Snaps work on very few mobs. Amnesia is rarely useful. Tanks can easily hold agro now days barring mem wipes with no help from our hate buff. This little bit of damage increase if the mob is mezzed.. really? Trying to pull a mob ahead of a tank so I can have a tiny boost to my crappy DPS when most names don't mezz...if any,is just asking to die and/or make the group mad, and not even a thing in a raid zone. How many more xpacks are the coercer going to be the bottom of the list? The charm pet DPS was nice, but barely, as only used in less than half the heroic zones, and nothing in a raid. It was nerfed down to where T2 DPS in a good raid guild was more DPS, so not really that OP , WHEN we could use it. You could have nerfed lvl 40s charm signets to stop working on lvl 120 mobs easy, and put things back to working as intended, and left the coercer with the one little carrot keeping us around to feed power in raid...but wait, BMs and Troubs can pull power feeds off pretty easy , and of course illies, AND they bring DPS to the table. Sure as we get gear, stats and higher lvl spells , we gain more DPS, but compared to illies in the same gear etc, we still suck. This used to be a group and raid changing class, for YEARS. Now we have ANOTHER xpack of people asking us why we don't betray. Well, I don't betray because I have been a coercer since a few months after launch of this game. Don't think I can continue to pay for this waiting on the next xpack HOPING for something that isn't going to happen, as that backup class that hangs around hoping the illies and troubs don't show up for the group run or raid , so I can feed mana and hit debuffs. Thanks for another crappy xpack for coercers.
Man, I don't want to bring sunshine to your pity party but... I group / raid with some coercers that are pulling really good numbers. So I guess I'd start with saying perhaps you're set up all wrong this xpac? You can't do what you did last xpac and expect to be pulling great numbers. You're a coercer so I'd point you directly to Gregore who you can find active on the forums. He is an outstanding coercer. Check some of his posts, and other coercer DPS posts. If you don't mind doing a bit of work and taking a bit of instruction you should be trending upward before you know it.
I know , with enough gear and stats, we can put up good numbers. But all things being equal, we are 2nd in a 2 man race. And they KNOW it, hence the little "mezz it 1st for extra damage" carrot we got this xpac. useless. Also, look at how many spells we still carry around that at one time were awesome , and almost OP.. Charm, was a risk reward. No more risk now, and as of yesterday, no longer a reward. Our pet is the weakest pet of any pet class. Mezzes and roots are useless except on some trash.. and why? A good coercer running in a good group.. the tank can pull everything between him and the next name with a decent solo healer. None of our agro control is of any account. If the group NEEDS a mezz or agro control, the problem is bigger than 1 snap or a weak mezz is going to fix. Yes amnesia works , on some raid mobs, but the tanks have SO many snaps, if he lost agro, it was a mem wipe, and will snap it back soon enough. I love this class, and will continue to play coercer, and continue to hope someday, they will show the coercer the kind of love they have given illies, conj, and monks. . Make the class like it was designed to be,hard as hell to play. Make charms break sometimes at the worst of times..., but worth it if you dare try. Make the agro control and healer buffs actually mean something... . All we are now is a faceroll T2 DPS class with a power feed and a few weak buffs barely worth casting, looking for a good answer when people ask us why we haven't betrayed yet.
First any class/coercer with enough potency/crit bonus could pull really good numbers. I would even says that with 170k+ potency any class could be expected to do some good dps. Does it means that all classes are alright and/or balanced ? Clearly not. Does it means that if you could not pull great number on a coercer (or another class) it is because you do not know your class enough ? Absolutly not. The reality is that with the right stats anyone could push two macros with all their abilities inside them and pull really good numbers even if not knowing the class. Of course a very good players would still do much better on its class than anyone else with the same stats. But their is soo many equipments/stats layers in game at the moment that it completly override any skills/knowledge advantage that players could have, with only the players that could invest the most at the top of the ladder. So looking only at the ACT parse is not sufficent to says that a class/players is good or not, or if it is balanced to it's counterparts. If fact it is safe to says that coercer are clearly bellow illusionist (or any other mage) in almost all game aspect, as barouder are to monk, or dirge to troubadour (with similar stats) The only reasons to take a coercer today in a group/raid is: a) you could not find any troubadour or illusionist to fill your group b) you could not find a beastlord that accept to trade some dps to do mana regen c) you still believe it is a good class d) it has really great stats e) it is a good friend of yours f) you really want a mana regen no matter the trade in dps/group buff Even then you could still do without a mana regen in some groups or raid with the use of some good other classes/ascensions abilities. Coercers , like some other class, really needs some love, especially in the utility side and if possible with some real class defining changes. But I believe (my opinion) that the person(s) in charge have absolutly no plans or visions for any class balance except making tiny adjustments when players complains too much. And their is not enough coercers left to make any real change happen. I could understand the reasons behind it, like there is not enough ressources, or making changes is very difficult because it could break so many things on live and TLE servers because of the code complexity. But the fact that there is NO ONE to have serious talk with players about the class change, no or incomplete patch notes to major game change, no explanation to the reason of those changes, does not makes me believe that it is worth to takes some personal time to give class feedback as it will most probably neither be read or taken into account.
