Nerf class A or Buff class B- Does it matter?

I think some dev looked at a spreadsheet (or started playing a mage) and happened to notice that the numbers in this spell line didn't "balance" in whatever way they think the damage numbers curve should be, and they smoothed them out without any regard to the actual impact on the game. I think it's as simple as that. I don't think "class balace" crept into the head of whoever decided to do this...not even once. They looked at numbers that seemed strange and made them not strange.

That's because in ToL they intentionally increased DD spells by around 60-65%. So now Barrage has a scaling more in line with what they did in past expansions instead the bigger increase that it originally got in ToL.

Alot of good points brought up here, one thing I can appreciate about the eq community versus others is people here tend to be more level headed and have vast knowledge of the game. I think the community is what keeps me involved with such an old game with a non meta class like a wizzie. So to the subject matter I am one of the people the said stop nerfing mages, the main reason why is I have several mage friends and I know how that feels to get knocked down and not be the "in class" every raid wants.

The issue is complex why people say buff and not nerf, everyone wants to matter in eq on a raid force as this is the peak activity eq brings to the table. I hate being just barely wanted on a raid force. Well we couldnt find a mage or a necro we hear your a good wiz though so you will do for now. But uhh the necro and mages get the synergized group...push more buttons if you want a shot.... it sucks...

Everyone wants to be wanted is why no one esp the meta classes want to be nerfed, and as a wizard I understand the struggle.

I have a question for Kizant, what if they made the classes synergy matter more vs nerfing and buffing damage. I.E the meta caster group includes a wizard because we bring more to the table besides lack of sustained
dps? Maybe buff class synergies and then we all matter to each other.

Wizards having a better synergy would be great but after other balance issues are addressed. Otherwise, we're just making the classes that are already too strong even stronger.

Better yet just make nukes even bigger i get it they dont wanna give any class to much dps increase but geez give some wizard loving its been a long time. I remember when in the old days i would make people go wow as the mobs hps would go down 50% + or back when old manaburn crit was pretty cool too. But they need to stop this copy and paste every expansion that way we never really get a good increase just very slight at best. Everytime i go into the general channel and i get wizards its always lower than all the other classes i play when i goto them and its kinda sad. rng/shm/enc/dru/nec/bard/mag well you get the point.

Good point, I do not have enough deep knowledge like you and sancus have to know what that looks like or what needs to happen. As for wizards, yeah we are behind on sustained dps, but the class was never designed to be sustained dps. We had huge mana cost with bursty expensive spells that melted mobs in group content, then we had to sit for 30 mins.

Eq seems to be getting away from quick bursty fights probably because of the state it is in as a 24 year old game.

So how do you fix the wizard? Do we need a complete revamp? Then how do you fix pure melee? How do you nerf the outliers without alienating your player base and it being fair?

I feel for the devs, I do not even know exactly what our class needs other than stronger burns or revamped burn cool down timers. More spell damage? Sheesh.

Thanks for responding to my question.

To answer the original question yes it matters. Nerf class A is the equivalent of lowering the ceiling to hold everyone back. Boosting class B,C,D,E to be competitive or in the ballpark of class A is the equivalent of raising the floor, to bring everyone forward.


Before people start screaming that encounters will be too easy, it will all get boring etc., at no time have the mobs or missions or raids from one expansion to the next been less involved or less gimmicky or had less HPs. I don't mean individual events (Meretas to Griklor) I mean taken as a whole.

I know we won't see it but I'd love to see some redesign on burns. For wizards, shorter cooldowns would be great. Wizards should be able to nuke for massive amounts, at least as hard as the druid dots tick, when they're burning and they should be able to do it more frequently. What if for example, every two minutes they do like 10s of massive damage and then at the end of the 10 minute raid the overall dps averages to be in line with the sustained dps classes. It think it would be fun and would differentiate wizards more from being petless mages.

In my opinion overall class balance would have all pure dps competing for the top spots, hybrids a notch below (including druids and shamans). Tanks should be able to do respectable dps in a good dps group but shouldn't be competitive with pure dps. A well played hybrid should be able to beat an average pure dps.

