You're wrong: You can only maintain the fervor if you are only casting the abilities that trigger it. If you are only casting the abilities that trigger it, you do like... 5 dps. The fervor duration is 8 seconds at grandmaster.
They are pretty obviously introducing Ascension as a "dual class" mechanic, with itemization and structure around it. We now get to think of ourselves as "[Class] and [AscClass]"... if you aren't, then start thinking that way. Epic stuff significantly boosting our DPS is probably to prepare us for T4 raids and the next 18-24 months of content. It seems to be a forward-looking decision. If they cared that much about us blowing up current heroic and easy raid content, they wouldn't have made them this powerful. Remember, they were clearly promised to be incredibly powerful and to persist for several years... what did you expect as the outcome?
Be that as it may, the disparity between certain epics and other certain epics is quite large. As long as these abilities are balanced around one another, then forward thinking and strong abilities are fine.
Savage Ally still far superior than Shadow Agent and thats not even taking into account the shorter recast and casting Small sample size, but i'm sure by the end of the weekend it'll still hold true
Except only certain classes are seeing the "huge boost" and in the case of beastlords they were the poster child of the game already. I'm really not trying to hate on beastlords despite what my guilds beastlord thinks, but as a conjuror my epic abilities really didn't change my parsing potential that much. And before the comeback of "well you haven't leveled it yet" is used, I have whereas the beastlord has not leveled his. Its still early and I do hope to provide more feedback in the coming weeks but this is what I'm seeing now regarding the epic abilities. I have to agree with Pitta here there seems to be a huge disparity. Had I seen a sorcerer get this kind of ability, while I still would be here complaining about how it ruins heroic gameplay and offering suggestions as to possible fixes I'd at least feel the class justifiably needed a little extra umph. Beastlords really didn't, they were already well ahead of the pack in the dps department and have more utility than some utility classes right now...
I mentioned this both in guild and in discord as well... you were casting yours on pull and yours were getting eaten almost immediately. If you don't wait, 5, 10, 15/etc seconds to cast them, there is basically no aggro tool in game (other than a full target lock) that's going to keep them alive. That is why your dumbfires were getting outparsed by mine. Your were still clearly ahead of mine when we were doing dummy parses together. Please do not spread misleading info when we're trying to have a serious conversation about class balance.
As Arieva has pointed out I do follow this forum thread. I will agree that with the new epics and assencion spells that heroic content now is way to easy. I was the one Arieva grouped with when heroic T2 mobs where dieing in 20 secs and less due to all the new abilities. I also understand that there are a lot of players that aren't as geared as raid guilds with epics and 22k potency plus that still have trouble clearing said zones. The question is how to balance everything so everyone can have fun and enjoy the game. Im sure in the upcoming months that a lot of these new abilities will get worked out and at anytime if the DEVS want some feed back all they have to do is ask I know a lot of peeps would be more then willing to give there feed back to make everything more balanced. I know no one wants to get facerolled by another class on the parse but lets give this some time for the DEVS to figure stuff out with out screaming for nerfs at ever left turn. Just like last expansion summoners swarm pets where all over the place form OP to down right useless to back to OP then finally a nice medium. There is also no need to get upset with BL yes some of us are ripping the parse up but there are a lot that are not so lets put down the Hater aid and come up with some positive feed back to find the nice happy balance.
I will also agree with Arieva that if all these new abilities are needed for T3-T4 raid content that's fine but where 3months into expansion and we have cleared all heroic content to the point where its not really that much fun anymore. When you have a top parsing Conj in group that cant get any spells off cause the mob is already dead I cant imagine it being very fun. Anyone that finished there epic got a lot of top end gear form rewards coupled with BiS slot off hand epic there is no realy reason to do heroics exept for the off chance for a spell component for the new abilities upgrade and cyan adorn component.
