesn't have any posts recent enough to actually show up. There are more class related posts in beta, but unfortunately those get deleted every year. I happen to have that fast DoT post bookmarked, but I couldn't find any particularly relevant posts from searching the archives, either.

    Kinda speaks to the sad state of communication regarding classes. I don't really think there's any clear design goal that has manifested itself in the past few years of class design. I just see large swings in different directions. Even a lot of things we all likely agree should be true haven't been for a good portion of the past few years.

    The distinction was pretty clear during the time you described, but it's not like it just vanished with the release of RoF or w/e. It's not as cut and dry as you or I might like, but I think you have to work hard to ignore the aptitude some classes (beyond berserkers and necros) have consistently had for certain durations. That includes Mages for sustained. I agree that Wizard design philosophy since RoF (or even VoA) doesn't really show great evidence of anything consistently.
  14. segap Augur


    It would be really nice if they could communicate their vision and direction once or twice a year. It does not need to be a developer either. It's a perfect task for the Producer to take the team's consensus and communicate it to the community. Make the disclaimer that they can change their minds at any time, etc. Just give us a little idea of what roles they see for the classes, what types of changes they're making to mechanics, what the dev team (vs. the design team) has as goals to update the client and stuff like that. They must have some sort of internal roadmap beyond releasing an expansion every 12ish months and monthly nerfs.

    Keeping the community engaged would seem like a good way to retain customers.
  15. Ibadan Kun'Tirel Augur

    We'll probably get a new magic based bolt. HOPEFULLY a new maloseniac eminence.
  16. IblisTheMage Augur

    Triggered by this, I went and looked at CoTF spells:

    Emminence *)
    COTHs *)
    Shield of Fate *)
    (metallic) bolt
    Mirror
    Cauldron
    Summoned ice clickie (5 charges, 1 sec casting)
    Remote RS

    The *) are the ones I have used regularily, some mages also liked the Cauldron...

    If they do a copy paste of CoTF, I really hope they make the clickie nuke 10 or 15 charges, they can quadruple the mana if they want :). I get tired in my memBraine if I have to recast it constantly and bag it...

    Not sure how to hit 23% delta with the above plus new expac special
  17. Sancus Augur

    Whelp, it's a Meteoric Bolt upgrade, a Dichotomic Companion upgrade, an Alliance upgrade, an Auspice of Eternity upgrade, and a Grant Icebound Paradox upgrade.

    Guess we'll make up the rest of the distance with tears?
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  18. Sheex Goodnight, Springton. There will be no encores.

    As is tradition.
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  19. menown Augur

    More than likely it will be a mixture of focus tab AAs with a ~15% increase to spells and upgrades to spells that you receive in non level increase expansions. I very much doubt that you would receive both a new Dicho and a new alliance in just 1 expansion.
  20. Sancus Augur

    That's simply incorrect. I'm not guessing, I'm looking at the spell file right now. Log in and I'm more than happy to discuss it with you.
    IblisTheMage likes this.