Focused Feedback - Mages

Hey guys!

Now that the expansion has launched, we're going to do another round of focused feedback. We're looking for feedback on anything you find frustrating, annoying or think could be better.

As with the last time, we intend to focus mostly on Quality of Life adjustments and things that make the game more fun to play.

We'll be keeping these threads opened for a bit while we gather your feedback and then look into making adjustments.

Thanks,
Xelgad

Okay then let's start Illusionist here:

Casting a Mez turns on my auto attack. I know there's a setting for "no auto attack" but it's annoying to remember. I can't name a fight where you want to mez this expansion, but it's annoying.

Once again, Buffs are showing their age and aren't being nearly as impressive or wanted as they should be. If you want specifics I can start getting into it but I'm sure others have better numbers and examples than I do

General:
I don't know what my role is any more. I don't think many people know what their role is. Are we down to every one being either tank, healer, and DPS? Is support a role still? Are there still hybrid support and DPS? The classes are blurring together hard.

Wizard:

(1) 'Ice Comet' to 'E'ci's Frozen Wrath' prestige conversion not affected by spell quality improvements:

- Pretty self-explanatory (and this is probably a wider issue affecting multiple classes), but AA and prestige conversions should also be affected by spell quality.
- Conversions are already affected by "Class Focus" effects, so the possibility for doing so with spell quality should already exist.
- I assume Ice Comet is a high-probability candidate for an Ancient option, which just increases the importance of this particular example.
- Conversions should be superior to the original ability, but not sure how you can factor in the high quantities of mod to ensure AE conversions remain superior (i.e. AE abilities gaining 1/3 per target).


(2) Fiery Blast:

- With the vast majority of temp buffs (charms, other clickies, abilities, etc) being on a 1 minute (or multiples thereof) cooldowns, any chance of getting Fiery Blast reduced from a 2.30 base reuse to a 2 minute base reuse (i.e. 1.15 down to 1 minute capped)? Even if this comes at a slight cost. More of a usability improvement, because the cooldown on FB jars with everything else. Or go in the opposite direction with a reuse increase to 4 base (2 capped) with a relative increase in the damage (Out of the two, I think I'd prefer this 4 minute base/2 capped option).


(3) Manaburn (and other "-burn" type abilities):

- Can we get these coded in a way that will (fully) scale against itemisation, i.e. in a form similar to regular ability/spell arrays? While, in theory, they should scale against itemisation due to primary attribute values being tied to blue stat values, it doesn't (fully) account for effects granted via itemisation (e.g. uplifting, practiced), buffs, or other AA choices (that grant additions to multipliers).
- Base value calculated in some form against power/health pools in a similar format to pri stats (at a large reduced value over the current live ratios).
- Affected by all of the multipliers that currently affect abilities (potency, crit multiplier (+ new critical system), mitigation debuff and vulnerability - and possibly SDA/ab-mod).


(4) Resist Break - Dragon tree (all mages):

- As with the vulnerability ears, any chance these can be changed to affect *all* magical damage? Our raid setups have been a little lopsided (with multiple wizards/conjurors), and this has relatively disadvantaged our other classes (nox based in particular).
- Never did take the time to test these, but I've always assumed they stacked (much like the ears). Is this assumption correct?


(5) Catalyst (Sorcerer) / Crit Chance AA:

- Guaranteeing that your next spell cast will critical has been rather worthless for the longest time. Any chance this component can be reworked to be useful against the new critical system?
- Probably the easiest way would be for it to grant fixed additive crit chance (at a meaningful value against the new critical system).
- However, I would much rather prefer something that offered future-proof scaling (e.g. short duration temp buff that granted a *base* critical chance modifier)
- Further to the crit chance AAs, might be worth taking another look at the fixed crit chance values granted by 'Spell Expertise' and other class equivalents (bards included). Seeing 176 crit chance on the handcrafted food makes me think these are now set at a beyond negligible value.


