There seems to have always been a massive disparity in strength among these abilities. It seems odd that the idea of these is to be an extremely strong ability for each class that can be used every 1 or 5 minutes and greatly increase your character's and or friends strength but some of them fall insanely short of what I'd assume they should be. Warrior: Amazing class defining ability Sk: Meh. I just use it as an agro ability, which is great but not necessary. Heal is fairly moderate in strength since it's scripted as a lvl 250 spell and if you need constant heals it's a fairly meh all round. Pal: probably same concept as sk. Bard: a minor mana regen ability mostly? Cleric: kinda good I guess, be better if it mitigated damage too imo. Ber: Pretty good, sucks it's damage got cut in half recently tho but it was probably too good to begin with. Rogue: fairly good iirc Shm: Fairly good iirc but just another proc to add to the lag Rng: fairly good Monk: fairly good Bst: one of the strongest abilities in the game Druid: idk, looks underwhelming but I'm not a druid. Mag: small dps increase in certain situations but seems mostly bad from what I got from Sancus Enc: idk, looks kind of good I think? Not an enchanter Wiz: pretty useless right? Could be great if they dramatically increased damage and reduces cast time or made it twincastable. It's embarrassing that the devs didn't make a simple adjustment to the damage on this to make it worthwhile. Necro: idk, think it's mostly bad unless you need a heal here and there? Thoughts?
Oh, I forgot all about our dicho thing. Thought you were posting about alliance. Yea lets bury dicho. On the dark side of the moon.
Abilities have always had this problem but a minor note, Shaman dicho is more then just a proc it also helps with an added heal.
There are a few key problems with Composites: Not very much feedback was taken into account for the initial TBM versions, and therefore some classes got useful designs and some got unuseful designs. The scaling since has been completely disassociated with the scaling of other abilities. This means even Dichotomic abilities that were good in TBM have in many cases become undertuned. Combat ability Composites can be (and in some cases are) fairly bad, but they have no opportunity cost, so they still get used. Spell Composites have an opportunity cost in terms of time spent casting (as well as spell slots) and therefore have to be better than a spell you were already going to cast or you would never use them. To elaborate on the issue of scaling a bit, I'm going to use Wizard Dichotomic Fire and compare it to Ethereal Skyblaze, as they're both relatively "vanilla" DDs (apart from Composite being level 250). In TBM: Dichotomic Fire 6: 127710 Ethereal Skyblaze: 33330 Effective Base (10% EoL&D): 36663 In ToL: Composite Fire 6: 155233 (+21.6%) Ethereal Ignition: 92123 (+176.4%) Effective Base (37% Focus AA, 10% LRI): 135,421 (+269.4%) That doesn't account for increases to all of the various foci that won't affect Composite Fire (but will focus Ethereal Ignition), further increasing the scaling gap between the two. If next expansion's progressive spells follow the same +10% pattern that TBL/CoV had, the gap will actually further increase due to focus AA upgrades. 155,233 sounds like a big base damage number, but when factoring in all of the things (notably, Twincast) that can't modify Composite Fire, it's worse than standard Wizard spells (not to mention the resource cost). It wasn't amazing when it was first introduced, but it's no surprise it's fallen so far behind given effective DD base damage has nearly quadrupled while Composite base damage has increased a mere 21%. In a perfect world, what needs to happen is: The Composites that did not have useful designs need to be altered, which probably will take actual communication with class communities to figure out what will be useful. For the Composites that have reasonable designs but have tuning issues, scaling needs to be brought in line with how other spells have scaled since their introduction. If those aren't realistic options, easier "band-aid" fixes include: Using the model of Ranger Composite (Composite Fusillade). This casts the Ranger Summer's nuke and does archery damage. This generally means that casting Composite can't be worse DPS than just casting Summer's. In other words, this solution at least removes the opportunity cost from spell-based Composites because they do something you would've done anyway and something more. Composite Fire could do its nuke and Ethereal Skyblaze (or Claw, or whatever else) for example. Alternatively, they could all be made AAs, as, again, doing so would at least remove the opportunity cost. I would note that these changes are proposed in the context of making Composite spells useful (and, therefore, making progression rewards meaningful). It's definitely important to note that, from an aggregate balance perspective, the strongest classes in many cases are not the classes with useful Composites.
In a perfect world yes, they should all be about equal. That said, all classes should be about equal in usefulness as well and that has never been the case in the history of the game and changes from expansion to expansion. Asking for a particular ability to be about equal among all classes just isn't going to happen. That said, I'd support improving some of the worst dicho abilities, and I think most people would, especially if they plan on continuing this line of spells in the coming expansions.
About equal may be impossible, but this game has a huge problem with virtually if not literally useless abilities that get formulaic upgrades.
