Nuke Favoritism from the Devs?

I have been following the caster adps thread and it got me thinking. I am really not sure why so many spells, AA and items are designed with nukes in mind exclusively or that do twice as much for nukes. Yet I can only thing of one thing that isn't a class exclusive deal that went the opposite way boosting dots more than nukes, being glyph of cataclysm prior to the two rounds of nerfing. I could see an ability, spell or item here or there and pass it off as nothing but when you factor up all the items below it defiantly shows a trend or conscious design choice to keep doing it. Anyone know why this is? Again some here or there at times due to tuning but all of these factored in clearly show heavy favoritism.

Illusions of Grandeur Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 10% and Increase Critical Nuke Damage by 250% of Base Damage (same 10% crit chance but only 110% increase critical dot damage).

Third Spire of Enchantment Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 7% and Increase Critical Nuke Damage by 100% of Base Damage. (no dot boost)

Group Spirit of the Black Wolf Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 9% and Increase Critical Nuke Damage by 200% of Base Damage. (no dot boost)

Ethereal Manipulation Increase Spell Damage Taken by 1% to 12% ethereals only. (no dot boost)

Chromatic Haze Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 100% and Increase Critical Nuke Damage by 360% of Base Damage, 1 spell. (no dot boost)

Fierce Eye Effect Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 10% and Increase Critical Nuke Damage by 110% of Base Damage. (same 10% crit chance boost no increase to dot damage)

Gosik's Aria Increase Spell Damage Bonus by 1284 (no dot boost but there is dotting song similar but for less of a boost)

Fatesong of Protan Increase Spell Damage Bonus by 1781(no dot boost but there is dotting song similar but for less of a boost)

Brell's Sacred Chromatic Strike Increase Spell Damage Bonus by 600 (no dot boost)

Mana Charge Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 175% and Increase Critical Nuke Damage by 150% of Base Damage from Sorcerer's Blade. (no dot boost or dotting equivalent)

Spell Empowerment Crit Chance/Dmg: 1%, Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 10% from Manalinked Gauntlets.(no dot boost or dotting equivalent)

Circle of Power IV Effect Increase Chance to Critical Nuke by 4%. (no dot boost)


Twincast for dots took something like 5 years later to come out. And even now there are more ranks to passive nuke twincast then dot. (uneven versions for dots 5 years later)

Spell damage mod works for nukes but not dots and continues to be added as a bonus to items like the alaris tear and such. (not dot version)

What gives? I don't see shaman epic only working for 1h damage or Ruaabri's Fury limited to 2h damage so why is caster support so leaning towards one type instead of being the same?

The Everquest community and the design of the game to a degree are driven by who can complain the loudest while presenting the most empirical data to back up their gripes. Casters, wizards in particular with one specific wizard in mind, tend to be the most successful at this as casters have it in mind that DPS is their exclusive domain. Any infringement upon that will result in numerous pages of graphs, parses and nerfs of other classes. Pretty much the squeaky wheel always gets the grease around here.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that certain parts of DoTs work differently than DDs, (in part because it's broken and they can't easily fix it without breaking Necros).


Focus effects crit for DoTs, (they aren't supposed to, but as aforementioned, they can't fix it without a major rebalance of the whole class), which means a small crit mod has a much greater effect for DoTs.

A DD for 20k base, with a 75% focus effect and a 200% crit mod will do:
20k base + 40k (crit) + 15k (focus), for a total of 75k.

A 30s DoT (5 tick) for 4k base (20k total), with a 75% focus effect and a 100% crit mod will do:
20k (base) + 20k (base crit) + 15k (focus) + 15k (focus crit) = 70k. With half the crit mod it does -almost- the same damage as the nuke. Technically more if you count the phantom tick, but I didn't.


Additionally: Crit mods stack for DoTs, they don't for DDs. This further increases the multiplicative effect of DoTs, meaning that even with a lower base value they can do about the same overall.

And finally, Necros specifically have a large number of self only mods, in addition to the highest passive crit chance in the game for any class. True there are "other" DoT classes, but any type of adps ability ultimately has to be balanced around what other classes can do. Giving a new 200% DoT boost for the group might make Shaman's subpar DoTs do well, but it would make Necromancers crazy(ier).

That does makes sense for some of it like when they both are effected by differing amounts but there is more than one class using dots and a lot of these are still nuke only. Still seems odd a nuker can chain 10 things in a row for 10 minutes of boosted damage verse a dotter only having 2 to use. From what I have been told the crazy classes doing everything are nukers. I ignored the self only stuff as from what I saw it was equal at worst. Dotters didn't seem to have more self buffing stuff when compared to nukers like you are implying. Still doesn't make sense that 1 hit limited effects are not around for dots or that I can't find dot exclusive clicks anywhere like a mana charge for dots. They simply don't exist outside of an old class specific item not for all dotters click like nukes get. Again a couple things make sense or doesn't mean much but 14 things I found in 5 minutes kinda screams out of a pattern to me.

A lot more classes have nukes than DoTs too, keep that in mind.

are necro beating wizard and mages in sustain? yes? good.

just say it out loud if you think wizzy sustain is too high ( or if there's no sustain-friendly raid in coTF).

