Test Update 07/11/2023 - Patch Notes and Discussions

Someone already parsed and confirmed on test last month it was the case.

If they did, I missed the posts with their parse.

I don't have time now but will testcopy and parse swarms tonight.

It's likely a bad spell parser, as the calc is different compared to standard spells. The banner is meant to scale to level where buffs are meant to just apply a value.

If you look at the SPA data, buffs have a calc of 100 which applies the value of base1 (negative something with a value of % * 10) with the max being 0. The banner has a calc of 5 which will scale 5 * level up to the max value (100 which would be 10%). It's possible that a base1 of 0 counts as applying negative, which would make the parsers wrong.

I think possibly a base1 of being -1 and possibly also max being -100 would probably fix this to being how it's intended to be, unless they make a new calc for negatives

It seems like the barrage of many nerf is really significant. Not that I would expect a comment from the devs as to why they are changing the spell at this current time, but one would really be appreciated.

Magicians have always had to deal with adversity, but this feels like the dev team is just tired of getting harassed by certain Wizards. You could have adjusted the scaling with the next expansion instead of reducing the power of a class during summer farm time.

If this were a mortgage, and you were rocking out with your 2.5% fixed rate, and then the bank comes to you and say's, " Well actually, we'll need to adjust this, as it doesn't fit our desired results." How would you feel?

You nerfed swarm pets in the previous patch, not by much but on a sustained parse, it was a nerf, and now you're nerfing Magician's more. It sucks and feels like a kick in the testies.

There are so many different options you could have taken to adjust class balance, like actually working on OTHER classes? Taking away from your player base is the go to for devs for over 20 years, you always manage piss people off and take the EASY route.

Sometimes you have to take the hard road to make something work, otherwise you're going to be working backwards. Instead of nerfing barrage, and swarms, why don't you guys focus on the next expansion? Instead of trying to cram as much into the 2 months before beta goes live as you can?


Disappointed doesn't even touch how I'm feeling right now..Mages are people too...

I'll have to wait and see how this unfortunate change plays out, but from reading what it says, I'm extremely disappointed. Why bork the mage (120) class?

From test
Shock of Many Rk. III: 4926 > 15300
Jolt of Many Rk. III: 6162 > 18555
Clash of Many Rk. III: 12418 > 22504
Strike of Many Rk. III: 28218 > 27292
Salvo of Many Rk. III: 33092 > 33098
Storm of Many Rk. III: 38466 > 40139
Volley of Many Rk. III: 46650 > 48679
Shockwave of Many Rk. III: 56575 > 59035
Barrage of Many Rk. III: 93561 > 74849

I would guess class balancing. Magicians doing too much on raids. That sort of deal.

Doesn't address the other top tier DPS class but that may be coming soon (TM)

I guess all the complaining about mages finally paid off. While attempting class balancing is fine, nerfs are not very popular way of doing things .

just check on bst they reduced our 120 swarm pet spell at rk3 form a 12% chance to cast 4 pets to 12% chance to cast 2 pets on test.

I'm doubtful that class balancing had anything to do with it. I think it was a spell developer going through the spell line based on the recent pet count changes and normalizing the scaling from bottom to top.

However, I can't help but wonder if that Dev forgot about the 65% base damage scaling bump on DD damage from ToV to ToL across all casting classes. Even if the Of Many line wasn't intended to also see an equivalent 65% increase that other DDs received, this decrease on Barrage seems heavy handed given ToL spell scaling across the board.

They fixed TLP Mages which is good to see and the adjustment to live Mages is reasonable. Beams and pets are the majority of Mage damage in current content so it's not a hug impact. Plus people forget that every class got a buff to DD spells a few expansion ago which was only supposed to go to Wizards. They just didn't have the time to target the change to one class. They really should apply the same change to a lot of spells.

i was being mean xD. nvm

It is huge impact and you know it, otherwise you wouldn't be here gloating buddy. The only way Magician's are going to be competitive is if they keep the add theme raids. Once they shift from add based raids to some other mechanic, this nerf will be felt on a much broader spectrum.

