Rebalance of Wiz/Mage DPS vs. Melee DPS on Raids

As someone who started playing a Wizard in the actual old days. I can quote the reason I chose the class from the manual that came with the CD.

This whole burn vs sustained conversation is still relatively new and I don't fully agree with it. I don't exactly hate it either but there were many years where all we looked at was total damage and biggest hit because there wasn't exactly a burn to consider and originally Wizards could compete just fine in total damage. I wouldn't mind if we got back to that as the standard.

Alas, today Wizards lack the one thing every other class dominates - being the best at something. Pre-nerf you could count on Wizards for DPS. Today the class feels more like a toddler in day care.

For Ezbro: Should, Should, Should, Should, Should, Should, Should, Should. That should be enough to get me on your ignore list.

- Coag

That is what Sustained DPS is. Total damage, but over a period of time.

Bust is being used to describe DPS that hits hard and then has a lull, DPS on a curve, while sustained is being use to describe classes that are more even with DPS over time. They may burn but their damage curve is much more flat.

But sDPS is DPS average by the number of total seconds engaged. It's not a new concept, just new terminology.

Then your logic is sound in theory but is flawed in reality of gameplay. Many Wizards and mages melee. Since they have lower HP and Mitigation, with no defensive discs, casters should be doing more damage than melee while in melee range by your logic. Not only do casters get no bonuses for being in melee range, A good chunk of melee classes will out DPS Wizards even while Wizards kitchen sink it with melee and NPT.

Zerkers should have ranged abilities like rangers, being the inverse, where rangers can out DPS a zerker at ranged fights and zerkers out DPS a ranger in melee. The fact that zerker ranged DPS is so low, when their axes and the ability to hurl rocks was part of the initial class announcement, is a problem too, but not on topic of this thread, but for what it's worth, I support a zerker ranged DPS revision.

That the problem when the game came out wizard where not made to have sustained dps. They where made to go hard and fast dumping their whole mana pool in say 60 sec and doing massive dps then having nothing.

But things have gotten to the point where the lowered wizards over all bust dps to increase their sustained dps. which means wizard have lost the spot they used to have. and some wizards want that spot back.

when the game came out it for dps wizards ruled the short game necros ruled the long game and mages where in the middle when it came to dps. those days are gone. but some want back.

That mostly dates back to a time when few people knew how to actually play well. Burning your mana bar in 60 seconds was never the optimal way to play. It was good in a pinch of you overpulled and needed to dead some mobs quickly before you were overwhelmed, but it was a poor method over all.

What made that method popular was it was easy, and it let you be lazy.



Additionally, people vastly misunderstand and misinterpret what burst vs sustained meant. It never meant "Wizards win a 2 minute fight and lose any fight longer than 2 minutes" because that idea is idiotic.

The idea was always that over an average period of time (20-30 minutes) the dps classes would be more or less equal. The difference was their damage curve: Wizards spiking high and doing 70-80% of their potential in 2 minutes, and gradually levelling off, whereas a Necro took 2 minutes to ramp up before they even got going. But by the end of the fight the idea was always that they'd be roughly equal.

The problem now is wizzys are not good at either sustained or burst. Something needs to be done to bring wizzys back on par with other classes not lagging behind them.

Saying "should" does not make me ignore you, it just makes me disregard your post from there on out as anything to be worth my time, and I regret I took the start of that post seriously. It just became worthless.

At least we had the option of bursting things down quickly, when we needed to. Sustained damage was pretty much just a question of mana efficiency back then.

The point was made in good jest. Now, I see your zealotry for who you are. Though an ignore would be a welcome addition to this board.

That right there is a very important crux of the problem, but you misunderstand my logic a little - Melee expect to have to be in melee range, and somewhere along the way their design went in for more & more spell damage that only works in melee.

For casters their design has gone very wrong if their Ranged DPS is given such a large boost by meleeing it is worth the risk for them to do so even with worse mitigatation than melee classes - thing you are forgetting is they retain the choice of doing solid DPS at ranged that melee just do not have.
Up the damage melee can do at ranged they also can have a choice on a few really risky events to maybe range damage the mob, but the developers seem intent on making melee be forced to melee while making it so casters can gain a lot from melee at perhaps an over-inflated risk.

