Well, I finally found a few spare minutes to take it out for a spin, anxiously hoping that the Devs took a good hard look at it, and made some serious changes. I was sadly disappointed. While my tests were not performed over hundred and hundreds of hours, I do believe that the data I have is conclusive enough. I am also planning on eventually performing a longer running test to support my initial findings. Overview: The Warlock Ethereal Orange rune (Eternal Darkness) description: Curse of Darkness will now affect the Warlocks raid and deal increased damage. In this review, I will only focus on the "deal increased damage" portion. I have no doubt that the other half of the effect works. Testing Parameters: I ran my tests for about 20ish mins each (with and without the rune). No other buffs, or equipment was changed.As CoD (Curse of Darkness) is on a 1 min reuse and 12 second duration, I was able to cast it approximately 20 times each test, and have it proc 3-5 times each cast. My static stats were as follows: Potency: 28,500 CB: 4,150 AB Mod: 985,000 Fervor: 54 Filtering though the data: To equalize things to the best of my ability I exported each individual parse into excel and manually removed any hits that flagged as "Legendary, Fabled, or Mythical Criticals". In addition, I also removed the obvious hits that had been triggered while Fervor was procc'ed from the Celestial Gate Rune (they were almost always approximately 2x as big and were extremely easy to spot).After removing the "outliers" (Fervor and Legendary, Fabled, and Myth Criticals) I was left with approximately 63 procs of CoD while wearing the Ethereal Rune, and 65 procs of CoD while not wearing the new Orange to do my analysis on. Notes: 1. First and foremost it should be mentioned that CoD is not a spell that is normally in a warlock's rotation. Casting it takes time. Time that could be used to cast a more efficient spell. 2. CoD is already a group-wide spell. Making it raid wide is great, but does nothing for the non-raiding crowd. 3. Making CoD raid-wide causes a tremendous amount of lag, effectively negating any benefit gained from people triggering the effect. Results: It should noted that over a 20 min parse, CoD only added approximately 1.731M to my DPS while wearing the new Eth Rune, and 1.563M without the rune. Extrapolated against an entire raid force, that would be a whopping 31.2M raid-wide DPS increase. This is assuming that the lag generated by the spell has zero affect on the raid, which is not the case. To put this in perspective, the average top 10 raid can pump out in excess of 50 Billion DPS on T1-T3 content, and over 15 Bil on select T4 content. This means that the rune is increasing RW DPS by 0.2% on T4 content (which we all know is not the case because CoD wont hit T4 mobs as hard as it hits a training dummy). The more realistic figure is probably somewhere around 0.1%-0.05%. Now for some direct comparisons of how much harder CoD hits with the rune on vs without. Using the same method as above, the average CoD hit while wearing the Ethereal Rune was 21.470M the average hit without was 20.121M. This is an increase of 6.7%. However, the orange run also provides 2 blue stats: 5 Fervor and 1% ability double cast. Ill be generous and solely reduce the damage increase by the 5% Fervor you receive with the rune. This gets us down to our answer. The portion of the rune that states "deal increased damage", will make CoD hit approximately 2% harder, and that is probably being optimistic. Keep in mind that's a 2% increase of a spell that makes up less than 1% of my parse (if I cast it every time its up). Conclusion: I am disappointed. Rumor had it that the Devs took the time to go though these runes, and make drastic improvement in the ones that were "bad" and mellow out the ones that were "OP". From what I have seen thus far, that has certainly not been the case. My hope is that when you coded these there was a mistake made somewhere, and that the rune is just not properly working, because as of right now, its not even close to being worthwhile. Suggestions: The rune would have to make CoD hit significantly harder. Probably in the magnitude of 10x more than what it hits for now. It could also use a higher duration that 12 seconds, or a shorter reuse. I addition, if it were to remain RW, something would have to be done about the lag it generates, as it is currently frowned upon to even have it in raid at all. My honest hope is that this rune is just changed to do something different all together. For the longest of time Ive been wanting something that would get me to stop the constant toggling of the Epic 1.0 Myth buff. Its kind of a ridiculous mechanic that no other class has to endure. A silly suggestion would be to have Dark Siphoning to have its range doubled and make it hit harder. That would actually help. Feel free to criticize my testing, comment, or suggest other creative non-OP things the warlock runes can do. Screenshot of both parses and my excel WB attached.
Honestly, I think the idea of the rune is just fine. Maybe modify Gift of Bertoxx instead, to appeal to non raiders, and buff the damage immensely. Possibly increase the trigger chance of CoD in addition to a (20+)x increase.
It is actually far less than this. CoD only procs off of spell casts and since more than half the raid don't use spells or very seldom use spells, having it buff the entire raid is mostly pointless.
The explanation I guess is very simple. The devs simply add some "decent" amount of potency to a particular spell. Wizard's Fusion rune works the same way. If you have close to 0 potency, the spell will hit 1.5 times as hard with the rune. But since you have 30K+ potency, it gets down to meager ~1% increase in damage. All such runes must modify the base damage of the spell, otherwise they are not doing anything with current stats. Try to strip your char naked (leave cloak only) and do your test with the rune and without it - you'll see it for yourself.
