Upcoming changes on Test- July 2015

nm

shhhh man they didn't notice that.

Well Necro DoTs appear to be still stacking for now (granted I only tested a few), but I know at least some of them suspected that the stacking changes were implemented as a potential avenue to prevent stacking in the future.

P.S. Making posts and then editing them to remove lots of (or in this case all of the) information is kinda sketchy.

It was a joke, but I thought better of it. Slasher got it.

Um... yeah... I'm gonna go with this was in the totally unexpected category. Expected and happened: Enchanter Haze fix, Enchanter Crystal fix. Expected in general: Melee rebalancing (lulz), melee friendly(er) raid mobs, caster tuning. Not Expected: Targeting out of the blue, Mages.

For the devs stating they are working predominantly on the next expansion, they sure have a lot of time to nerf, sorry, re-tune "casters, er, I mean a single class. During TDS beta Necros got to have a huge discussion with the devs about balancing etc. When did this happen for the other casters? Right. It didn't.

You've been on a self-righteous crusade to run casters into the ground for months now. Stop acting like normal gameplay changes were ever anticipated. Pretty sure I have never heard a Mage secretly say "geez, I hope they don't nerf rains b/c they are SOOOO OP".

There's been discussion of using rains on the caster class forums where myself and others were singing their (Rain spells) praises, as a conceptually well-balanced spell idea with good risk vs reward in using. Then they immediately get nerfed. That will be the **last** time I personally ever offer any information on characters I play to others, I will be taking the Necromancer's first and second rule of fight club from here on out. Anything to slow the nerfs down

They're going to nerf everything anyway, but I need not speed the process along by publicly enjoying my class on forums...

Find me a post where I said they should nerf casters. All you will find is me saying balance is screwed melee suck

As for rains. There was a thread somewhere around here months ago that showed the efficiency of rain spells vs rest of the mage dps spells and wizards even compared them to there own rain spells asking why do ours suck compared to mages. You have rain spells that are highly efficient compared to rest of the dps spells that class gets it has been for years. I honestly did not care about rain spells the risk/reward was fair.

We both have seen devs say one day something is intended but 6 months later they claim it was a bug.

Another Daybroken patch. You keep singing thr tune that you are strapped for time to develop us enough content, but you sure have enough time to nerf mages into bench warmers. I got a news flash for melee dps. You never going to get an upgrade in dps, instead they are going to nerf casters out of existence and say "We buffed melee dps! Go check the parser!"

If we had enough content, we wouldn't be on the boards complaining. So stop wasting time with nerfs and get us some new content.

Welcome to the world of melee, where we have to stack all our ADPS into one glorious short burn at the expense of any long term strategy

I'm not saying this as a way to complain at casters or anything - I actually think casters are reasonably balanced *vs each other* right now, but have no faith whatsoever in this being true after this patch. The change is to the wrong location.

Seems easier for them to nerf down to "balance" instead of actually improve the classes that need it and actually tune appropriately. These kinds of changes just wind up indirectly hurting melee more since mobs die slower resulting in them dying even more than they were before. It probably won't make much of a dent in the top end but for the middle ground, it will probably hurt a bit.

Maybe when rains are the ideal DPS weave on the TLP servers they will whine enough to get it changed back. How many years will that be..?

TLP will be dead by October

If shaman rain heals remain nerfed, it will directly hurt melee (at least in my guild).

As someone mentioned earlier, content changes would be better to bring things a bit more in line for many. Rogues suck in TDS raids (at least the way my guild raids) because there are so many rear arc AE's and such that can just be avoided entirely by sticking the rear of the mob in a wall. On those raids, I often wonder why I'm bothering to take up a raid slot. Arx3, with all of it's range damage.... why am I here again? I don't even bother throwing things during the heal totem phase. My whopping 300dps isn't worth getting summoned into her aura. Making adjustments to things like this would make way more sense to me than these sweeping changes.

I mean, yay for procs and all, but destroying one class's dps, and hurting the dps and healing of others isn't really a fair trade. We all know that the 'balance' in this game is less like a teeter totter perfectly balanced on it's fulcrum, with casters on one side and melee on the other, and more like a ferris wheel, with each class in a different seat. Anyone that hasn't figured this out by now either hasn't been around long, or hasn't been paying attention.

While I don't expect this change will hurt the very top guilds, it's going to have a rather nasty impact on the not-the-very-top guilds: given how much melee is sucking this expansion, we've been depending a LOT on our casters to pick up the slack. With these changes, we're still going to have slack laying around. Who's going to be picking that up? The tanks? The healers? Are druids suddenly going to be nuking on raids, to bring our raid-wide dps back up?

As a side note on the whole necro dps thing: dots didn't always stack like they do now. It's been like this for several years, but it hasn't ALWAYS been like this.

The thing about nerfing dot stacking is, when the campaign comes out it will like be burst centric, like it usually is. There may be a sustained event though. You [not Winnowyl] think your dps sucks now, wait till it takes twice as long to kill a sustained event as it does now.

Although I understand that a higher burn is offset by a lower sustain (and some really are able to pull off a GLORIOUS burn), the burn itself for most melees is really a tad too short and the slope to what remains after discs fade off is too strong.

And with fights taking continually more and more time (due to concept and blanked nerfs), melees will continue to fall behind even further. Longer fights = people dieing (especially those near enough to get a beating when the tank dies).

As for the rain "concept changes", I pondered during the night until quite far into the morning:

Magician's Rain nerf = bad (especially for mages)
WIzard's Rain nerf = disagreeable, but most of our WIZ actually don't even use those
Shamen's Heal Rain nerf = crippling, especially for tanks and melees

Even if someone wants to hurl a stick between the magician's legs (vertically or horizontally) - can you please at least leave heals out of the equotation? As a magician, I don't want to have "healer nerfs" be attributed as "resulting from [my] playstyle. Thank you!".

All these mages saying that raiding without rains is impossible, don't worry, you can still achieve like 70k dps. I bet I can find some parses from zek where a mage is really going hard and has an enchanter in group (back from when Zek had enchanters, before the sanguine nerf that no one else cares about).

"Raiding without rains" - no
"Raiding with a good chunk of our DPS nerfed" - yes

"Impossible" - no
"Frustrating and not very productive" - yes

If the nerf turns out to push mageicians too far down the DPS-o-meter, magicians will face considerable benchtime again.

Are you basing this on test patch notes, or have you actually tested it on test?

Umm, that actually is bad. In a melee dps group, I bet that 70k could be done by a tank.

I havn't tested it, and am assuming people are over-reacting here. But if it pulls mages down to 70k, that would be bad.

I've tested this on test, there's not a whole lot of uncertainty though. Rains are Mages highest DPS and most mana efficient spells, and they recieved a ~45% nerf to their burn DPS from what's currently on live. Now for raids we're back to our VoA RS->Storm->Spear->Spear lineup for most scenarios, which is significantly inferior to Rains, and also goes through mana like there's no tomorrow. For burns we're kinda out of luck... Our spells have long refresh timers, so we're forced to weave at least 4 spells. We have Storm of Many, Spear of Molten Shieldstone, and Spear of Blistersteel, and no great fourth option. Remorseless Servant is not modified by our burn abilities and is significantly less powerful relative to our other spells than it was in VoA. Had rains not been nerfed, they'd be ~40% more DPS than Spear of Blistersteel, and we now have to weave an even worse spell in after that on a burn (either a Bolt or the VoA Spear). So there really isn't any grey area here, it's a pretty huge nerf.