Focused Mage Feedback

Warlock: We don't need more spells to use, so leave dumbfires etc as they are. What we need are: Shortened cast times and most of all to be able to get as many passive procs from pom, potm, synergy, miasma, arcane tyrant, VC etc etc. as chanters, summoners, beastlords etc

There is allot of good feedback on sorcerers so I might be repeating some stuff. I can't speak for Warlocks but their DPS does seem to be the worse of the two so I'm sure they need more work too.

As its been said, sorcerers have no real utility (unless you count teleportation which hasn't been useful/needed for a long time now); yet we are consistently out parsed by summoners and scouts and reckless tanks.

Single target dps and raiding - Fiery Blast, it's required we do as much dps as we can in order to maximize its effect. Unfortunately many raids require us to target through the main assist and burn down adds or objects not connected to the encounter in order to prevent fail inducing conditions. Having that situation come up in our spell cycle severely dimishs our dps. The same problem effects both of our new prestige lines. No one specs all the way down either line because maintaining the required procs is way too difficult and tedious; especially when we aren't even allowed to stay on the same target

Manaburn hasn't been very good for a long time. Too many mana drains and a plethora of other problems with it. Its not even worth using without sanguine sacrifice.

Please redo our entire prestige line, everyone hates how tedious it is and it doesn't even improve our dps. My idea is to make one line a pure self-dps line. Instead of some annoying useless procs, have the end line effect be some sort of buff for manaburn. Make it cost no mana, or do double damage, or crit, or something that will make manaburn good again instead of giving us more spells to spam that don't even increase our dps. Make the other side of our prestige be some sort of utility that helps the entire group/raid dps instead of just our own. Having some such utility might justify our current mediocre ranking on the dps charts.

Please combine more of our spells. My wizard has way more stuff to click then any of my toons. Tons of dots, two pre-spell procs, two melee range only aoe spells that I cant even cast both before groups are dead most of the time. My wizard is definitely my most difficult toon to play; unlike my beastlord that has 1/4 the amount of skills. When I'm playing my wizard i literally cant even look up from my hotbar because im so busy spamming the obscene quantity of spells, I may as well not be playing a game with 3d graphics because I dont get to watch myself play.

Someone pointed out the huge gap in sorcerers minimum and maximum spell damage may be way we arent reaching whatever the developers think our theoretical max dps is. It's a very valid point that I never considered before, a long time ago those gaps were probably a good thing. But now adays they are 20k damage BEFORE the critical multiplier. Closing that gap may be the the simplest overall solution to sorcerer dps.

For Warlock I agree 100% with what most are saying, especially the dependency on Upbeat Tempo. Without a troub a lock is all but useless.

Wizards.
Manaburn has been flawed since day one when Necro's got lifeburn. Given we use mana to do damage then have manaburn that works like lifeburn but uses mana instantly puts MB as a second rate spell becuase it is the same pool drawn from for all our other spells. Add to it a necro can be healed to full right after LB but a wizard will be spent after MB especially with all the mana drains in the game and MB becomes pointless. MB needs to be released from the mana pool or allowed to crit, something that offsets the HEAVY penalty of loosing the entire mana pool making the caster useless.

As all the others said the wiz AA prestige is a mess. The only realistic option is splitting the trees out. I was able to make successful use of the cold line though the dps drop was significant but the heat line is unworkable. One suggestion which seemed reasonable was unlink the wizard Prestige AA tree so we can have more selections outside a left or right path. I would prefer incineration go to 100% and a rework of the proc counter concept. Truth be told if on the cold line we just got the frozen spells without having to use increments that would move up our dps but still wouldn't put us at the top of the tier.

To reiterate what has been said the amount of interrupts, off targeting and mana drains makes things like the counting procs or setting up fiery blast much more about luck then skill. Please take a hard look at how these mechanics are actually working becuase in the prestige line they just arn't.

I know for wizards the focus has been mostly dps in this thread but truth be told that is all a wizard brings to a raid or group, we have little utility to speak of. As such to make the wizard fun the mechanics need to change so wizards are competing on the top of the parse.

