Testing needed: Upcoming changes to mana/endurance return abilities

Honestly the harvest line should be brought up to par by making it a 5 min recast and a 6 to 8 second cast time i use spell harvest as a last resort im not typically clicking it every time it is up because it is such a long cast and then the syllable of refreshment could be dropped to 3% without any complaints from me

Alot of other things not said here such as now all mana classes except druids have a mana burst ability, melee gets thiers nerfed.
casters get claravoyance
casters get AAs to reduce mana costs melee dont get end reducing AAs
those are just off top of my head though

i dont even main zerk anymore but ill jump in on this with mages get staff AND shield block while zerks the only class with no block aa at all and the devs refuse to fix there jolts..

and before anyone says anything about decap thats the reason i dont main the class i did for 6 years anymore. the community is over run with decap zerks and thats all the devs hear about now not the actual fixes for the class... end rant

I believe these changes could be good for the game if they are handled properly. I also agree that death should have penalties, but because of game design and speed, a huge paradigm shift needs to take place before these changes can be well received by the player base.

Slowly reduce the proc rate of wizard harvest, maybe 1% at a time and test/watch.

With melee, there are many additional steps that have to be implemented in conjunction because of years of neglect. If there are going to be big mana regen abilities, there needs to be equal endo regen abilities.

Bring endo regen up to par with mana regen in the same ways that mana regen has been increased. Give mages a endo click stick to summon. Give enchanters a endo regen buff. Give shimmies a endo quiet miracle that they can cast on melee.

Please do not throw a huge change on the entire player base without addressing the entire problem, half implemented solutions are bad no matter how good the intentions.

How about beastlords who has the lowest endurance regeneration of all ?
They have no endurance regen AA at all.

Imo, melee are ALREADY having penalty by having their attack speed lowered while under rez effect.

BUT worst it will be for tanks, since they have to get up ASAP during a raid as they for sure die the most.

This will in effect take a tank out of the fight for 30 secs til rest have run its course, or they will not be able to use ANY discs at all due to lack of endurance. This will drastically change fights during raids, which imo Means most raids need to be modified to take this in effect.

And well for wizards and the proc, easiest solution there would be to change that for the effect to take place, you need to cast a spell that costs X mana, no more endless mana as you mention.

To help primarily tanks, WHO without doubt dies the most.

Make so that when people get a rez, they will be rezzed with 10% endurance.

And for rest itself.

When using it, and you fight, half the endurance you get back

Wizards: easiest solution there would be to change that for the effect to take place, you need to cast a spell that costs X mana, no more endless mana as you mention. (as mention in post above).

Sorry if I repeat anything already said, I stopped reading posts at page 2...

Rest being removed by entering combat other than direct offensive action by the tank renders warriors/tanks useless after resurrection, period. Limiting it's function while a tank is attacking or about to be attacking is already in place. You seem to be confused as to what management is, it is the attempt to control something. In this case, it is our attempt to control our endurance while maintaining threat/aggro and surviving. We are already managing our endurance by fading/resting to maintain endurance simply to continue a tank rotations. I play a warrior currently in the highest tiers of CotF content and I, as well as my fellow tanks, constantly battle with low endurance just to do our jobs. You seem to imply that we are exploiting the ability to fade off and rest. It would be far more accurate to claim it as our only means to successfully do our jobs.

How about attempting to implement endurance regeneration to enchanter Voice line of spells, or Druid/Shaman hit point regen spells. Simple fixes that will allow you to make other larger changes. Your current plans will break melee, especially warriors, period. (I know I am ignoring a lot of other classes, sorry. I can only guarantee my opinion for the Warrior class and the similar issues for other pure melee.)

your reason for nerfing wizards is false.

as you have stated before a wizard that never runs out of mana has no worry about resource.
however , this was already addressed with the nerf to the instant cast spells to make them unable to be chain cast. then again later with the nerf to wildmagic to cost more mana then was possible to regen.

there is almost never a time where mana efficiency isn't an issue.
in group settings with chain pulls mana gets used up very fast being the primary dps.

in raid settings on events like WK2 I can easily use all my harvest spells , AA , forced rejuv , steadfast , and kiss of erollisi to burn the mobs.

if I die I can click harvest for a quick boost after rez- limited by rez effects. and once clear cast claw a number of times hoping for that refresh so I can get back into the fight.

is it your intention that a wizard either chain casts low mana cost / low damage spells for most of a fight , or going max burn for 2 min and sitting most of the time ? such as it was in the past.

as for "needing" testers - you have beimeith who im sure can provide reams of parses he has done of all of our spells and different settings. as well as your own spreadsheets.

regarding comparing wizards with other classes, again a false statement. you nerfed necro's bloom effect. , you nerfed mage pets several times. , SK / ranger procs / spells .

if these "fixes" go live several things will happen.
you will lose a lot of players.
tanks / chanters / wizards / clerics will be severally handicapped.
many mobs / raid events will be impossible to beat without being rebalanced.

a long / difficult raid will have all of the wizards sitting. all of the tanks dead and the only one on a mob will be the necro's and mage pets.

is it your plan to make all the classes in the game be "paper" avatars running around a virtual world beating on pink fluffy giant bunnies ? and turn EQ into a WoW / facebook game ?