CoD is a 100% trigger chance on spell cast while active. Over a year ago it was brought up that the spell caused serious raid wide lag. The issue with this dev crew is that they just don't listen to anyone that actually has any good ideas, they listen to the people that say "Booo hoooo this is too tough, make it easier or I will quit". The effect on the cloak was seriously broken, they copy and pasted it directly into the rune. Meanwhile, the Illy rune, which is also a copy paste job, still raises the Illy's DPS by 25%+, another broken item that was brought to the dev's attention that did not get fixed. When asked, the devs confirm over and over again that they are still part of the gaming community and they do still raid in their own game. When stuff like this is reproduced time and time again, it makes me question the validity of that. There is no way they could be raiders in this community if they KNOW that the illy cloak is too OP to exist but they copy paste it, and that the warlock cloak makes CoD a forbidden spell in raid, but they copy paste it. Is it a lie to for them to say they are still raiding? Or is it true, but cognitive dissonance? How quickly was the Fury cloak "fixed" when it was causing too much damage? Why can't the same be done for cloaks that obviously do too little damage?
I'm not even trying to imply that they did a good job, I'm just saying that if the rune was tuned correctly, which it obviously was in terms of an illusionist and fury, the buff to CoD wouldn't be terrible, as long as they could optimize it to not lag the raid out. The problem I'm sure we both agree on is that it will not be balanced correctly, regardless of whether they do a new rune or not.
Devs please, You guys tell us that you monitor these kinds of things and are open to making adjustments if players take the time to write up helpful critiques, and not just tell you that "my cloak is broken". Well, ive done that. Please at least acknowledge the fact that you are going to make this better... this cant be left the way that it is... it just cant...
like all posts about the runes ... I wonder why they didn't do the tests themself .. why they didn't listen to players back in ToT .. I heard the warlock cloak was making raid lag .. and they just didn't change it ... why ? I think the ToT cloak was from raid mobs (didn't play during ToT so I don't know) .. so it's normal to have raid focused spells .. normal I don't know .. but it can seem logical coz it was a raid item. But here, the rune can be bought by anyone ... so why make some spells raid wide when a non raider can buy it ? all I can say is .. it's a poorly done job from devs part
Back in ToT the cloak came from both heroic and raid. The raid version was identical to the heroic version except it was not relic.
are you considering that now that everyone are ascensionists, everyone that uses an ascension skill casts spells at least once in a fight now? but you are mostly right, the vast majority of what's being thrown about is only roughly half spells, half ca.
yes .. I heard some CA's are now considered as spells and can double cast. also on my bruiser for exemple or warden ... the proc on epic says "on a hostile spell 15% of proccing" .. and it procs while I use mostly CAs so it deson't mean anything anymore. That's why also the troub cloak rune isn't that good ... coz maestro already procs off of some CAs who are actually spells ...
While you are 100% correct, the whole point of having these group buffs, is to cast them and have your group mates go through all of their fast casting spells to get as many triggers of it as possible. I feel like casting ascensions to trigger this is just a waste of time, i mean if you're lucky you'll get 3 casts in, and that will add basically nothing to your parse. Plus, lets be honest, no one out there is going to be saving their ascension nukes until they see a raid wide tell from me saying "get ready to cast all of your big spells! Lag incoming!" Now that I think about it, a neat effect would be "VC procs triggered while CoD is active will hit twice as hard". or " VC started while CoD is active will affect the whole raid". Obviously one of those would only be useful in raid, but non the less it would encourage people to time their rotations and hold some spells instead of just facerolling.
Broken abilities and Items that never get addressed (like this) are a big reason why people get sick of this game and quit. When one of the worst T1 classes gets an "special summer orange rune" that effs up one of our abilities, causing that ability to be a "net loss in raid damage due to the lag it causes" - and the devs have known that this specific effect issue has existed for YEARS now, and NO changes are made, that tells you something about the mentality running the show.
I don't think it will change it would be nice if it did though. I notice the sk one still lags out the raid as well one thing they could do is just give stronger universal orange slot runes you wouldn't lose out so much on wasted rune slots then.
Seriously, they could JUST REMOVE THE CURSE OF DARKNESS part altogether and it would actually improve the rune. You heard that right. Removing the Warlock-specific affect improves the Warlock rune. Cause feedback ignored Cause too busy banning people for giving feedback too many times
Well, I guess enough people have cried about this (including myself) that we finally got a direct dev response stating that several runes are being buffed soon. It is my sincere hope that this includes this rune. Really hoping to see something in the patch notes tonight. *fingers crossed*
shouldn't be just buffed. should be changed ... for the runes that make raid lag ... completly changed and what I don't like (I digress) is ... people are banned too easily on discord for a place where u have all the hot news on EQ2. If discord is the place to be to know the news ... don't ban people that easily. otherwise .. how can we know what's happening ?
Has anyone tested the new rune yet? Not even sure how much "120 fervor to Curse of Darkness" changes it
I've seen a couple of runes now that add x fervor to y ability now... anyone know if those things work in tandem with Celestial Gate's increase, or does it still abide by the fervor cap?
