What classes do you think today are underpowered?

Does Healing Light proc on casting a stun, or on landing a stun?

So you are still trying to talk to me about healing light.
Just for fun I loaded up all 4 stuns and cast them plus Force of Disruption every time they refreshed for 2 minutes. I cast 39 stuns during that time. I proc'd Healing Light 5 times.
I get that this is just RNG and so lets imagine that Healing Light proc'd all 39 times.
It rarely hits for 200k, but lets pretend it did every single time. Thats 7,800,000hps healed over approx 2 mins. Thats 65,000hp healed per second.
Bearing in mind that Healing Light is never going to proc every time you cast it, but this is fun right?

Ok 2nd scenario. You're an Sk. You are meleeing with 2hander out, and doing approximately 1,500,000 dps and you hit your epic that lasts for 2 minutes.
Just as a reminder. SK epic converts 50% of melee damage done into healing.
You're passively healing in this scenario at 750,000 hp per second.

Now please, don't talk to me about healing light in this conversation again, it is pathetic.

Your probably the only wizard in eq that is fine with wizard dps lol. I hate how even shamans can put the business on us, we cant go out and solo content like pet classes can.

Then we cannot blow the parse up as compensation in raids lol. If we do not have perfect adps we do terrible dps, how exactly are you fine with this? The only reason why we are in better shape this year is due to alot of AE going out and the few small tweaks they made imo, the class needs more work.

I respect your opinion and feedback so if I am missing something about the wizard or am off base send me a message.

Looking at my log it only appears to proc when it lands and it would be far too easy to exploit if it fired on cast.
It also does not generate a group heal unless I am under 100% hps.
I assure you, Healing light is so under-powered as an ability that it bears no discussion in this conversation. I have asked for the ability to be dramatically improved many times in the past and it has never gotten any significant improvement.

not to be, um, impertinent here, but could you check something in game for us real quick?


because

[Wed Jun 14 16:22:43 2023] You begin casting Force of Disruption XXI.
[Wed Jun 14 16:22:43 2023] Combat Dummy Caza is hit by a Force of Disruption.
[Wed Jun 14 16:22:43 2023] Your wounds heal.
[Wed Jun 14 16:22:43 2023] You healed Trustee for 0 (30831) hit points by Healing Light XXIII. (Critical)

first click, btw. not to say it's 100, the Proc has a 20% chance, but it's not 10% like you've claimed

Wizards haven't been able to solo like pet classes for almost the entire life of the game. The only thing that's important when it comes to solo play is that we do enough to solo xp on current expansion mobs in a reasonable amount of time. Today we can do that just like we have in most expansions. CoV was a really bad low point and now we're back to normal.

As far as raid DPS goes.. I've brought up our single target burn every time I can. Every class needs ADPS so that's not really something specific to Wizards. When I post about class balance and DPS I rarely focus on Wizards in a bubble. I'm more interested in the game as a whole and every class being a spot that makes sense. Sure there are some overpowered classes right now but the fix isn't to make everyone overpowered. That would make the game worse.

Healing Light has a 20% chance. Your small test case is 12.8% so yes bad RNG for you there.

For the group it's 50%, for the SK themself it's 80%. Plus the accuracy mod (+40 for group, +70 for SK). So yes it's even more powerful. Go figure.

I think the one thing that is overlooked a lot when people try to discuss class balance is what classes work with what adps, and what that means on the grander scale of raid makeup and raid dps.

Also, the meta-evaluation of raid efficacy is about what works on current raids, not what works on hypotheticals or on raids that are two years old, etc. Some examples of this point can be used to understand why both Paladins and Zerkers are heavily underpowered, or why many think classes like Mages are overpowered.

For the Mage example: The clear best mage group setup is Brd/Enc/Dru/Shm/Mag/Mag. This is because mage soak adps from pretty much everywhere. However, even in this group, mages do not out potential Necros on the vast majority of current fights, even adjusting for fight durations for various guilds.

Additionally, this group only makes sense because all of the adps classes can do serious work themselves. If shamans weren't so individually strong, you'd take the shaman out and put in a third mage, a necro, or a wizard. If Druids weren't so individually strong, you'd take out the Druid and add a third mage. This would reflect on the parses as mages doing less dps, as a direct response result of a shaman or druid nerf.

On the other side, Necros only need a bard and enchanter. This is why they are so strong in particular, right now. Of course they can make small gains with other adps classes, but it is all tiny in comparison. If Shaman and Druid become weaker dps individually, you just remove them entirely and straight up go for a 4xNec/Brd/Enc group.

On the melee/tank side the same thing happens. Zerkers and Warriors get the vast, vast majority of their adps from bard. Paladins as well. But you plug an SK into the above groups with Brd/Enc/Dru/Shm and you honestly aren't missing much from swapping out a mage or wizard. In fact, with AE heals and how relatively weak adds are in modern raids, SKs can still put out that dps while tanking a mob or two.

