Fixing raiding Wizards during the lvl 70 block

Wizards are supposed to be THE raid DPS class. On these servers, level 70 Wizards are a waste of a raid spot. This is sad to me. In Classic-GoD on these servers you see tons of wizards who are passionate about the game. Due to tuning issues the wizard population completely disappears in OOW, they get fed up and quit. By TSS when they're decent again the damage is done. A few simple tweaks to improve the class would stop this from happening.

Major TLP raiding Wizard issues in the level 70 block:

1) Sustained DPS in a raid setting is awful. This is due to trash mob resistances, high wizard mana bar turnover, and mobs frequently dying before wizards can land a nuke. When not burning, wizards are better off spellshielding raid members or disspelling mobs or tanking than DPSing. This is not what the class was designed to do.

2) A Wizard's only disc is completely unusable if the fight is longer than 90 seconds. In it's current form, Frenzied Devastation is nothing like Prolonged Destruction was when OOW was current. Wizards in OOW on TLPs have far more mana than they did back in the day due to heroic changes, yet can't use all 20 counters of Frenzied Devastation with Ancient. This can't possibly be intentional.

3) Burn DPS is fine if the fight is 90s or less, but Wizards can only use their disc once every 72 minutes and have to med for >10 minutes after the fight.

4) Wizards don't synergize in a raid setting. There are 5 aDPS abilities that affect Wizards before DoDH: Cleric spell haste, Season's Fury (Druid Epic), Spirit of Vesagran (Bard Epic), Ancient: Call of Power, and Auspice of the Hunter.

Season's Fury is limited to 20 counters and they mostly get eaten up by hybrid nukes that are low damage, low cast time.

Spirit of Vesagran is, in ideal circumstances (aka 33% uptime) a 4% crit rate increase.

Auspice of the Hunter only hits a Wizard when it's MGB'd because it doesn't make sense to put a Ranger and Wizard together as the ability is far more aDPS for melee classes.

Ancient: Call of Power is effectively 0-5% postcrit spell focus due to Wizards walking around with 1-25% from Improved Familiar.

You would think a class that was designed to do damage in a raid setting would gain more from being around a raid than any other class, in actuality they gain the LEAST!

............

Solutions:

1) Increase the - resist adjust on level 68-70 wizard raid DPS spells. Increase from -10 to -50: Corona Flare, Ancient: Core Fire, Gelidin Comet, Mana Weave. Increase from 0 to -50: Thundaka. -50 resist adjust isn't going to alter the way wizards play, it's just going to make more of their nukes land on trash mobs that are up for less than 10 seconds. They're not going to be able to hit Hanvar with Ancient: Core Fire due to this change for example. Raid debuffs will still be required for bosses, etc. They just get to reliably damage trash now. The devs during DoDH were clearly comfortable with -50 resist adjust raid DPS spells (see Ether Flame), it makes sense to extend them to all wizard raid dps spells.

2) Change the focus on Academic's Robe of the Arcanist's from 1-55% damage focus for Ancient: Core Fire to 1-25% manapres for Ancient: Core Fire. This is an obvious upgrade as casting 2.5% more Ancient's in a manabar is far more valuable than 0-10% more postcrit damage per cast. Decreasing manabar turnover improves sustained DPS at the expense of burn DPS.

3) Remove the 4 counter limit on Academic's Intellect. As it is now, clicking that BP allows you to cast 4 ancients at 4 secs/cast plus GCD vs 4.56 secs/cast plus GCD. Removing the counters would theoretically enable 7 ancients at 4 secs/cast plus GCD. You're removing at best 1.68 secs of dead time from a burn, around 85 DPS. Wizard burn DPS isn't amazing, it's fine, but there's room for this small upgrade. The real benefit is on trash mobs you're less likely to see the mob die before your nuke lands, and you don't have to worry about an interrupt or fizzle eating a counter.

4) FIX FRENZIED DEVASTATION. The mana penalty portion needs to be properly tuned such that a raid geared character can use all 20 counters with Ancient. The reuse timer needs to be reduced as well. In no way is this disc overpowered to the point that it needs a 72 minute cooldown. 50% reduction in both mana penalty and reuse timer would make this disc useful and valuable, as opposed to a loldisc you use to make numbers go brrrr over a 90 second fight that your guild is in 0 danger of losing.

