Focused Feedback - Mages

I think all AAs in this game need to be reviewed, i'd like to see an update at some point that only deals with that as a lot of them don't do much anymore. Defilers have one that increases unconscious health by 1000!

I recently dinged 100 on my warlock and most of what needs to be done has already been written above but the level 100 prestige spell unda spiritus arcanus seems to need a little attention, damage wise it's a little low but also on the functionality.

I'm at work now so can't check the description but it says damage increases with range, which is does, so naturally if I am fighting a mob solo or in a group I want to be as far away as possible to maximize damage but as it's a blue AOE for engaged targets there doesn't seem to be a point in which the icon goes red in my spell bar to show the enemy is out of range which I could have used to get the max range and therefore max damage.
However if I am outside the range and still use the spell it doesn't hit but still gets used and goes into cool down. Something like rift wouldn't hit anything in this situation and so could be used again. Please make the icon red out to show max range on this or at the least stop the spell going into cooldown if it doesn't hit anything.

Mercs and Illus in AoM and what is "soloable"

Hi,

As an Illus I have embarked on AoM solo timeline, admittedly having only just got back into the came, so my gear won't be as amazing as people who've been doing the previous xpac for a year, but it isn't that bad. I do only have around 320 AA and realise most will be maxed out.

I am finding my pally merc increasingly squishy in some AoM zones, I wondered if:

• I'm doing something wrong?
• Mercs are yet to be balanced/upgraded taking into account AoM zones/mobs?
• There is a better combo post level 95? (I've just started trying SK and noted some benefits depending on mob/zone).
• There are some unresolved bugs re: some mobs and mercs?

By way of example, there's an early quest on Isle of Refuge requiring you to kill around a 5 down arrow mob encounter; @ lvl 96 my pally merc dies instantly - when they then turn on me even I last longer than the merc did! Eventually I managed by calling in help but took a while...

Also the brokenskull bay bilge rat (whatever it's called!) solo zone is proving near-on impossible solo with a merc, I've tried again at 97 and with improved gear and still a prob. The solo questline seems to have reached a point where I can't progress until that zone is done, but as it stands I won't likely be able to solo it until at least 100?

(as a returning player am open to the fact I may have overlooked something completely!)

Since you're going with this, I would say for illusionist/coercer their buffs. There is nothing more frustrating to me in game than dying and having to rebuff my synergisms, rapidity, arms of imagination, illusionary arm, time compression, and enchanted vigor.
Making it so these persist through death ( along with velocity, peaceful link, coercive healing, enraging demeanor, and siren's stare) would make enchanter at least 800% more enjoyable to play.

Conjurer ( Im sure most of this is listed already I am just making my own list anyway)

1. Scout, tank, healer pets- Either remove them or fix them they are horrid you already know whats wrong with them so I wont reiterate.
2. Dumb fire pets- Still die easily and shouldnt these are a spell like any other spell, thats like one of our other spells just cancelling out after being cast seems silly.
3. Pet sharing- Mark on all gear, charms, jewelery rather or not something shares with the pet(put a tag or something) so that we know exactly which items do share and do not without having to test on dummies with ACT etc.
4. Essence Shift- casting this STILL puts us in combat, if you have something targeted its going to be pulled automatically killing everyone in sight along with you.
5. Najenas essence Summoning- Why does this use power? I see no purpose. Also could we get something added to shards like pot or cb increase or something so they are somewhat useful?
6. Antagonize- useless STILL, we are using Defensive Haven, having an offensive and defensive stance is kinda useless why not just combine and put all stats on one stance since we only use one anyway?
7. Invisibility- Why cant we just cast this while moving? I dont get the point wizzys can its annoying.
8. Stoneskins(group)- Does this even work? I cant tell really, if I can never tell then Im assuming it either is not or is just awful either/or, make it more useful. Stoneskin(single)- recast is too long on this we dont have FD or lifetap like a necro has this is it pretty much for survival.