(6) Passive regenerating wards (often granted via AA):

- This affects many classes beyond just sorcerers (e.g. bard resist songs), but it is also a sorcerer issue (Magi's Shielding, Ward of Sages, Scaled Protection).
- Passive regenerating wards should be rescaled to provide base values appropriately balanced against current hitpoint pools and mob damage values (and then also ensure they scale appropriately against our other multipliers). With the lifting of the CB penalty on wards, the sorcerer ones actually aren't too bad if you currently "bug" them out (below), but it's a bit of an annoyance to have to constantly do this if needing to respec (so would rather the base values were corrected to be balanced, and then the loophole below squashed).
- While rebalancing these across all classes, the bug(?) (that allows you to inflate the ward values far beyond their intended values) should be fixed (apply buff, mentor, unmentor, zone, is the easiest illustration of this).
- Oh, edit: "Scaled Protection" from the dragon tree does not persist through death, and needs to be recast every time. This probably shouldn't be the case.


(7) Wizard left-side prestige (single target line):

- I know I've said this last year, but it is worth repeating: The left-side prestige will never be used as it is not a viable alternative under any scenario.
- At the very least, it ought to offer wizards an advantage in ranged single target scenarios.
- 'Blaze' isn't enough and should be redesigned (not mod). It is rather easy to gain fixed ability mod values (where wizards are currently pushing their excess reforging pool). That and our high SDA values will further diminish the relative value of 'Blazed' casts, as doubled casts do not benefit from mod.
- 'Incineration', while it does scale against certain multipliers, is still a proc, and as such is further disadvantaged by existing mod and SDA values (from original design). Also overly limited by the single target heat spell restriction.
- 'Mystical Heat' is fine on paper, but indirectly suffers from the problems that Manaburn has (see above).
- 'Hellfire' is a rather average ability (inferior to Thunderclap in damage, but on double the cooldown of Thunderclap). Pending any useful changes to Blaze, either the damage values or the reuse (or both) should be looked at.
- Is this important at the end of the day? Maybe not, because I'll just do what wizards do, and continue to use right-side under all scenarios. It would be swell to have a viable alternative though.


(8) Firestorm:

- Increase the base radius (from 7.5m) to 10m, and reduce the "Enhance: Firestorm" AA to instead add 10% / 1m per rank. The existing combination remains unchanged (at 15m), but the cap is increased to 20m, leaving headroom for Spell Reach and Resonance.
- This will better match our other existing AEs, and be a little less annoying to execute AE rotations with the reverse-range requirement on 'Unda Arcanus Spiritus'.


(9) Iceshield:

- It is tough to get the triggers on this ability consumed, especially with our (main) brawler tank. Frequently I just watch them fall off when the duration expires.
- Be swell if we could have the proc condition changed to operate in a similar manner to Prismatic Chaos (on a spell/combat hit). Or something that allows it to proc more reliably on our brawler tanks.
- The focus effect for Iceshield should be changed (to grant an extra trigger or something mildly more useful) if so.


(10) Fortify Elements enhancements (and other magical mitigation buffs from other classes)

- Still on my list, but a rather minor point.
- Allow the AAs in the wizard/shadows tree (Enhance: Fortify Elements and Arcane Barrier) to affect our group's total Max Power amount. Currently these abilities only affect the rather insignificant portion of power directly granted by this buff. We have plenty more ways to buff Max HP than we have to buff Max Power.
- Also, are the (magical) mitigation values granted by mage (and other) group buffs set at an appropriate value in light of the upcoming raid zone requirements (130-190k+)?
- To future proof scaling in this regard, it might be more logical if (magical) mitigation buffs were just a % base value increase, but this might be more complex to implement.


Probably more to mention, and will add it as things come to mind, unless others beat me to it.

Necromancer:

1.) Lifeburn: This iconic ability is falling short because of scaling issues and as daray suggested all "burn" type of abilities should end up scaling with all stats at the cost of lowering the current damage significantly by lowering the scaling it gets from the HP pool and then allowing it to scale with other stats. I would also like to add that the ability be made instant cast.

2.) Undead Horde: This is spell is great but just has a very long base recast timer on it. There would be many instances where I did not have the spell up for a name that would require a burn strategy or I simply needed to unleash a burst during a phase in a fight that would require you to deal a great amount of damage at that time but I couldn't because this spell was on cool down and LB was not up or is not worth cast at times. I suggest lowering the base reuse time to 2mins and have our reuse modifier lower it down to 1min 30secs.

3.) Vampirism(Vamp Orb): I love the idea behind this ability but it just does far to low in damage to be really considered worth casting all it really needs is a damage and healing adjustment and it would be a worthy spell to cast(Necro's lack AE and a fix in damage to this would help for sure.) Oh and yea the fact that this is also our lv100 Ancient spell makes that much more in need of fixing.