honestly there should never be issues this large with balance, literally spend a couple days getting internal parse data from all the classes within 97-99% of the class maximum potential and balance based off your data
Well I cant say that it shouldn't, there are a lot of classes a lot of new abilities and a lot of variables that need to be calculated. What I can do with my BL and what others are able to do with theres can be completely different given the same gear. Im not saying be any means I play the best BL but I take my time understanding the class the abilities and gearing and specing according to what I think is the best for him. I reforge atleast once a week and re do my AA lines once a week as well until I find what I feel is the best then I review it all again. I hot the training dummy all the time understanding the best rotation to max out my dps. DEVS don't have that much time do that for every class
The beastlord and assassin swarm pets are so powerful that no amount of threat that we have access to is able to hold aggro off of them, short of a complete force target, as Entropy said. This essentially means that beastlords and assassins will rarely get to use them at their full potential, while effects like Rising Tide and Ethereal Ravaging are active. Throughout raids this entire week, when a beastlord or assassin is able to use them under these abilities, there was a disparity on the parse of a 3+:1 ratio from the next highest t1 dps, usually a summoner with his/her epic. The abilities alone were outparsing the next highest dpser. When a beastlord or assassin was not using them under maximum potential, they were still 40-60% above the next highest person. This was seen consistently among the two different guilds i raid with, no matter the length or tier of the fight. All expansion we have been saying that class balance is at the worst it has ever been in. We were wrong. THIS is way worse. One solution is to bring all T1 epic's in line with the beastlord and assassin swarm pets. This is, in my opinion, the best option to take, since we have only seen a snapshot of what T3 and T4 raids are going to be like, and as far as I can tell, we will need astronomical amounts of dps and combat mit debuffs to kill these upcoming mobs. The following would need to take place: 1) The dps potential of sorcerers would need to increase by about 65%. The major issues with this sub-archetype have been either neglected (warlocks) or incorrectly "fixed" (wizards) for several months now. 2) Bring the Ranger hawk to be in line (or close to) with the new summoner primary pets, or raise the dps potential of the class by about 35%. 3) Increase aggro generation of tanks to combat the increase in dps. The other solution is to bring beastlord and assassin swarm pets down about 35%, and then bring the dps potential of sorcerers up by about 50%. This is the least favorable of the two in my opinion, because of the amount of dps required to kill T4/some T3 raid encounters. I don't like lazy fixes. The percentages of the options that i proposed can be adjusted, as i dont have a complete sample size of each individual class, i am just going off of what i personally see. There is no longer an accurate way to judge the dps potential of every class in relation to one another, simply because of the amount of variables that we have to take into consideration.
It's pretty naive to think that these extremely overpowered abilities were put on a select few classes in order to kill t4 raid mobs. Not only is it not fun for all the other classes but it's not fun for the classes who have one or two abilities that do 75% of their dps. If I were to make an educated guess, I would think they purposely made the t4 raid encounters impossible for now so they have time to tune the abilities to where they should be. If they didn't make them impossible and left them killable, then as soon as these broken abilities were released, guilds would steamroll the rest of the content with nothing to hold them back. That is pretty much exactly what happened when people started to level their ascension abilities. Guilds started destroying raid encounters with those overpowered abilities, luckily there was a time gate on the t4 mobs saving them from getting steamrolled. In the history of eq2 they have never purposely put in abilities that do this much lopsided damage, I'd hope they wouldn't start now.
