Defiler Class Issues (Consolidated Thread)

On raids I never, ever, cast shroud of armor. It is more benefitial for me to have another 1,399 hp buff on a squishy then a regenerating magical ward for 659 points of damage, but that is me. I still find it funny that more then one healer in a group uses their physical mitigation buff. The only part that stacks is the secondary effect, the physical mitigation part does not.

Gimbel@Permafrost wrote:

That's valid to do on some fights with only trauma damage - I can think of a few offhand. On most fights I think you're dramatically reducing the overall survivability of your group, though. Even on fights without AEs it can absorb it can be worth it if you have people using bloodthirsty chokers, especially more than one.
On a lot of fights though the amount it will heal overall is unbelievable though. It'd be crazy not to use it on many fights, particularly since wards absorb power drains. Seriously, use it on a fight like Anashti and see how much it heals.

Chath@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Sedenten wrote:

MalkorGodchyld wrote:

Guys I think you all mistook my post as saying that the Shroud of Armor AA is useless. I in no way believe that it is. What I am saying is that I personally believe that the Defilers are a casting shaman and that Mystics are the melee shaman. Although the Shroud of Armor is a decent AA skill it is a improvement to a Static buff, a cast and forget if you will. I in no way think that we wouldn't lose something by giving up that ability, but my point is rather this:
Casting Wards is what defines us, and as the so called "casting Shaman" I would think that we should be improved in that area over Mystics. This is also why I disagree with the layout of the Agility line. Both classes are healers, yet the mystics get a benefit for improving their Healing crit, while defilers just waste points.
I think logically that if we were to receive a decrease in casting time for our Wards it should occur in the Defiler tree, levelling the playing field for the Mystics melee bonuses. Now in the Defiler tree a skill that would reduce the cast time of all of our wards definately falls into the prevention line. In that line we do get the benefit of an improved ward in the Enhanced Shroud of Armor but in many cases it can be an unused buff and offers very little boost on all fronts to the "Casting Shaman". Mystics get melee abilities which changes their whole class, and they are used repeatedly throughout the game experience. The buff to shroud of Armor is cast only when you get a new version of the spell, when you die, or when you leave a raid where they had you remove it.
I would contend that we should be willing to give this up, a fairly small concession to get a decrease in casting time for all of our wards. It is far enough down the tree where you have to invest a decent amount of AA to get to it. I would even go as far as to say move spiritual circle to the SOA slot and put the new Ward cast time decrease in its place. Or maybe instead remove Enhance Spritual Circle and put the casting decrease there. Sure it would be nice of SOE to remove something totally useless and give us multiple ways to decrease our cast times, but then the swing of balance would be totally on our side.
Instead lets take an active look at some of the things we could give up to drastically improve our class. As we know many of the AA abilities we get sound good in the description but fall way short in application. I personally believe the Enhanced SOA is one of those.
BTW what is the actually point difference between the SOA ward with no points invested vs the 5 points at level 80?

Something like 300 points? It's a 40% gain with the AA maxxed, so it's very significant. I really can't disagree enough with giving it up, honestly. Frankly, it'd probably be enough to make me betray to mystic if we lost it, since I think of it as the largest argument for still being a defiler in higher end raids. Cast speed/reuse increases are all well and good, but those are things we already increase with gear/buffs so see diminishing returns at the high end, while shroud of armor's passive ward isn't something we can otherwise modify. I'll freely admit that it doesn't matter much at all when doing most heroic instances or the like, but it's incredibly strong in a lot of raid encounters, and without it we're pretty much a gimped mystic.
If you want to give up something that I don't care about, focus on our various dps enhancers, cannibalize, or something like that.

Houngan are you even level 80? Your profile is blocked, and on your guild roster it shows you as level 42 or level 15, which toon do you play the Venekor one or the Nagafen one?. ( I know EQ2 players is notoriously slow at updating so giving you the benefit of a doubt)
If not, get to level 80, kill some end game raid content then get back to me about our class, because frankly you haven't a clue. Oh and yes, I do have a PVP toon as well so I'm "aware" of the differences in our servers so no need to go that route.
Some ideas presented here are real good and will help improve the class, others are half botched by someone who doesn't understand the class or the mechaincs of one of it's best buffs.

Well, there's no need to be rude. He wasn't being belligerent about his suggestion, and if you haven't done any of the fights where shroud of armor really shines and makes up an enormous proportion of our healing, it'd be easy to dismiss how useful the ward component really is. I just tend to think of it as being our biggest balancing factor against mystics right now on harder raid content, and without it they'd have a pretty significant edge over us.
Personally I think defilers are pretty balanced with other priests right now. We don't enhance dps much/at all compared to the other priests, so we're arguably a bit weaker there, but I think we have a small edge in overall healing power due to shroud of armor and spiritual shrine. Inquisitors have an edge over everyone else for solo-healing groups on cure-fest fights because of their mythical clicky, and I don't think equalizing that a little bit with stuff like making crystallized essence/distill soul into a clicky-cure that's hard to generate on demand would be too unreasonable - particularly if they're tradeable so that we could hand them out to groups that need more coverage between fights. I just think it'd be a tactically interesting ability.