4.) Siphoning of Souls: I like the idea of drawing souls from your enemies to gain temporary abilities however it is a pain to gain these abilities when it interrupts your chain of casting and the fact that you may already have a certain temporary ability and get that said ability again is frustrating. I suggest making this ability into a buff for the necromancer that proc's the debuff on the mob on spell cast and make it a very high chance that way we don't need to waste time casting siphoning of souls. Another possible change and may be easier is allows us to actually farm souls/charges and have them stack up to 100x charges so that we may be prepared before raid or a heroic instance.

5.) Shift of death: I have used this ability in a raid setting however that is perhaps the only time I would use it for just one encounter. I would prefer something that empowers our Heart's or Shard's to give a temporary buff on use to the user(open to suggestions on that one).

6.) Scout/tank Pets: I think this is just self explanatory hehe however I was told a dev is working to get these pets functioning? confirmation would be lovely oh and it would be awesome if the scout/tank pet would scale from our melee stats!.

7.) Resist Break for all mages: As daray said this needs to be change to affect all magical type of damage.

If anything else comes to mind I would update this post.

Surge of Ro and Gift of Bertox being a constant buff instead of being casted would be a good QoL change for sorcs

Summoner's AAs:

1. Animated Dagger - Most summoners are putting all 10 points into it because the AAs for critical chance increase are rather miniscule. Summoner's are lacking in the AE field and in controlling hate.

-I would suggest making this an AE ability with the same cast time that also reduces hate in the area. This will allow for more hate control in fights. Slight change in damage possibly increasing its damage would also be helpful.

2. Teamwork - groupwide buff that has been iutdated since... CoE/DoV.

-Increase the scaling of the ability so it had the option to be a worthwhile ability. With mos of the content not hurting pets, it could be a viable choice if we do not need reanimate.

3. Wild Channeling - Critical Chance AA

-Summoner's have to put points in this to receive one of our best AE damage abilities. The scaling per point is really low and is quite useless. Letting it have more critical chance per point could make it quite benefical especially with the new critical damage system.

4. Planar Motion and other pet save abilities - Have to put points into this to open up the AoM tree.

-The ability is not really useful in any of the content. I have only seen it used for one fight and it was not really game changing.
-The idea behind the ability was to give more pet control/survability, add stats to the summoner such as dc, int/sta, pot/cb and allow them to share with the pet. With large portions of stamina and gear scaling it would have a way better chance at surviving for both the summoner and the pet and we would also gain the stats to keep it alive better through heals, etc. With the new way wards are applied, Sorcerers gained a lot of survivability with the magi shielding ward aa. Enchanters have the ability to control hate. Summoners can not manage aggro as well as other's and on top of that have low survivability.
-Some suggest adding raidwide utility instead allowing people to receive buffs when using shards/hearts. If you go this route, just make it a buff for the group/raid. I have not seen many fights requiring power regen, so heart/shards are not really useful as is. I would think doing this would not stack the stats from necromancer and conjuror shards/hearts, unless you make it do so.

5. Cabalist's Aura - Not as much the AAs but the buffs it modifies.

-The raidwide buff is rather low with current gear scaling. Give the raidwide buff better stats or add something to it such as resists and/or crit bonus.

6. Energy Clash - Pet Encounter damage/management ability, looked over because it does not proc things (cast through pet) and hate is not really an issue for pets.

-The damage potential it has is decent.
-Pet hate issue is not an issue at all, most of the time.
-Reduce the recast by half or at least lower it and apply the following
-Allow it to be cast by the summoner instead of the pet. Or both!
~~This will allow for more hate management in linked fights.
~~This will also allow for procs, etc, to hit making it useful.

7. Pet Weapon Mastery - Currently Outdated and Useless

-Allow weapon damage stats to share properly through pets with this AA fornscout and tank.
-Give pet wand auto attack with equivalent damage to ours OR remove that extra melee damage and just increase the pets spell damage further to 10 or higher is even better! Mage pets are never auto attacking at any point so the melee increase is useless.

Conjuror Abilities:

1. Sacrifice - Conjuror utility for group heal and power

-This ability does not crit. Allow it to crit so it can be useful for current gear and hp scaling. The current read for me self-buffed is 16k heal and 4k power. This is not game changing nor useful without it critting.