Illusionists:
Fix the pet zoning / epic drop issue
Illys have more than fallen behind coercers they fell off the cliff as far as mana regen goes. Please improve an illys ability to increase mana for a group. Even with a full AA spec all dedicated to mana regen my illy is hardly noticeable in trying to maintain a groups mana compared to a coercer. Which is really silly given an illy is caster focused and casters are much more mana dependent than a melee focused group is.

It might make sense to improve TC compared to UT. Right now UT is an absolute must for a warlock or a necro, while TC is just OK for wizzies and conjs. If you added 1 additional tick of dots to TC, that would make these two buffs more or less comparable, because right now TC is strictly inferior to UT.

reposted in error

Please allow the special abilities that coercers get to modify hate work on RAID MOBS!

And what I mean by this is.... Thought SNAP! Why do you have Mem-wiping fights, give coercers the tools to counter such events, but make the mobs immune? Such pointlessness SoE....

This is just 1 example.

I was going to type it all out but this guy said it pretty perfectly. You asked for what it would take to make Warlock's enjoyable to play again. Please read the above qoute.

When I think of a wizard I think like an above poster said "glass cannon". Overall i have always enjoyed playing my wizard. But with the recent expansions and such i feel like we have lost the concept of glass cannon.

Personally I would like to see more aoe spells and some harder hitting single target spells. Eci's was about the only spell which made me happy with the expansion.

I would also agree point blank aoe's are stupid. Fusion for such a hard hitting spell is just about useless. I know that isn't completely true. But, there are quite a few mobs that require quite a bit of movement, and the ones that don't require max range which voids 2 of your spells right off the back. However, we have more issues then that. Even on fights where Fusion is able to be casted on cool down, it does not up your dps enough to be the only fix in the works.

The biggest thing about a wizard are the cool downs ( like another poster stated ) On pull you pop your dots etc. Low damage abilities once the tank has established agro you pop everything including fiery blast. This is likely the only time you will have a flawless fiery blast hit. After that everything is up at different times. Which means you either use FB on cool down, or you wait for other spells to become active to score another big hit.

With that being said maybe if our end line was something along the lines of "instantly refreshes all of the wizards spells." Put this on the same cool down as fiery blast, so they can always be used together. It could use some minor tweaking but you get the idea. Or make it available for every other fiery blast. This would really up our dps. If you added some sort of immunity to stuns etc it would be very useful as well.

Really hate to restate what others have said but some things I agree with:

Dumbfires: make them useful please! Or get rid of em? IDK, breaks my heart every time I see someone new to a conj or something firing away at em like they are helping their parse.

Coercer~~

SOMETHING with the pets. persist through zones isn't really fair maybe but something to stop the aoe deaths would be great. Some of us have to block insane dpsing scouts and can't use sever hate on our pet

IDK about persisting on zone in wouldn't mind it but may allow OP pets in zones they don't belong so /shrug.

A pet capture kinda thing would be great if you can only recall it in an appropriate level zone. Not that I would mind having an Epic x4 pet tearing up solo instances (wait they are easy anyway) or whatever but I can see where it could be a problem.

I personally use IR and would like it to get a boost and feel like it was something I was actually helping the raid by having.

EV power cost is fine. It is a pretty awesome endline and without the drawback people would cry it is OP and I would be begging to be in a grp where i was the best EV target.

Thought Snap/ Shout: With hate shuffles they feel useless. The coercers perfectly time their shouts with wipes to tanks and still it is a crap shoot. Kinda feels like why bother some days that it isn't our shout working or not it is where the intended tank wound up on the hate list which blows.