It's funny man, the community banded together for Wizard tweaks. Yet here you are, doing your salty thing. Your class envy is so obvious, it must really make you feel some type of way losing on the parse, that you created.

Shameful.

I dont have a live mage but this seems to me like it would be true. When I watch live mages play they often have a trigger reminding them to refresh theft of essence on their pet, which is not something a TLP mage would ever have to do as the spell is in the rotation refreshing the buff faster than it will ever fade.

I dont love my preferred class ever being nerfed, but I think its pretty clear when looking at the changes across the spell line that a blanket formula was applied across the board which at least makes things consistent. That or someone thought it was worth their time to adjust one rank by 6 damage lol

So to make a better post than what I did above, as a wizard I work very hard for my DPS so if the EQ team came down and handed me a nerf I would also be upset. The issue is the bottom performers namely non dotting melee classes need alot of work. My class probably needs way less work than the other low performers.

I am of the opinion that you bring the bottom up to be closer inline with the top outliers for DPS roles. Hybrids and ADPS classes should be right behind the pure DPS classes. I understand that power creep is a real issue in games, but a game this old it is kind of too little too late to be worrying about peak dps from people who perform at a high rate.

I see DPS as being like this, shorter raid fights wizard/rogue/zerker is top dps, the longer the fights go then shm/necro/mage/druid follows up behind followed by the hybrid classes somewhere in between. As old as this game is maybe that's not a possibility but I do not design games so I would have no ideal.

I think this change to barrage of many will depend more on raid strats as to how much it hurts. Doing open raids we tend to not spawn as many adds to beam so this nerf will hurt my DPS more than some main raids that can handle the extra adds for optimal dps and faster clear times. I also won't benefit from the superior standard which has some minor buffs for mage?

Looking at last week's parses for barrage it will be 50-100k less dps, most events I'm around 2m dps but some messy events it dips down to 1.5m or up to 2.4m on very good events if that helps give a range. Sometimes we don't get any ADPS from attendance etc.

I believe changes like this are better when it's not a single class because the top end of dps is not only mages, even on the open raids I do necro/druid/shaman/beastlord can get to my dps levels if played well it just isn't as common to see DPS druid/shaman on opens but the necros and the dps Druid/Shaman that show up do well and would likely benefit even more from a "spawn more adds together" strat. And then you have everyone else at the lower end that could use some buffs that nerfs like this do nothing for.

It is healthy for the game to be more balanced but often these changes don't lead to more balancing.

Looking at my most recent raid parses with Druid/Enchanter/Bard ADPS, the 20% Of Many nerf would have reduced my single target DPS by about 5% and my overall nightly combined by about 4%. No one likes a nerf, but the aggregate impact on our raid (and group) DPS will be manageable.

I could write a lot about how I don't like the way in which the 4-5% reduction was achieved (and, to be clear, I don't - I think Of Many's relative strength was an important tuning point for differentiating group vs raid Mage DPS, and I think the further homogenization of the two that the last two patches have effectuated will make ongoing balance harder), or how the new 21% scaling per version is incongruent with how spells have actually scaled over time (most notably, the 65% increase to all caster DD spells in ToL - it is not consistent with how EQ has actually been developed).

That said, what I really want to focus on is what comes next. Too often in EQ, nerfs come in sets, and the end result of that campaign (against us or Necromancers) will just leave DPS classes as strictly worse options in raids vs the myriad of non-DPS classes that can compete DPS-wise nowadays. The focus really needs to be on boosting up pure melee DPS and, to a lesser extent, Wizards to a level that's competitive while reigning in the future scaling of overperforming classes. I really think the community (CRC or otherwise) could be a useful tool in directing these balance changes; it's really disheartening given the overall lack of class development/communication to see these changes come via decree in patch note bullets.

Know it's not but any chance the cast time been reduced? Wouldn't mind if they did that in the process of changing the spell line a little bit =p.

Thread cleaned. Please stay on topic.

No I was just adding some context since a lot of people seemed worried. Just go by what Sancus said and ignore me if you want.