2. Plane Shift - Pet buff ability.

-Change the stats in order for it to be fully useful. "Greatly increases max health" is not much, in fact, it gives a little less than 10k hp which is not "great" at all.
-Cast speed is not really useful as most summoner's are at the first soft cap for cast speed to double cast conversion.
-Attack speed is currently useless especially for the mage pet because it does not auto attack. If it does auto attack, the damage would be far too low anyways.
-We can apply a focus effect for the ability to have 30% total potency for the pet. When spiking high in raids and applying all the group buffs and war runes, this increase is quite small for the pet. Further increasing the potency gain could make the ability far more useful.
*The fix: Allow the All Attributes that would only go for the Earth pet to apply to ALL pets. Also, allow the greater health increase to be greater. This would help increase pet survivability and allow the buff to be even more useful. Increase the potency gain. Keep the crit chance the same or increase it slightly, with the new crit system this is actually useful, somewhat.


3. Communion: Pet Swarm ability

-The cast time is quite long. Timing for things such as timewarp, can be somewhat difficult. Reduce the base cast time by half or let it be instant cast for better timing purposes.
-When the ability is applied allow it to proc things like the other swarms are able to do. Make it more like Undead Horde, since the spell already acts like an encounter spell, let it have the proc chance as if it is an encounter ability.

Overall mage changes:

Resist break: As Daray said, have it affect all spell types.

Also, World Ablaze.
*The fix: Xelgad, make me a signature like yours but with world ablaze instead of the skull foci . My ability to draw is quite terrible and the signature, if i tried to make it myself, would look like it was done with paint instead of photoshop.

This is fluff, but it WOULD be fun: whatever happened to those rumors of one day being able to use previous appearances on necromancer pets? I know it's been requested here and there for a while, but I could swear at one point I saw a dev say they were working on it as a side project.

Most class AA are really outdated and contribute very little. Essentially a few abilities added (like Soulburn, Elemental Blast, Focused Casting, Fiery Blast, Ethernere Chains, etc.) and prestige are the only ones that actually make a significant contribution. The rest are basically filler and almost trivial with current stats. I would suggest an overhaul to the majority of the system to not only streamline it, but to make a lot of it actually useful and hopefully scale better. Furthermore, the idea of spending useless points into things we don't want just to get something we do is annoying. A better alternative is just to make certain things cost more points rather than force us to take things we don't need or want. Even though it would be somewhat of an illusion (since you may end up spending the same number of points) it would give us greater customization and choice because we only pick what we want.

There are only a few things AA actually do: increase stats, add abilities, and enhance specific abilities. A lot of the stats added are repeats (we don't need 5 separate AA giving us potency, health, etc.), while some give way outdated amounts. Thus, I think AA should be split up into a few categories:

1) One tree could focus purely on giving us stats... pretty much any stat in our character window such as attributes, health/power, potency, crit bonus, crit chance, DPS, haste, etc. But rather than giving a specific amount, it could give a % increase to the amount we already have. This way no matter what happens to our stats, it should be potentially relevant. This tree could be the same for every class for simplicity as well as to give us the ability to customize our characters the way we want. There could still be unique increases to stats such as the prestige which converts potency to crit bonus. However, things like this would be considered abilities instead since it is not just a direct increase.

2) Another tree could focus on giving us new abilities. These abilities would be class-specific, although some could be shared among other archetypes if they are more general. Basically, just take all of the abilities granted through AA currently and put them all here. This way we don't have to spend points in other things we don't want, but make each ability's cost different depending on how significant they are.

3) The last tree could focus on enhancing abilities. It has the potential to enhance any class ability and ones added through AA. On a simple level we could have the ability to enhance the base cast time, reuse, recovery, duration, triggers, damage, radius, range, etc. And on a more complex level, some abilities could be given extra effects (as some already in current AA). Some abilities could cost more to upgrade or the extent to their enhancements could be limited based on their innate strengths. A simple balance check (at least for basic damage spells and heals) would be to take the base damage/heals and divide it by the cast time + recovery speed to calculate the casting efficiency (AOE abilities could be balanced around a specific number of targets). With that, each point could be designated to increase the casting efficiency by a constant amount. For instance:

Spell A does 2500 damage with 2 second cast time and 0.5 second recovery. Thus, the efficiency is 2500/(2 + 0.5) = 1000 damage/second.
Spell B does 4500 damage with 1 second cast time and 0.5 second recovery. Thus, the efficiency is 4500/(1 + 0.5) = 3000 damage/second.

