At level 60, wizards had bane nukes for giants and dragons. These spells debut in the original Velious and the idea of bane nukes for wizards never really came up again past this point (to my knowledge). I heard many people were not into these nukes are they were situational due to the fact they only worked on certain enemies. Personally, i think these nukes were a good idea conceptually because they encourage wizards to do different spells for different opponents. Situational nukes are something that should be synonymous with high level wizard game play- I think we should have more nukes useful in choice situations that distinguish themselves as superior to our traditional spell weave. Wildscorch Strike and Dissident Fire both count as highly situational nukes as well that can be better than our normal options under the right circumstances. Sadly, these options don't have as high of a payout as they used to because our Claw and Ethereal spell lines are growing faster than other useful spells are. In a way, it feels like wizard spell choice is getting boiled down to it's essence too much- I don't think spell choice should get reduced to a point where a few nukes mean way more than the rest of them do. It certainly should not get to the point where wizards don't need to think about situational nukes at all to play at high levels of DPS, but in a way it seems like that's the direction we are going in. So, that's why I was thinking about bane damage spells and why they are a cool concept. Mages/ Druids have current content bane damage for summoned creatures, Necros have bane dots for plants and share bane damage to Undead with Paladins and Clerics. Perhaps wizards could gain bane nukes back for Giants and Dragons. We may be getting another year of Veilous with the non-level increase expansion next year, which would be a perfect time to bring back these dead nuke spell lines. They originally came out in Velious and could join the ranks of non-level increase spell upgrades that we get going forward. The general baseline for the spells could be set by being a better option than our Ethereal Fire spell line when available to use - whether that be faster cast time, more base damage, lower mana cost or some combination of these three things. I am curious about what the community thinks about this. Naturally, I'm not advocating that we gain the ability to do bane damage in exchange for losing some power on our general DPS potential, but rather it be an option to do more against those specific monster types. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Always good to see an idea (even if I'm not going to agree with it). The bane nukes were a one-off … results from two quests in Velious. They were special and never considered real spell lines for wizards (don't forget those two peridots per cast either … and that 6 second base cast time). If I also remember correctly, the draw wasn't the bane damage so much (since I the best fire nuke was comparable at the time). .. it was the unresistable part. I'm not sure how that translates into modern EQ now. The other classes you mentioned have had their banes for pretty much the history of each class, with many upgrades over time. I'm not in favor of adding more extensions to these two spells because nothing in EQ is given freely by the developers (well, unless you are shadowknights or dot classes … yeah, we're all seeing the ToV parses ...). Until ToV, ask any Paladin how much they enjoyed having Slay Undead held over their heads when trying to ask for damage increases. As it is, it has taken basically an expansion of undead only for Paladins and Shadowknights to be roughly equal in dps (yes, as great as all the undead are for paladins, shadowknights are still right there with them on dps in ToV … any short term difference are usually based upon how often slays occur … but over long term parsing in same groups, pretty much a dead heat). [I've played as a paladin as my tank in my person group for 16 straight years...and at any point, except ToV, I'd have given up Slay Undead for real damage increases at any time. And unless the next expansion has as many undead as ToV, I will go back to wanting to trade Slay for real damage.] Bane damage is the wrong avenue to go down in my opinion. I do agree with your general premise that we are getting a little locked into a spell lineup (although nowhere near as bad as mages). And having flavorful options to add to our spell bar would be more fun. I'm just not sure the developers understand casters (particularly dd casters) well enough to not produce one more underwhelming thing for us … or worse, give us something that is balance altering … that will then get nerfed into oblivion. Our situational nukes are less about good choices and more about developer restrictions/loopholes. We're one of the few classes that does not keep their dissident on cooldown due to the twincast restrictions on our dissident. Honestly, I don't consider casting dissident fun … it's a chore. Wildether with an old TBM belt isn't fun either … it's a loophole in lining up an old spell with an old proc. With the ridiculousness in procs as a percentage of our total damage, most the time on raids I feel like a proc street walker instead of a casting wizard. I do it, but the fun part about being a raiding wizard for me is having great raid situational awareness (knowing what you can cast on adds based upon how fast your raid kills, squeezing the last bit of power from your adps, meleeing smartly, ae usage, etc.) and some casting rotation stuff. But that's just my opinion on the fun of wizarding and I know others have different concepts. Developer time is limited. If they are going to spend time on wizards, I'd rather tackle the hard stuff - losing twincast restrictions on spells, spell cast times, the global cooldown time, greater self adps, converting overflow crit chance to increase in crit damage … and many others.