One issue that is probably making balance challenging is the difference in stat dependency. There is a big difference in dps for a melee that has all their trophies, max HA, perfect augs compared with a newer character. And then there are classes like mages that really just needs their raid foci to be near their max potential. Assuming max AAs.

Fixing mechanical issues like the hodgepodge of Wizard AEs is challenging (fixing burn timers is easy), but tuning DPS levels really isn't very hard. The main challenge is specifying the gap - how much additional DPS do Wizards, Rogues, Monks, Berserkers need to do to be balanced with Necros/Mages (and, by extension, pretty appropriately balanced vs tanks/priests/hybrids)?

Once you do that, all you really need to do is add a passive modifier that has fairly good scaling returns, estimate those returns, and then apply the appropriate amount to accomplish the increase you're looking for.

Using numbers entirely made up for the sake of example:

1. Let's say we think a Berserker needs to do 50% more DPS to be balanced.
2. We then choose a modifier with good scaling - SPA 482 for melee.
3. We then determine what portion of a Berserker's damage this affects - let's say 80%, with the other 20% coming from procs.
4. We then determine the scaling of melee damage with SPA 482 - a 1% SPA 482 modifier increases melee damage by a little less than 1%, let's say 0.9%.
5. 50% / 0.9 / 80% = 69% SPA 482 modifier.
6. Add that 69% SPA 482 modifier to the Innate Prowess

And, voila, Berserkers do 50% more DPS. This does not fix the mechanical issues they face that A) their burn timers are too long, B) their AE damage isn't competitive with multiDoTting/Beams, and C) the gap between their burst and sustained is too wide. It does, though, very quickly move DPS levels closer into balance.

Two key qualifiers: 1) this SPA 482 modifier never needs to be upgraded unless its part of another intentional rebalancing of the class. A big problem in AA development is adding modifiers that should be one-time adjustments and then upgrading them in future years. 2) It would probably be prudent to be a little conservative with the modifier at first and then increase it iteratively.

You could do the same thing for Wizards (again, #'s made up):

1. Let's say we think Wizards need to do 30% more DPS to be balanced.
2. We then choose a modifier with good scaling - SPA 461 is the simplest for this exercise, though I think there are instead good arguments to accomplish this via focus AA adjustments (SPA 413). I'm going to leave that outside the scope of this post, though.
3. We then determine what portion of a Wizard's damage this affects - let's say 70%, with the other 30% coming from procs.
4. We then determine the scaling of DD damage with SPA 461 - a 1% SPA 461 modifier has near perfect scaling, let's say 0.98% increase in overall DD damage.
5. 30% / 0.98 / 70% = 44% SPA 461 modifier
6. Add that 44% SPA 461 modifier with a Level 253 limit to Destructive Adept

Same idea. No mechanical fixes, but it moves overall DPS output much closer to being in balance. Same disclaimer that this would not need to be upgraded and is probably best done iteratively.

There is definitely an argument as to whether it's appropriate to implement boosts like above or nerfs, but with the state of the game as it is, I really do see boosts as the better option. I would argue there really only are four classes (Mnk/Rog/Ber/Wiz) that are particularly out of line DPS wise (also clerics, but that's sort of a different scope). While additional small adjustments could be made, hybrids are more balanced vs Mag/Nec DPS levels than vs melee DPS levels, as are tanks/priests.

I understand concerns about making the game easier, but we're a few months from a likely level cap increase where power is going to scale anyhow - just moderate that scaling for most classes while bringing the underperforming ones up to par. It's not like NoS raids are short for most guilds, so the incremental raid DPS is not ground breaking. Back in ToL I estimated putting those classes on par with Necros/Mages would take 600s (10 minute) events to 466s (7.8 minutes) on average. That's not a trivializing change, especially late in an expansion going into a level cap increase.

I wonder what other classes will still be making up that top 10 after this patch. I doubt it's going to be the ones that needed buffs before this patch and we only get 0-1 patch a month to fix balance through the year so seeing time wasted on this change instead is not great.