Thus, you could specify each point to increase dps by 100. Therefore, if you wanted to increase damage of Spell A to correspond to 100 dps, then you would need:
100 dps = (x damage)/(2 + 0.5), which means x = 250.

For Spell B:
100 dps = (y damage)/(1 + 0.5), which means y = 150.

Therefore, even though Spell B is better, enhancing either would give you the same potential casting efficiency increase (100), which means you could potentially enhance any ability you wanted to suit your play style and still get the same benefits. Reuse could be constant across each ability since cutting the reuse in half would double the potential of any ability regardless (although none of the enhancements would necessarily have the potential to reach 100% base increase/reduction and could be kept relatively low for balance ~ 10-20%).

There can also be more in-depth enhancements that add extra effects such as Thunderclap which can be enhanced to add extra hits depending on your distance to mob. These would have their own respective point cost, and potentially require previous enhancements to the ability (although it would be nice to instead give appropriate point costs so we don't feel like we're being forced to take certain things).

Increase base damage of enchanters autoattacks to 2.0 on par with scouts.

Let possess essence to be cast on a group/raid friend and increase its damage. Let charm to work on epic trash. The idea is to make coercers to be true pet mages or/and bring more buffs to a group rather than to be a bleak resemblance of such.

Reduce casting time of shock wave by 50%.
Change power regen spells to work as a percentage of a power pool per tick rather than as a given amount.
Increase the damage of initial ticks of all coercer's dots spells.

Warlock - Related Fixes/Improvements

**Disclaimer: I'm leaving Dark Siphoning out at this point. However, I do think it should be changed to no longer generate extra increments AND our increment scale changed to 150. I just fear that this would somehow be changed in such a way that would significantly hurt class power.

1) Dark Aggravation (This is a pet peeve of mine and most other knowledgeable warlocks)

The What: Dark Incubation allows the Warlock to apply Dark Overflow (direct damage, plus aoe damage). However, part of applying Dark Overflow removes Dark Incubation from the caster. Because the removal of Dark Incubation occurs before the spell checks to see if it can double cast, the Warlock gets an error message implying we attempted to apply Dark Overflow when we were not maintaining Dark Incubation. As a result of this failure to double cast, a spell which is intended to force player skill and reaction is starting to be "not so hot" which defeats the purpose.

The Why: This was fixed in the past. Then when a patch went through (to the best of my knowledge, this is how it was explained) the old spell code for Dark Aggravation went in and it stopped working again.

The How to Fix: I believe the easiest way to fix this would be to change one thing. When Dark Overflow applies, have it last .25 seconds, and have it remove Dark Incubation upon termination. By doing this, Dark Overflow's spell-double check should occur prior to removing Dark Incubation, allowing it to work as intended.

2) Gift of Bertoxxulous, Curse of Darkness, and Netherrealm/Eternal Damnation (This is our primary QOL issue)

The What: These temp spells either take too long to cast, or should just be maintained.

The Why: Having 3 cycled temps plays a little clunky considering the other button mash periods of focused casting/spellbind, charm activation. On top of that, Dark Siphoning and Netherrealm/Eternal Damnation are frustratingly long cast times.

• Gift of Bertoxxulous can be maintained permanently by recasting it every 45 seconds, making the click of the ability somewhat redundant, interrupting spell flow. This is our primary pet peeve.
• Except in very rare cases, Curse of Darkness is vastly inferior to Frigid Gift. ex: Frigid Gift has twice the duration, casts in .25 seconds instead of 1, can be recast 15 seconds faster, and does about 15% more damage while also slowing the target. (cast and reuse times calculated at cap)
• Lastly, Netherrealm/Eternal Damnation has a very long cast time for a temp spell (1.5 seconds at cap) - also, upgrades to Netherrealm do not improve Eternal Damnation (see Daray's post above)

The How to Fix:

• For balance reasons, any improvement to Gift of Bertoxxulous should be coupled with improvements to Surge of Ro. I think both should be maintained.
• It seems Frigid Gift was always intended to be better than Curse of Darkness in most circumstances. As a result, I doubt we'll see duration/recast/additional effect improvements. However, I would like to see the cast time of Curse of Darkness be reduced to .25 seconds when at cap. If so desired, this could be built into the Enhance: Curse of Darkness AA on the Warlock AA page.
• Netherrealm/Eternal Damnation should be .75 seconds to cast when at cap. The long cast time is prohibitive because the only solid use for this spell is when aoe swarms hit. Because aoe swarms die fast, a 1.5 second cast time ends up making the spell massively less efficient unless the Warlock relies on 3rd party timers to warn them of soon to come timed add spawns. And if the add spawn isn't perfectly tied to a timer, then we're just relying on luck. On top of that, I'd like to see Eternal Damnation improve it's damage if Netherrealm is Mastered/Grandmastered.

3) Sorcerer AA Page Changes (Warlocks and Wizards both, future-minded scaling issue, see Daray's post above)

The What: Catalyst's "guaranteed Crit" has no impact on current content. The potency and crit bonus granted by Freehand Sorcery do not scale well with statflation. There are scaling issues with all AA across the spectrum for all classes, but I will focus on these 2 as I believe they impact Sorcerers the most as they continue to remain irrelevant/lose value.

The Why: With the Critical revamp comping, Catalyst is primed for changes. In addition, with statflation, a previously important AA that only affects 1 spell per 30 seconds (Freehand Sorcery, and its enhancement, Mental Acuity) hasn't scaled well and is approaching "nearly useless" status.

The How to Fix: As I stated before, a change that would cause this ability to remain relevant as content grows in the future would be ideal. +X% to base crit chance (like Spellbind, but for crit chance) would probably be the most logical choice. For Freehand Sorcery and its enhancement, something similar would also make sense.

4) Mage Roots (All classes except for Wizard)

The What: I think somehow a Mage ability never upgraded by mistake. Illusionists, Coercers, Conjurers, Necros, and Warlocks did not get an upgrade to our root spell at level 93. However, Wizards did. It really really seems like this was an error.

The Why: As the level cap increases I think it will be important all 5 other mages get a root for solo/heroic content as well. This probably only affects solo/heroic content.

The How to Fix: Retroactively add a lvl 93 root spell, or add one to our level 96 granted spells list, or improve our level 83 master root to be equally powerful and hard to resist as the level 93 Wizard root.

5) Aura of Void (Warlocks only)

The What: Aura of Void doesn't generate increments. This is most likely due to the fact that it applies like a debuff that then triggers damage.

The Why: The spell is intended to be an efficient spell with delayed/triggered damage, but ends up losing a lot of efficiency due to not generating increments.

The How to Fix: Replace one of the triggers with a similarly powerful initial damage hit.

Hello, Nune here with a long-*** post on Warlocks


With regards to our AA's:

(1) Statflation

The issue: With the amount of Potency/Crit Bonus etc. people are walking around with at high levels a lot of our AAs barely make a difference anymore. This is not just a Warlock issue but one that all classes suffer from at this point.

Possible solution: If we were to increase the stats on AA abilities, perhaps the best way to go about it is to have the Pot/CB gain per point spent scale according to player level, much like the damage on our AA spells scale with level. You probably don't want level 30 characters running around with 40 potency as that would make itemization in lower tiers irrelevant.

As an example of how it could work, take our Sorceror AA Brainstorm. Currently we have to spend 10 AA points to get a 4% potency increase. Level 100 Locks run around with 700-800 Potency easily, and this increases further through temp buffs/gear procs etc. so 4% really amounts to nothing. How about we make Brainstorm and similar abilities (such as the ones that increase crit bonus/potency on specific abilities) start scaling between level 50 - 100? At level 50 you'll get 4% (or 0.4% per point spent), and this slowly ramps up to 40% (or 4% per point spent) at level 100 (perhaps every 5 levels the % gain per AA point spent increases a little). This avoids making low level characters excessively powerful while making the AAs relevant for high level characters.

(2) Catalyst

The issue: As Daray and Mogrim already stated, this ability has become useless for high level characters.

Possible solution: I would like to suggest to turn it into an ability that makes the next hit a guaranteed Fabled Crit (or even Mythical, but that might be asking too much). I think this would be in keeping with the original function of the AA, and would give Sorcerors a reason to consider speccing down the STR tree.