the Bane nukes addressed a specific need - dragons couldn't be cast on with normal spells from outside melee range, and warriors didn't have any (literally any, they had none) agro abilities I'd prefer to stay away from specialized spells like that
Yeah, I think the cast time and reagent part date when the spells came out more than anything. Pretty much all the big nukes had really long cast times. They would need to redo it for modern EQ to make them the same or faster than ethereal fire to make sense imo (overall better than Ethereal Fire to really give incentive to use it, just not a crazy amount that would make it OP). And the reagent cost could probably go away too. I agree with this potential danger, which is why I wanna stress that I think the potential of bane nukes should be considered more like what Necros or mages have. Necros rely on their plant dot for the right mobs or when a mob is debuffed to be able to use it. However, if they can't use it, they are by no means weak. And with mages, their ability to do something to summoned creatures is pretty much just a little bonus, and does not factor in to their overall power against general mobs. Zerkers suffered stagnation treatment due to having decap for a long time too, just like you mentioned with Paladins. I'd hope if we gain bane nukes back that everyone would have enough sense to view it as a small additional bonus, and not much else. As other modern examples, it seems like Rogues and Rangers aren't getting held back from having their low level killing abilities either. So... I guess it's a toss up about whether or not classes suffer overall from having situational damage if we go off of history. I'd be happy to see the devs tackle useless spell lines among casters in general as well. Kizant made a good consolidation list of spells worth keeping last year when the subject of useless spell lines came up. Mages have a few bad ones as well. Dev development time is precious, of course. That's why I think it's not a bad idea to keep upgrading useless spell lines. Plus, then they need to make Faycites for them too (which apparently takes a lot of time). Upgrading spell lines with potential and scrapping all of the useless ones would be nice. Thricewoven Radiance is another spell with a cool name and concept that would need considerable re-balancing to become useful- but it has potential.
There's zero harm in having an extra bane based spell like some other classes. I don't think we should expect Aristo to make any serious spell changes for wizard but copy/pasting a spell another class has and changing the target type may not be impossible.
IANAW. It would be interesting if wizards could choose a bane and have something(s) extra in their toolkit to go along with it. Ice, fire, nature, dragons, etc. If dragons are my specialty, maybe I can "master" locating their kind, travelling to their homelands, attacking, defending, etc. I know, I know...dev time, complications, nerfs, not everyone will like it....but not having everyone be exactly the same can be fun though.
We kinda had that before with the different familiars and they took that away for us Pretty much all the specialization stuff has been taken from us over the last several years. Really, we're just mages now without pets, but better magic nukes and have cold nukes (to be fair, mages are just wizards without cold and most magic spells, but with pets). It's sort of ridiculous how our spells/powers overlap these days (we have improved familiar, they have elemental form, etc.) Before I'd like the devs to add anything like you're thinking, I'd really like the devs to sit down and think about what they want the two classes to be in solo/molo game, group game and raid game. Cause I worry that if they continue down the same path AND they manage to fix the pet issues on raids, there going to be a whole lot of wizards riding raid benches due to lack of dps.
So … we have some time ... Let's say, for argument sake, that they are adding an updated Giant bane and Dragon bane spells. And these work on the undead giants and dracolich types for ToV, including raid bosses. And let's assume that the spells ONLY work on the specific types, but are unresistable (like the old spells). And all adps that works on ethereals and claws would also work on these (so tc, etc). What's the minimum that these spells would have to look like before you would consider adding them to your spell bar in the following situations: -group fighting in ToV Kael -group fighting in ToV EW -raid Sleeper -raid Vindi and AoW (yes, there are only a few giants in AoW) Does it need to be a big damage, big cost (better than Ethereal)? Better ratio than claw?