Is that strength? Sure. However, it is also using raid resources in terms of your adps to attain it, where on the other hand a warrior can do respectable dps from his tank group with just a bard.

Paladins and Zerkers are weak right now for similar reasons. They don't really fit into the current mosaic of what makes a great raid force.

As above: both classes receive adps inordinately balanced towards having a bard. However, by the actual value increase of dps, neither gets as much raw dps bonus from the bard as their counterparts that deal sizeable magic damage (SKs and Beastlords, respectively). Both classes lack any real non-single target dps contribution to raids that are heavily balanced towards AEs and multidotting.

Additionally, an incremental cycle of decay has been in effect for a while. Zerkers famously with their crit chance being capped for quite a while now (this also affects warriors, of course), and Paladins with their heals/AE heal being less necessary with the advent of strong shamans and stagnating mob damage output. In the current meta, Paladins are very niche. They only really excel at tanking a single mob isolated from the raid, and even then they aren't significantly better than the other options. In current raids there's only a handful of mobs that you do that with. 2-3 on Pit Fight, Mean Streets (kinda), and 1 on Firefall Pass (which is such a healing light fight that it doesn't matter at all). In my opinion, it is really only favorable to keep two paladins on a roster currently for the one thing that only they can do, AE Cure. Which isn't even used this expansion, but always need someone to be able to do it.

Incrementalism issues with healing affect Paladins and Clerics pretty hard. In this case it is the stagnation of player HP pools with heal amounts scaling much higher. This means that large heals heavily overheal, and with the AE heal blanket being maintained by shamans, the actual healing attained by these two classes is decreasing by expansion. Clerics are pretty much limited to remedy spam and smashing emergency buttons as necessary, as remedy is the only heal that won't just straight overheal in a raid setting.

Despite all of this, the worst class currently is Monk and there's really no question about it.

So this leads to the obvious question: How can these issues be fixed?

The most obvious band-aid fix for melee, to me, is to give Monks a melee version of IoG. The duration and crit damage amount can be workshopped, but this will make the class itself viable, while putting the other pure melee classes back where they need to be.

Historically, there has been a dev mindset against adding melee crit damage stacking. Famously the addition of an SPA that makes Shaman epic, Glyph and some disciplines not stack for crit damage bonus. This has also persisted in the form of lack of new crit damage bonuses or stagnating ones in comparison to caster counterparts.

This aversion was well founded when you could burn down events very quickly or even skip phases or add waves by just blowing up a raid mob. However, the ballooning hp of raid events and the stricter scripting and requirements no longer make this an issue. Currently, even Zerkers are just 'in the pack' of classes that can do a super strong one to two minute burn, which isn't super meta-relevant to current raids as is. This fixes that.

Additionally, for Zerkers (and Warriors), having a roll-over mechanic for crit rate where additional percentage above 100% is converted to crit damage percent would make them continue to be relevant. I do not know the issues with programming this, as crit rate is a system that stems back to original EQ and could be extremely hard to change, but I imagine an additional calculation such as (((Crit Chance Mod) * (300 + ((Total Dex - 255) * 0.2))) - 8900) / 8900 = bonus crit damage mod would work for these two classes.

For Clerics adding healing echoes would work well. Single target heals that drop a second (or third) heal after a couple seconds would allow for their spam heals to have additional relevance. Additionally, clerics should really have some sort of actual dps burn, even if it is just for a couple minutes. This could be either a melee burn or caster burn, but the dials of their current burns of these types need to be multiplied by around a factor of 10 to be currently usable. Make the cleric unable to heal during the burn, so it can only be used situationally; high level players will find a way to work it into raid settings.

For Paladins... I don't know. I don't see a clear path to making them viable over the other tanking counterparts. To be honest, I haven't thought extensively about how to fix them, because I find their whole concept broken to the core in the current raid development meta.

I think what you are referring to is power creep which is indeed an issue that plagues other games like EQ2 for instance. I do not know if power creep can even exist in an old game like eq with the old engine. But if it can then yes I would agree, I think balance will look like small adjustments over time to under performing classes and less power increases to over performing classes untill things "look" like they are in balance.

Wizards could solo play in the form of quad kiting, with long sit times to regen mana ha. I would like to be able and go out and do basic things in eq without having to beg people for a spot in a group.

Yes, Shaman are unbalanced. And, yes, primary purpose of priest class is healing, not dps. And I know plenty of druids, myself included, that solo dps. You can kill 2 mobs, and then sit and regen your mana bar. Certainly nowhere near as effective as my beastlord that can solo without a merc non-stop, but better than not having any options. I believe druids are in a much better spot than clerics when it comes to soloing.

