Illusionist Class Issues : Sentinel's Fate Edition

ok, here's a parse from ERH on the Fullyfunctional battlestation thing. I thought it interesting so... (names other people are with held for non-specific reasons)
Swashbuckler: 18370dps
Monk(tank): 16658dps
Wizard: 15684dps
Dirge: 15379dps
Illy: 9113dps
Inquisitor: 2167dps
Ok, the inquisistor was only auto attacking, the monk is raid geard and the wizard has been 90 for 2 days and is still wearing mostly gear from leveling. The illy, myself, has been 90 for a month now and is wearing mostly treasured 90 gear with the odd fabled and has the myth buff. The dirge and swashy are geard similary to myself, with maybe a few more fables.
I popped every single cool down i own, including doppleganger and construct of order (which dosn't seam to do anything) and well... i think the parse speaks for itself.

Tenoris wrote:

Dpsing on an illy is difficult to begin with, so given your gear, etc you did an admirable job. I always marvel when I can parse 35-40k on a trash mob in a raid zone, and then easily come down to earth when I look at the parse. The wizard pushing nearly 100k, the fury, bard and all other classes who edged me out only to see myself sitting at the very bottom of the parse. Its disheartening when the conjy's elemental blast hit for 800k, and your largest hitting spell is 1/100th of that dps.
I keep posting regarding the class balance. Its picking battles big enough to matter but small enough to win is where I think the illy community is going wrong. We want so much change but not focused enough on the "winnable" ones. I keep going back to some "cheap and easy fixes" for our class. Persistent buffs through death (single target included). Red/Yellow specific Illy adornments for SELF dps (e.g. change the existing PA adorment to one that adds an additional 4 triggers to PA, increases its base damage by 20%, and allowing to be triggered off spell and/or melee attack). Changing our modifier from 1.3 to 1.5 with all the other mages. These are winnable fights if we can focus on battles big enough to matter but small enough to win (yes I said it again!). 3 simple changes that could GREATLY impact our class, is not costly for developers to implement and would increase the illy communities satisfaction tremendously.

There hasn't been much activity/advocacy on this thread lately. Many suggestions have come through on communicating with SOE with "Top 5" things to change to make our class better and push those 5 things until done. I thought I would throw out a few things and hopefully get us to agree. I will volunteer to send it to Rothgar, etc.
1. Change Prismatic Chaos to work off of melee and spell damage. Reason: with all the brutal AOE's in raid and zones no one is meleeing on a mob all the time, however casters can still dps at range.
2. Change our critical modifier from 1.3 to 1.5.
3. Add a red adorn for +15% potency for UV Beam (like Conjy's Crystal Blast).
4. Increase the Prismatic Chaos red adorn from 2 triggers to 4 triggers.
5. Include a 15% base damage to Flash of Brilliance.
6. (yes 6th, this should be a given...) Allow us to cast TC on ourselves.
This increases our own personal dps and increases our group viability. What are your top 5 suggestions?

Well, you'd want to send to Xelgad, not Rothgar, since Xelgad is the mechanics dev.
I feel the crit multipler change won't happen - coercer damage is about where it should be (behind sorcerer, but not by a vast degree), it's just illusionist damage that's much lower by comparison. I don't think they'd change the crit mult for one of the enchanters but not the other, since it'd be a little jarring. Also in solo and heroic aspects we're pretty much fine, it's just that in raids we've found ourselves particularly weak.
The thing we need to emphasize is that while our utility is still relatively in demand in raid settings, our contribution will diminish with time and gearing as players begin to cap all the relevant stats we increase, so our damage needs to remain competitive both to make our class entertaining to play and to make us competitive for raid spots with other utility classes. I feel the best solution for illusionist woes is to upgrade our red slots, similar to the ideas you post there.
1. Suggesting this change to prismatic chaos, while reasonable, probably won't happen because of how similar to Despotic Mind it'd be then. Prismatic Chaos is almost uniquely vulnerable in terms of targetting because of needing specifically a strong melee scout to cast it on who will use up all of its triggers before the recast comes up, so it can be much more easily disrupted than despotic, much less Hostage or Spell Lash. I'd rather not give it even more triggers because of that (when we could get 7 triggers on prismatic it was all too common that scouts wouldn't use up all the triggers even if something as mild as a knockback happened), I'd rather see the red adorn just increase its base damage by 40% or so.
2. Won't happen, unfortunately. Coercers do too much compared to us and they won't give us a different multiplier than them.
3. Good idea for an adorn, though I feel some of our other adorns need to be combined to make room for it. In particular, the two synergism adorns should be combined. The peace of mind adorn should be made coercer only and our destructive rampage adorn should do both rampage and peace of mind.
4. As I mentioned above, I'd rather see the red adorn add significant base damage to the ability than give it even more triggers - a 40% base damage increase is equivalent to going to 7 triggers from 5, though I imagine the number may be too large for them to consider it.
5. Yeah, the Flash of Brilliance adorn should definitely give either base damage, crit bonus, or both in values equivalent to Intellectual Remedy adornment.
6. Time Compression should definitely be self-castable, though spell double attack benefits us far less than most mages we cast it on. Still, it'd be nice to have the option of doing so rather than be stuck putting it on, say, a bard.