To an extent, It may have to do with the devs not having the time to make every class greatly different from each other. I'm sure it's a lot easier to try to tune our classes how they want when we work in incredibly similar ways. They do this with how they tune a lot of melee DPS things too. I kind of wonder in which era wizards and mages were the most different from each other overall. I've only played since ROF so I can't really answer that well. I'd really like classes to continue down the path of feeling different from each other. That might be hard with how many classes EQ has vs the dev team size (or impossible) but I hope it can be worked towards over time. It feels like there is not much point to play separate classes when things get too close together.
As long as it does more DPS than Restless Ice Comet I'd use it during full burn and it would have been good during RoS raids against the fire resist dragon. I don't mind having some spells that have limited use.
While we're talking about bane nukes, I'd like to mention that Porlos' Fury and Hsagra's Wrath are currently pointless in velious. Tears of Solusek/Prexus has a better damage to mana ratio, is nearly unresistable against the mobs the bane spells are good against, and doesn't cost 2 peridots a cast. I like the idea of quested spells that are specific to enemies, but they need to actually be better against those enemies.
I don't know why we would want more super conditional spells to make things more convoluted when we have so many barely used spells. Just pick a couple lesser used nukes and add a bane component to them like the cleric nukes versus undead and summoned. Gives extra life to a line that could use more advantages. Lures would seem like a pretty solid pick imo.
That's also a good idea. I do wish the devs would salvage spells with potential and just discontinue spells with no good purpose. As long as the base damage component is good enough to outpace / replace one of our single target options in the normal lineup when fighting the right mobs.
Be very careful what you wish for... A magician's bane damage nuke is worse DPS than our lowest DPS fire based nuke used during raids. So, a copy/paste of that nuke, but affecting dragons and giants would be worse than a wizard's lowest DPS nuke, by a long shot We're talking Cloudburst Stormbolt damage, for you, but with a 1.5s cast time, NOT instant cast... Doesn't really matter if it's only usable on a certain type mob, if it's less DPS than your worst non bane damage spell, it will still almost never get used... Sure, they're great on mana, but still a garbage nuke. IMO, developers place way too much emphasis on damage per mana. If the damage isn't there, it really doesn't matter how little mana it uses, it will still rarely be used.
I agree. I think mage construct spells should fit the bill of being better than one of your standard nukes too, for the record. I think your bane nukes could be buffed to be more viable than they are now. Dzarn made it seem like he wanted to make some useless or weak clicks better before beta. I hope we keep going in that direction until the full spell kit (or most of it) has a use somewhere. Some mage temporary damage shields should probably get looked at as well. Unless i'm missing something big, I'm not really sure what the point of Burning Skin is supposed to be since it's only four charges lol At least it seems like they got it a bit more right for the necro bane dots.
Obliterate has a 12% chance to proc a 400k nuke. It has a good type 3 aug and a 25% focus AA like everything else. On average it'll hit for another 48k base damage on top of the 26k because of that proc. Plus with a 1.5 second cast time it would be able to proc Arcane Fusion. I know for a Mage nuke that might not seem like much but for our weak wizard nukes that would definitely be worth using.
The 400k nuke proc is unfocusable/SPA 79 and adds a 12-17 second debuff that prevents any other cast of that spell (from any Mage or Druid) from proccing the same nuke. The nuke got a large enough boost for ToV that it is worth using in very specific situations, but outside of Improved Twincast it is a DPS loss to put it in our spell weave. It's, like, okay, but it's super misleading to multiply the proc base by its chance and count that as "48k base damage."
Ya, 400k unfocusable damage, with a 12% proc rate, that blocks others' spells from proccing same... not that good, pretty crappy in fact, and in no way can be considered equal to 48k base damage, heh. But hey, it only costs 2k mana... BTW, since magicians 'mirror' wizards so much... can we get some of that 100% plus crit rate self activated AA stuffs please?