And this is why it's hard to reach balance. If it has to work across Heroics, Easy Raids, and Hard Raids, there's always going to be way too many variables (mob HP and encounter scripts being just two of many) to do this in a satisfactory way that makes everyone happy. Anything that hits hard and has a long recast has very high potential on fast (burst) encounters. There's no way to mitigate that effect except for turning a short DoT/swarm into a very long one, or making it permanent (i.e. summoner epic pet or epic buffs to otherwise crappy pets). - I do think assassin and BL dumbfires need toned down a bit. Maybe 15-25%. Maybe 35%, as you mentioned. - Summoner epic pets might need a similarly slight boost (however, they're up 100% of the time so that can go overboard pretty quickly if overtuned). - Rangers are looking like they're going to need some help. - Sorcerers need tuned up. Period. - Tank aggro isn't too bad - DPS should still be using deaggros intelligently, and there are other tools (Sever Hate anyone?) that already exist that should be used more often. - Good bards and rogues are still doing T1.5 DPS. Bad ones are doing... bad, as per usual. However, I haven't seen any T4 content, and none of us have any idea what's coming in next GU or next xpac, so I don't know what the "new baseline" is supposed to be. They didn't design these epics against current trivial KA content (content that was meant to be tackled without epics); they were forward-looking design choices, so keep that in mind before we're all like "whaa whaa everything feels so easy now". The devs explicitly promised us that these epics would be strong. Maybe we need to all start thinking as if the devs intended the following situation to play out: "Everything from solo up to T3 Raid content was meant to be done without epics. Everything KA T4 Raid and beyond is balanced around having Epics." If that's the case (and there's reasonably strong evidence that it is), then this general power boost makes more sense.
Right, and thats why i dont like to see people complaining about the 20s T1 fights when they are comparing these abilities. Ethershadow Assassin will always outparse Soulrot when they are only cast once. I agree. However, the T4 content is so incredibly gated that i have to agree with what Yards said about If this is the case, then that is very unfortunate.
To be fair I'm not complaining about the short spikier abilities outparsing on shorter fights. I'm complaining that trivializing content too soon with OP abilities isn't fun unless you're the one with the ability and to me it feels way too soon in an expac cycle to be doing so. The EQ2 team can't provide content releases like they use to. They need to learn how to make what they can put out, more enjoyable for longer. In that way I applaud them for some of the time gating this xpac. I know some didn't like it but I thought it was ingenious to make a smaller than we're used to expac feel larger.
If by this post you are implying that due to upgrades heroic is trivial and we should just accept that and stop doing it that's your opinion but some of us enjoy the time spent when not raiding in heroics. I generally am not burned out on heroics till warm weather hits in late spring. But you might want to save your pennies for those rare shinies since apparently there is no point for you left in heroics!
If ascensions are the new long term strategie, than we end up with a 4 classes game. If the ascensions spellst stay that powerfull and dominating, then we end up with pushing max 6-7 buttons to get 80% of the dps of a parse. I have been playing EQ2 since the very beginning and the complexity and skills needed to play a toon well, and the high veriety ot toons, was the reason why I stayed so long. EQ2 is now about to loose it's original charm, and I don't like it. I agree with Arieva, that DB should learn to work with the resouces they've got. Some timesink is ok if you can't programm more content, but do it more clever. For instance; I would grind more heroic Innies for shinies if the rare one's were not so rare that I will never get the final collection ready, not even for monay ( not in broker), so why bother? I would do heroics more, if I would get more tite points. But Kralet it more effective, so why bother? I would enjoy PQs, if I could help with some DPS, but I can not. (Ranger, 450.000 Mod, 26.500 Pot unbuffed, Elementalis lvl 9, Mastered makes 100 k, where others make 1-4 million) so I feel useless all the time. I allways fellt, that the dev's know what is going on, and that they will get issues fixed and balanced. For the first time, this is not the case anymore.
On the contrary I do love Heroics always have always will and as you know will always be up for doing them and yes I still want my dam shinnies so stop needing on them please But this thread is for the new BL abilities and after raid last night and talking and reviewing the parses I would agree that the BL swarms maybe be a tad high and would agree with what Entropy has said that a 20-25% nerf on them would be fine and put the BL in par with summoners. As for Predators not sure what I can add as I don't play them but they need a bit more loving IMO. I have to have faith in that the DEVS know what they are doing and what they have planeed for content down the road to make sure that content isn't being facerolled.
If you're decent at math and passionate about good mechanics and balance you'll save more time by taking the time of understanding where each class stands instead of trying to fix the same things 5 times and still being out of balance. It's about quality of work that's an issue. There seems to be an issue of acting before thinking instead of thinking before acting