Couple things here, for the SK epic does 80%, which would mean 1.2million in heals per second. But more importantly 1.5m DPS from just melee for an SK is REALLY REALLY high. Even running T'Vals and spire, and glyphs, and VoD with T2 NoS 2h. Most likely the SK is getting that kind of DPS by adding in HT, taps, DoTs, Pet, Swarm pet, Spite, quick spear, Conjunction, and maybe a disc if timed correctly.

We don't just hit Epic+2h and auto attack then AFK for a sandwich. Also pets, taps, DoTs, spear (DD), Conjunction, etc don't benefit from epic effect. That 1.2 will be severely diminished.

Now a Rog grouped with an SK, the Rog could get 50% of their melee back as heals for 2min out of every 5 as long as the SK is on top of their epic. But this would mean the SK is not using their epic to keep themselves alive, more as a buff for the group. Also putting an SK in what I assume is a DPS group seems odd, but every raid is different.

I'm sure you don't need to be reminded many things with a % chance to proc do not come close to their percentage.

But you didn't say our primary purpose - you said "do what druids do best - healing" which is objectively wrong. Even in a group its likely that the tank of that group will heal themselves better than I can since 2/3rds of tanks have better self heals than what I provide them (I might be exaggerating a little here but not much).

Sure, my bad - we can solo. Pretty sure I'd get more exp from doing overseers twice a day though. I just want to be clear on this point - I don't care about our soloing potential whatsoever. I am not advocating for druids to be better soloer's.

As for druid's being in a better spot soloing than Clerics - well of course they are. Did anyone say anything different?

Look, all I said was that druid mana needs help in the current meta - that's it. I didn't say it was top priority or that druids were in a terrible state or whatever. It is objectively true that druid mana needs help. We can argue all day about priest purpose or whatever but none of that matters because the devs have created a meta where the single best thing a druid can do is DPS, that has been the case for a while now and I don't really see it changing anytime soon. In a meta where a druid's value lies in DPS, we need help mana-wise because if we don't keep up in the DPS dept. then we will no longer be viable in the raid end game (as Gorator explained at length above).

You're correct. It appeared to not be doing anything because I was alone in the guild hall casting on a combat dummy when I tested. I just love all the filters though.
However as we are talking about passive self healing, the resultant 65k healing per second to the group is a minor consideration but certainly worth taking into account.

Also I never claimed anything about the proc rate. This was just my results of casting for 2 minutes. If I did it again I might get 10 procs, who knows? Its 20% chance as you mention, and if I did a few hours long parse it would probably result in somewhere below 20% actually proc rate.

As we know, SK epic, which is just one of the many passive healing options a SK has is going to try to provide a heal every single time the SK gets a hit to land.
And yea, I forgot it was 80% on the SK themself. Sheesh.

Ozon, you're right, hitting 1.5 mil dps is not typical, it was just me throwing out a number thats possible under certain conditions.

I'm not home so I don't have any parses available to me. Hoping there is a top end paladin who has high cast counts of stuns/fod, that can provide their healing parse breakdown for a full clear. As per your wish this will be the last time I bring up a class specific ability in an area that you are complaining about, passive healing. I'll make a suggestion that perhaps it should be able to proc off of any detrimental spell and not just stuns.

I'm not even going to bother with the second scenario between the wrong % of leech effects and then correctly knowing that leech effects are strictly from melee but still using the 1.5m dps total to exaggerate the amount of passive healing. We get it, the sk epic is the most op item in the game and only gets more powerful as dps increases. Keeping in mind, you as the paladin also benefit from said leech effects (weapon equipped of course and swinging) at the 50% level. You then have to deal with riposte strikethrough though. With that said, I have had little issue tanking with 2h out with sk epic on on a single mob and multiple mobs with glyph rolling.

I was going to suggest for funsies on the next raid clear on sunday doing a simple test. Add in two stuns to your spam key, keep fod on cd, and see how much healing it provides you on the 4 or 5 events from that night. Then on monday, go with 0 stuns and we can get a look and be able to compare between the two raid nights the amount of procs and total amount of heals. This is not the most ideal way to go about it as it would be better to compare the same events (Off top of head I would venture to guess you will get more total hp healed on an event like door vs mean street) Try utilizing all the tools and show data before making the blanket statement that it is pathetic and paladin passive healing is horrible. I agreed that it's not great and gave one suggestion specific to the pres line in comparision to the sk skin line. It just seems crazy to me to call something pathetic that you don't even try to use and then complain about passive healing. And then come at me with 2 minute parses in a guild hall and not real event data to proclaim it's horrible. I guess we'll agree to disagree. I do appreciate you trying to get improvements for the class.

At 120, any guesstimate on how much the SK self-healing is tied up in their epic?

In other words, assume a 120 SK doesn't have their epic. Would that fact itself level the playing field versus 120 Paladin, all other things being equal?

Well on May 28th the hubby had 12.2% of his total heals from the night be from Healing Light XXXIV (8.273 M)

Valiant Disruption and Force of Disruption - 270 and 346 respectively