Cosmetic
Every tier we have gotten a new appearance for our pets, the level 97 Earthen Avatar looks just like the level 87 earthen avatar and so on, too lazy to make a new skin? We should have options like other pet classes to be able to change the way our main pet looks. Sick of looking at these ugly pets for years on end personally speaking. (NOTE: We were the first pet class in game(summoners) just a reminder).


AA's

Useless:
Animated Dagger
All scout and tank line since these pets are useless
Hydro pet
Bubble
Offensive Onslaught
Shadowstep

I think everyone else has listed most of this already otherwise not going to re-list.
This is just my short list.

I am suggesting a new sort order in our knowledge book. As of now we can sort by level, max level, alphabetical, etc. I would love a sort by “type” in the knowledge book. Then they can be grouped by Group buffs, Single Target Buffs, Self-Buffs, Debuffs, single target attacks, encounter attacks, AoE attacks, etc.

I take up 2 full hot bars on my screen now just for group and single target buffs. I am using all 10 hot bars and would like more, but if we could get this I could remove them from my screen altogether. You can then sort by group buff max level. Or, sort by single target attack max level. What heals do I have? Sort by heals. I know this would bring up a lot of questions like what if I am a Shadow Knight and my ability taunts, heals, pulls 5 plat from any Guardian that is in zone, and does damage where should that go? Personally if it “Heals” it would show up in the sort by heal, and if it taunts it would also show up in the sort by taunt, etc. So yes this one ability would show up in multiple "sorts".

This would also make learning new Heroic, level 85 characters a lot easier. What group buffs do I have?


I have lost count how many people I have helped who did not know about ability because of the 50+ abilities that come with each character and they just missed them. It’s a wave of abilities. I will admit I myself have dragged ability off my hot bar and then if I notice, I have to go digging for what one is missing.

Adding a little more,

I'm a little excessive, but with a timewarp rotation bar, my DPS bar, my pots, my buffs, my sometimes cast spells, my mana bar, etc etc etc I have 8 bars hanging out on my screen. A love having a ton of abilities, but at the same it gets a tad overwhelming.

Having it so I didn't have to cast buffs every time I died would free up some space.

Also, for mythical buffs, buffs that don't require concentration, and the "always on" sort it would be nice to make them just flat out passive if possible. That way I don't have to worry about "Is this cast? Did I remember to cast it when I reset my AA build? Did I find them all in my spell book?"

Thanks for asking! Here are some conjurer quality-of-life issues:

The maintained spells window is often completely full, meaning that things like Time Warp Preparation and Time Warp don't appear since there's no room for them. That in turn means that an essential utility like DragoWulf's Spell Timer can't see them, so it becomes an unreliable way to synchronize yourself with Time Warp. It'd be super helpful if the new filtering feature you folks added to the beneficial spells window were usable in maintained spells as well.

World Ablaze is difficult to use for the same reason, it's hard to tell what its status is in the constantly shifting maintained
spells window. Since conjurers already have lots of temp buffs to manage (Blazing Avatar, Elemental Unity, Elemental Toxicity, Spellbind, Shockwave, plus clicky charms), it'd be nice if World Ablaze was a little easier to manage visually.

The threat meter seems to be inaccurate sometimes, making managing aggro difficult. Recently I pulled a mob (contested Drinal) off a tank even though my threat meter never passed 97%, and my pet's threat bar was below 50%. It's also difficult to know what your threat is in an AoE fight, since the threat meter only shows your threat with your current target.

Essence Shift throws you into combat, so you have to be careful not to have a mob targeted.

The concentration bubbles sometimes are out of sync with the actual amount of concentration used, for instance they can show one empty bubble when in fact all concentration has been used.

Despite it being a green AoE, Ice Storm's casting will be interrupted with a "Target is not alive" message when the target it's cast on in a linked encounter dies, even though other targets in that encounter are still alive. Contrast this with the behavior of Shattered Earth, which will continue to cast as long as at least one of the linked encounter mobs is still alive.

Winds of Velious is difficult to use as an interrupt, since it's a DoT. If you're in a fight that requires interrupts, you need to macro it to cast and toggle off, so that it will cool down a little quicker and be available as an interrupt again sooner.

