Curious as to which spell lines people don't use anymore. Personnally I can't remember the last time I used my pillar spells and some of the smaller nukes. I tend to stick with Etherals, Vortex, Claws, Cascades, Instant nuke (for when I have emotes), rains if AEing along with Fire close range AE and beams. Not forgetting harvests and self buffs/runes. What spell lines do you no longer use?
I would not miss at all any of: Dragoflux's Fire Frostbite Torrent Thricewoven Capacity Arcron Husk Flashburn Virnax's Pyroblade Chaos Burn Divergent Lightning Flashfrost Lightning Tempest Lure of Qunard Torsis Guard Cortexfreeze Leap of Stormjolts Wheel of Flame Aegis of the Arcron Concussive Volley Katelanata Lure of Travenro Shield of Scales Tears of Dragoflux Wildflash Strike (101-106 nerfed versions) and: Telanata Magmatic Explosion Skyfire Pillar Frostbite Pillar Musing Harvest aren't much better
Spells are dead. The spell Dev (Aristo?) Hasn't been seen or heard from in weeks. Possibly laid off. The amount of bugs and errors in ALL classes spell lines is egregious. There will be no fixes or tweaks or creative new spells. This is just the times we live in. Your (our) only hope is that A) Ngreth adds spell clickys to items like it was in the loot from tacvi B) Dzarn takes on the spell workload (unrealistic since he is already taxed to the max) C) someone gets a hold of a daybreak executive and gets them to loan a Dev to the EQ team to fix stuff and or make new stuff. Not knocking you yinla, just you see this as much as I do. P.s. i think Dzarn method of AAs that add % increase is the best thing we can hope for
Aristo doesn't post much unless its beta, where he did plenty to let us know where spells were at. He was in beta, which I think was after they announced layoffs, I could be wrong though my memory seems to be play tricks on me since an opp last week. Just something crossed my mind with the devs being so snowed under, why don't they just stop upgrading the spells we don't use? I don't think any of us would be that worried if they didn't replace the spells with something else, but it may free up time for them to do something else worth while.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but no, he wasn't laid off. He hasn't posted outside of beta in years. I'd be more worried if he did post. I think the rest of your post, while not necessarily incorrect, is extrapolating beyond the information we have. They have an AA dev and a spell dev, but their time was reallocated towards other things this cycle. The allocation of their time in future cycles is not necessarily set in stone, and in general not having to launch an anniversary zone + 3 anni raids + 2 progression servers will probably lighten the load to some extent.
This doesn't really take into account having to weave things and I made it during RoS, but this is what I came up with when looking at Wiz AEs (top line is Skyfire for comparison):
Yinla - to get back to your primary question... Yeah, your list is what I primarily cast when grouping and in my various raid sets. It's been pretty well documented and tested that those are the best bang for the buck so if you just stuck to those, you would be doing fine. I think the only thing to watch for is making sure to use claw as much as possible due to the refresh/twincast capabilities. I suspect you already do that. I'd avoid rash judgements about all spells, even though I'd agree with the general premise that there is only so much you can do with damage and the two overriding factors will always be highest damage output and best damage/mana ratio. It might be a good exercise to figure out how much more damage/resist factor/etc some of the less utilized spells would have to get before you would consider them. The list presented as spells that can be removed without issues has at least 10 that I've used in TBL raid progression. It's the rare raid set where I cannot have both harvest and gambit on it. If there's down time or a death, harvest is just better. If there's any serious penalty for non-movement, you have to use the fire/cold instants instead of cloudburst. Pillars are some of the few non-reflectable spells we have. Without getting too detailed, some of the others have come in handy and even be a solid contributor to various T1 and T2 TBL raids. It's funny in a way...TBL was probably starting to setup as the first expansion in awhile where we would finally get to use our plethora of spells because of our 3 types of damage versatility. Then they got scared and removed almost all the fire resistant stuff (dirty secret - as long as your force is using all their fire debuffs available, you can run fire sets on virtually all the Doomfire raid mobs). Damn mages...
No. Perhaps I worded that sentence poorly. My intent was to say that in future cycles they will not be devoting significant resources to those things I mentioned, as they are special cases for the anniversary. That frees up resources to devote to other things.
I can tell someone doesn’t know what cortexfreeze can do. Lol really tho about 17 maybe 18 on the list could go. There are, however some very useful spells on there. Most are very situational of course. I would have liked to have seen a higher % pump to the spells’ damage as what was giving in TBL is pretty dame weak compared to the primary upgrades giveing to other classes. As far as wizards needing new spells, my spell gems are pretty full now. Some new port spells would be the or removing the TC restriction from dico or wildfire. A new Triple or quad cast spell.
A few exceptions to the list notwithstanding, why do wizards have so many dead spell lines that keep getting supported in modern expacs?
AA count. Without the 31 different lines of spell focus, our aa totals would drop under warriors and rogues. Until the spell focus aas, we were always near the bottom of the aa count list. I don't recall the last real new ability we got through aas … it's pretty much been cleanup and same old stuff as everyone else for a number of expansions (wtb the time spent chasing the pre-consolidation familiar aas). The main problem with all our underutilized spell lines is that most are balanced for a particular time in EQ history (when they were introduced). And once introduced, the only thing that generally changed on the next version was spell damage and mana cost. But the environment for EQ has changed so much since most lines were introduced (better tank aggro control, more root/snare resistant mobs, more summoning mobs, less open space, etc.) … mob hp totals are much higher … mob resists are higher … and even our mana pools relative to spell costs have gotten better. For example, take a browse through the 106-110 spell lines and look at what has a twincast blocker. I am not saying if you removed the twincast blocker you would cast those spells, but with twincast blocker it is pretty much a no brainer not to and you move on. A number of the underutilized spells have a negative effect, or chance at a negative effect. IMO most of the negative effect are worse for now's EQ, but the spell damage increase is just a straight linear change. So again, not worth the negative effect. At this point in EQ development, we're going to continue to get cookie cutter upgrades without much thought into the underlying balance mechanics of our spells as a whole. While disappointing, it's not going to stop my wizarding. I'm much more concerned about mob resists/hps/immunities to snare and root/summoning in an expansion and how changes in those can affect my play. WTB a spell dev not afraid of twincast in an era of 10M harm touches...
Yeah, the main problem is they have nothing to replace those spells with if they removed them. Then we'd just complain about having less abilities than others. I'd post some suggestions if I thought they'd read them
To be honest you are probably one of the most influential players in the class. If they would be unwilling to listen to you it’s pretty much a lost cause. I have lots of ideas about makeing the class more fun, lore friendly, and sorely needed better DPS. Sadly most of the ideas would require reworking of existing spells or completely new ones. At least with TBL I can see a pretty decent change in the spell line up we have been useing for,what 5 or more years now? When I realized yesterday that there could be a much better line up I actualy got excited about the change. As much of a pain in the caster it is to get there. It’s all about the gear this time around.
