Focused Mage Feedback

We're requesting focused feedback on the current state of each class. We're particularly interested in suggestions on how to make the classes more enjoyable, such as improving tedious abilities to be more user-friendly. Balance issues are always a concern, but numbers tend to spotlight those issues, while it's easy to overlook problems that simply make the classes less fun than they should be.

We do read your normal forum feedback, but we have had the most success with feedback during betas and in the testing forum. However, it's difficult to address existing class issues when the focus is on new additions. The idea here is to put the focus on the classes as they exist on live, including everything from the new Prestige Abilities to the spells and combat arts granted at early levels. We're going to close this thread at the end of next week, but we'll do more focus feedback threads if they are successful. The goal is to get some improvements to live with the next game update.

Thanks!

Cool!

Conjuror:
-- Plane Shift - Having to cancel in order to cast Soulburn isn't hard w/ a macro but for beginners and others who don't know the macro, it's a hassle to click it off in order to cast Soulburn. Also, Plane Shift is a long cast spell, and an endline, and we don't get a ton of use out of it b/c letting Plane Shift run its course without casting Soulburn is a DPS loss. Necros increase pet health a huge amount and end up with very large Soulburn hits - so would love to have devs consider letting conjurors keep Plane Shift up while we Soulburn.
-- Dumbfires - they are worthless. People play summoners because they love the idea of summoning pets and beings to do their bidding. Making dumbfires worthless takes a lot away from playing the class.
-- Procs / Buffs not transferring to pet - again, this limits the fun the class could be. I know there are balance issues w/ this, but maybe consider balancing next level up in a way that allows buffs and procs to impact pets. Having some shared stats has been a huge improvement in game play. Again, our class is all about our pet, and the more we can do w/ our pet, the funner the class. Would be nice to see you go all the way w/ this.

Coercer:
-- Pet - such a pain to recast after zoning, to find a mob to cast on, and then have the pet die almost instantly to AEs, even w/ the new prestige. I'd suggest permanent AE immunity or a proc on myth that gives a substantial chance at AE immunity. Also, let coercer's grab a pet off other people in raids. And let the pets persist thru zoning.

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I play a necromancer, so I 100% Agree on this matter. Dumbfires are completely useless. The dps from them does not warrent the spending of the cast time to do it. More dps to stick with the soulrot/bloodcoil casting order.

The other issue I keep running into is that my pet loves aggro when I have it on passive and a tank is mass pulling. I have it set so that it does not attack back when it gets attacked or when I get attacked. But I watch the SK mass pull, and all the mobs come right after my pet. Mind you, I haven't even clicked a single button at this point.

Necromancer "Dark Heart" is useless anymore. Not to mention, they offer such a little power boost/recovery. Its something like 1410 power over 20seconds and a 1.8% if you have AA spent into it. Not much considering most players have over 50k power...

I do miss the old days of having to get the skulls from killing mobs that you debuff with Mortality mark in order to cast Revivication on a player. (Trivial I know, but it made me have to stock up on those skulls before grouping/raiding etc)
I also miss the having items that proc'ed alot that would increase our dps that were actually worth getting, not like the adornments of blasting and such..they are useless imo.(I want to say that was around the EOF era)

Overall, I enjoy playing the class alot. I do miss the utility aspect I felt it had back around EOF or so. Where we actually did more than DPS lol. Mainly with the hearts being actually wanted, our revive was actually decent and used. We have alot of spells available to us, but honestly we use probably about 3-5 spells for good dps?(Minus sending our main pet in) Elemental Tox, bloodcoil, soulrot, Soulburn, lifeburn, Maybe pandemic and lifetap? I cant remember the last time I actually used some of the spells outside of that.

I do not raid or such, I just group every now and then. So that is just from a group perspective.

For Warlock, fix Dark Infestation so that it'll still tick after the broodlings pop. Fix Broodlings, Acid Storm, and Neatherlord (as well as all temp pets for all classes). Boost Absolution and Rift.

