Updates needed for Magician "of the Many" line due to 6/13/23 Test patch notes

Its not great. Its like the level 70 era in the sense that if you work really hard and really push your dps to the top levels, you will do decent damage. You will still be beat by several other dps classes and possibly a really good bard or well geared warrior.

With the max number of pets required, you simply cannot land an Of Many in the SoF/SoD/HoT eras for as much damage as your bolt spell does so now the spell is just a faster cast, longer recast bolt with 7+ pets and a bad spell that hurts your dps if you cast it with any less.

EDIT - I should say the level of dps competitiveness will vary a bit. SoF mages are still going to be very strong. SoD until you get to EoK are going to hurt though, especially as necros just get better and better and make your damage insignificant in comparison.

Going off one night of raiding on Mangler (TBM era) following the update, -of Many damage is down about 25% after switching to Storm of Many Rk. III. Since -of Many accounts for about a third of my total damage, that's around an 8% overall nerf. Noticeable, but probably not rewriting the class tiers over it.

Obviously the further back you go the larger of a percentage Clash of Many contributed to your overall damage and the more significant the loss will be.

Good info. Like you mentioned, this is beyond the expansions most effected. On Mischief we got years of expansions hit hardest.

SoF drops later today for Mischief. I just can't decide. Should I stick with the class I put a lot into and be The Last of the Maghicans. Or, switch to my rogue alt and join the hoards of melee dps.

Are mages completely useless because of this change or does this only affect raid dps rankings?

How are things looking for everyone in SoF post patch?

yeah almost no point to having it on the bar its a load of BS sands hits better

The choices are

A conditional nuke that does less damage even when all the conditions are met or...

Just use one of your regular nukes and not have to worry about conditions and do more damage

It's a tough call.

Yeah, Shock of Many II was hitting for 650 with 1-3 pets out, with 7 it was hitting for like 4500...super bad.

Good stuff team! Wait two years for a new and innovative spell line, only for it to be made completely worthless the day before unlock.

Just remove the spell from the game if you’re going to junk it. Oh, and don’t forget to buff monk dps!

Monk turns attack on and gets more than double the dps of a mage casting 2 bolts and servant whenever gift of mana pops up. "Don't worry, when SoF comes out mages will be top dps." SoF comes out and a week prior DGB nerfs mages main dps spell. Why not replace it with an unresistable malo so mages can just be coth and malo bots in raids since their dps is less than 1/2 of any/every melee class?

I just don't know why I invested so much time getting the Force of Nature achievement and maxing out every aspect of my mage, for my monk alt can do double the dps and never have to worry about keeping a pet alive that needs to be fully rebuffed and equipped after each death to do less than 1/2 the dps. Every melee in group can do consistent dps using every disc whenever it's available for more than 30 minutes before they need to sit to regain stamina out of combat. Whereas a mage and other casters need to sit and regain mana out of combat at least two times in the same 30 minute time frame. There's just no reason to play a mage anymore other than maybe casting coth once or twice a raid when someone comes late or goes afk.

The next nerf they should make is draining stamina from melee after every melee attack so that after 400-500 melee attacks melee need to sit and be useless out of combat for 3 minutes like casters. Then everyone can quit EQ all together.

Thanks for the updates, devs. Good talk.

ETA on monk dps buff?

Has there been any interaction at all from a Dev in regards to the issue? About to swap off my mage on Mischief because the damage is absolute trash.

There has not, and at this point it is unlikely they will address the issue. I got my necro to 80 last night. Rerolling is fairly quick and painless.

Why wouldn't they address it? The patch note says nothing about reducing damage to this spell line. They can't acknowledge whether or not they intended Shock of Many to perform completely counterintuitively, thus rendering it objectively useless?

At this point the only logical conclusion is that they have seen this thread, talked about it internally, decided not to do anything and are now ignoring it in the hope that we will eventually stop complaining and just accept the result. They see it as a temporary problem and don't have the time or desire to balance things on TLPs.

That is why they won't address it. If they were going to they would have done so by now.

After having a couple weeks to fully explore the effects, yeah the change to the of many line for TLP mages is crippling. If you mix/max your spell weaves to the situations, your dps is.......fine. Not tremendous, not great, not even good, but its fine. Fine being, your raid shouldnt boot you out of it for something else, but you dont actually matter.

That said, I dont want them balancing a class around a few old expansions purely for the TLP crowd, so I dont think we can nor should really expect anything to be done about this, it just is what it is. A really frustrating experience since so much of the TLP ride is just an absolute kick in the pants to the mage class.

Thanks devs, and thanks OP for starting this thread. Looks like Darkpaw agreed that Shock of Many doing less damage than a bolt spell made absolutely so sense.

The wording in the patch notes is confusing but it is allegedly getting buffed next patch .

Just looking at the 7+ pet tiers on test:

Shock of Many Rk. III: 4926 > 15300
Jolt of Many Rk. III: 6162 > 18555
Clash of Many Rk. III: 12418 > 22504
Strike of Many Rk. III: 28218 > 27292
Salvo of Many Rk. III: 33092 > 33098
Storm of Many Rk. III: 38466 > 40139
Volley of Many Rk. III: 46650 > 48679
Shockwave of Many Rk. III: 56575 > 59035
Barrage of Many Rk. III: 93561 > 74849

I box 4 120 level mages. Looks like a big nerf is incoming. Thanks Devs, thanks a lot.

Sigh.

The massive adjustments to the early versions of the spell show how bad the initial hit really was, and thats a good change, but all this did is get them to examine the line and nerf the end point we are working towards on these mages.

Notice how no other classes had spells buffed up or nerfed at the high levels with this patch? All we managed to accomplish is to have our class nerfed in the long run.