(3) Ward of Sages / Enhance: Magi's Shielding

The issue: Back in TSO these actually helped out Mages a lot, the Magi's Shielding ward amounted to roughly 10-15% of my total healthpool, and Ward of Sages was also pretty good. However with the increases to Health the tiny tiny wards we get now barely do anything.

Possible solution: It would be really nice to see the wards upgraded to be relevant to our healthpool. Perhaps make it a percentage of our total healthpool so that it scales nicely across all levels. Mages have it pretty rough in the new expansion in terms of incoming damage so this would be a good surviveability boost for us.


With regards to our Abilities:

(4) Aspect of Darkness

The issue: Especially with the focus on resists in the new expansion, the noxious resists on Aspect of Darkness are really low. A single new Noxious white adorn has higher resists than what Aspect of Darkness provides.

Possible solution: Boost noxious resists on Aspect of Darkness (and possibly resist buffs across other classes as well), to provide better utility.

(5) Gift of Bertoxxulous

The issue: A buff that lasts longer than its recast time can hardly be called a temporary buff.

Possible solution: A true Quality-of-Life improvement here would be to make it a permanent buff, as many others have already said.

(6) Dark Aggravation

See Mogrim's post

(7) Aura of Void

See Mogrim's Post

(8) Netherlord

The issue: It takes forever for the pet to apply its damage, which means it also has a much higher risk of dying at some point compared to Dark Infestation (who are only up for a short time) and Acid Storm (which can't die at all). Especially in Heroic zones stuff dies before the pet even gets to the good part of its damage output. Netherlord has the potential of being a good spell but these issues make it pretty frustrating to use at times.

Possible solution: Cut the time it takes for Netherlord to apply its damage. Maybe down to around 10 - 15 seconds.


Miscellaneous Bugs:

(9) Dark Nebula/Blast of Devastation

The minimum damage values on Dark Nebula and Blast of Devastation start going wonky when you have high ability mod (roughly when you get in excess of 24000 AbMod), where they will no longer benefit from the full amount of Ability Mod even when they should. It could be just a tooltip error, but it could also be an error in the formula.


That's all I can think of for now

Conjuror broken or non-working spells,
1. Shadowstep spell 99% of the time does no damage, regardless of whether this spell ports the pet or not ( depending on what pet your using ) it should do damage if you cast it.
1.1 Flameshield spell does not do critical damage this makes it completely useless.
2. Interrupt being tied to Winds of Velious is horrible, winds has a reoccurring power cost, this serves no purpose. But because of this, the 7 second recast timer does not start until the full 33 second spell duration is over. This means conjuror's only interrupt spell has a recast timer of 40 seconds. Many raid fight scripts call for Interrupts, plus battlegrounds and dueling in PvP where interrupts are very useful. Comparison...the necromancer has interrupt on Dooming darkness with a 7 second recast timer. Please remove the reoccurring power cost from Winds so it has a recast timer of 7 seconds as intended when Interrupt was added to the spell.
3. Essence Shift and Transference spell, what is the purpose, regardless whether the spell is stealing health or power from the pet that this must put us in combat automatically targeting the closest mob and attack it. This is completely annoying, all mages have power feeds, Sorcerers just cast their power feed and it feeds them power out of thin air, and doesn't put them in combat or target and attack any mobs? Why on a summoner even though it steals it from the pet, have to auto target, put us in combat and auto attack, again this serves no purpose!
4. Teamwork summoner AGI line should have a small upgrade but even if you disagree at least let this stack with other summoners, having two summoners in group or raid and not allowing this to stack defeats part of their buff.
5. Vampire Bats spell when mousing over the spell does NOT show the two initial damage hits of the spell only the two dot tics, this has been bugged for years and needs to be fixed.
6. Bubble spell from the conjuror AA tree has always been useless, what is the purpose of this and how and where would our pet ever need to be aoe protected if we are not attacking or fighting anything?
7. Offensive Onslaught from shadow AA tree broken, putting points in this does nothing useful to change the mage
pets stance.
8. Shattered Earth encounter spell recast timer just too long.
9. All Stoneskin spells recast timers are way too long, all these spells protect for 3 hits so basically after the first 10 seconds of the fights your naked for the next 1.5 to 2.5 minutes. Comparing to necromancer who has lots of fast casting, fast recast timer heals that they can use over and over 24/7.
10. Summoner Hydromancer and Ooze Crawler should be able to give us a second pet up in addition to our main pet these do very little damage and debuff or heal, but make them immune to damage, the last thing we want is another pet to babysit that's always dying.
11. Elemental Toxicity damage is way too low compared with ice lash or miasma this spell is really not even worth casting.
12. Energy Clash from heroic AA tree also needs to be fixed to ever spend 20 points to get it, either increase the damage or half the recast timer to make even remotely worth spending 20 points to take it. Compare this to sorcerers heroic Chains spell and Energy Clash is garbage.
13. Finally new AoM first summoner ability Planar Motion or Shift Death is just useless not really worth putting on the hotbar.
All of the above listed I have sent in feedback at least 50 times (no exaggeration) to SoE and they never fix anything, none of this is new, this is years of old problems that nobody ever wants to fix, so good luck and hope this makes the game better for all conjurors.

