Testing needed: Upcoming changes to mana/endurance return abilities

I think these changes will hurt the game not improve it. tanks without endurance cant tank effectively. they die group/raid go down. wizards without mana, I guess they can teleport you somewhere since they wont be nuking or are you going to give them a pet like mages get so they can still be considered a dps class.

The wizard change is a far cry from saying they will not have mana anymore.

As a group only tank, I never run out of endurance other than on deaths. The changes don't really have any effect on me other than it takes a few more minutes to recoup from a wipe.

I can't comment on raiding.

I did some basic testing (a few 5 min parses on hall dummy) with autoattack+backstab only, autoattack+backstab+spam keys (deceit, gash, incursion, etc), autoattack+backstab+knifeplay (long duration "sustained disc") and autoattack+backstab+knifeplay+spam keys.

Cutting to the chase, the spam keys added around 20% more dps. (So I'd lose 17% if I didn't click.) That's not game breaking itself. Rogues also get relatively fast reuse discs (7-10min) so we generally keep cycling them unless there is a key point we have to save them for, and indeed we need to keep firing them in order to match other melee dps classes. That's where the big chunk of our dps loss would come. If push comes to shove, I'd ditch most of the spam clicks bar incursion and gash probably and then save all the endurance for the heavy discs. (For what it's worth, the figure is around 1/3rd dps lost for monks, although it may be offset a little with multiple monks.)

The principle of having to manage resources I don't desparately disagree with. Death will be the total cripple though. We're hit so many ways; lack of endurance, discs cancelled and needing to wait on timers again (this is major when it's a 3min duration disc), slow, negation of any haste buffs, lack of raid buffs (they make a bigger difference generally to melee, but we can be rebuffed at least).

If the rest change goes in to force resource management on long fights then we need a new way to regain endurance on death. Maybe just spawning with a chunk of free endurance (more than 10%, less than 30 say) so we can at least do the frugal stuff. We also need higher regen so we regain it a bit quicker. Without dropping aggro and waiting for out of combat timer, I'm around 40 mins to regen my endurance back to full. That's just too long!

(And before the wiz lol and say they're 0 dps when oom - you're wrong. You lose more than 30% sure, but with mana free nukes and high mana regen abilities you're "oom dps" is far from zero.)

that's really the big crux of where this kind of change comes in - on raiding, End issues and Respite are *frickin' huge* to the way that raiding play has evolved over the last several years.

in an age where raids are designed around a principle of 'you can only survive being hit by this mob with a defensive disc going', a tank death isn't just an issue of efficiency it's an issue of that tank being completely incapable of tanking, period, full stop.

i completely agree with a design perspective that says ways of generating effectively infinite resources is a bad thing, and that resource limitation is an important part of gameplay.
but, EQ is a game right now where 'disaster recovery' is as fundamental an aspect of the game's overall mechanics structure that to remove it (as the proposed changes aristo mentioned would do) would cause monumental negative changes in the way that the game plays.

That boils down to, leaving it alone and keeping it fun(being able to fight through bad situations and recover) or making people reset the event and rebuff completely however many times. I don't know about you, but sitting around rebuffing isn't my idea of fun. Especially with some of the stupid random death mechanics we have in place.

i think that there can absolutely be a good middle ground, where having a method for disaster recovery is in place (what Respite is supposed to be, and is right now) but where it doesn't end up being a short-cut to infinite resource (which it also is right now).

that's why i think changing Respite to be something more like 'reduce endurance cost by 90%, and give a minor amount of endurance just to get you going' but only having it be useable under say 5% would be a best of both worlds situation, provided it was also done in conjunction with giving every End using class some form of enhanced regen over what currently exists in the game.

It will be very bad on raiding on some raids i die around 10 times just to things I have 0 control over I can counter them sometimes but not as often as I would like and this will just make raiding worse on a class that already has it terrible in every other part of the game except raiding the warrior. So unless the point is to destroy the warrior class even more I am not sure why this change is even happening.

Instead of changing it flat out across all classes change it based on who is using it as endless resources and leave it alone on the classes that absolutely have to have it function in the way it does now.

Tell ya what, have melee start with 10-15% endurance on death, and modify rest. Melee are already stuck with the slow regardless, so what does it matter if they start with some endurance?