Necro:

Quality of Life only, as requested. [Lifeburn has serious under-powered issues, but I guess we're not discussing that at moment.]

1. Lifeburn (LB) is un-fun, cringe-inducing to use. To the point where I pretty much stopped using it in pick-up groups completely and it goes for long unused periods even when I'm with healers I trust.

• cast-time is way, WAY too long. this makes LB a no-cast on trash. casting it on just-aggroed trash is going to steal aggro and get you dead too often. casting it on half-dead trash is not worth it due to long cast time and 10s tick-time. in any group where my dps is not higher than the rest of the group combined, the trash mob would be dead shortly after i would just finish casting LB if I started when it was unlikely to steal aggro. => Fix: cast time needs to be no longer than 2s base; and ideally even 1s. I realize this underhandedly equals to increase in ability power. Consider the (supposed) Conjuror counterpart of ElementalBlast - its cast time is 1s; lets even ignore the downside of Lifeburn taking 10s to deliver its damage vs instant of ElementalBlast. If you still think this change would violate the mandate of "no-power-increase at this junction", at least shift the upfront casting-time cost into increased recovery-time after using LB; this will keep net-power of ability same from maintained-dps perspective.

• life-drain is excessively taxing on the healer. days where Consumption, Lifetap and good group-heals got you through Lifeburn reasonably safely are long gone. in a raid mage-only group at least it's reasonable to ask the healer to pay exclusive attention to my Lifeburn, but in a heroic setting I feel obnoxious for even implying Lifeburn is anything of sufficient importance. LB not exactly hot-cakes in solo content either. the love for constant, heavy, incurable tick damage on the group in AoM xpac makes this problem way worse. => Fix: [ideally I'd recommend to increase the damage to be very compelling as to provide meaningful decision-making of risk-vs-reward, but this is not that kind of thread.] so, at least please make the healing required less demanding - back to the Kunark levels of Lifetap + group-heals keeping you above 50%, so Necros can at least stop feeling guilty for using this ability. Alternatively (or may be in addition) make the first 2 ticks out of 10 not take health away. this will work well in conjunction with the cast-speed change above - the time that healers have to react to my health starting to drop will remain as is today.

2. Lich in conjunction with Enchanted Vigor (EV) buff

• passive life-drain on Lich is really unnecessary. what does it even accomplish? we've already been through this pure annoyance back in TSO when original Accelerated Decay AA used to also have a recurring health cost. it was finally changed, thank god. out-of-combat regen outheals Lich health-drain fine, but with EV on it doesn't anymore. i have to un-click Lich when on a break and hopefully not forget to click it back on, or just keep healing my leaking life if on a shorter break. => Fix: at the very least, if you believe the health price is an important balancing piece of this ability, tag the health-cost as 'in-combat-only'.

• in-combat life-drain from Lich+EV combo adds to the Lifeburn's quality of life problems mentioned above

3. Siphoning of Souls

• This spell is just not worth casting for purposes of receiving the temp buffs. [Whether it's worth casting for the debuffs on it I don't think any player really knows, but for the purposes of getting temp buffs it's a pretty easy math-crunch to show it's not worth it.] Pre-group farming of the buffs is not a worth-while effort because only 3x triggers granted. In-group farming of the buffs is not worth it because the buff granted is random. => Fix: Change it to a maintained buff with ~2x/min proc rate. How many times per minute exactly you can balance to whatever you think is not 'too powerful' and it'd still be quality of life improvement. Alternatively increase triggers to something like ~100, so that bothering to do pre-group farming would actually feel valuable. You might have to examine the reuse on the granted buffs to make sure having 100 triggers available doesn't make them overpowered.

to add on siphoning of souls, I think at the VERY least, it should grant an ability that is not already sitting at 3 charges... it is so irritating trying to get Pestilent Soul and constantly getting everything else that is already maxed out. increasing the charges to at least 10 or something would also be nice, so we are not giving up DPS on one fight trying to get spells for another fight. i would also suggest increasing their power, or outright changing some of them. Flayer's Soul, for example... 16% increase to mana and some marginal skill increases. I find this outdated, as mana pools are ridiculously high already, and in most cases increasing it further has no benefit, and there are already a million other abilities that increase our skills so far above the cap it doesn't even do anything noticeable anymore. It's called "Flayer's Soul"... make it flay. Maybe make it a dot that reduces the mobs abilities or taps mana for the group. Feasting soul is a great concept but the heal portion seems weak. I only use it to help heal myself through lifeburn, but let's increase the heal on it to reduce the stress of the healer. I haven't parsed Servile Soul in a while, will have to check that one out but I am not sure it got the same love as our other dumbfires.