Also I forget who bitched about having to have 4 bards/ chanters in raid. Even if you made the group buffs raid wide... the single buffs that utility give are often such that you would have a lot of pissed people if they were in the group with no utility. raid wide buffs would have a benefit if we had more to choose from and could coordinate which we were running with each other to boost the whole raid or just to give groups with an illy the coercer buffs and vice versa. (etc and so forth heh) If the raid works well together and everyone is doing their jobs those 8 spots can hit awesome numbers on the parse anyway so what are you gonna sub em with? dps that will parse more like utility without their single buffs anyway? hmmm

Plus a lot of people with utility mains would be out of a spot and im sure at this stage a lot wouldn't bother to reroll a new main so boom another decrease in population.

My main is a Conjuror. I have not read anything related to conjurors (or summoners) in this thread that I do not also radiate. So add another vote to anything related to any conj/summoner suggestions already said. I also play a Illy, and also agree with most of what was said related to them (the few things I dont, is because I've not raided with my Illy yet).

I'll leave the mechanics to you guys, but I do have a few UI improvements that would greatly help any pet class.

1) remove right click tray for summon spells.
If I put this spell on my bar, i want that spell to happen when i click it. These spells far too often get "broken" and start randomly changing to another pet spell when you die/zone/port (I had to cast each pet, and pet its perma name to "wrongpet", so I could tell immediately if i summoned the wrong one) (you will also note that the top tier of pets is missing from this picture, it is because this is the picture I used to submit this bug december 2011, when BST/AOD screwed with it) If you cant/wont/dont remove it, at least make it sort them by level?


2) pet/illusions management UI
I've got a bunch of the pet illusion wands from the SC store, and a few pet illusion spells, and a bunch more wands from SkyShrine, and I would love to be able to use older pet models (its such a shame we blitz past lower levels and dont get to use someone's hard work for more then a few minutes/hours)
Suggestion: clone the mount inventory, split in 2 sections [a] summon spells illusion (petamorph wands + illusion spells). Anything from [a] can go in left, anything from [a] OR can go in right.

This benefits anyone with summon spells, not just summoners/chanters (including dogdog + attack hawk). It also (like mounts and currency) frees up inventory space


(pardon my poor 'shopping skills, its hard to work with web based editors)

3) pet stats
We have that 30sec "possess minion" (purple puppetmaster icon) spell that temporarily lets us see our pet's abilities/stats (as if they were our own), but why do we get this limited window to view them when we get to view our merc's stats/abilities all the time, and beastlords can also. This would go a LOOOONG way to helping us test/debunk which stats/mechanics do/dont transfer to our pets (since you never make it clear, and often change them)

This would benefit any class with a pet (even dogdog)

These! I agree with each of these!
Irving:
- 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.

Buffrat:
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.

Pifflestix
Minds Eye - Why do we have to us a button to refresh an ability that's up all the time anyway. Just make it a buff.

Also - Make Mez work on trash mobs in raid zones. Maybe not all of them all the time, but it would be nice to be able to react when some idjit doesn't follow directions and brings some unexpected guests!

Illusionist:
Time compression: All but useless, either greatly improve this or make this self castable, nobody wants this anymore, in fact I get requests to quit casting this because they want upbeat tempo ( which is self castable for the troubadore ). Used to be that the illy got UT and the mage got TC. Now the mage gets UT and illy gets nothing and TC goes unused.

Mana regen: pretty useless at this. If it wasnt for time warp, coercer take over in raids would be complete. Coercer can mana flow 2 full groups at a time. Illy can flow 1 person. The ONLY reason an illy gets a slot in a raid is for TW in the mage group.

Illy pet: cant keep this thing up, the new prestige for this did apparently nothing i cant tell the difference.

I forgot hot much much "fun" a wipe was for certain classes.

So your two big hitters (fix one mechanical bug, watch dozens of abilities for all 4 archetypes become "more fun"):

- Make dumbfire/swarm pets useful
- Make single-target buffs persist through death (of either caster or target) like group buffs do

Conjuror.

Planar Conjurations: This spell isn't sharing the stats with the pet.

Pet Data Window: A more comprehensive and accurate window for the pet that showed ALL the pet stats, spells, skills, ect., without having to go through the posses minion. More user friendly.

