Focused Mage Feedback

I completely forgot Rift was 12 targets. I keep thinking its 5 or 8.

SKs get a ton of blue AEs, much more than Warlocks. A Time Warp on them with Chaos Cloud and then Death March resetting Chaos Cloud 100% of the time so they can just cast it again is just evil. This is mainly a case where our AEs reset faster than theirs do, but the mobs are generally all dead by the time this matters.


Fendaria

I know they do (I have an 89 BG alt sk) but I still don't see them beating a warlock unless the adds die really, really slowly, at which point they would then lose to a right side specced warlock as Eternal Damnation would make it worth taking the right side if adds are taking 20s to die.

Has Mogrim made a post in this thread yet? He is uber lock advocate

He's too busy using dark siphoning without the myth clicky on to gain right side increments atm. He made a thread on flames and most of the non-ridiculous stuff has been put here by either me or Buffrat.

You are doing it wrong then.... Our Necro's lifeburn parses higher than his soulburn. In a parse where he does 1 million damage, lifeburn is 4th on the list.

One last request for conjy.. PLEASE make it where half their out of combat spells stop turning on spell auto attack. That is the most annoying thing I have ever seen and can cause a conjy trying to get mana back after shards to wipe a raid.

Illusionist:
Make TC more appealing and castable on self
Do something with illusory arm
less temps to cast
Make buff persistent with death
Give us back the power regen we had on our mythical before the 'break' or do somthing with our power regen.

i'm not doing anything wrong.

there's just no need to get lifeburn nerfed again because you're not happy with manaburn.

I actually agree with that. Fix one skill don't nerf another... that or maybe Necro's Lifeburn is a Class Specialty that makes him better than the Conjy at something?

TC on self... I could see too many Illy hoarding this. It is meant as a buff to others.
Illusory Arm needs something now that many Scouts have 600+ MA.
Temps just need to persist through death. It takes only 5 seconds to fully charge up for a timewarp.
Power Regen does need to be re-increased. Coercers still have the upper hand by a long shot even over 1 group power regen, never mind Raid-Regen.

Edit: Sorry for double post clicked before I realized I could "Edit" this 2nd post into my first.

Illy feedback:

1. TC is far less desirable than UT because of the stat caps. At the current raid level, it essentially takes 6 AA to make TC worth casting. It's not even a good leveling talent as you can't cast it on yourself.
- Possible solution: Make the 5% double cast baseline and TC castable on self. Change the SF AAs add a small damage proc to TC.

2. Illusory allies (and all swarm pets) are useless.
- Possible solution: Make all swarm pets AOE immune. Make it so Illusory Allies restore mana to the group with each strike from the summoned copies. This would also give illies a snap mana regen that doesn't step on the coercers toes.

3. Phase is dangerous and useless.
-Possible solution: Turn phase into a 1 shot stone skin on a semi-long timer (i.e. You cast and the target goes out of phase, allowing one hit to pass through). Maybe have it proc a dehate when the shield expires? Make it group only if need be, but it would make it useful to help a healer dodge an aoe (or yourself) and/or to give that conjuror who just combined TW and EB into an aggro parfait the chance to survive.

4. Raid rebuffing is a nightmare. Dying as an illy is inordinately painful in a raid. You get a rez and have so many buffs to recast, it's insane. All the Synergisms, EV, TC, IA, AoI.
- Possible solution: If even just the AA buffs persisted through death (still requiring synergism buffs), it would make life much more fun.

5. IA, in particular, isn't appealing enough.
- It's not terribly hard to get MA capped at this point. So IA isn't very useful, especially at max level. Give IA a chance to proc extra crushing damage on a melee attack.

TC probably could be made castable on self to make it at least somewhat useful in solo or small party, but it should be made more powerful for raids and given an additional effect that only works on another character. Illy buffing self instead of a conj or wiz will be a nightmare for the raid, because he would just buff himself, thus losing raid DPS.

Swarm Pets, people have been asking for AoE immunity for them since the game came out and every expansion after. They have almost always been irrelevant. More then anything I would prefer they were removed from the game entirely because we have too many spells to cast as it is.