I don't even believe this was an intentional "balance" adjustment to mage dps with some thought behind it. It really seems more like they tried to fix TLP "of many" after the last patch reduced it and made the entire line linear while ignoring the reasons for those later expansion increases which were part of balancing around the giant leap in DoT damage. But that won't stop people for asking to have even another mage nerf on top of this before it even hits live.
Maybe we could get some actual reasoning/intent behind patch notes that currently don't include most of the basic info in the first place.

There is a wide range of raid guilds and currently the stronger your guild is the more likely this change will be a small difference because you're going to have a higher percent of your spells be beam for the week than a low to mid range guild because they can't handle as many adds at once or don't have the dps to burn past mechanics or they require mages to be on non hate list mobs to succeed.
This will likely lead to even more nerf calls from those top end guilds who don't see as much of a change which will decrease the damage for low-mid range raid mages again, I think it's clear why people would rather just buff the classes that fell way behind in recent years than to continue this cycle. Also the DoT revamp isn't done yet so it's likely DoT damage will increase when those other lines go in leading to more of a gap between DoT, DD, and melee damage.

I will add that if they copy/paste the DD and DoT spell scaling from ToL to the next level gap, wizards will already be #1 at 125.

We have no idea what their plan is or if there even is a plan, we'll just have to see in beta.

I believe I told Swiss above this same thing, if they push our spells again like TOL we are going to be thumping pretty hard. I dont know if I want that because I am not really the type thats like "oh thank god its my classes turn". I don't have this sense of entitlement. If it happens it happens, people will scream about how OP wizzies are, id rather not deal with that.

I have a great raiding home so im content. I push my buttons.

You're right, it has not scaled well. The incoming damage that mobs are dishing out is vastly more now than it was when the epics were introduced. The melee damage players are doing has not increased anywhere near the same amount. So, the healing provided to the group be the SK epic is far less now than it was.

How does the SK epic manage to make it into every conversation about nerfs, including the ones that have absolutely nothing to do with melee?

No, they could repeat ToL completely and it's still not enough to put Wizards in that spot. It really isn't something you should be concerned about. It would require the types of changes that would never happen in one expansion.

It's pretty simple. In one scenario, you are taking something away from somebody. In another you are giving someone something. Which do you think people would enjoy more? Imagine you go into your job and your boss says, sorry we had to cut your pay by 5%, so you make what the other guy in your dept makes. Or would you be happier if they just gave the other guy a 5% raise?

It's a video game not life. If everyone did neco/mage DPS right now we'd finish raids in 1/2 the time and everything about the game would be way easier than it already it is. Try thinking about how you would design a video game if you weren't so personally attached to your character.

I was looking for a post that touched on what I was going to say, and here it is. It affects the ability to succeed or fail, and that's why it matters.

The first post's point relies on everyone succeeding easily, only concerned about trivialities like where nearly perfectly-played players sit on a parse. And balance does matter of course, but a nerf or buff isn't as significant with that play experience.

In my guild, it's true in raids these nerfs aren't an enormous deal. So the following is NOT about Inverse Logic.

But years ago pre-merge into my current guild, it did. I say this without exaggeration: When they went on their nerf spree in the summer when Empires of Kunark was current, they knocked my guild back 3+ months in progression. (The expansion has rapidly spawning high regen adds especially in T2, making the dps nerfs catastrophic.)

Edit: This was an unnecessarily long novel. I chopped out 3/4 of it and the main point isn't affected.

This nerf isn't severe, of course, but there is a huge difference in addressing balance with nerfs vs. buffs.

Sk hitting their epic in a tank group becomes the best healer for those tanks that are tanking. The damage output tanks put out makes the leech effects basically complete heals for when a squall wave hasn't healed them back up. I linked two tank parses one from my sk and one from paladin. And the melee heal from epic was number 1 for both. Have epic, pop 2h- never die.

Also, squishes are stupid, and if EQ did have the resources to do it and actually did that, they would kill the game.