Crazywack wrote:

Crazywack,
Other than your complete lack of constructive critisism, let me give you the benefit of the doubt. Houngan is now 47, the one I play is on Nagafen and this is my second account. Long story short the first character I rolled in the game on launch day was a defiler on Lucan, and at one point my original account had 3 shaman. I left the game for about six months and I started fresh with this account. Yes I am rerolling and not at 80 yet, you have me there. But when I am at 80 and done what you have asked will I then be able to ask you to get your elitist head out of your rear end and bite me.
You have no clue where I have been and what I have done in the game. Also if you read my posts I clearly explain that that is my personal opinion of one spell that when I look at the math is less productive than my spoken alternative for my playstyle and how I play the game. Yes there are differences between PVP and PVE but again just my suggestion. Its nice to know that this is the defiler thread, but only for those defilers that are in high end raid guilds and not "all defilers".
Also since I have never played a T8 character (or at least you say) I could never understand the benefit of what the enchanced SOA offers, since we get Shroud of Armor at level 5.
Chath thanks for at least being civil, I am basing my experiences off of what I have had and have now. As a PVP defiler I feel the pain more than a PVE one so maybe that is why I don't see as much benefit as others and I will never be a high end raider. That always ends up being more of a second job to me than a fun way to enjoy your evenings. That being said, I am not against defilers saying this is a bad idea, it is just my idea and strongly believing that we deserves more perks than I see us getting based on the perks that Mystics get. I see the the writing as a AA boosted decrese to the casting/reuse time of our wards. In following that thought, I believe that belongs in the defiler prevention line and should require some investment down the line to be acquired. "I feel" it could replace Enhanced SOA, now many people disagree, but I still feel that the casting shammies get boned, as many others have said and that casting speed/reuse much like RoA but defiler specific would go a long way to improving that. I think that a 5 point AA that improves our casting and reuse times by 5% a point mathematically works out better than the regenerating ward of SOA.
Feel free to call me an idiot, I have a thick skin, but when you do, tell me why I am wrong or how you disagree. At least add to the discussion.

Frankly, the only reason I haven't posted numbers for how good shroud of armor is at the highest end raid encounters is because it's such a massive swing that I'd be worried of attracting the attention of a nerf - it's shockingly big, but I feel it's a pretty strong balancing factor to the greater dps buffing of mystics. Suffice it to say that in the extreme cases, capping out the value of casting haste and reuse to our single-target/group ward wouldn't be enough to equal losing 40% to shroud of armor.
I do sympathize with what you're getting at though. I couldn't imagine playing a defiler in pvp. I think the only thing that'd make it bearable would be something like bane warding, which is a specific set effect on some of our level 80 armor that adds a huge damage shield component to our single and group ward. I understand this was nerfed a bit in pvp, but I don't think I'd ever be able to stand playing a character with so little offensive power as defilers in pvp content. Curseweaving is nice when you get it to sort of aim at what you're going for, but even when we have litany of combat, offensive stance from shadows tree, and int line our damage is pretty miserable compared with other priests.

Hey, I didn't call you an idiot, I called you clueless. You assigned the idiot tag to yourself. Glad you have thick skin, because I'm not being rude, just straightforward.
Do you have any T8 toons? Really. Did you have T8 defiler specifically? My intention is to not make this a raiders vs casuals type thing (or a pve vs pvp). I also say that you don't understand the mechanics of the spell, and also said it's is our best buff. (specificalay telling you why that part of your idea was bad) Did you go back an anaylze your combat logs or ACT to see why its better (at the current state of the game) to have enhanced SoA then slightly faster casting wards?
As was alluded to, it offers a significant amount of healing and protection from other detirments, an amount that wouldn't be compensated by faster casting wards ( plus there's plenty of benefical alacrity and resues items out there to help with ward speed).
Now I do agree that faster wards would, in general, help in PvP , but not at the sacrifice of SoA.