Wizard

Hi,

most of the Issues were already told; so here's a quick overview what
bothers me while playing my Main, a Lvl 95 Wizard. (320AA, 460Crit, 760Castskills)

Manaburn
You really want me to use Manaburn with all those Mana Drains around ?
Calculate the Damage on my Max Mana while burning all my remaining.
Making it Crit would also help, but the former would suffice for me.

Spell Reach
Let it enhance everything which is Range based, including the Cone AEs
like Fusion (enhancing Range and Degree of the Cone - 15m / 180" before
AA mod, so that you could have 20m /180") and the Range Damage based
Spells like Thunderclap (enhancing every Step in it).

Prestige Line
Maintaining Cremation on group encounters is near impossible; change it to the way
the cold line works, as a ticking self buff and not an effect on the Encounter.
Personally, i went with Dual Conversion, easiest way to manage in a Raid for me.
(For more on the Prestige Lines, please see Darays Post).

E'ci
Do you know how often i'm 95% into casting E'ci and all i get is a
"This Enemy is no longer alive" ? Targetting wise, let it work like the
green AEs so that it just finishes casting as long as another Enemy in a
linked encounter is still alive.

Resists
Having 760 Castskills (solo) and having a Troub in Group who buffs castskills
(whats that, over 800?) i am still getting a lot Resists against Group or Raidencounters.
My only chance is an Illy and/or a Brigs Dispatch to get some spells off unresisted.
Tried some Adornments with the "lowers the Resistance of Enemies", still won't help.
(It's not that i expect no resists, but just not so much resists which i currently get).

Fiery Blast
Maybe i should just learn to time it right, but as far as i am concerned it is too
much of a hassle and fails on me too often.
If i could record it and use it up later (30secs? 2mins? Same Fight? Same Zone?)
it would be more appealing to me.

Dumbfire Pets
Just... let it be. Move along, nothing to see here...

Thats all for now,
Rock on.

Greets, Theriatis.

So a Lesser Version is applied if on Self as opposed to case on others?

Unsure if it is mentioned but the focus on "Enraging Demeanor" to give 10% potency should grant it to both the target AND the Coercer, you'll be amazed at how many coercers (often in Pickup-heroic groups) selfishly guard this buff and consider it their own.

If this buff ALSO increased the potency of taunts/detaunts of the coercer/target by 100% that would be amazing as well /pipedream.

Also Illusionary Instigation on the illusionists tree doesn't do "that much" to tanks; hate is often capped and the small amount of strikethrough given won't increase hit rate *that* much.

If this was an ability put hate positions on the standard tank taunts (encounter/single) instead it would be a great alternative to coercive shout, with mem-shuffles as they are tanks need all the help they can get.

OK, finished poking my fighter nose into the mage conversation; carry on

My feedback from warlock's perspective. I'm trying to focus on the issues that make class less fun to play than it could be and leave class balance issues to minimum.

First some general issues I have with current game mechanics and content that impact the enjoyability of my class.

Dumbfire pets are terrible. You have said you don't want to change those spells to something else since you'd like to fix dumbfires. Please finally fix them. I miss my little broodlings.

Lack of meaningful AE content is not fun for us AE classes. Pretty much only AE content are swarm adds and those have so little HP and die so fast, that having lots of AE spells is meaningless. All you need to parse well on adds is couple fast casting AEs and temp buffs from group. I think this has also caused classes to become a lot less specialized. For example currently there's not much difference in single/AE dps between warlocks and wizards. I'd like to see wizards gain a buff in single target damage and warlocks gain more AE power. This obviously requires varied content to support this. IMO Sentinel's Fate was last expansion that featured nice mix of single target and AE encounters.

Passive dps (aka proc dps) has gotten out of hand, especially in AE content. There's just so many buffs that grant 100% damage procs that it has really huge impact on spell and class balance. Faster casting spells have become way better and long casting, hard hitting spells have lost their efficiency. It is now more efficient for me as a warlock to cast Nullify (fast casting, 0 damage encounter detaunt) than Absolution (slow casting, hard hitting encounter nuke) on AE encounters. And that's just plain wrong. Most of these temp buffs have quite short duration but since mobs die so fast, it doesn't really matter. I personally would like to see our actual spells doing most of the damage.