I see no need for any of these nerfs unless it to make future mobs / content appear to be harder by making the classes weaker. and nerfing spells / aa's to allow the creation of higher ranks, new spell - same function. rather then creating brand new skills / spells / etc.

Endurance today is not exactly "yellow mana". If anything, it's more like what the mana bar for most casters was like a decade ago: a resource which depletes quickly, takes a long time to refill, and without which a particular class is severely restricted. The main difference is that the casters of that time still had enough of their resource to remain competitive, while current melee have no chance without rest/reprieve.

You see, this skill really is the glue holding our extremely broken endurance system together.

Over time, melee classes have been given a regular flow of endurance-costing abilities - abilities they must constantly use in order to perform their expected duties. And, as others have noted, endurance regeneration simply hasn't ever kept up. By now it's nearly impossible to go 10 minutes of normal gameplay activity without using up your entire reserve. When I came back to my monk after several years, I was really confused about this. It seemed as though my ability costs were specifically balanced around dropping combat and using rest/reprieve every couple minutes. Otherwise I would be unable to continue pulling while the rest of my group was ready, or unable to even come close to the sustained dps of the casters around me.

It just seemed to me that rest/reprieve was the "patch" in place of what otherwise would have been a rebalancing of both endurance costs on low-cooldown abilities, and endurance regeneration itself. After all, running out of endurance was supposed to be what happened when you used all of your burn discs on a raid boss, not what happened when you pulled trash mobs for a group while dpsing here and there.

When I read threads like this, I can only ask: has the idea of class/archetype identity been completely lost? This entire focus on ensuring some sort of equal resource management flies completely in the face of several classes' design.

Consider:

• Bards have only ever used resources for very specific abilities, most of which have not been necessary for them to still be both extremely useful and in high demand. Neither the devs nor the playerbase have a problem with this, and rightfully so
• While necros have always "managed" resources through mana-health conversions, it was pretty clear that they were meant to have a near-limitless mana supply under the right circumstances. Assuming proper testing, any problems with the class shouldn't be related to mana availability, but to what said mana is able to accomplish. The necros are right, other classes should have seen this coming when the nerf bat recently hit them - it was there in the writing
• The idea behind wizards fits more with what you're trying to do, and I can understand how the class having too much mana recovery would be an issue. However, if you want wizards to fill their classic role, they need to retain that identity: huge burst damage alongside quite a bit of downtime. Ruining class abilities without defining a clear goal (e.g. - "we're taking away some of your mana regen so we can improve your damage elsewhere") is a surefire way to alienate people
• Melee classes were a popular choice for years despite having no resource available to them other than their health bar and a few disciplines to choose from. They had a simple design. They traded mana - and the amazing things casters could do with it - for sustainability. The ability to go the distance is the boon they're supposed to receive for having to move from mob to mob, dealing with every painful AE mechanic game designers can muster up

The problem is not that melee have limitless endurance thanks to rest/reprieve, it's that have to rely on the skill at all - outside of coming back from deaths, of course. The fact melee in groups have been constantly sitting at <25% endurance for several expansions now should have sent a message that something was wrong. I don't see how you can say something as obvious as this was "masking" problems with endurance regen and costs.

I usually don't stop to cast harvest when I'm almost out of mana. There is resource management involved, and it depends on how long the fight is when I will harvest. If it is a long fight, I might harvest at 75% to try to get a Syllable of Refreshment from a Claw proc down the line. At minimum, if I know the fight will be long and I will need the mana, I will harvest early so that I can harvest again when it refreshes later in the fight. Regardless, I am doing no damage for 12 seconds each time I harvest. The resource management is not asking whether to sit there OOM or harvest. The resource management is determining when the correct time is to harvest in a fight to maximize dps while retaining mana efficiency.

Mages have pets, necros have dots, melee can continuously swing. Wizards put out zero dps if we are not casting DDs (ie. if we are harvesting.)

Wizards should be casting far more than 50 spells in a burn, unless we are talking about General Vaxa. But regardless if a wizard is casting 50 or 150 spells in a burn, that just means that every spell we cast is more valuable than every melee swing that you make. If in your hypo a wizard should be casting 50 spells, but only casts 45 because he has to harvest, he is doing 10% less damage. Without pushing for every second of the burn, nobody can push their maximum efficiency. Doesn't matter if you are a wizard, mage, zerker or monk, everybody is going balls to the wall and any time you have to stop doing damage it is going to negatively effect your damage output.

Please. This is such bs. This might be true for rogues unfortunately, but zerkers, monks, mages, and necros (if the fight is longer) all have the potential to meet or beat wizard dps on a regular basis. DPS is very competitive atm, and since wizards haven't received an upgrade to our burn rotational spells since RoF and melee dps have and will continue to receive upgrades via CotF gear and weapons, melee dps should be gaining even more ground in the months to come.

IMO this problem can be broken down two fold.