Call of the Hero: Make call of the hero castable in combat.

Line of Sight; Pet will cast soulburn and elemental blast even if it doesnt have line of sight of the target, causing the reuse time to start. It will also go through animations of casting even when it has bad line of sight.

Pet Offensive & Defenive Stances: These have stats that do not apply to the pet due to shared stats. Offensive stance is pretty much broken completly due to this, but there are a few stats on the Defensive stance that make it worth casting in certian situation Hate/Health.

Scout/Fighter Pet: These pets are sharing Mage stats and are becoming useless. Scout pet is useless.

Hydromancer; This pet requires AA points and is a terrible healer.

Planeshift/Soulburn; Would be nice to remove the casting restriction for casting soulburn while planeshift is up.

Dumbfire pets; communion, aqueous swarm, roaring flames ; These spells do not do much damage vs cast times, and you have a chance that they will completly be destroyed by any one of the many AOE's that comes off the mob resulting in even more of a loss of damage output. These spells also go away after the targeted mob of the encounter dies, this isnt the case with most encounter based spells. These spells do not crit.

Shadowstep: Will only work if not engaged in combat and used as the first attack: Not sure if this is an intended mechanic or if this is a broken spell. This spell has potential but in its current state its not worth a hotbar spot.

Shockwave: Does not work on the target your attacking, and therefor doesnt work on single targets.

Raid Shards: Cannot cast during combat yet still takes a huge chunk of power.. Leave the power drain and make them castable during combat. Shard power output needs to be increased also, % based would work.

Essence shift: This spell places you into combat because it does damage to your pet. This will cause you to attack an enemy you have targeted while waiting for a pull.

Flameshield; This spell is fairly weak, some improvements could be to add an elemental debuff to it and maybe an elemental resist buff to the player character it is placed on.

Sorcerers

Catalyst and Freehand Sorcery have lost a lot of their power. The 100% crit chance to the next spell is worthless now with people at 400%+ crit. Similarly, the +25/30 CB and Pot for the next spell was much more important when the Bloodthirsty Choker was the only commonly available item with Pot on it. Now people are 300+ CB/Pot self buffed and the increase these spells provide is much less noticeable. Perhaps for DoTs they could make every tick crit as well. Or they could cause the next spell to be 100% spell double cast.

Flames of Velious hits twice and can hit extra times now from the Prestige. Please let the extra hits each have their own chance to proc. We need something to help in this area against Summoner's/Beastlord and the higher proc rate melee always seem to have from melee. Same with Thunderclap.

The size/regen of the Magi Shielding ward hasn't kept pace with the current game. Maybe make it a base % of our HP; like 10 AAs is 30% of your HP.

Energy Redirection prestige is only ever taken by those who double spec. For a 'utility' buff this prestige needs to be redone/rethought. Mystical Leadership needs a boosted as well. Perhaps from 1% to 3%.

Master Strike - This DPS ratio for this spell is just bad for Sorcerers. It never makes it into our rotations. Too long a reuse/casting time for how hard it hits.

Warlocks

We need more blue AEs and less green. Perhaps Absolution (or other spells) could be made to target like the Wizard's EC'I.

Our AE spells need to hit more targets; too many are stuck at a max of 5. Give us some AAs to let Rift, Cataclysm, and Apocalypse hit more targets.

This expansion has been lax on AE encounters. Years ago, we complained about this heavily, and many more AE encounters were added in the next expansion / new content. Now it feels like we are seriously backpedaling. Additionally, the few AE encounters there are, the mobs have so little HP that they die way to fast. Non AE classes can use their limited AE abilties and parse well, while the encounters requiring us to repeatedly cycle through our AE abilities are non existent. What good is it then to be an AE class?

Encase is weak. It needs a DPS boost. And why is it cold and not poison or noxious? Change it so Encase can at least have a chance of procing more of our own stuff. Same for Flames of Velious.

Aftershocks was never very good for damage. Increase the proc rate and let Aftershocks have a chance of procing Aftershocks.

