“Summoner dps is currently in a place we are comfortable with at the moment”

(That’s a quote from Caith in the recent Stormhold AMA.)

Having always done respectable DPS as a summoner on live, let's say 80% of traditional tier 1 DPS, I’m puzzled by my DPS output on TLE. Namely, it strikes me as quite low. Currently, at level 55, I’m doing DPS on par with a defiler mentored down from the mid-70s and 50-75% of a tanking SK who is level 59. All of us have comparable gear for our respective levels.

I can think of 4 possible explanations for this personal TLE discrepancy vis-à-vis live:

(1) Suddenly I'm lousy at this, even though my casting rotation is if anything more efficient than it’s ever been.

(2) Levels and mentoring are so wonky on TLE that a four-level gap with an SK or a twenty-level gap with a defiler can make a world of difference.

(3) We’re hitting a historical point in the expansions (TSO) where the AA tree was less favorable for summoners compared to other classes.

(4) Summoners are in a bad place on TLE, after having been wildly OP at launch two years ago, especially necromancers. I have read of universal nerfs to summoner pets that have been applied with live in mind, yet also apply to TLE and have a disproportionately negative impact there.

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts, experiences and possible explanations, especially if you’ve played a summoner on live and TLE both!

I'm sure someone who actually raids on a summoner on TLE will have things to add, but the BIG two things that need to happen:

1) Nerf Lifeburn.

2) Remove fervor debuff from TLE (and from the game in general, but that's a different discussion).

Fervor debuff on TLE is hilarious. My GRANDMASTER awaken grave's aoe deals less damage than my EXPERT Lich's Siphoning proc. That statement is so ridiculous I can't believe it even though I wrote it.



I also think it's fantastic that his auto attack hits harder than his ability now. Pulling up old parses from a year ago (from when I last played this toon) my swarm pet's abilities deal roughly 10% of the damage they used to.

So how does your DPS compare to that of other classes? Have you had an experience similar to mine lately?

I often beat a necro I group with on TLE in a pure DPS parse.

Ok, and you play which class?

Wait, wait....

There's a FERVOR debuff on Stormhold, despite not having any Fervor to begin with because old world gear has no Fervor/Resolve?

So what...do you all have -100 Fervor? lol.

That's what was suggested in the Stormhold AMA. It was the first I'd heard of it, but if our pets have a 60% debuff then that's probably most of the answer right there.

I'm dumbfounded as to why they would apply blanket changes like that.

Anyone know when this debuff showed up on TLE, if it in fact exists?

Summoner dps is fine...you can't compare yourself to an sk pulling multiple mobs in a dungeon---of course he'll be higher. And comparing to mentored people is just apples and oranges.

As I have stated to some in my guild regarding Necro damage, melee classes like SK and Paladins are higher proportionally than they will be in the future due to the low overall "casting" stats like AB Mod, CB, Doublecast, no Fabled+ Crits. Except for massive pulls on raids in AOM, tank classes including SK never came close to my necro in DPS. We had an assassin in AOM that was crazy good that would beat me regularly, otherwise I was at the top (or top 3-4 always).

Plus playing a raiding necro in an end-game guild on live in the past (and being the top DPS at times on raids, and almost always top 5) there are a number of AA abilities that dont exist at this point that are a big part of increased DPS - Elemental Toxicity, Soulburn and Graverot to name a few. Once those come out it will help the necro quite a bit.

Currently on raids (not top-end, but things like RoK/WoE) I am in the top 1-3 DPS, mostly based on lifeburn...which is fine as LB has a fairly long cooldown and I usually use only on named fights. In a few expansions (unless they fix globally with class balance changes) LB is completely useless and I didnt even cast, so it is nice to actually have a use currently on SH.

That's all quite interesting. To return to my original post, though, is it therefore to be expected that my TLE group DPS would strike me as crappy? Or can I simply not compare it to that of a mentored-down defiler and an AEing SK tank, as a previous poster suggested?

Right. Their way of tuning swarms was to decrease all the multipliers a swarm gets: potency, crit bonus, and fervor. The issue came when swarms started fervor sharing and they were considered op, so they needed to be nerfed. Instead of just nerfing the fervor multiplier, like they should have done, they nerfed all multipliers. I am not sure where TLE is at the moment, but I believe you all still don't have crit stuff yet? Whereas I believe there were crit items in the past. Swarms are at around a 63.6% stat share from each multiplier, if I remember correctly.

I assume what is happening, since fervor is a final multiplier with a 1.00, is the swarms are still being multiplied by fervor on TLE (with it not being a current stat), then taking the 63.6% of their damage, reducing it in the end. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case since live is the beta test for TLE.

Something like that. Pulling up a Crypt of Valdoon parse from june 2016, my min hit on rapid decay was 2,038 and my max was 5,309. Now (with coil/soulrot doing about 30-40% more damage due to gear and like +2 levels) my min hit on rapid decay is 280 and my max hit is 565. blighted horde used to do 260-700 now they do 30-80.