Just another thought while I am here as well... Elemental Tox could use a boost in the damage department. Sure the threat reduction is nice, but I think everyone already has quite a few aggro reducing tools. Let's boost the proc damage to make it more on par with other abilities.

And also I wanted to add that I agree in terms of lifeburn not really being worth the risk of using it. In the time it takes to cast it we could cast a few other spells for almost 0 risk and do about the same amount of damage. It is a huge inconvenience as it stands now to ask any healer to stop what they are doing and focus on us. Which is another point... the point of lifetaps which is to heal ourselves when we take damage. At best I think I cover about 2 ticks of lifeburn with all my heal spells (pet heal transfer, transfer life, lifetap, soothing soul, AND a healing potion. If the healer is busy healing the tank then there are 2 problems.. one being I may have timed my lifeburn badly, but that is not the point The other being that I am sitting at low health waiting for a heal or casting my heals instead of DPSing - or i get hit by aoe and die

I also think every tick of a dot should tick, but that may be a discussion for another post hehe.

I am only speaking on what I have dealt with in heroics, I do not raid as of yet (dang early job and late raid times), but I doubt I am the only one that sees or feels this way.

Pretty much agree with what Mogrim, and Nubek have said so no reason to repeat whats been said, I agree with their suggestions and would also like to see those happen.

But if any kind of wish list type suggestions could be made, it would be having Focused Casting on a 4 minute base recast timer to line up with other temps better, even though it's already a very powerful temp buff , it's just that extra 30 seconds is just a big pet peeve to me when im not getting any kind of consistent reset proc for it from the prestige tree.

I play a few different mages, and agree with most of the posts here, the higher int is noticeable in this crowd

Conjuror- Something that will heal the pet as a side effect when casted would be nice, similar to how the necro debuffs (siphon souls and mortality mark) work.

Necro – I’d just like to restate that Lifeburn Soulburn and Vampiric Orb could use some modernization. Consumption heal the group for more than a couple hundred health.

All of the above: Shards and hearts should have a noticeable effect.

Warlocks – In addition to the other good posts here by Mogrim and Co., I suggest to make the health and power returned from Dark Siphoning useful, maybe percent based to keep up with inflation.

Thanks for asking again I remember from last time that it really did work out nicely.

A lot mentioned already the outdated AA which are for many classes and cases rendered redundant over the years. Specifically regarding enchanters now, I don't want to go to great detail because that can others do better. So I comment more on the "how somethings feels frustrating."

Its just that I don't know where you want to go with enchanters. EQ2 is (was?) a game with a strong emphasis on support classes. I loved that. But over the time the supporting role of Enchanters got more and more crippled and the new AoM prestige for chanters reflects that even more.

At least on my server it's so, when people ask in LFG chat for support they mean "bard". And when they have their bard they ask for "3 dps". And when they can't get the 3, only just then they open one spot for "mana". So we are no pure dps class either and at least I don't want to be pure dps. I want to be - and stay - a support class. But a support class with meaningful, well, support. Enchanters are neither fish nor fowl.

I am afraid this might come across as class envy, but please don't read it so. It is not meant as such. I really don't want anything taken from bards, just that chanters get back their coexistence in support. I also have a troubadour and dirge (93 and 90), but can't bring myself much to play them, because I love my ratonga coercer best.

