Test Update 07/15/15

Fair statement, and I suppose I did write that in the heat of the moment. It's just that with a change as significant as this I would have expected the kingdoms to communicate, even if they normally don't.

PS: Love that meme you posted earlier.

The differences ins IoG and BW are bad for sure. I just find it comical that Magician First Spire now actuallygives zero Crit Damage. :

Thanks for giving me some lulz in an otherwise wholly depressing thread.

^^ This.

Comical is not the word I'd use.

Another in the long line of nerfs which get exacted with an axe instead of a scalpal.

What's the problem? Mage rains are too good? (I'm assuming that's the target of this nerf?) Better nerf every 96+ AE spell in the game including shaman heals. /boggle

Isn't half the point of burning these days maintaining 100% crit rate for as long as possible? Now we're going to arbitrarily cap rains at 40% and just remove that strategy (or rains out of the strategy).

And of course druids were just way too powerful right now so better catch them in this too. /boggle

Let's nerf cleric dps for melee dps to be competitive.

Never worked at a company where you have weekly meetings ? Not that they would be paying attention most of the time but they do talk about the changes they make with each other and the lead producer(holly) should know about any change before its made. They don't just work alone they coordinate the changes they make with others. Well that's how its suppose to work If anyone thinks a single dev would make changes like these without anyone else knowing i got a bridge to sell you.

They talk but not nearly as often or as on point as they should. You must have missed the past swings of the pendulum the last decade or so. One class or archetype will have a weakness that needs a tweak and instead we see the problem fixed completely via discs and then another dev fixes it completely with AA then another adds a good click or weapon change. So what should have been a fix by 1 of them or a 33% by 3 becomes 3 times the fix or way more then was needed. Or they all completely design content or raids leaning towards this class or archetype after years of it being more for these classes and archetypes. Leading to that class or archetype then pulling away and now being a problem rather then having gotten a small boost to be fixed. After that happening multiple times they became gun shy. So now they try tiny baby steps for some stuff but still make the mistake of randomly pulling out giant leaps elsewhere at times.

Our dps will be a lot spikier than before, I'm sure. A buff to short burn, a nerf to sustained. Is this more good than bad, or the other way? Depends on the context, I guess. Vitio is going to cry. Nomia is going to be pleased.

We have less than a week before this patch (presumably with the changes) goes live, and still absolutely no dev commentary.

Guys, I want to personally apologize to my fellow magicians for the changes to our rain spells and first spire. It is quite apparent that the Everquest developers saw my piercing parse in the Wizards vs Magicians thread on the caster forums. They saw myself struggling to attain 1000 DPS via my new dagger. In my post I requested that we get our piercing DPS increased significantly to be right below what a rogue can do.

Obviously, if you improve one thing....you must balance it out elsewhere. Unfortunately the negative balance is going to be happening with the rain and first spire changes. However, magicians should expect to be able to use piercing during the next expansi...err, content upstate. And we should expect to be piercing for around 100k DPS on burns, right below where rogues are.

So while the decrease to our spell damage is bad now, we will regain that power with our piercing DPS in a few months. And all will be balanced again with my class.

Sorry about the situation now. But you will be thanking me in a few months with your daggers..

EDIT: my mistake it was not the wiz vs mag thread on casters forum. It was the personal DPS thread on vet forums. https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/your-personal-dps-best.224698/

I think you will be surprised at how much more damage we might be able to do now that more than one proc can proc at once. arcane melody + mr aura + frostweave aura + hedgebrew + your weapon/augs/belt damage procs will all be going off at once. Unless they adjust that after they adjusted it...

I highly doubt that the procs will really compensate our lack of critical hits on rains, though I am willing to try this (and even load two more proc augs).


It does, however, not affect the fact that magicians will take a big hit to their competitive DPS. Everyone gets a boost - fine. Melees only get a boost - fine (they would have been needing it for a long time now). Magicians getting the tools nerfed they've been forcefully tuned around for three expansions - is not.

Frankly, I don't love the rains much. Basically they mean that if there are multiple mobs around, especially mezzed ones, I'll lose DPS. I would really like if our damage capabilities would be swapped back to (more safely usable) single-target spells. But losing our AoE DPS without getting a boost to single-target DPS is a nerf - no matter how you look at it.

Also, with procs going off all at once, I see funny aggro-times coming during raid between melee DPS and Tanks

Auntie Edith sayeth: Oh, and tanks and Shamen will have a hard time as well - Shamen getting their AoE heal nerfed in the same blanked manner as the damaging rains is probably not the brightest idea ...

I go away for a week and come back to this... wow. Still waiting for Enchanter targeting on PBAE spells to be fixed; seems they covered everything else

hi there

Group mage here my damage is being reduced by my rain spells crit change reduction so not having the luxury of other classes boosting my damage that means I am left with ::: effect force of magic and focus effect sympathetic force of magic to boost my damage? Also similar effects? and how often will these be going off each effect per cast one after the other or in a queue system ?

Also if I have done my maths right my current rain roughly crits for 66 k after this patch it will crit for 53 k (or around there) whereas using the same figures my group buddy wizard would crit for 64 k?

Ta for guidance

Not quite--- your chance to crit is being reduced, not the crit damage. Although, comparatively to single target nukes, rains are already capped for their overcrit, the payoff used to be that they could crit 3 times, with the reduction, that likelihood is reduced, reducing in turn their overall effectiveness--- if I understand that correctly

Should we still continue to use rains against single targets? I assume so, since they can still hit 3 times and thus are more mana effecient, but using the lower rank of spear/bolt might be an idea now instead?

I would use spear but i dont raid on a mage just play one as an alt With the lower crit rate it will not be as mana efficient.

What an absurd patch... let's nerf arguably the weakest of the pure casters hardcore for no reason, and greatly increase the capability for the best burst class to burst even higher (with a largely minimal impact to their burstained).

Prolonged + Glyph + Second Spire + BW + IoG + FE + multiple procs = holy @!#@. 2-3 minute parses for wizards are going to be ridiculous. Rangers will get a nice bump too with all the proc stacking.

Not too much of a drop off on sustained either. Black wolf still only helps the nukers, so your best nuke group still has infinite 200% crit if the druid from the necro group coordinates with the druid from the nuke group. (100% reduction on it, but with the base 100% missing somewhere).

Previously wizards had so many different ways to increase nuke crit that it wasn't even possibly to take advantage of them all, even by spreading them out... because the best ones would start repopping before you use all of them back to back. There's no question this is a net INCREASE to wizard dps... because we all know how much they were hurting.

I look forward to doing 400k with my eyes closed on vitio on my wizard.. who knows, couple lucky haze procs, and 500k should be easy. 300k would be where I close my parser in frustration because I @#@! the burn up.

And nerf mages... why exactly? If anything, mages needed a slight boost (though of course, not nearly as much as the major problem right now - the fact that melee absolutely suck after their burns run out... how about increasing melee sustained significantly across the board and leaving the perfectly fine casters alone??)

Just... /boggle. Do the devs even play this game?

Bummed along with the rest of you about the Mage nerf.

But can we just take a quick moment to celebrate this?! - Magician - Summon spells such as Call of the Hero no longer cause their target to dismount, unless the location that the target is being summoned to is too small of an area for that target to have summoned a mount.

*Happy, happy, happy dance!*

I genuinely could not give two $h1t$ about this. Sure, it's a minor inconvenience, but in the sea of the very large nerf bad, forgive me if I'm not celebrating about something that really doesn't matter IMHO.

No offense, of course. I'm just unable to get it up for something so trivial in light of the big picture.

You're a silver lining guy, and I like that about you.