Volatility is never taken. The biggest problem is this is a spell we have to cast; it should be a passive effect.

Focused Castings needs some way to play nicer with Time Warp. A 200% spell double cast Plaguebringer might be a bit too much but there should be a common ground somewhere in the middle.

Reckless ShadowKnights should not be able to out DPS me on an AE fight so easily.

Let Boon of the Damned stack with the Wizard Converge. This is so annoying.

Mythical click buff. Just get rid of this and make it a passive buff. If I cast the spell on one target, it does extra damage. If I cast it on multiple, it doesn't. Stop making me click the buff on and off, just have the spells it modifies work this way on their own.

I like the idea for Acid Storm, don't change that. Just make the spell better so its worth casting again.

I miss my Dark Infestation and the little AE pets it would spawn off. Make this spell worthwhile to cast again. It doesn't have to be a great spell, but at least pull it up out of the 'will never cast again' category.

I would love a Warlock only Slug appearance mount. This would be fun

I'll wont repeat the many problems with our Prestige endlines, left and right sides. I agree with what the other Warlocks have complained about. Both sides need to be boosted up.

Aura of the Void needs a boost too if you are going to force it into my rotation for Empowered Bolt. More triggers would be a helpful start.

Wizard

Fix our Prestige endlines. We asked for it in beta, it didn't happen. Why is dual speccing so much better than either Prestige side? Even in the optimal situations for those sides (single target for the left, AE for the right) they loose out to the dual spec.

We simply need more single target damage. This is the biggest problem with the class right now.

Manaburn needs a boost or something, especially with all the manadrains we have now. Its only good at 100% mana. As well, when we do cast it there is a good chance we will be loosing some DPS afterwards. Mystical Heat provides too little mana return to really make it as worthwhile as it may seem on paper. Lowering the casting time / reuse is a big needed boost, but we can't keep up with all the mana drains now. Manaburn is just too difficult to cast every time its up. Plus we are traditionally grouped with an Illusionist and this does not mesh with manaburn as well as it used to. Illys get a good chunk of their mana power from making spells cost less (Savante, Channeled Focus) which doesn't help with letting us cast manaburn again quickly. As well, something is up with Sanguine Sacrifice. I am constantly getting 'can't cast' messages because I am completely out of power while this is up. When Sanguine is active and I have the health, I should be able to cast at zero mana. And then as other's mentioned, Manaburn's damage just isn't scaling as well. Perhaps making it something like either the X damage it is now or 5% of the mobs health, whichever is greater. And boost the conversion of it into Fiery Blast. It doesn't need to be a lower % than our other spells with the slow casting time it has. Oh and Manaburn can't double hit and can't crit.

Iceshield - Tanks need to get hit more so this can actually trigger again. I've been in named fights where this spell never triggered through its duration (though the tank is taking damage cause I can see his health dropping.....). It also could use extra triggers these days. Perhaps it could trigger when a tank reposts or something too.

Elemental Surprise - Heroic mobs are often under 80% health before they get into camp. for non heroics, getting extra damage when the mob is under 30% health is generally superior, as that's when your raid can be struggling to get it dead and need to burn. Also, the under 30% health fits much more nicely with the Flames of Velious prestige HP requirements. Overall though, this is just a bleh AA.

Expunger boosts the Warlock's best spell Plaguebringer while it boosts Hailstorm for Wizards. All Warlocks take this while most Wizards opt to put their points elsewhere. We need a different spell picked; Ice Comet/EC'I or Fusion.

What point does Fireshape really have anymore?

Incineration - as many have said, needs the proc chance increased and the damage increased. The fact that it triggers only off of our single target heat spells (of which there are not many and half of them are very, very bad) is another nail in the coffin for this Prestige line. Comparing this to the Summoner's version is just depressing. At the very, very least this needs to have 100% proc chance, work with fireshape, and have a damage increase over where it is now. (Though truely just working with fireshape isn't enough but its something).