Necro - a lot has been written already but here's my take on it:

Scaling issues, new game mechanics that don't scale properly for our pets or AA spells:

• Lifeburn doesn't scale with potency/crit bonus and as such is pretty useless right now. This is one of the highest risk spells in game and it should show some serious damage for that.
• Mage pet HP/resists don't scale where the focus in this exp seem to be on exactly this: HP/resists. Dots on the pet kill it in 2 or 3 ticks, which is no fun. Solo as well as some raid fights are more fun / do better dps without pet, recasting and managing it is just no fun.
• Scout pet: the AA bug that prevents proper CA casting is bad, then also the scout pet does not get any benefit from WDB/MA/Dps/haste making it total crap.
• Tank pet: same as scout pet + well obsolete ever since mercs came. Might as well convert the whole pet idea to a nice buff.

Pet issues:

• Pathing is still weird sometimes.
• Targeting: sometimes the pet can't attack a target when the summoner can hit the target just fine.

In general the necro is in pretty good shape and I'm loving the exp so far, so kudos to the team! Yet some of these ever present pet issues are sometimes so annoying that I find myself wishing for an AA that converts the pet to something more useful like a beefy tank buff, bard buff or warlock-like +30% base damage instead of the pets.

Warlock

Most Warlock stuff has been covered in detail and well by a few warlocks that play them a whole lot more than I do. Still, i do love my lock and want to add a couple of things for QOL

1. Dark Agg needs to doublecast (i'm repeating this one just because it's probably nearly the top of issues and really should be long fixed.)

2. Left Side Prestige no longer viable - yes, we do have a fully viable right side tree. But why completely throw out the left? it's a fun mechanic and I really enjoyed the playstyle of it back when LS was better for ST and RS was better for AE fights. I'd love to see made viable again. If i understand things correctly the technical issue may be that it doesn't benefit from amod, but i'm sure there are many ways to improve the damage to competing levels.

3. Acid Strorm takes too bloody long to cast. Really just a pet peeve of mine. It's a good spell, but it takes forever to cast. A lot of the time part of the add set in a raid setting is already dead by the time i'm done casting it. Given that it's an AoE, that's a pain. Either lower the cast time or just remove having a hostile target requirement for it and make it a ground spawn effect.

So, I feel this could go into every one of these threads, but that may be redundant. I will post it on the mage thread because I was most recently playing my warlock and noticing this "problem" (may only be a problem to me of course)

So, while I am certainly not raiding and by no means a master of this game/mechanics, it is my understanding that the casting speed cap is 100% (or a 50% reduction on cast time) no? That being said, while running dungeons with my warlock, I couldn't help but wonder why I have so many abilities. I have 8 encounter spells, and 6 blue AOEs, and what? 10-15 single target nukes/dots that all basically do the same thing? To me it is just too much. Not only could I get by on a trash pack just spamming all of the green/blue aoes with no time to cast single target spells (probably even worse if I was at the reuse/recast cap)

The same applies for single target, I can ALWAYS cast my dots again before their duration is up which in theory would be a loss of dps due to clipping (again no master of the mechanics here)

This also applies to my fury (current high level classes I play are warlock/fury/zerker) and the zerker to a lesser extent mostly due to combat arts a) almost not being worth casting and b) clipping the much more potent auto attacks. But the fury I feel the same way, I just have so many spells that I never use because once you start getting more casting speed/reuse/recast the better abilities are off cooldown quick enough to cast again.

tl;dr with the blue stats available there seem to be way too many superfluous abilities to me

Conjuror/summoner:

Shard of essence guild loot spam - It happens when you recast over the top of your old shards, showing everyone looting a fabled shard of essence. Nothing game breaking but it fills up the guild events.

Shards should be more useful - They are showing their age and could use some kind of extra bonus for using them.

Pets still need a full rework - It was mentioned a while back that it's known about the other pets and that a fix is somewhere down the line maybe a in a year. Well, here is you're half-way point reminder!