1) Melee rez effect is too harsh as it also blocks buffs. We get a small slow, but that ignores the fact it blocks haste. If this wasn't intended then we could go with the positive hundred hands method that Aristo mentioned before. It'd stack with haste, but block some HH effects (far less of an issue than pure slow). This means it's beneficial to buff still.

2) I know they won't like me saying this, but frankly death having almost zero impact (bar the mana) on casters seems a bit wrong. I've seen cases of both wizards and necros die on a raid pull, get a quick rez, and then top the parse on the very same mob being pulled.

Death *should* mean something. The melee effect is too harsh IMO while the caster one is too lenient. Balance them!

I haven't tested this change as I can't get an entire raid on test to do it, but on Live I know there are a number of raid events that we do slowly enough for me to be using Rest mid fight. This implies the change will hit my dps even without dying and not during an indefinitely long XP group, but a single raid event (eg WK1, sometimes WK2 if we're low on turnout), Bixie 2, Neriak 1, maybe more.

The impact of low endurance will simply mean I stop using some abilities on any longer events. Older things like Jugular Slice, and maybe some of the poorer DD proc-oriented discs. Chances are I'll stop using Deceit and the shadow pet too unless I absolutely have to, in order to spend the endurance on dps instead. Some discs would want looking at too. Eg Executioner's Disc is 130 end/sec and yet barely does any more dps than Knifeplay.

On paper the amortized endurance drain for my rogue is around 17 mins for an entire bar. With some combat endurance regen offsetting that it may rise to 25-30min of fighting, but I get the feeling I've forgotten something as in practice I seem to run out faster. Can I make it last longer by "managing resources"? Yes. However is it management in the way you (Aristo) desire? Probably not. Management will basically be totally ignoring half of my abilities, including brand spanking new ones.

I suggest just discontinue the rest line entirely, and tune future abilities to have a slightly lowered endurance cost to make up the difference. Then, as someone said, have everyone start with 10% endurance upon death. Enough for tanks to use a defensive type of disc and grab aggro (10% or 15% or whatever is enough).

If the intent of this line was to provide a way to get back in the fight, then the above does just that but with one less button to push (and we have way too many of those). Rest was nice when you could fade every 2 mins and get pretty much infinite endurance, but with the proposed changes it´s just better to remove it.

Edit: But regardless of whether one of the proposed changes take place, or line is removed, melee will need retuning of endurance abilities. We are already well behind casters in most scenarios and these changes would, if not compensated for, further compound the problem.

If respite really has to be changed, then how about making it into an endurance harvest ability, with 7sec cast time and instantly add 20% endurance or so?
Reuse maybe a few mins.

And this is why all the " Nefs & balancing" is going on, endless whining. Lets just make 3 classes for eq, give them all the same abilities and get it over with?

I agree here if they decide to remove the refrsh from harvest on syllable, why not decrease the reuse on it. It will hurt non the less, but to a lesser degree

This, a lot of wizzys don't go OOM because they have switched to lesser spells before they run out.


With the 1st Ethernere raid I am normally nearly out of mana with the Commander at around 10%, if I use harvest I'm out of the fight too long and the mob is normally dead before I get a chance to use a fraction of the mana I have got back, if I drop to using lesser spells I can do more damage over the same length of time. Claws aren't always worth using instead of higher damage spells for the small chance it has of returning mana, I'm more likely to call for Para than use Claw for mana.

That said I've never been a fan of Claws, I don't like random effects.

This is the PERFECT resume of the situation.
If i want to be useful in raid i NEED to cycle my dps discs for that i need endurance. Our actual DPS is balanced around our endurance.
I could not use some discs to manage my endu but then i would be behind every casters dps that care to play at 100%. Every honest raiders will confirm you that.
Just take actual parses. Do you see melees dps owning casters? Why do you want to nerf melee dps at all? I never saw one post in this forum asking or pretending that melees sustained dps is too high vs casters sustained dps.
Unless you nerf every casters dps and not only wizards this change will break melee dps and you'll see lots of people main changing/quitting/slacking depending on their attach to the game/their character.

About group game this is worst than anything. For me with 100k+ endu pool (group geared rogues have more like 60) atm i need to click rest after 10-15min of fighting. Then i reclick it every 3-5min.
Playing with the change will be :
- 10-15min fight then click rest and wait for 1-2min without doing anything.
- Then play 3-5min and click rest again, wait 1-2 min again and that until i med for full endurance (at least 5min of dowtime)
Other option : i dont use my dps discs to keep my endu consumption to the minimum and my sustained dps is divided by a factor 2.
That is what you want? you think dividing melee dps by a factor 2 will have us better balanced vs casters dps?

Clerics are the new protectors of DPS casters. Basically we cant touch rez effect for casters without breaking the entire raiding game. Melees are not essential for the game so we can hit them and hit them hard. Nice way of balancing the game really.

They could fix that if they wanted, just give priests an AA which ignores the detrimental effects of rez effects and returns X amount of mana to make them functunal, would also help Druids who have quick mana return.

The same way they could add an AA to fix the tanks not being ready to tank, add an AA which only returns end if they have rez effects.

Not that I agree with any of these changes, but there are ways to fix some of the problems they create.