Yes, they suck, just like healer mercs do. Have you tried tanking current content as a melee (dps class)? With a real healer, those tank mercs stand up a lot better then a melee dps class using a healer merc though.
You just quoted Piestro as saying that every class is different. So why are you comparing Mages to Wizards?
I like how the argument is that one should be able to take on 1-100 current expansion mobs in a kite at range with no risk because healing a tank merc is slightly slower than a tank being healed by a merc cleric. Y'all have a really skewed sense of RvR. Druids aren't broken because they won't be able to find 5 non summoning mobs to kite in a zone at once. You are literally arguing that your class will suffer because you won't be able to round up 30 or so current expansion non summoning mobs to kill 5 at a time because one might take damage and summon you into a pack of 30. That you would otherwise be perfectly safe to run in circles at range with zero risk. Talk about powermongering. There is no reason a player should be able to take on that many current expansion mobs at once.
No, snare couldn't possibly have anything to do with it. Wiz snare has always been limited to 4 targets. Even the post-nerf wiz beams hit 8. In swarm kiting, all mobs must move at the same speed, snaring only some of them would ruin the whole thing.
I NEVER asked for 30 mobs at once. I did say I regularly have to get around 10 mobs in my kite at a time for efficient soloing. Saying that a healer soloing with a tank merc is only slightly slower than a melee dps soloing with a healer merc is a joke. I never literally argued that my class will suffer because I won't be able to round up 30 mobs in a current expansion. I have always refered to RoF and VoA zones, first of all. Those are not current. I have never said a number higher than 15. And I try to stay away from that many anyways unless I have burn abilities up. Please don't exaggerate what I am saying so much to make your point. When non-summoning mobs are mixed with summoning mobs in the same area, that effectively means I can not quad there. That has been my whole point, and that this initial change was going to greatly limit the places I can solo.
He was talking about the discussion that was going on before that. Someone asked about snaring, which has nothing to do with it, and it went on from there. It looks like "every class is different" means we give out abilities, and then nerf the heck out of the for only one class and give big side effects to the same class.
The complaints about the summoning mobs are ludicrous in an RvR standpoint. Go look again at the quint vs charming thread for Druids. It is a seriously flawed argument that a class should be able to entertain 15 blue, even, yellow and red con mobs at once. Specifically looking for places where mobs path by to reduce pulling time as they auto aggro to increase effectiveness. Sure Druids weren't lagging out zones which is the main complaint with regards to this type of killing but crying woe is me and the sky is falling because it reduces your capacity to fight that many upper level mobs is amusing. Now I don't really care if people do it or not. But asserting a scenario where you are not able to do this as efficiently as before but still maintain the ability to solo upper level mobs is silly. It calls into question if you should be able to do it a all. Most players capable of mass killing are restricted to the lower ends of mob cons and older zones. Which is still an option for those who might have been impacted by a change like this. Not all mobs were going to magically summon players and kill off charming or swarm kiting. It would just reduce the size of the swarm and kill rate. Which isn't the same thing as killing off the ability to do so. At any point players have been able to round up these numbers of mobs in the past it has almost always been a dev decision to reduce the effectiveness and encourage zone sharing and grouping. Soloing is still a viable option the xp returns would just be lower. Take a paladin for example or even a warrior. Tanking just one without outside support takes a while to kill and the risk of death is higher than at range kite. It is kind of silly for that player to watch another round up 15-100 mobs and have at it. So the paladin and warrior runn oft to zones with ligh blue mobs and an easier chance to tank multiples. Mass killing light blue mobs makes sense. Parading around a mass quantity of end zone mobs that hit too hard to tank but can be disposed of with ease at range doesn't make much sense. But I digress you can kill as many mobs as you like so long as the game allows it. It just so happens that the game might not let this circus continue and if that were to happen I doubt I'd shed a tear over it because these classes that are still in an uproar would still be miles ahead in current content kill speeds.
Has is really taken 5 + years to develop a few zones that are kiting friendly? I do remember that Loping Plains had its completely lagged out moments back in the day. After that in subsequent expansions, there was animals mixed in with non animals, things that summoned mixed in with non summoners, undead mixed in with live and so on. Loping Plains was probably the last great charm kite zone for a druid for quite a long while. Granted, every expansion had some quick kill scenario that favored some class over another. Some got nerfed. Most didn't. Touching on that, the reason why this is an issue now is there is content where you can actually kite. It has nothing much to do with classes if people want to play the "what has happened with wizards since 2007" card. There really wasn't any good content to swarm/beam so no one cared much....until now. The nerf happened and then content just wasn't worth while to beam etc as time went on so wizards got over it. Now there is Evil tree.....lots of wide open spots with animals. CoB...lots of wide open spots with animals, or at least things that do not have adequate power to summon.
RoF = western wastes and other zones VoA = valley, cob, wind song, and other zones HoT = al kabor, kobolds in ss iirc, grounds UF = limited but iirc there was some of this happening in convorteum, Brells rest, fungal Forrest, and cooling chambers SoD = field of scale, tosk, and hmmm I know there was more SoF = dragon scale hills, crystallos at one point, loping plains etc That basically covers the last 5-6 years. But the scale of the kiting was always limited by the content. This current model was a hands off approach and players took advantage of it.