Pet fix suggestions (aside from working properly) - I'm sure many could come up with better but here is my ideas.
- Mage Pet: Best for Raids, best single target dps
- Scout Pet: Best for heroic group content, best aoe dps. Maybe 100% ae auto attack, nice group buffs, and non-epic stuns/interrupts. Whatever to make it work better in a single group content zone. Could still be useful in parts of raids.
- Tank Pet: Best for duo zones or soloing a bit of contested stuff (really great in lower levels). Make it really powerful atleast as strong as the 10 year tank mercs but half the damage of the scout pet. It should be able to hold aggro and stay alive with a real healer partner in duo zones. It should be the safest way to kill a hard contested mob even if it takes a while. If summoners are going to be stuck in 2nd tier dps, then why not allow them the power to be one of the best soloing classes.
- Healer Pet: Best for duo zones and times when you just can't find a healer. Make it a good healer, merc healer level or maybe even better. It should be able to help keep a tank partner healed in duo zones. In a fix it could be used to help heal in a group when no healers could be found. I remember a time of desperation when necromancers were used as a groups healer. It would be a great for lower level content where healers can be even more rare.
- Elemental Manifestation (the mythical weapon pet): can you just remove it and give the mythical weapon a better bonus? Or is there anything that can be done with it?

Ice Storm stops casting when target dies - Could you please make it continue to cast on the rest of the encounter even if the target dies during the cast. Shattered Earth will continue to cast.

A special pet menu - Showing all what stats your pet has and what you share and need to share to boost your pet.

More fun spells - Atleast group fire/water illusion. Some new class fun spells would be great.

New summoned item? - Shards are not that useful and with CoV everyone is too lazy to ask for CotH so we can't summon players anymore... don't need food/drink summoned... give us something new and useful to summon as we are summoners.

Mostly, fix the other pets please!! ...i could have swore i already posted this in here.

Conjuror:

1. Complete stat sharing between summoner and pet.
2. Complete stat sharing between summoner and pet.
3. See points 1 and 2.
4. See point 3.

Dumbfires: When they are cast on a mob and the mob dies, they despawn. They are simply a DoT at best, yet they are able to die (which makes them quite inefficient in comparison.) Make them stick around for their whole duration, and move onto another mob. This is particularly evident with Communion because the pets stick around after the mob dies and just run back to the summoner and wait there for the duration of the spell and despawn. Non-direct AE damage avoidance would be nice too.

Heal Servant: Can we add a cure curse to this? There are curses that can apply to the pet that tick damage, that make babysitting the pet quite annoying. No healer is ever going to waste a cure curse on a pet (as they shouldnt) so a cure curse attached to the heal (that already cures everything else) would be nice.

A lot of other points have already been covered, so I'll leave it here for now.

I would add that :

lifeburn is the main class defining skill of the necromancer, indeed the mythical cloak actually buffed that spell.

Pet got 1 shot by the bonecrush aoe of the skeletons near highkeep (since this aoe had been made weaker but still), using possess pet i read resistance that were equivalent to no resistance at all

Tank pet should be able to tank easy group content, like in the old days. It also should be the way we solo in a safer way, last it should be our tool to do hard content (e.g. ASolo). It needs to be completely revamped.

Many of our AA endlines are devoted to pet survival, other mages get instead aas that massively increase their DPS
(pet extra life, pet aoe immunity, pet storage) and even with them it may still die. This is just bad design, our pet should survive without any specific AAs.

Some AAs buffing the pet are totally outdated and do not scale at all (like additive CB, Pot etc)

None of the raiding necro I know is fully right spec, simply the final right prestige is very bad and everyone get better dps
using a dual spec. We need a right prestige final talent that is good and implies some tactical gameplay (ie increments or something similar)

General remark on mage central prestige bufs :

Several mage have a buf that stack when group kills something but reset on a death.

For raid it is useless (unless you are farming, but in such case anything is useless).

Those bufs should be changed :

- Either make them persist on death.
- Or make them proc on an attack/spell at some rate, with rate around 4/mn, and keep them persitent,

Unda Arcanus Spiritus wont hit when farther out than 20m (its range.) However, even if it doesn't hit anything, it still goes down into reuse as if it hit something. Shouldn't this work the same way as other AE's where if it hits nothing is says "No Targets in Range." and doesn't go into reuse?