The same can be said for the Focus AA list of every class. The ones that are disjoint from the spells they focus (either by level to attain, or not inclusive of the entire spell line) are chronic problems.
I am sure Kizant has some insight on this as well, the wizard composite spell is basically broken i.e it does not stack with burns and does not twin-cast which was already mentioned above. For instance my flashbroil rk3 spell has base dmg of 37198 will out nuke the composite spell. The current expansion ethereals for the wizard way out power that composite fire spell even though on paper it has more base damage.
Enchanter: Composite Reinforcement (max progression) 1. Adds a variable proc chance to spells (which also decreases current hate by 12%) 2. Increases mana slightly by 3103 3. Increases spell damage (before crit) by 4812 It's still viable and raid enchanters don't really run out of mana as much as other classes do. I'm sure this may be a different store for a group-geared enchanter. It continues to be part of our spell rotations. It has a base mana cost of 13,831 but is reduced by mana pres to approx 7200 to 10,000 mana. Druid: Composite Winds (max progression) This is basically a large remote nuke. It nukes the target and heal's the target's target. 1. Composite North Wind: deals 78,008 damage 2. Heals target's target: 35,984 HP It has a base mana cost of 13,125. However, with mana pres and maintaining a wolf ability on you 100% of the time, the variable mana cost is expected anywhere from approx 3900 to 7800 (using just group wolf as an example here). It sounds good right? It's not when you look at how much druid DoT spells cost ranging anywhere from around 8000 mana up to 15,000 mana. Also, druids don't have any AA means of getting mana back like some other classes do. DPSing druids go through mana like water compared to all other caster classes. This spell works decently still on single-target mobs and group missions. I like using it in group missions since they finish up pretty quick. However, try using it on a 20 minute long raid event while DoTing multiple mobs... fuggedaboutit. It took me some convincing to eventually drop it on my druid. DPS was not noticeably affected. Equality on the Dicho Front? The only way I think any equality is to exist on such spells is if they all acted like buffs instead. The mana cost is also a huge draw-back for some of these when you think about a new, group geared player coming into the mix. In fact, when you look at what progression level 1 of these all cost, they are virtually the same as progression level 6.
No. Not everything is equal. Classes are not equal, epics are not equal, abilities are not equal, etc. What I would say is that all dicho/composite should be useful to the class. For some they are near mandatory, others rarely get used. But you can also have the same discussion about epics- they all should be useful for their class, but some do not last longer than an expansion or two for certain classes. Now don't get me wrong and bite my head off, I do see your point. I just don't think the word "equal" applies.
These seem to have the same pattern as epic 2.0. Some classes' epic 2.0 is only worth being wall decoration whereas some others' are mandatory to have.
While that comparison works somewhat, this is different in that they have been updating them every couple expansions. I highly expect to see upgrades in the next expansion. By contrast the epics were last touched around 17-18 years ago.
This isn't the only line of spells that have the issue of being useless (or nearly useless) yet they get updated frequently.
Most puzzling are the useless ones that get hundreds of focus AAs each expansion. My main point was this is more likely to change than epics, like the huge caster upgrades recently or bard DoTs suddenly becoming essential with (IIRC) ToV
I posted about this in the class forums a while back, but a list of Enchanter spells that have no real use: Perplexing Constriction Polyluminous Assault Chromashear Chromatic Flare Psychological Appropriation Tears of Xenacious People complain/speculate all the time about what is a good use of the devs time, maybe next level increase expansion take a look at what spells actually get used and cut the rest to reduce development time. Also I agree that some classes need their composite spells looked at, on non-level expansions these are one of the few upgrades casters get along with alliance (which have their own issues that need to be addressed).
Fun idea: I wish they'd make the mage dicho a 3m recast, made it so the mage "inhabited" the companion for a few ticks and gave the pet a massive DPS boost to make it a high-risk, high-reward spell. I don't think they should all be equal, but I do think that they should all be useful. I also think the Dichotomic pattern of meaningful, content based upgrades is more fun than the rk 1->3 we get from spells. If it were up to me the next expansion would only have rk1 spells with 3-5 of the most important spells having significant upgrades that came from specific content (achievements, specific named drops etc).
Sorry, equal was probably wrong word. I meant roughly equal in that they are all powerful and useful to the class that casts it. "Roughly" equal meaning they're all good with variable levels of goodness between them still.
Make them equal kinda like how epic 2.0 are all equal? my 2.0 was junk when it was new. Got good look thats it.
Equal? I dont really care. I would be happy if Dicho was something every class would acually use. The nec spell for example is top dot mana and does dmg like the bottom scrape because the spell is lvl 250 and not focused properly.
I'm not really a numbers person with the game so I trust what I'm told for the most part. I was told the bard one isn't worth it, then I was told maybe it is, then I was told "maybe" so I started using it again. It was definitely worth it when it was basically infinite mana for the group...