General Balance Issue: Nerf shared stat'd pets from being able to double and (in some cases) triple dip procs for the player.

Coercer is in pretty good shape in CoE. However ...

- Lower the cast time of Possess Essence, because it's annoying and not fun. It takes about 7 seconds to cast right now (longer than the description says it does), and it seems to ignore your casting time skill.

- make Coercive Shout and Thought Snap work on all mobs as a rule, not the exception. Almost every mob in raids is immune.
- continue to increase the efficaciousness of Coercive Shout; it's still not providing enough of a "snap" given the new "hate shuffle" mechanic

- increase the efficaciousness of power regen for all Coecer spells to make them actually increase power in a meaningful way: Mana Cloak, Manasoul, Cannibalize Thoughts, Shift Mana, and Ether Balance

- significantly boost the benefit of Intellectual Remedy to make it a must-use kind of spell, rather than a nice-to-have.

- Remove the power cost penalty to the target of Enchanted Vigor

wizard is the only mage that is pretty much forced to dual conv spec to not loose dps

single target line is terrible :

• incineration is 75% to trigger for some reason - not the same case for other classes

- its cool that you made it heat & cold lines but we get screwed by this cause we only got 6 spells that will trigger it , 3 of them are bad , rays got long reuse , fov will be a waste to gain / keep inc's when mob still at high % of hp

• mystical heat - mb reuse is nice but the power regn proc is way too low
• fire chains - i really rather have something to help my own dps to catch up to the mages , frigid gift and arcane tyrant are more than enough to make my group happy
• hellfire - its way too hard to maintain 5 inc's to be able to use hellfire , trigger chance and duration incineration.. change incineration to be a self buff please

the amount of procs pet owners are enjoying is stupid high.

Mages aren't my strong suit, but.

General-

Dumbfires are useless.
Mages need a reason to cast their group power/mitigation debuffs. Necros have a reason because of the 5% damage reduction on it and because they have nothing else to take up concentration slots, but that's really the only mage.



Conjuror-
Plane Shift is just awful now as well. It's lost a lot of it's effectiveness as the stats on gear have risen.
Offensive stance is worthless.
Scout pets still don't cast even half of their combat arts and the AI is terrible.


Necromancer-
Dooming Darkness never got an upgrade.
It would be nice if the charges granted from Siphoning of Souls stacked to 3 or 5 and you didn't have to cast the lower level versions to get more.
Scout pets still don't cast even half of their combat arts and the AI is terrible.


Warlock-
Absolution needs a damage boost.
Vacuum Field could use a longer duration.


Coercer-
It would be nice if PE worked a little like warders, where you would just have a summon pet ability and whatever you PE'd last would be summoned when you used it.


Illusionist-
Rampage should be an addition to PoM, and Illuminate should be an addition to Flash of Brilliance, cutting the temps required to cast.

General - Dumbfires, rework them somehow to be useful or replace those spells.

Warlock
- Make Gift of Bertoxxulous a maintained buff with 5 aas in the warlock tab (45s recast and duration is a bit... weird).
-Make it so Dark Infestation's dot doesn't stop when the dumbfires summon.
-Absolution either needs some cast time changes or a damage boost as Buffrat said.
-Vacuum Field longer duration would be nice as Buffrat said.
-Rift needs either a cast time reduction or a damage boost. I would be willing to see the maximum number of targets reduced to 10 or even 8 if this is the concern about it for balance.
-Dissolve I don't know if I even care now, we don't have gaps in casting as it is now and above changes would make that more so, so don't add an upgrade to it the next time we get to that level.
-Also making the mythical cloak actually useful to something that's either listed above or a mix of 1 or 2 of them, or maybe make it +1 dot tick (which may or may not be overpowered).

wizard :

make fusion work like E´Ci.re-do the whole wizard prestige. think about manaburn the next time
you plan to add some super fun time manadrains on raid encounter.