Why can't there be something in place that recovers endurance quickly that only works if you have the resurrection sickness buff on? Whether it be a /disc that only works if you have the icon on you and are under, say, 3% endurance? Or what if resurrection sickness code can be modified that once you receive the icon you receive "x" amount of endurance?

i had the same thought, but then you get into that nebulous realm of 'well, rez sickness lasts for 3 minutes, so the end regen would need to be so weak per tick that it wasn't worth it to keep it on in order to utilize the extra End', which could lead to tricky situations of infinite resource that we're trying to eliminate in the first place.

fine with me - heck, give all pure endurance users infinite endurance and unlink all of their discs, as far as i'm concerned.
i'm a raid leader - the more powerful the people in my raid are and the more options they have at their disposal, the better it is for me.

That's a thought why not have rez effects regen x amount of endurance per tick ? It already slows melee from 225 to 90% isnt that really enough death effects ? Casters have no negatives from rez effects melee are punished over and over in this game.

How about this leave rest as is but change the timer to 7 minutes but when you die it refreshes the timer so you can use it again. This way you cant just fade and respite all the time but if you die you can actually use it when you need it most.

Here is a thought, if you get killed and ressed back you choose between jumping in right away or getting your 15k endurance. Then maybe the raids don't have to be tuned to withstand bind rush.

I don't quite understand why Observer Rest needs to be limited to 21/25/29%. If you have to sit out to use it why not let it work at any endurance level? It would actually resemble resting. No reason blue mana couldn't work the same way.

Endurance regen is nutty. The barest trickle unless you are OOC or low enough to use Rest then a torrent. Mana regen is nutty too, the character's own native ability means little, mostly buffs, clicks, songs and of course OOC.

I never understood why mana regen was sooo much higher than endurance regen.

Can anyone explain why it is like that? Especially with modrods being out in the game for so many years. The game seems tilted towards casters in that regard.

Mana costs V Endurance costs, spell cost is in the thousands, discs are in the hundreds

SOE could go one of 2 ways

1. give you end regen
2. lower your disc/abilities end cost

I'm guessing it's because, using wiz as an example, they originally did no damage once they had no mana, needing to regain some before damaging. Meanwhile a melee with no endurance can keep on autoattacking. Yes we (melee) take a hit, but we do *some* dps without endurance.

Now it's not correct to really say no mana => no dps. There are two factors that equate to the baseline dps when you've run oom. 1) There are several mana free nukes. Not huge, but they'll add up (I believe somewhere in the 5-10k dps mark depending on group, AA focus effects, etc). 2) Oom is not an indefinite state - you regen. So you can use up mana at the same amortized rate that you can regenerate it. That is natural regen, harvests, modrods, etc - all those gain abilities divided by the time to reuse them to get the amortized regen rate.

I don't know what the typical damage per point of mana is for a wiz, when in efficient mode. I asked in guild what their regen rates were and got a host of replies from 600/tick to 1000/tick. Someone with wiz knowledge can do the math and work out their base "oom" dps levels.

My point? Well I didn't really have one except to justify why mana regen is higher than endurance regen. Even with the higher regen I'd imagine wiz "oom dps" to be less than melee "ooe dps". It should be of course, as a flip side to the "max mana burn" dps being higher than the "max endurance burn" dps of a melee. I suspect a bit of tuning is needed on both sides to make that true currently.

I parsed my level 100 group geared wizard unbuffed at 5-7k dps only rotating 3 free mana AA nukes : force of will, ice and fire. Thats not using any point of mana, i could have used mana i regen with my gear to do some low mana nukes to add some dmg probably doubling the dps or more, i could have used harvest AA or spell, or in case of death during raid mod rod or ask for mana from other classes.

With new rest my rogue for example dying during first wave of WK1 event would be pretty much out for the entire event : 5 min of rez effects, then endu capped at 29 for the entire event without possibility to recover it when i am close to 0 (which is pretty fast when i use my dps keys) unless i have escape up and i drop from combat for the entire duration of rest . Honeslty the best bet in that case would be to gate to lobby and wait for full endu regen there before coming back.

Wiz AA nukes aren't affected by focus effects so I don't think you could pull 10k DPS solely with those unless you are under burn (as they benefit from crit+crit damage).

I agree that these rest changes are unwarranted as endurance isn't currently designed to be sustainable without it. If the developers want there to be some kind of resource management involved with endurance, they will have to buff endurance regen rates across the board by a sizeable amount.

As for the harvest changes, the notion that a Wizard under full burn doesn't have to worry about mana is quite wrong. A Wizard is very easy to oom under burn conditions if they just rotate ethereals non-stop.

I do think that the Syllable of Refreshment is very powerful. It is however extremely random in when these procs show up. I've been flooded with mana many times, others I have had nothing. This is a big downside to having a big part of our mana regen linked with a proc.

Hm sry what is a manaregen? Ah you mean sit down and wait, damn Rangers...