First: Elkana must be a scout or a class with the golden end of the rod right now. No offence, but the only Illy's or Coercers doing well right now are those in great gear and those that understand melee is king and your AA spec better reflect it or your DPS won't. Second: What is happening to the Enchanter class, or not happening, is indicative of the negligence being given to all Mages as a whole. Every class across the board is required to spec to melee to be productive and scouts and others of the like will continue to troll the threads with, "I know some mages doing SUPER DUPER DPS right now" never mentioning that they are end game raiders min maxing with everything they've got and any ole tom, dick or harry can jump on a scout and be right there with them without even trying. The point is Mages are getting pooped on and have been since KA. It makes sense. Up through KA Mages were nice and lots of people dumped tons of money in them to get them up up and away. Then by nerfing them and boosting scouts, tons of people swapped classes and dumped money into them. Not to mention the Bruiser to Monk swap. it's all pretty shady if you ask me. I have been and Illy main for a long time and am looking to make a change at the end of this xpack. You would think after 2 or 3 years of domination by scouts mages would eventually get a bone. But heh, we could always hope someone actually gave a POOP heh.
I know my opinion won't be popular but I think the problem with balancing the enchanters, and utility in general, is that people aren't happy until they're topping the DPS. For example, let's say that the top DPS in the raid is doing 50 bil. If they give utility a spell/CA that raises the other 5 groupmates' DPS by 10 bil, the people playing utility will complain because that 50 bil they're bringing to the table is not on their own parse and they're only going, say 30. To make people happy the parse would have to look like 50 bil done by everybody and who is on top would vary by minuscule amounts every fight. I've seen this for over a decade, where people choose a spec that benefits them personally by "10" instead of giving the group "5". The value of a utility's parse shouldn't be in their own parse alone, but on their parse mixed with parse that would be lost if they were replaced by a straight up DPS class. And the value of the utility player along with their parse is their ability to work together with their groupmates to exalt them by coordinating boosts during damage record chains, etc. I've played an enchanter for over a decade. Some expacs I've played one and some the other. I'm happy to have enchanters receive more love. But if love has to equate personal DPS then we're just asking for utility to cease being utility. And that kind of thinking is how ascensions were born.
Gninja's own words in a discord pm, parahphrased: "In every expansion we boost one class over the others" -- make of this what you will.
All MMOs do it. Even blizzards, a small indie studio have FoTM changes several times per expansions and some classes gets blaclisted no matter what they do for the entire expansion. Nothing new in the world of MMOs..
same for bruisers ... it's also based on how many people play the class, how much they whine and how much they spend. true DPS are the biggest whiners so they usually get more changes ... but even then, conju is only going down since KA. And monk/SK are still top dps tanks.
Elkana is a scout, sorry for butting into this conversation. I may have seemed rude I apologize. My friends aren't what I would consider very geared, we're mostly in heroic gear, a little challenge gear, a little raid gear. I'm not sure the target numbers of people or what they are expecting to hit so I guess in general I was saying I know some coercers doing numbers I consider really good for a utility class. I've played the same class for over 10 years. Some xpacs I look like a champ, some I look like a chump. I get that ebb and flow. I'm sorry you guys are in the state you're in now.
It's not healthy nor is it about the game. People want to play the latest FOTM and that ultimately means "cha-ching" in the cashbox. Why do you not think that class balancing has ever been done? IMHO, it's all about filling the coffers. It's not that class balancing can't be done, but it would vastly reduce the cash flow and that's why you'll never see it happen.
I wonder if that balances out the number of players that leave the game because the toon they've come to love has been intentionally gimped.
post his exact quote please. most likely what he said was, "despite our best efforts to balance them as evenly as possible, some things slip thru the cracks and some are accidentally more powerful than others". buncha ppl in here need to order some tin foil hats from my collection pronto. classes aren't balanced because there are 24? of them. and there is only 1 dev who - even lets be generous - is likely at B+ skill / knowledge level on like 3-4 of them at most, and the rest straight dabbling Dorothy. let's even give him credit that he's a smart guy - he just simply has no chance of being aware of all the nuances that matter and esoteric ability interactions classes have - so, somewhere on the napkin in his office the calculations might be correct, given his starting assumptions, but chances that his assumptions are 100% exhaustively reflective of a class's reality are quite impossible. i've just described to you why the Platonic form of balance is absent from all MMOs. however, in EQ2 there is an additional whammy on top of above. given how wildly multiplicative stats involved in the final damage calculations are today, even a small offtarget guesstimate on paper turns into a gigantic difference in final numbers.
That may be, Twisty. It's a possibility. How much of what you actually posted about him/her is based on facts known to you personally? Otherwise, you may want to grab one of your own tin foil hats, haha. There are a lot of players in this game that have quite a few alts and can play them extremely well. If the situation is as you describe, then perhaps whoever is the dev might want to develop some contacts. There are other solutions, but we'd probably all agree there's no chance of them being implemented. This ship is sailing with what it's got.
I will go through the discord chat and see if i can find the exact post but suffice is to say it was nothing on the lines "we try hard and it just happens" because my reply to his post was nothing. I recall remaining quiet on the matter after that (out of acceptance of reality tbh) but i did appreciate him being open about it.