Summoner
group procs give summoner too much dps

Sorc
nayena ring effect will look nice now in sorc prestige thread.
prestige eci and neitherreaml need to be obtained with full left spect

Wizard
Need good solo manaregen nuke with high effective dps
All spell with 2c+ cast time need 0.5sec base cast time boost
fiery blast need split record and nuke like bard concetro has
time warp need boost spell DA to be inline UT now UT give more for wizard then timewarp,
fire shape need to be reworked mb in nayena ring effect for fire spell

My area of expertise is limited to a conjuror , however I have been playing one since KOS, Here's what I would like to see changed.

• Swarm Pets: they are completely useless do, do very little dmg, are not immune to AE's, and the appearance of them hasn't changed they are still a stupid little flame tornado and fish.
• Scout and Tank Pets: again are bad because of stat sharing, my tank and scout pets don't get MA,Flurry, DPS mod... ect from me because i'm a mage, the mage pet can hold aggro better than both and i can keep him alive with my heal so why would I use anything else? I did like the pet gear feature in eq1, which would allow me to have different gear sets on my pet making them all somewhat more viable. also i hate the appearance of the mage pet give us something like one of the harrowed horde mobs but on fire, they look kool.
• Elemental Aspect and Geotic Rune: Most of the time in raids and group I take these off to put Fire Seed on the illusionist who is melee'ing and the healer who is melee'ing along with the scouts/tank, they really aren't doing anything, give them a small proc or dmg reduction for the grp, maybe power regen instead of base power, something to force me into leaving them up.
• Fire Seed & Flameshield: again they really aren't that effective, flame shield needs to grant something to the tank im going to put it on, maybe small weapon dmg bonus? fire seed just doesn't really do much either, id rather see it be an accuracy proc or maybe a small crit bonus proc for the target.
• Planeshift:Sacrificing the use of soulburn while this is up is not worth the 30% potency, and the casting speed for mage pet is useless because with buffs im up to like 180% cast speed which is a shared stat, not going into scout and tank pets planeshift because at this point they aren't used.
• AA's: anything with reduced re use speed is worthless because its soo easy to cap re use now.
• Healer Pet AA: it really doesnt do much for healing, plain and simpleeven if it did my pet does so much dps its not worth using. i vote completely get rid of it and change this into a heal proc on my pet for the grp if i spend points into it, similar to glory ability of the templar.
• BUBBLE: this needs to not be dependent on pet positioning, make it exactly like the necro counterpart one and just be plain and simple ae avoid
• Why dont I have an interrupt? i have knockdowns, a stiffle, and a stun but on mobs that need to be interrupted IE drinal, i cant do it, pretty sure most other classes have some interrupt attached to an ability, if i had to pick one it would be petrify
• On a side NOTE: Bards and chanters need to have raidwide buffs not just groupwide, I HATE that they take up 8 slots in raids for 4 classes, that means that out of 24 classes with 24 raid slots, you are restricted to utilizing 20 of the classes this game has to offer in a raid, and that's if you aren't doubled up on any other class. by making their buffs raidwide you free up 4 slots for other classes, if the game has 24 classes, and theres 24 slots seems to me the original design was 1 class = 1 raid slot and is something i would like to see.

I hope this helps you make decisions on how to go about improvingthe game,
I really enjoy playing it, and am excited to see this happening, i know some of the things aren't realisticallygoing to happen but i wanted to make sure you have all
the information from my perspective

Call me sceptical after the last few times, but perhaps I will bite and put some thought into this.

[Wizard] General class issues

I guess the best way of describing the issue with wizards/sorcerers is that they currently need to play with a scout mentality to remain competitive. This in itself is rather counter-intuitive for many playing the class, and is oftentimes the largest root cause of the poor class performance that many wizards complain about. I would like to see some relaxation of the range (and radius) requirements of some of our abilities.