5) Retune Harvest of Druzzil to account for larger mana pools. A raid geared wizard in real PoP had around 7,000 mana. These days they have around 8,000. Harvest needs a 15-20% increase to account for heroic stat inflated manapools.

6) Remove the 20 counter limit on Season's Fury. Else, restrict the effect to spells with minimum cast time of 6s.

7) Increase the spell critrate mod on Auspice of the Hunter III to 20%. It hits casters once every 72 minutes per raiding Ranger, making it noticeably good for those casters is not breaking the game.

8) Add 25% crit rate multiplier to Ancient: Call of Power. It makes sense to have the class designed to help other people do damage in a raid setting to have a spell that helps the class designed to do damage in a raid setting.

[Cries in Mage]

I expected a "monks outparse me, fix plz" post but this is actually pretty well thought out. I wouldn't go as far as saying wizards are a waste of a raid spot, but there's not really any compelling reasons to have them over any other dps class.

No they aren't. Wizards are but one of several classes that are supposed to be THE raid DPS. Wizards get ports and evacs, so they have some utility, more than rogues who are also supposed to be THE raid DPS. Meanwhile Berserkers, who get virtually no utility at all, don't fare quite so well in the level 70 stretch.

You can't fix just one or four expansions at a time without a major class rebalancing across the whole entire progression timeline, which they literally cannot accomplish with current staffing or even the staffing of 10+ years ago when these things were set in stone.

Why not?

Because class balance across 27 expansions is a MASSIVE undertaking, with thousands of variables that change constantly. It literally changes every expansion every 2-3 months as various live changes are made. If you hired 1000x the DPG dev staff, maybe together they could balance EQ across every expansion, but I doubt it. You could move the entire WoW/Blizzard staff to EQ tomorrow, and give them a year, and they could not come close.

Sure, agreed on this reasoning, just not your conclusion. To me these sound like great reasons to focus rebalancing efforts on a small segment of expansions at a time, rather than just ignoring any rebalancing efforts at all because they don't have the resources to rebalance the entire game in one swoop. OP's suggestions are specific to level 70 era abilities and would not affect earlier or later expansions. That's of course if they choose to undertake any TLP rebalancing efforts at all, which I do agree is rather unlikely

I would LOVE for them to do this, but the two interns they MIGHT assign to this task would not be successful in doing it well. They don't have the resources to even balance a small segment of the TLP progression. If they did, they would have been doing this 10 years ago when they had 10x the resources they do now.

Also, if they were to focus on rebalancing "a small segment of expansions at a time" they should not start by focusing on the very least popular serment of expansions in EQ history. By all objective measures, the level 70 expansions, especially PoR and the other expansions towards the end of the 70 stretch, (dodh and don) have been the least successful expansions in the history of the franchise, in terms of player retention. DoDH is a decent expansion once players get into it, but PoR and DoN on either side of it kill the entire stretch.

Oh come on.

So the least successful portions of the TLP stretch AREN'T where they should start?!?! Seems to me like that would be exactly where they ought to start.

I agree with Machen. Should the proposed changes be implemented? Probably. Will they be? Almost certainly not.

Well said. I main switch from my wizard at the start of omens cause it was just so painful. I went necro cause for something different but Anguish is absolutely killing eq for me right now. There are 2 fights a caster can participate in anguish. The rest are completely MR and or pointless to assist with.

Wizards are dropping like flys

I agree they do suck during these eras BUT, oow/don you should still be able to make top 10 on raid parses & dodh/por you should be able to make top 5. Speaking from experience and yes you will have to try hard and milk it for everything its worth. Just hang in until SoD/RoF easy money.

You aren't topping parses in these eras unless either the melee are completely lacking in gear or not trying, which stops being a fair comparison if it's "fully geared and tryharding wizard vs semi afk boxed monk" or a similarly unfair comparison. Meanwhile, hanging in there until SoD is literally 2 years to wait for the game to stop being so awfully imbalanced.

On the contrary, if you are going to fix something, you SHOULD start with what's broken! These eras are the worst for balance aside from maybe vanilla itself and none of the nostalgics are going to cry about changes post-ldon. Let the new hires or interns or whatever wet their feet with oow resists and deathknell where even outright breaking things is more likely to help than hurt.

