Hi I'm playing my mage, and i only recently got Theft of Essence AA to rank 8, so i only assume rank 9, 10, and 11 are the same. Rank 1-7 seemed to work fine, perfectly infact. Rank 8+ however; Rank 8 is when the duration is near enough doubled and it starts having an effect on the swarm pets as well as your normal pet. That's great, it increases their damage substatially. but the buff on my pet shows as "Permanent" even though it has a duration of 240s according to AA, and about 6 minutes according to my timing tests (Assume this is due to gear) The other annoyance, and possibly the worst part is that you cannot refresh the timer by procing it again. it must to expire before you can proc it again. This leads to at best a few seconds that the buff isn't on, at worst several seconds due to it's 45% chance not procing. Rank 1-7 did have a timer and was refreshable before it expired. rank 8+ is not, I must assume this is a bug?
Will it still be an aura that affects all pets that are in range of the mage pet as it used to be, or will it be a buff that does not work on new pets until it prock's again. So you can be without the buff on new swarm pets for a long time if you do not perma spam the off many spell?
For the sake of people being able to see it, the below is largely verbatim from my PM to you: I appreciate you taking a look at fixing some of the bugs with Magician AAs. That said, the "bug fix" to Theft of Essence is actually a significant nerf to the AA line. The primary purpose of Theft of Essence is to provide benefits to swarm pets. It was changed in EoK to be an aura because swarm pets cannot practically be buffed by ATK buffs, and therefore had ATK values far too low for raid boss AC. It was so bad in EoK that they could not even land DI 20 (max) hits, and they therefore were getting to a point that they weren't worth casting. Theft of Essence was the solution, and it was an aura so that it could apply an enhanced ATK buff to all in-group swarm pets to compensate them for their lack of normal ATK buffs. While I'm not pleased that swarm pets will receive less ATK (given the removal of the Enhanced version), the much bigger issue with the change is that you need to re-proc Theft after summoning every RS pet for them to receive the buff. Every ~11 seconds in a raid, a Magician casts Riotous Servant. Those pets live for 42 seconds. With your change to the AA, they are no longer automatically buffed by Theft. Instead, we will have to re-proc it off of another spell, with only a 45% chance to proc it every ~10 seconds (really more like every 12 with our rotation). As a result, for a significant portion of the life of any swarm pet, it is probable that they will not have this buff on them, significantly reducing the average uptime and therefore their average ATK. Every time we summon a new swarm pet, we will again be subject to the RNG as far as the duration with which it benefits from Theft. In essence, we've traded what might've been 10-30 seconds to re-proc Theft every four minutes (essentially, ~90% uptime) for 10-30 seconds (1/2 their entire life) to reproc it on every new swarm pet we summon. To fix this, I really see two options: Revert the changes (the aura construct was fine). Change the proc rate to 100%, so at least we can follow an RS cast with a Barrage of Many cast to get the buff up quickly on our swarm pets. I'm also worried that the ATK conferred will be too low for swarm pets once NoS raids are tuned, but I'll post more data on that as Beta progresses. I'd also note (which was not in my PM), that this change actually makes ranks 1-3 of Theft of Essence slow pets. SPA 11 (Haste) has a baseline value of 100; any value below that results in a swing rate lower than the the default. Those ranks shouldn't have haste on them at all unless the Base1 value is greater than 100.
The targeting on this AA is also not working as described above. It's only proccing on pets within 60 feet of the Mage, and only if the Mage's pet is also within 60 feet of the Mage. Some scenarios to illustrate: Scenario 1 Testing with two Mages grouped together: Mage1 was at -1006.71, -155.19, 52.53 (84ft from Mage2's Pet) Mage1's Pet was at -972.67, -170.67, 51.44 (46ft from Mage2's Pet) Mage2's Pet was at -931.25, -190.97, 51.44 Mage1 proccing Theft buffs Mage1's Pet but not Mage2's Pet. In other words, Mage2's Pet being >60 feet from Mage1 is causing issues even though it's within 60 feet of Mage1's Pet. Scenario 2 Mage1 was at Mage2's pet (-930.82, -190.83, 52.07) Mage1's Pet was 70 feet from Mage1/Mage2's Pet (-997.7, -170.97, 52.07) Mage1 proccing Theft does not buff Mage1's Pet or Mage2's Pet. In other words, Mage1's Pet being >60 feet away prevents this buff from proccing on either pet.
This change is a serious nerf to Theft of Essence AA. The code just needs to allow auras to overwrite themselves instead of waiting for auras to fade/removed before they can be refreshed. This nerf also highlights another issue. That issue is swarm pets (both AA and spell) have too low of attack. But seriously, theft of essence needs to be relooked at again.
Please don't patch this as a fix. It break almost everything this AA was made to do. Really hurts Ritiius Servant dps value which in turn is tied to our synergy. I don't want to go back to not casting this spell cause it is so weak. Which than effect our of many line since we need pets to up it's value. Basically this change has multiple large impacts to how a mage operates period. If you can't get the aura to override just don't change it. Would rather have 90 percent uptime and know the swarms are doing something versus them rarely having the effect on swarms at all.
Having to manually reapply it to every new pet on top of it having an incredibly short range is far from a fix. Going from a minor inconvenience to a huge nerf in up time and ATK values is a weird way to fix a bug. Normally the only thing that 'should' get adjusted in a bug fix is the bug itself. It feels like if there was any testing done, it was done with a singular main pet and a singular swarm pet and it was shipped out as a solution whereas how it actually plays out is far from that. It would be nice to actually allow players to test things out before they are deemed live ready.
The original implementation for Theft of Essence was, frankly, a hack. Definitely functional but not well supported by code, which is something we weren’t happy with internally. Dropping the aura was the real target of this “fix,” which is something I should have been more forthcoming about. Basically, I should have expressed our intent to modify the core behavior of this AA from the beginning. That lack of communication on this was definitely a mistake on my part. Double trouble; its pretty clear our changes just flat-out missed the mark. Fortunately, we’re in beta right now, which is one of the reasons it made sense to move forward on this change (since there are plenty of players actively testing stuff and letting us know how badly we screw up when we inevitably do). As such, we are definitely going to continue iterating on this while taking your feedback into account as we go. And in keeping with that direction, the first thing we’re doing is to roll back this change. So next steps - since we are stuck with the aura for the foreseeable future the best we can do to improve the current functionality of this AA is to give it a 100% proc rate. It’s pretty clear that the buff from this AA is meant to have a 100% up time, despite it’s 45% proc rate. So for now, we’ll make it possible to refresh the aura almost immediately after it drops. This change will be on beta tomorrow.