However the mitigation point is simply a red herring on raids, watch a huge ae rampage go off and everyone melee or caster that is too close is going to be taking a dirt nap, successfully surviving ae rampage often depends upon not mitigation but upon hitting a very slim razor thin sweet spot of distance because it doesn't matter what your mitigation is unless you are an actual tank with a shield equipped - if you aren't a tank in tank mode, you are dead. Melee shouldn't be expected to use dragon glyphs and armor of experience just to survive doing their role.

Some of the solution is instead of AE rampage that is going off pretty much every single combat round that can outright kill you to some predictable - oh here comes a huge AE rampage once in a while and here is a warning, better back out for a few seconds mechanics. Or if the ae rampage is so hard to avoid on purpose then it needs to not be one-shot capable and be able to be countered by active heals. Nobody needs the insanity of finding the perfect 3.175mm (1/8 of an inch) spot right ahead of the line of death, only for a tank to cough and kill half the raid because the mob flinched an inch.

I always thought zerkers should be capable of doing some serious ranged dps albeit lower than what they do in melee but its pretty close to pathetic, probably that aforementioned desire for melee classes to be forced to melee in pretty much every situation - some flexibility in classes would open up some novel raid design I feel.
But that's the way the designers want it I guess.

Interesting that you had to add the letter K to demonstrate how you think it should sound. Let me see..... L u c l i n.
Hmm, nope, no letter K in there. Because it's based on....
-luc-, root. -luc- comes from Latin, where it has the meaning "light. '' This meaning is found in such words as: elucidate, lucid, Lucite, lucubrate, pellucid, translucent.
E-loose-id-ate
Loose-id
Loose-ite
Loo-soo-brate
Pell-oo-sid
Trans-loose-ent

LOOSE-LIN


Also Gif is pronounced like Gift. Drop the T. Gif. Simple.

I think you nailed it!

I agree with your pronunciation of gif. However, the difference between those words and Luclin is that Luclin has an L right after the C.

loo-kyoo-breyt actually

I do the same thing with "literally", except in the very rare instance where it's used properly.

You focused on Luc - as light source

However, the letters prior to the C are irrelevant in the sound of the C.
This is where you are making a basic mistake in your English education, your understanding of what was already pointed out & your rationale in attempting to justify your version.

The letter after the C, not the ones before it changes the sound of the C to either an S or a K.
This is a rule of English Language known as the "rule of C" this is a general rule not an absolute, not all words obey this rule, but the vast majority do.

Grouping words to illustrate this rule makes it clear why "loose-lin" is wrong and why "luck-lin" is right.

Rule of C examples for "ce"

Ace - S
Lucent - S
Translucent - S
Source - S
Access - S
Fence - S

Notable exceptions:
"Soccer" - the ce here is a K sound or else it would sound like "Sok ser"
"Sceptic" (UK English ) the ce here uses a K sound or else it would sound like "Septic"

Rule of C examples for "ci"

Lucid - S
Elucidate - S
Lucite - S
Science - S
Pellucid - S

Rule of C examples for "cy"

Racy - S
Cyst - S

The Rule of C is really very reliable, so much so that many words deliberately replace the C with a K to comply with it:

"Skeptic" (US English) purposely spells the word with a K to comply with the rule of C.
Picknicking adds a K after the C to remove confusion about how it sounds, otherwise it would sound like "pick-nice-ing".

Luclin therefore is pronounced with the C as a K sound because the C in it is not followed by e,i or y.

Just like:

Cash
Accuse (both C sound like K here as neither are followed by e,i or y)
Acclimate (both C sound like K here as neither are followed by e,i or y)
Anecdote
Corrupt
Crash
Actor
Hiccup (both C sound like K here as neither are followed by e,i or y)
Cycle



This is the way.

Very nice breakdown of rules for me. I do not have English as my first language

Wizards and Mages as separate classes were a mistake.

When "the game came out", any wizard who ever tried dumping his mana bar on a mob would be dead long before he finished. On raids, all casters did essentially zero dps, no group wanted necros, and wizards couldn't solo for beans. Two decades of entitlement-mentality whining has resulted in the perception that all classes should be equally good at raiding, grouping, or soloing, and resulted in a bland homogenization of the classes.

There are people that prefer the old days, and people that prefer the situation today. Neither side is right; neither wrong. Personally, I think DBG (and SOE before them) is missing a bet by keeping classes perfectly identical across servers. There's no reason there can't be server-specific class rulesets, to go along with other server-specific changes. Players would naturally gravitate toward the server that best suited their playstyle.