Yeah, to be fair when you 5 split omm & 3 split vish it can be a bit light I believe dodh/por were only 2-3 splits

As someone who played Wizard from Classic through to Gates and recently returned with Mangler I understand what you mean, Wizards are competitive until Omens when melee start getting really silly with gear and the melee balance changes for live.

I think your suggestions are quite reasonable, and wouldn't make Wizards wildly different in the 70 era. Though I will say your changes don't address the rain cycle which was a staple of the classic to GoD eras. I like that cycle, it makes a lot of damage, I often miss that cycle even though it meant i needed to be pressing buttons every few seconds rather than a melee who autoattacks, discs and goes afk.

I prefer to be the person on the parse being at the keyboard rather than the semi-AFK person topping the parse.

From a min-maxing standpoint on TLPs there's no reason to be a caster (other than enc) from levels 70-85. (I haven't seen TSS+ Necro since revamp)

They will almost certainly not nerf any classes to bring them down to this era of caster level, and buffing casters will only make the problem worse, so take it in stride. Much like I advocate nobody plays a Rogue prior to PoP (TSS if I'm being 100% honest), when PoP hits casters should strongly consider making a new character for a couple years or disable GamParse if you don't want to play a C string DPS.

I am going to side with this as well, even while Machen is absolutely on the money about resources with this game/company and that doing any TLP rejigging on classes is unlikely.

The way EQ has done most of its class balance is through the live game - class balance absolutely changed over time to fix many of the problems classes had because they tried to mainly address things during the development phases of each expansion so OoW problems with a couple classes got some attention at least during the development of DoN, problems with classes in say TSS had some attention in TBS - and so on & so forth through EQ's developmental history & they do some minor tweaks here & there along the way & maybe a class has so many issues build up over time that they have to do a DoT revamp like they did with Shaman & Druid & later the Necromancer (the latter of which is still ongoing).

I do think though that doing any work on classes for TLP balance issues that crop up probably should focus in the eras where the game was weakest.
Specifically that level 70 stretch feels weak, it aged badly, and it does have a bunch of issues for multiple classes, Enchanters were uninspired still reeling from deliberate nerfs in the post PoP era, Wizards had been left on the backburner for a while by that point & most of those problems are difficult to fix because they are intricately tied into the design choices of the day, TTK on raid trash as an example.

All that said, prior to Prathun & the other two seasoned devs leaving I think the team DID have an appetite for doing more for TLP servers & one way they could do that is a little more focus on addressing some class weaknesses over the full range of expansions, the 70 era is almost universally regarded as one of the weakest eras of the game's history & could use some additional work to polish it up & reinvigorate it a bit. How that appetite looks now with a team hard pressed to get the next expansion done & the future roadmap is hard to fathom. But, if something can be done I absolutely would say that the 70- stretch is where they should start off.

All that said, by TSS wizards are pretty badass again and it is definitely worth remembering that classes wax & wane in power over the course of the game's expansions, weak phases exist but so do strong ones for almost every class (Post-Omens Shadowknight might be the sole exception).

I know I'm just shouting into the wind, but I wanted to add my 2 cp as well.

I've played for 20 years off and on. I've also played on nearly every TLP and for whatever reason wizard was the most fun class I've ever raided with. I enjoyed it from Classic all the way to GoD. I enjoyed the DPS competition, I loved being able to port around quickly, and I really just loved the class as a whole. I didn't have to be top dps on every fight to have a good time, but I loved that there was a chance to beat the melee on most fights. However, OoW there is as close to zero chance as I've ever seen. I honestly didn't know it was a thing and I was really looking forward to the expansion because I've never experienced it. I even submitted a bug report like an idiot because I though something was broken. I was essentially told, "Just want 2 years until TSS and you are good again". Who the heck wants to play a class for 2 years just so they can be good again?

I know DBG has a skeleton crew, and I'm aware this game is 20 years old, but somebody really needs to start investigating the balance issues.

I would argue that it's content, not class balance, that makes these eras bad. Balancing wizard dps is not going to turn PoR into a great expansion that everyone loves.