• Thunderclap – Remove the 10m and 20m range requirements for the extra hits (Heroic Tree) – or at the very least, relax them to 15m and 25m.
• Fusion – Increase the base radius to 10m (so that it results in 15m with Enhance: Fusion in the Wizard tree). Remove the ridiculous narrow cone requirement, making it (at the very least) a 180 degree frontal like blast of devastation (if not just a 360 degree blue).
• Firestorm – Is fine with its 15m radius (once enhanced in the wizard tree), but it might be better to have it reach that 15m through a 10m base and then Enhance: Firestorm adding 1m per rank.
• Blast of Devastation – I suppose the base range is fine at 10m (since that makes it 15m with the Heroic tree enhancements, even though I don’t like being forced into taking them!), but perhaps consider turning Blast of Devastation into a 360 degree blue AE too.
• Eci – Would like to see the effect radius increased from 7.5m to 10m.
• Spell Reach (Wizard Tree) – Would be nice to see this have some type of an effect on radius/effect radius too.

I had originally considered making the above targeted blue AEs instead of relaxing the range and positioning requirements, but the reality is that it would remove some of the rather desirable flexibility that these abilities have (not needing a target to cast, and not having them cancel their casts because your current target has died). So it would be better to see a range increase.

Other:

• Manaburn – This spell has scaling issues, so would like to see either an increase in the ratio OR (more ideally) a reduction in the ratio, but allowing it to be additionally affected by the crit multiplier (to make it more future-proof). With all the power drains in this game, it would be cool if it could use something like the "Max Power" number to calculate its damage, since the constant power drains somewhat sideline this ability.
• Protoflame – Suffers from the same issues as all other dumbfire pets.
• Ro’s Blade – Probably better if the trigger conditions were on a combat hit, instead of a melee hit, but not overly concerned since the damage it does is rather irrelevant.
• Aurora – What was the point of this spell exactly?

[Wizard] CoE prestige additions:

I remember covering the problems with this rather extensively during CoE beta, and it went Live anyway. Now we have the majority of wizards running a dual conversion spec, mostly avoiding the mess that is these new wizard prestige additions. That in itself should say a lot. I suppose I will go over the basic issues again, but it has been said elsewhere enough times.

In short, these new additions need to be at least as appealing as opting for the dual conversion (even with the current 6 wasted points in the first row by doing so). While running a dual conversion might not leave us too far behind other classes at this moment in time, it does leave me concerned for the next prestige tree expansion when we will be forced into using them regardless.

New Left side:

• Incineration should not be limited to heat spells only, and the proc chance ought to be looked at again.
• Hellfire definitely needs to be addressed, because the way it works atm is a negligible benefit. The problem with Hellfire is that it is based on an increment count of Incineration (an increment count that is a hostile det on a mob and therefore continually being cleared/reset (losing them due to target switching, adds dying, named dispelling). Hellfire can also only be cast on the target with Incineration on them, which is just more added complexity. Solution: just remove the Incineration requirement to use it, and let us cast it at max potential damage (which is rather low anyway).
• With the above in mind, I even question the necessity for “increment” calculations in this tree anyway (clearly the servers are struggling with all the added CoE combat calculations).

New Right side:

May work well in whatever theory based scenarios you put it through, but the reality is very different and these are by far the worst option out of the entire prestige tree. The new right side is geared towards building up increments over time in a continual multi-target environment, which really doesn’t exist in this game. Most fights, if they have adds at all, will have a very limited “swarm add” element that is only up for a few seconds every 1-2 minutes (that I rarely even have time to get fusion and eci off on, let alone build up/use increments).

• Velium Chill in this tree also works badly in practice too. Apart from the 2 spell choices you made being rather mediocre (should have both been chosen from a pool of Fusion, Eci, Blast of Devastation, Firestorm), the biggest issue here is usability. You end up not using either of the spells, because you are waiting on increments of Frozen Rain, or you don’t use your increments of Frozen Rain because you are waiting on those 2 spells. All I see here is waiting, and waiting results in lost dps.