No difference at all for the purposes of my post. I picked immune as a way to illustrate a mechanic that eliminates the mob from being considered as a target for solo'ing melee classes - much like summoning eliminates a mob from a Druid's target list. Even with melee immune mobs, tanks and knights could still grab aggro and hope their wizard merc kills it before they die, right? That is about as useful as suggestions that Druid's use tank mercs to kill summoning trash. I could care less about Mage beaming - until it causes a "solution" that impacts my class more than it does Mage's. And I really dislike the notion that petless, non-tanking classes are supposed to just accept yet another smack to their class because it really doesn't bother the majority of other classes and generates no more consideration than "what's the big deal?".
A druid quinting 5 mobs at a time, and having 10 snared up, is still slower than some classes soloing 1 mob at a time. Pretending like a druid is killing 10-15 mobs at an insanely fast rate is not accurate. I don't get what the deal is. Yes, I gather up a group of 10 or so mobs, but I am still XPing at a *slower* rate than some classes that target 1 mob at a time. If we are purely saying that a druid shouldn't be able to have 10 mobs kited up because they are getting XP too fast, are we prepared to say that the classes that can kill 1 mob at a time solo at a faster rate should have their DPS looked at as well? I am completely ignoring the half a dozen classes that still destroy druids in solo xp while pulling larger masses of mobs for the sake of the argument.
No I was saying that complaining that 1-3 mobs that you might encounter in a 15 mob pull might summon and therefore ruin your kiting all together is silly. Which is the argument being made. And I don't think the kill rates for over the aa bonus of 60 aa in 30 min as quoted in that other thread as being chump change. Even at a reduced capacity that is still a nice chunk of xp. Which doesn't even cover the fact that relevant drops, ts items, and modern quests are achieved while doing this. Outside of necros and the extreme case of mages that is a really high return on solo xp. You could of course be relegated to older expansion mobs like other classes. The xp gains are irrelevant. I'm just saying that complaints seem rather odd when you factor everything together.
If I was relegated to older zones, like say...VoA era, I could accept that. I can't think of anywhere off hand you can Quint kite before VoA as access to those spells were not around until then so I never had to look. It would feel weird if spells I received in VoA and beyond were only useful in pre-VoA content. 3 mobs in a 15 mob pull would in fact ruin it completely. When you are using quint spells, you do not get to pick which mobs you damage. It would be completely useless to have 10 mobs in a quint pull if 3 summoned. The occasional 25 purity random dropped trash mob is really the only relevant item I ever have gotten from kiting.
Which pretty much proves my point. It isn't that you won't be able to pull 5 mobs to quint that don't summon you just want to be able to pull as many as you can kill with a full bar of mana. Instead of just worrying about the 5 that will yield xp at a time. It isn't that you won't be able to kite... You just won't be able to kite enmasse or further still how you want to.
So, pulling 5 at a time is ok. Pulling enough to keep 5 damaged at all times until I run out of mana ( killing with a full mana bar? lol...) is unacceptable?
I'm not sure that shiftie fully understand how kiting-quadding-quint-charm swarm works, and can not imagine how adding a bunch of summoning mobs ruins it ( not make it harder, ruins it). Grelleth courtyard currently have a mix of summoning and non-summoning mob ( you can differentiate them by the graphic of the pigs). Go on and try to mass kite ~10 mob over there, tell me how it goes. I did try... I doubt I could do more than 10 AA an hour when I constantly have to peel off / root mob away from my pack, and must be paranoid about roamers around me. Grelleth is also a low-density zone... doing this in evantil or valley would be devastating to any kiter who hunt there.
You'll have to elaborate on the lol I'm not hip to that jive. In terms of what is or is not acceptable you are the judge of that you were the one ranting that your playtime would be ruined because your kiting would be ruined. When indeed it isn't about kiting but rather limited kiting ie not able to round up as many as you want with little to no risk.
Shiftie is arguing a moot point since it is clear that if you kite only non-summonable mobs 5 at a time like he is suggesting, all the mobs will eventually be able to summon. If they limit the summoners to certain spawn locs to avoid this, you end up with the same problem we have now, where you can just beam kite around the summoners.
Pick a different zone or use another method not every zone will be prime for kiting. And before you say anything I'm a paladin, I've made a living on limited content. Knowing full well that if I stepped outside my sweet spot I would be less efficient. There hasn't been a solid undead only area in ages.
This is getting out of hand on FV, tonight Valhalla guild members come to the grounds and start pulling the zone ,, all of it, when people shout out, this guy or girl Celebron shouts back."I am camping the Zone." Mobs are rubber banding all over . running around lost out of there area. some just stuck in one spot . Like my death. five dogs stacked on top of each other just standing there. I thought it was only one.. nope So I end up dying from his #@#$*&^ trains , lose about 15 mins of my lotd. Its time to start Handing out 3 day vacations to some of these ( have to be nice) Hate to see what this weekend is going to be like..