I don't know in what realm that's fine unless they're trying to recreate how bad swarms used to be. It's almost more efficient to just recast bloodcoil rather than cast a swarm pet.

Here's the full break-down of summoner DPS on TLE.

Necromancers are in a really good place because of the stupid amount of HP they have, and they have traditionally always relied on pets less than Conjurers. I don't know if the figures are still accurate, but I remember reading somewhere it's a 60 player / 40 pet for Necros, and a 60 pet / 40 player for Conj.

In order to fix summoners being really broken on live with the addition of new stats, they gave a base -60% fervor to pets across all servers instead of actually tweaking the abilities to work at all stat tiers throughout the game. This achieved their idea of balance on live, where as it brought necros down to nearly where they should be and just stepped on Conjurers to the point where it's a miracle anyone still plays them on TLE.

This coming off the handful of expansion where pets were extremely overpowered due to over-tuning the were given a few live expansions ago to make them actually relevant. It seems we are headed back to an era where summoners just remove their swarm pets from the hotbar until we start getting fervor. Which doesn't bother me much, that's how it was when I was raiding this content originally.

All that being said, on TLE Necromancers are still slightly too powerful with Lifeburn still over-countering the painfully weak pets, and Conjurers are (I would say) a little more than slightly too weak with the class being so reliant on pets. As has been the gripe since the start of TLE, the devs are unwilling or unable to push separate balance tweaks to the classes of live vs TLE so as summoners were very overpowered at the start of TLE, and now moving into a very underpowered state assuming Lifeburn begins to lose effectiveness I can almost guarantee not a single thing said in this thread matters.

And yet lifeburn pops only every 10 minutes. My gripe was made in regard to group DPS, which often moves too quickly to make casting lifeburn worthwhile—but it feels as though it's moving quickly due to the damage done by others, not by me.

When I rolled my conjy on TLE, I never dreamed that I'd be in one of the most stable raiding guilds of my MMO career (Vindicate). I've been going pretty much non stop since the server came out, except when I went to RTT to farm some coins for a month.

That said, I've never been a min/maxxer in an MMO. As a raider, I try my best, but there's so many unknown factors on the TLE setup that for me I just focus on buffing my auto attack (DPS, haste, Multi-attack, flurry etc), with spell casting stuff second.

It usually works for me. I'm usually competitive, like spot 2-4, sometimes one if it was a mana drain fight like Trakanon (yay autoattack!).

So hit level cap and see if that helps. I just found out that when the expansion is released they're removing the DPS cap, so maybe I'll keep investing in autoattack stats lol.

All that said, lifeburn is broken as hell. You can't argue that an ability is not OP because it has a long cooldown. If I had an insta-kill ability once a day, it would still be OP

There's a decimal place in the wrong spot or something, but Lifeburn is not game breaking so devs and most of us players don't care enough. Raids are still fun and can be tough to beat, but admittidly it IS just silly to see everyone get say 18k DPS then the necro parses at 60k.

I wasn't arguing one way or the other. Read my previous post. My original post had nothing to do with raiding. In group play when most stuff dies in 3 seconds, it's irrelevant. I'm simply bemused by how my contribution to group DPS seems comparatively low.

Just a heads up that they're not removing the DPS cap in its entirety, but they are increasing it to 600 (on Stormhold).

Itemisation is a big issue, from 68 on my warden ended up with 300dps mod, 100 MA and 100 hate , sure it is fun to tank yellow ^^^ (non named) of the current expansion (Moors) and to destroy them in less than 40 seconds but it is rather what you would expect with a 1^.

The auto attack madness obviously benefit much more melee classes, and even more classes that can easily ger high Meleee AOE (crusaders, zerk and probably others).

I don t know what is fervor, but the flame tornad of my conjurer and her Frozen Sharks were big big damage when i stopped during DoF, i even waited those two 2 spells to be up for named. But now they don't really do much. I quite dislike that because it reduce ever further my gameplay and soon i may find myself using only 3-5 buttons.

What Sprok said is fair-- the rest of these posts, holy cannoli. Phae-- compare apples to apples please...if you have the proper stat allocation, casting order, and target the right mobs, in groups and in raids, you'll do great things.

The problem I have with this sort of comment is that I'm doing nothing differently from when I had totally decent DPS on live. Some great information has been volunteered in this thread, but if someone could give me a reasonable explanation as to why I'm experiencing this precisely now—perhaps it's where I am in the content on TLE, mid-50s in DoF with TSO AA and not yet raiding—and also not throw in the "but LIFEBURN!" rejoinder every three sentences I'd be grateful. I agree that Lifeburn is OP, but in my original post I referred specifically to group DPS, where everything dies very quickly.

I came to TLE only four months ago and am simply seeking to understand why TSO mid-50s necromancer group DPS is what it is at this juncture.