Hellfire - At least it has a cool name going for it. Its DPS is low for all the difficulty of getting 5 increments on our target (and being forced into using sub optimal spells to reach that point). And while Heroics don't count for much, getting this to trigger in a Heroic instance on anything but a named is impossible; stuff just dies too soon.

Time Warp - much like Warlocks need Upbeat Tempo, I feel like a Wizard needs a good Illy who knows how to use Time Warp well. Without it or an Illy who doesn't know when to cast Time Warp, your DPS suffers greatly. Like the Warlocks UT, this should be a boost, not a requirement.

Fire Chains - weak. Yet another damage proc, this one only triggering when we have 5 increments of Incineration so it is also gains all the problems that brings. Just scrap it and bring in something new. Preferably something with damage. I like the idea of heat spells getting a significant bonus to their spell double cast chance.

Frozen Rain - covered by a lot of people already but I'll repeat. Where are the AE encounters to make this worthwhile? The don't exist this expansion. Maybe 3 fights a zone (generally trash) this is ok for. Overall you are left with a slow gaining increment count that isn't worth the extra damage. Additionally, if we get a double spell cast on the big nuke, the second hit is neutered by thinking it doesn't have the 120 triggers. If the stars aligned, I got the big nuke off during a TW, and put in the work to get the 120 needed triggers over the past many fights, please at least double the full damaging spell.

Ice Anger - talked about this before too. Worthless. I have no agro problems this expansion, my DPS is too low and tanks have no problems holding agro over me. Even on AE content.

And in general, effects requiring you to be at max increments...when you also have a nuke that uses up all your increments...is working at cross purposes. Its bad planning and execution.

Frozen Detonation - More of the same. After finally building up 120 increments we get a big AE nuke...except there is so little content for it...and we have a bigger single target nuke already.

Arcane Surge - Why is this a target encounter damage proc? Leave that to the Warlocks (not that there is a lot of AE encounters..). Give me a bigger single target damage proc instead. And this spell just illustrates some of the weirdness of the Wizard heat only buffs. It works when Surge of Ro is up (which only boosts heat spells for minimal damage) but then Arcane Surge effects any spell, not just heat. Something just doesn't seem right here.

Ice Spears - Yes, its our steadfast long debuff. But it used to be an OK source of damage. Now its a low, low damage source we have to work in to keep the mob debuffed. It needs a boost. I don't want it into the great territory, but its needs more oomph. Many other classes have a decent DPS attack as their main debuff.

Fiery Blast - this ability is such a pain. First, the mob has to live for 12~14 seconds (rules out lots of heroic content). Then I need all my big hitting spells up. Then I need multiple mobs up and positioned well to have EC'I and Fusion (and BoD) land on multiple targets. Then you have to time jousting so it wont wreck your precious 12-14 seconds. After all this...I get what looks like a big nuke...so I can maybe tie predator / beastlord / reckless tank parses. And any type of stun stifle effect, your completely out of luck. Its extremely frustrating. I can't state it enough. This is my #2 issue with the Wizard class. How dependent Wizards are on Fiery Blast to parse high, how problematic and error prone it is, and then how when the stars align and it does work out...we are still behind on the parse. Predators get AA/Prestige so they don't have to be in stealth for their big chains...and we are stuck with the mechanics of Fiery Blast. It is not fun and frustrating as can be.

The last item, and biggest, is just the lack of damage we have. This is my #1 issue with the Wizard class right now. I've played this class for years and we are at a very low point right now. Bring back our single target damage. Something needs to be done. It makes the class not fun to play. Help.

Rift needs no more than it's current 12 targets, it needs a cast time or damage change.
If you're losing to reckless sks you're doing it wrong (or we have a really bad sk, which doesn't seem to be the case).
50% cap on hate xfer needs to be removed if converge and boon are gonna stack.
Apart from that yeh above poster for warlock.

not saying that manaburn doesn't need a boost but coming after necro lifeburn is just dumb. necro lifeburn is just as outdated as manaburn. both need fixes not a nerf like your posting might imply.