And then some warlock specific issues.

We are too dependant of having troubador in group and getting Upbeat Tempo. To fix this we need either increased ticks for some selfbuff or overall increase in our spell damage. Obviously you'd need to nerf UT (probably change the extra tick focus effect to something else) to compensate this. That would also bring UT more in line with TC.

Netherealm and Curse of Darkness have too long cast times. With current cast times you pretty much need to time add spawns and precast these because if you wait untill adds spawn, you lose dps by casting these. Well casting Curse after adds have spawned actually does increase everyone elses dps so much it's worth it but makes you lose personal dps which is not fun Faster cast time would make these a lot more convenient to use.

Gift or Bertoxxulous has 45 second duration (with AAs) and 45 second recast (with max reuse, which pretty much everyone has). It has fast cast time so it's not that big deal to keep recasting, but changing Warlock tree AA (Enhance: Gift of Bertoxxulous) to be 5 point investement to make it maintained spell would be nice.

Focused Casting has become quite annoying to use. With Time Warp resetting and being up more and increased requirements to move during combat, it has become almost impossible to get full benefit of this spell during lots of encounters. Making FC and TW able to stack would most likely be overpowered but current situation of them overlapping is really annoying. Removing root component of FC would also make it less annoying in fights where you need to move a lot.

Thunderclap forces us to be in close range of mob if we want to maximize our dps. But since almost every mob has AE that kills you in close range, we are forced to either lose dps by staying at range, or keep jousting these AEs. Obviously jousting also decreases our dps (but not as much as staying ranged) since we can't cast while moving and it also makes Focused Casting so much more annoying to time. I personally didn't roll a warlock to play like a squishy scout. Also using melee auto attack instead of ranged is still more dps since we get added procs from Grasp.

Grasp of Bertoxxulous should be able to proc off of ranged and spell weapon attacks.

Absolution and Rift need damage and/or cast speed buff to be competent again. I want to cast big nukes and not spam small ones like i was an enchanter.

One really minor issue that has always annoyed me is that Flames of Velious (a spell we share with wizards) is fire/cold damage. It really should be something like Noxious Flames and deal poison/fire damage. Also Rift should be poison or disease damage.

Even though it came from a Fighter... This sounds like a great idea and I wold love it on my Illusionist.

I would agree actually and go a step further to say for the duration of FC let the Warlock move AND cast, thus making it a personal specialty no other class has except Chanters with "Focused" (Same word here) Channeling.

Wizard

1,
Wizard depends too much on Raid/Group set up.
Wizard needs almost everything / every utility / every support you can imagine
only to do their primal job as expected, to parse as T1 DPS.

You need Troubador of course.
Illusionist who can use Time Warp well is also must.
You want Coercer because you want Mana flow, Peaceful Link, and Psyche/Asylum to debuff spell mitigations.
You want Brigand because Elemental Mitigation needs to be debuffed as soon as possible.
Inquisitor or Fury is needed for their buff.
Pally's Amend or SK giving group buffs should be counted.

You get everything you want or Wizard is only a pityful T1.5 or T2 DPS offering very small utilities to Raid.

2,
And having every utility you want is just toeing the starting line.
Wizard still needs to manage with his/her own difficulties/complexities/good or bad luck things as many people mentioned already.
You always need to time Fiery Blast, Fusion, E'ci, Blast of Devastation and Timewarp.
You need to time when add will pop to make full use of your all big hitters.
You make sure you are in close range so that Fusion and BoD hit as many mobs as possible.
Joust AoEs which can 1 shot you.
Make sure you use Thunderclap and Arcane Bewilderment when to move.
Being stifled / stunned / interrupted / knockbacked while using Fiery Blast is of couse your fault.
Dont be lazy about rotating your 15+ spells while watching timers and range.

You do everything well and finally you are one of best T1 DPS classes, not the best of T1 DPS classes.

3,
Wizard is fine in theory but hard in reality.