Wasn't trying to turn this into class whining which is why I kept it to nukes and dots which are shared by many classes. I still haven't heard a reason why circle of power, sorcerers blade, manalinked gauntlets dont have dot versions. I get why the effects on some differ but still don't get why there are 10 nuke only instead of following the same pattern of boost nukes by 5 and dots by 2 since they are different. Boost nukes by 5 for 10 things with no dot boost doesn't make sense.

Because everytime necros are even close to competitive Wizards who are much more active on the forums cry nerf.

However alot of those abilities would just raise Necros Burst, The way necros operate is pretty hard to balance, because almost anything that could/would boost their sustained DPS, would have a very very large effect on their burst.

See twincast

It's an interesting argument but like many things in this game there are so many factors at play when looking at Nukes vs dots that it is hard to boil it down. It was said before it generally boils down to what the affected classes intended burst dps end up being as well as the sustained dps.

Let us look at the flip side of this argument... would most people want to achieve their maximum dps with fewer clicky/auras/effects or more synergistic boosts at play. I would argue that its probably better to have fewer outside influences to hit the theoretical maximum dps than to rely on the stacking of multiple effects that are beyond my control. Dots stack so lowering the base value of spells so that one could have multiple outside influences increase the final actual dps is not as good. Now if what we are really talking about here is increasing dps then that is another thing altogether.

There are fundemental differences between how nukes and dot's work in EQ and that makes it impossible to treat them in the exact same way.

Necros have a higher base DoT critical % then Mages or Wizards have for nuke critical %.
Spell/AA buffs that give DoT critical damage stack while Nuke critical damage buffs don't stack.

Ignore Biemeith he is far to biased even if some of his points are factually correct.

You have to understand that classes are tuned around the ADPS support available. So necros are actually *more* powerful because there are less abilities that affect them. If we compare nukes to all the melee ADPS abilities, we could say there should be many more/more potent ADPS abilities for nukers. Instead you see casters doing 75% of their potential without any support versus melee doing 50% of their potential (estimated numbers that vary by class). The more DoT support abilities that exist, the more DoTs are watered down.

Moral of the story is be careful what you wish for

Grrr hit qoute not edit

oops double post

lolol

Really that's low editing what I said.

I don't dislike him he is simply to biased to have any credibility when talking about non wizard classes. I see him for what he is make sure I filter what ever he says to take that into account. He does provide useful information at times but to many times it comes wrapped in a thick layer of bias.

Some things to add to the list:

The bard BP click (T2 CotF for example) provides a bonus for DDs and melee, but not DoTs.

[39400] Ionian Octave

Duration: 12s (2 ticks)

Max Hits: 52 Outgoing Hit Successes

1: Increase Spell Damage Bonus by 1394

9: Limit Max Duration: 0s

11: Increase Hit Damage Bonus by 248

The bard spell damage bonus song for DoTs only works on magic and fire dots, and doesn't work on flash dots. There is no spell damage bonus song for poison/disease DoTs or DDs.

[35160/1519] Siavonn's Psalm of Potency Rk. III

Classes: BRD/98

Duration: 12s (2 ticks)

1: Increase Spell Damage Bonus by 1397

9: Limit Min Duration: 18s

11: Limit Resist: Magic

12: Limit Resist: Fire

Spell damage bonuses like these aren't affected by crits, focus effects, or spell damage, so I don't see how including DoTs would create an imbalance.

There are plenty of agenda pushers around here. The fact that they push agendas does them a greater disservice than they might realize or care about, because most of them know their stuff but you have to filter out the horse crap first. Beimeith is by far one of the most blatant examples but he isn't the only one. Most come armed with parses in abundance and all kinds of rhetoric that promotes them as being an authority to lend substance to some kind of nerfing of competition or boosting of their own class. (Again Beimeith is example numero uno). Still, its never good to put anyone on board ignore, in spite of how much of a donkey they are. I have learned a bunch to enhance game play on various classes from people I pretty much can't stand and would rather just punch in the face, let alone listen to. It is too bad the dev team rely on them so much, because now the game is more nerf happy and screwed up than ever. You can only hope the sun shines on a dog's butt once in a while and we get some positive effects from it.

Just because class A has something doesn't mean class B has to have an equivalent version of that. Beimeith's post illustrated that perfectly.

Beimeith is correct in that adding something to boost dots for shaman would be nice, but it'd also boost dots for necros by substantially more.

If you want an example of this, just look at glyphs. They were godly for necros, so much so that even some of the necro community complained because they disliked pretty much having to use them to do the dps that people expected from them. It's a catch-22 problem there. So glyphs got the nerf bat, despite the fact they weren't overpowered on shaman, or on melee for that matter.

There are also issues with what focus effects exists. DoTs have traditionally been problematic to focus due to the way the coding works. However where the focus effects do exist there is nothing stopping the devs from adding multiple spell effects per click/AA, scaled by differing amounts to try and keep some balance.

Is balance not kept as things are? Necros still owning up on long battles, ya?