Crazywack wrote:

I no longer have any T8 toons, this is a new account and I wanted to restart fresh.
My problems with your first post was your lack of any contribution yet you feel the need to call me clueless (idiot, whatever its not about symantics) and say I do not understand the class. Now as far as the buff SoA goes and how I see it, maybe I fully don't understand it usefullness due to the content I am currently experiencing, but to that end I am already planning a respec for my mirror that has the exact same setup except for with and without Enhanced SOA. Once I am ready and capture multiple times through the same zone, with and without it I will honestly give you my opinion on this again. I am not saying I am not wrong, but I am not going to take a reply that amounts to nothing more than a troll post and not respond to it.
I will ask you again and please feel free to be straight forward, if you agree with the majority of other posters in here, and agree that casting times could be improved, how would you do it? From where I sit, especially on a PVP server, Defilers only excel as raid healer and although there are differences, Mystics are more attractive to pick up groups than we are. All other healers far exceed us in every other need for a healer, Heroic instances, small group and yes especially PVP where aggro is not controlled and the healer is the first target. Does that mean I am going to change classes, no but if you look at the priests as a whole we, get the shortest end of the stick. I still love my Defiler, it is my main and playing it has brought me back to the game. But I would like to see the disparity between us and the other healers fixed somewhat. I believe that there are a number of ways to do that, but the most effective that doesn't involve nerfing across the board or revamping spells and classes is tweaking AA.

Overall, we get some of the strongest survivability tools of any priest, which makes it a little hard to argue for more stuff. We're pretty much dead last in categories of enhancing dps or doing dps ourselves, although our AE damage isn't terrible in some very rare situations with huge swarm adds and our offensive stance. I think we could get a little more without being totally imbalanced, since I tend to think templar/inquisitor/mystic dps-enhancing tools are a lot higher than ours without being much behind us in group survivability. I do have a gripe in that our dps stance is tied to our dog (gives him a proc), where I'd much prefer it did something like give -us- a proc on hostile casts and melee attacks, similar to Wardens' offensive stance.

Houngan@Nagafen wrote:

Unless you're doing a zone where your group is getting hammered with spell effects, or some of the DPS is donning chokers you're going to be back to post triumphantly that your testing concluded that Shroud of Armor is indeed useless. In the lower levels, you more than likely aren't going to notice Shroud of Armor doing a lot over time. The spell shines in raid situations where spells are pelting your group or in DPS groups where you have several DPS classes using chokers. In the higher level and more difficult instances, you will notice it picking up quite a bit of damage as well. It only ever blocks spell based attacks, and around x4 or x5 what the mystic version blocks of physical. It refreshes in full every tick (6 seconds). At level 80, that's a nearly 900 point ward that is always up and ready to shave some damage off AE effects which costs us no power to maintain.
I'm not going to disagree with you that casting speed would be grand, but when it comes to specialty heals we have the same casting/reuse speed as mystics, templars and inquisitors. All three of those classes have the same exact casting and recast on their class wards and reactives. We share the same casting and reuse as templars for our straight heals, due to the fact that both us and templars have the most potent single shot heals of the priests. While they could add AA's to improve all our wards, it wouldn't make sense from a balancing standpoint for all priests in a PVE situation (I'm well aware that the casting speeds plague PVP defilers).
If you're asking where I'd rather see casting speed AA's added for our wards, I do agree that the Soulward line is where they would best fit. I'd rather them drop the recast on our fear (I'm assuming that's useful in PVP to some extent?) and squeeze the AA in that spot instead. If an AA were added for casting speed, we would probably get at most .5 reduction to our group ward or a similar reduction in recast amount.

I say drop the debuff casting speed benefits from the heal stance (we already get this from RoK/Cursing line) and add a ward cast/re-use benefit.

I do not intend to take the Enhanced SOA lightly, nor will I come back here after just one test at my tier and pronouce it great or garbage. The fact is that with the amount of people who have spoken up about it, I will honestly be looking at it for my final spec. I just want to start capturing data with it as soon as possible.
I use the AOE fear fairly regularly in PVP and it is definately useful, but I would drop that for a casting time reduction. I am not asking for a personal permanent RoA but we should at least get something to speed up our wards. Yes this is more of an issue for PVP than PVE but it is still an issue for the class as a whole. As far as total time if they shaved 1s off of our group ward it is better than nothing.
Yes PVP hurts, but I do both and see failings that affect both sides. On the raid end of things we do shine, but shouldn't we have all around use in the whole game? I am not asking to be better than every other priest, but I see, especially what AA does for healers as a whole and we seem to be on the short end of that stick.

I have a small Suggestion regarding Leg Bite, the first bubble on the Shaman Tree Strength line. We defilers have a lot of abilities to cast without micro-managing the dog's combat arts. Could we possibly get Leg Bite changed to an innate ability for the dog to use at its lesuire (like the one in Ancestral Pedegree in the Shadow Tree)? Also, instead of a dot + interupt just make it flat damage + interupt. Thanks.

Or you could macro your leg bite to one of your other spells.
I have both /pet attack and /useability leg bite attached to some of the other spells to ensure that 1- my dog is on my target, and 2- that leg bite is up and I don't have to actually watch for it to recycle.