Updates needed for Magician "of the Many" line due to 6/13/23 Test patch notes

I don’t think the conversation should be about how to maintain clash and those likely unintended cumulative effects, but how to normalize the mechanic across all spells. As a player who hasn’t seen the post underfoot era, information that adds to the understanding of this spell line and it’s major contribution to being an asset, especially in a raid environment, is very helpful. The hope is that, if a change can be made, that changing spell damage numbers is an easy fix compared to maintaining different spell lines/variants given that a change is being now. This likely wouldn’t be a conversation if the spell line wasn’t being looked at, but while it is, let’s try to address it correctly as opposed to an adjustment that doesn’t consider all of the player base (tlp and live).

Quoted for emphasis. I've suffered through a year of absolute joke DPS because I keep hearing it's about to get better. It's laughable how awful mage DPS is from OOW through TBS. Out of frustration I leveled a zerker to 75 toward the end of TSS and it was equalling my maxed out mage dps with autogranted AA's and a rod of shaded wrath. Balance is laughable. "OK fine, here's a swarm pet spell that could help you sniff decent dps....buuuut we're gonna make it cost five billion mana so you have to pair it with Gift of Mana. Enjoy!"

And how bout those new TSS summon spells? Another suuuper fun part of being garbage DPS for six straight expacs is waiting months (or even years for the haste mask, lol) for summon spell upgrades, only to have to pay a krono+ per spell or fight over 8 spawns in direwind cliffs for days/weeks/months on end.

Thank you OP for crunching the numbers on this unnaceptable BS nerf.

Yeah, this put the nail in my mage's coffin. Leveling a necro now.

Hearing a lot of mages saying this now unfortunately.

Switching from a mage to a necro? Considering that mages are in-fasion these days on Live and necros are limited to solo group game and raid-dps only role, I wouldn't call that a wise choice.
Any group welcomes a mage, and necros are not really group-friendly.
Begining in SoD mages and beastlords leave necros in the dust and only in the latest expansions necros catch up. BTW, always pair a beaslord with a mage - that is an amazing inter-class synergy in a group game.

Happy to be immortalised.

Balancing has been done over time with this spell as part of our arsenal. Plenty of issues with pet dps on raids, see https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/pet-melee-lag.260257/

I am only advocating not nerfing us into the ground by changing the value appropriately/fixing pet dmg on laggy raids. We are getting worse as expansions go on.

I spend most of my non-raid time soloing. The group game isn't something I am concerned about. On the rare occasion that I do need a group my sparkling personality gets me a spot, even when I was a useless druid. Mischief won't be at live for years. If the situation changes and Mages become fun again I didn't delete her. She still exists. I need someone to make my necro pet toys.

These are the TLP forums. If this change goes through necros are just going to all over mages for 2 years straight on TLPs. Almost being good for one or two expansions 5 years into a TLPs life? great deal.

You know, I don't entirely disagree but, it also shows how terrible mages DPS is that a spell has to be that broken for the class to come close to competing with other classes that are pure DPS.

Speaking as a Mischief mage in TBS, their damage spell lineup is just bad. In particular the ridiculous 6 sec base cast times. The elemental pet is horrible dps. The gargoyle is decent but impractical in a large % of situations. And, even given an ideal situation where you are DPSing a target uninterrupted without switching for an extended period of time (this happens rarely), you will still get smoked by the majority of other DPS.

I've been playing months looking forward to a small moment of glory with the next few expansions and no, denied. It's just frustrating. And, to see people posting "ah whatever you deserve it" is just annoying at this point.

The biggest issue I have is that there is already a huge shortage of casters on TLPs, even in TBS era on Mischief. Our raid has like 7 monks, 4 rogues, 3 berserkers, and 1 mage, 0 necros. Our mage just came back to the game because they were excited about SoF...now they'll likely leave again.

On fights that are going to start requiring ranged DPS (Tallon and Vallon in SOD for example), and such a lopsided breakdown of classes, it's detrimental to the game to make a huge nerf to an already underrepresented class.

they nerfed necro epic and necros were still the highest dps in the xpacs the nerf affected, here they are nerfing a mage spell and it will put sof mages behind tbs monks. With this spell they are only about 15-20% higher dps than monks which shows how absurd melee dps is for these levels that a spell needs to 4x dmg to compete. Ive never seen a 50% total dps nerf in a balance patch before i hope darkpaw will say something about it soon.

You're really giving them too much credit if you think this was an intentional balance change. I'd be surprised if anyone at DBG even knew that the early of Many nukes functioned differently from the later installments. Just glad Mangler is nearly at EoK when dependence on the old nukes goes away anyways. If anything from EoK onwards the lower pet thresholds is going to effectively be a buff to the class in both raid and group content.

So the question is if this goes live, do I swap to a Zerker or Necro for SoF and beyond? Change makes me big sad.

Completely agree. The motivation for them touching any of this is the seemingly-endless quest to reduce raid lag, and the player recommendations saying it's OK to reduce the pet count so long as the total damage is upscaled to match, They must have over-generalized that idea and applied it to an earlier era where the lag was never really a factor. Can the older nukes be retuned? I would think so, but don't hold your breath expecting that to happen before this patch goes live.

I think the biggest tell here is that, for the most part, everyone in this thread agrees this is a terrible change. Even the outliers are the exception that proves the rule.

EQ TLP Players rarely agree this readily, and when they do they are usually right.

Just go Zerker. Melees will always be safe. Can't upset the 6+ boxers with their double monk setup.

Imagine if melee dps was reduced to less than godlike compared to casters. This thread would be 300 pages long already with dozens of angry posters frothing at the mouth.

I mean, this was a documented bug and was clearly not intended when the issue was found out. You can clearly see that with the later ranks, and can also put 2 and 2 together that using such an old spell for so long doesn't make sense. If they completely changed the spell specifically for this level range it would be different, they merely adjusted it to how it should have been all along.

With that said, it is quite dumb they allowed the spell to go unchecked for so long even after they knew about the issue. This should have been fixed a lot sooner, but assuming this was intended was a bit naive.

Any "fix" should come with an appropriate balance to bring mages in line instead of just burning down a class to the ground.

This has me extremely uninterested in playing Everquest as we enter into SoF on Mischief and actually pretty sad, since for months the only thing that kept me going was looking forward to these expansions. And, now after 16 years they decide to change the spell that brought mages to glory and decimate our damage the day it releases.

Put yourself in the shoes of a Mischief mage who has sunk hundreds of hours into your toon and tell me how you would feel about this. I'd love to see these forums if they announced a change that had the unintended consequence of reducing monk damage 40% next expansion.

Do you honestly want everyone playing melee DPS? Is there something horribly wrong with a class (that is a DPS class) shinning for a couple expansions because of an OP spell?

Because if a class dominating DPS for multiple expansions is a problem to you, we need to have a talk about a few others...

Throw a mage a bone!

You must be new to EQ.
Because that almost never happens.

No, I am not new to EQ. I said what should happen not what will happen.

We all know what will happen. It's why I'm pissed.