I'm just throwing this in because you said more "fun to play"
Illusionist is pretty fun. Thanks!

You will see 20 negatives to this but I would love to see BOTH chanters get a fun charm spell.

You remember Veksar, the sunken theatre. No it was not intentional to charm the goblin and have him do wicked dps, but it really was fun. Something like that would make it exciting to try to charm one of the heroics in the AoM zones since they hit really really hard, and it will give groups reasons to take us into zones.

I would like to see the necromancer prestige Death Grip deal a relevant amount of damage to make it useful to cast opposed to just a debuff. In addition, fixing lifeburn scaling would be nice.

It's pretty well accepted that necromancers don't have many aoe's in in comparison to other mages. Adding two aoe's in the xpac may have helped but since all the other classes get access to these aoe’s, the problem still exists.

Again more peeps that just don't even understand their class, first off the necromancer has 7 aoe spells before the AoM xpac, how much aoe power do you want? Necro has three additional aoe spells that the conjuror doesn't get we share the same two (shockwave and theuragists detonation) and necro bloodcloud spell is equivalent to the conjuror earthqwake spell, also awaken grave is identical to aqueaous swarm, but in addition the necromancer has............ 3 more below
1. Vampirism orb this is a huge aoe spell does massive damage
2. and you have two more aoe spells from siphon souls
If you knew how to play a necromancer you would realize this is a very aoe powerful class, I top the raid on all aoe and encounter fights on my necromancer while raiding and in heroic groups, I only lose, but not by much to wizards and warlocks who are truly aoe beasts that's their specialty.

Again Xelgad didn't asks for wish lists of how you all want more dps, but rather what is broken or not working correctly or just plain annoying mechanics about your class! Everyone always thinks they need more dps boosts, you must learn to play your class first and you'll realize your already overpowered.
Same for sorcerers you guys are the elite top of the mage tree you have the highest dps potential and you need to stop asking for even more dps.

Concentration-based group buffs that increase resist could use a boost to be relevant again, especially considering the emphasis placed on resist checks this expansion.

Example: Illusionist - Aspect of Genius VIII Master is 1338 to Arcane, with shadows AA this would go to 1606.

I think the base resist value for a master should be closer to 4k, providing roughly 20-25%(if specced for shadows) of the resist value of 1 piece of jewelry to only 1 resist type.

I did not read through all this to see if this was mentioned but I will go ahead and mention that I was highly disappointed to see my lvl 97 tank pet on my necro. Cut and paste was lazy. I mean no disrespect when I say that, but let's be real... it's a lvl 97 fighter. Even if it is not used much, it should still look even more awesome than its predecessors. I have not gotten my conj to 97, but I would assume they got the same bum deal as well. Let's rectify this, along with making it actually useful

Awakened Grave is really good, although it frequently gets killed before it can use its second aoe. Vampirism would be a lot better if it could SDA and if it wasn't on such a huge recast. The recast is ridiculous; shouldn't be more than 30 seconds. Siphon Souls abilities are okay but very unreliable for getting stacks again. If you only lose by a little to wiz/lock then I'd say they don't know how to do AOE dps effectively. Depending on the length of the fight, sorcerers can do easily 2+ times the damage of a necromancer. The only way a necromancer can hope to keep up is if it is a green encounter since pandemic is one of the best encounter spells in the game.

Lol to think Vampirism does massive huge damage...

u stack enough mobs around it does okay but not in a raid environ. look at most of the book posts those are raiders.

enchanters are okay ish.. but ya not much need for the class unless a mechanic in a raid requires it.