In short, I would scrap this new CoE right-side completelyand redesign it from the ground up - with the aforementioned in mind. Whatever benefits are to be gained in the CoE right-side prestige, need to be both immediate and tangible. Perhaps you can save yourself some server load by doing so too, while eliminating this whole increment nonsense in this tree.


[General] CoE Prestige

Perhaps this is just a personal preference, but I’d have much rather you allowed us more choice in what we could take in these trees by not linking everything into 2 long lines. At the very least the 2 new CoE path additions ought to have been separated from the SS CoE paths to allow us to mix and match any X of the 4.


[Mage] Spell Weapons:

Really, spell weapons have been a mess from the outset. It’s completely pointless to have spell weapon stats exist as a separate stat (they should have always used the melee version of the stat, and had their base adjusted if any balance adjustments needed to be made).

Furthermore, if basing the damage and hitrates off the “Focus” skill, then you need to provide meaningful ways to increase our Focus (itemizing it on gear and adorns alongside casting skills), or you need to change it to something that we can increase (e.g. Disruption).


[General] AA system:

Again, this is something I have said in the past, but I have always had a strong dislike of the methodology behind the earlier AA trees (Class, Subclass, Shadows, Heroic). It’s like they were never designed with future character growth in mind.

All parts of these trees should have always had a ‘multiplicative’ or scaling effect, so that the AAs remain proportionally as useful now as they did on Day 1 (see some “before modifiers” examples in the Skyshrine prestige for a much better way of doing it). Additive ‘fixed’ values, especially to existing multipliers, are just such a bad way of doing it, since they become marginalised over time and probably lead to more class balance issues in the future.

I could throw out many examples, but an exhaustive list won’t help.


[General] Group procs

Group damage procs are becoming a bit of an issue with regards class balance, especially with the addition of yet even more group procs in CoE. The balance issues tend to arise with classes that can have multiple entities procing them, or (a quite separate issue) by having too many of these being “non-normalized” (i.e. 100% proc chance).

I have a conjurer in the low 30s. He runs in a duo with my wife's necromancer, who is likewise in the low 30s. We use the paladin and the inquisitor mercenaries to round out our little group so that we can do dungeons and whatnot at something resembling a level-appropriate level.

We just recently finished most of Kaladim in Butcherblock.

We, ah ... We don't have a reason to use our summons. The mercs outperform them in every way; we have been upgrading out summon spells using the Upgrade tab, a smattering of station cash and drops as they occur. Excepting the scout pets which we just recently picked up, they are all masters or nearly so.

The paladin merc out-tanks our fighter pets, the inquisitor merc out-heals my priest pet, both of the mercs out-damage our mage and scout pets ... while being even more useful than the summons because we can tell them who to follow, who to protect and who to assist while also having them set to protect us and protect themselves.

We've noticed our dumbfires (my fish and her zombies or whatever they are) die before doing much of anything other than wasting our time by casting them. The bugbears especially ate them alive.

As is ... well, I'm a conjurer with a paladin sidekick and she is a necromancer with an inquisitor sidekick, both of whom occasionally remember to call out our elementals and undead when we're inside a dungeon.

Summoners who don't bother summoning. Heh.

Is there a way you can change things so that we can pay our summons the same way we pay our mercs to make the summons as useful as the mercs are? That'd be lovely. If not (and I'm assuming that you won't in all honesty), can we at least assign them assist, follow and protect targets like we can for the mercs?

(No, I don't want the mercenaries nerfed. I merely want to have my summons be worth using because they are as useful as the mercenaries are rather than merely a distraction barely worth paying attention to.)

Coercers- Thought Snap needs to work again on every mob
PE is a huge pain it needs to be like an image capture as buffrat stated, where you posses a mob then can recall it at command.

Conjuror- Bubble as stated above it needs to work just like the necromancer spell

Oh also.

Summoners-
Pet buffs should be self buffs that apply their effects to whatever pet you currently have summoned, and should persist through death/pet death/pet resummoning/whatnot like normal self buffs do.
Cabalistic Conservation should persist through death too, no idea why it doesn't.

Coercer - PE needs to have AoE immunity or be like a warder like Buffrat said, its a real pain to have to search for a pet pre pull and when i enter i new zone.

Still in favor of the original ether balance (the one on the 5 second recast and hit 4 times per trigger) but thats just me and im sure many do not like that style of play, but i still felt it was fine, did the same damage as it does now, was just way more fun the old way.

But the coercer PE is the only main issue with the class.

Its fine how it is, if they were to remove the power cost penalty they might as well remove the skill, its such a strong buff that it needs a draw back, further more if they did that then all coercers and illys would just hog the buff for themselfs.

Commenting from the point of view of my wizard. He is more or less CoE EM geared, a few DoV items left are offset by a a few HM items. Fully adorned with T10 adorns, and glass cannon specced with everything of aa's and prestiges aimed toward dps sacrificing survivability. While i might not be the best at playing him, I am putting enough time into him that I probably don't totally suck.

Dps overall:
In the raid setting, at best I can parse equal to similarily geared conjurer. Usually a tad below. I always parse way behind our assassin. Since wizard probably is the class in game with least utility(assassins aggro transfer -> huge utility), I would expect that to be compensated by more dps. The wizard should be equal to assassins on dps, be a bit ahead of the summoners, and we are not. Only situation where I can comfortably match or outparse an assassin is in huge AE encounters, in particular huge green encounters. Not many of those around.

Heroic play and Eci:
To have a viable dps for group play, a wizard must have Eci. Without Eci the group level contribution becomes way too small to be competitive. In order to make both sides of the prestige tree possible to use, I suggest replacing Eci with something else and make Ice Comet behave like Eci instead, possibly from an aa choice somewhere. AE Ice comet must be available to all regardless of which prestige tree you choose.

Complexity of play:
The wizard has a lot of concerns to handle to get max dps. Many high dps spells are short range, which leads to: jousting(dps lost running or just staying ranged) and AE deaths(to being (too) close to mob). Many spells need aiming, and for instance Fusion can be difficult to get good hits with. Fiery Blast can easily get nonoptimal because of many factors like tank moving, interrupts, etc. Wizards need to keep some 15-16 spells on constant cooldown to get max dps, that by itself requires a lot of attention(or lost dps), and gives less attention time to watch for events in the raid environment that needs reacting to. While I think having complicated play is part of the fun with the wizard, it is important to note that this complexity means that it is very hard to push a wizard to his 'theoretical' dps limit. There is always something quite not working out.

Prestige trees:
As Daray said, currently most wizzes run with dual conversion prestige specs since that has turned out to give best result. There need to be a dps upgrade to the prestige lines to make them competitve, plus the Eci thing mentioned above. In particular the counter thing has turned out to be combersome. The left side single target counters should be made to proc off all spells, and you could make them 100% proc while you are at it. The right side ae counters should have longer lifetime so they can be accumulated across several encounters even if puller is slow.

Close range stuff:
Since wizzes are forced to spend a bit of time close to mob since we have major dps spells that are short range, we should have the tools to survive and handle this. A short time 'cast on the run' self buff would make it easier to run in and out as situation warrants. And of course wizards need plate armor! (ok, that last was a joke, if anyone doesn't get it)

MOST OF BROKEN STUFF ABOUT CONJURORS CAN BE FOUND HERE You are welcome */crosses fingers* hopefully you guys fix these 5+ year old broken mechanics/spells/AA's with summoners.

bump for coercer PE. finding a pet on zone-in is fine. but having to recast it over and over and over in combat on certains fights/zones sucks. one solution would be to give the pet like 30m melee range and setting to make it stay there, but the real solution is some kind of permanent immunity to AEs.