Chath@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Hmm Can you narrow this down to your top 5 things and make life easier for compliation? Sounds like you agree with 50%....

Chock wrote:

I'm still here, just little more to be said.
On your ideas:
1. Agree with Tehom on this one. I never have a problem finding a target for it anyway.
2. In the original post.
3. Would be nice but would only equate to perhaps 500 dps? Not going to be class fixing.
4. This would be nice.
5. Also nice. However this one would do nothing to make the class any better than it already is really. I alreday cast the spell.
6. As per the original post, there is no comprehensible reason for this not to be the case, other than faildev.

My top 5 would be:
1. Sort out the single target buffs and make time warp less of a pita. The mechanic for JC/Gravitas/Time Warp etc. is just a mess and also adds to lag since people have large macros with lists of players that they just repeatedly spam whenever its up.
2. Increase the base spell damage numbers by 15-20% or so across the board. Thus fixing illys without mucking Coercers up.
3. Fix IA to be useful again.
4. Make the pet immune to non-direct AoE's, like virtually every other pet in game.
And long term:
5. Design mob encounters that require crowd control OR get rid of the linked encounter design so mobs just agro socially in whatever numbers are in the area. Lets be honest though, this is too fundamentally game changing to ever happen.
An alternative would be to put power drains back in the game properly for chanters. Have mobs lose abilities for having zero power, including critical AoE's from raid mobs (other AoE's can remain as "innate" as they are and not need power). This would then be like semi-crowd control, the mobs are still active but we are nerfing them.

neat ideas guys
I think something else that may help a lot too is to make our dot durations the lesser of the duration and the recast time or make durations be effected by adorns or spell reuse stats because as it is the durations and end damage is making reuse benefits basically pointless for some spells.
There was a spell effect in the 80 pvp gear that reduced brainburst durations by a certain percent (I think to 7 seconds?) after a few set pieces were equipped (by reducing the time between damage ticks, not by removing them), which I thought helped a ton with its usability, I wish a similar effect were carried over for that and nightmare that halfed its duration, just that alone would add like 12 seconds to its usability, and both nightmare and brainburst for avg dmg per second of casting time are pretty high relative to most illy spells.

actually.. and I don't know how many people would agree with this, but I'd actually be sorta against prismatic chaos buffs to reconcile dps. Its already a really powerful spell and while it would be one of the easiest single spells to change to increase dps, besides like peace of mind or something, I also wouldn't want dps outputs to be more reliant on the use of prismatic chaos, and less reliant on the use of the rest of illy spells and spell orders if that makes sense... plus prismatic chaos is sorta harder to incorporate into pvp combat and doesn't help as much there.

I am so sad. I kept waiting, thinking surely SoE will see that they have broken illusionists and they will fix them. Clearly not. The class designer has made it clear we are buff bots. Buffs people don't even need/want once they are geared out. I got out parsed by a warden in an instance today.
I'm done. Another ruined class by SoE. I used to enjoy it when it took actual skill to play an illy well and really get him to shine. Why are they compelled to churn classes?
Another toon goes into retirement. Best of luck to the rest of you illies.

I noted they are addressing guardians. Even though we have been promised better communication, when was the last time you have seen a dev post to the illy forums? The only thing that keeps me around is the wonderful players and people in my guild. Take that one aspect away and I would have been done with this game long ago.
Aion has great communication with their players, and steadily make progress on class balance. Rift looks promising. I will be sure to choose my next mmo based on game mechanics and player communication since its a source of animosity here in EQ2.

Tarted up the first page a bit, fwiw.
Think most suggestions are in there, I'm concious I don't want it to be totally TL;DR. They need little excuse to ignore us.

Anduri wrote:

Its quite lovely now!
The thread is still worth a read if the dev's ever did as it had other interesting suggestions such as better red adorn's changes to spells (like Prismatic Chaos triggering off of spell or melee), etc.

Chock wrote:

I personally would prefer to see prismatic trigger off the mob instead of the player like the coercer's hostage i believe it is... nothing like the fact they can cast at the very last second of the fight and knock of all 8 triggers they get with red adorns at once.

desinence wrote:

You know, I didn't even think of that. Brilliant idea. No more macro'ing prismatic on scouts that find themselves dead at the feet of HM mobs, or ninja afk on trash. The triggers would be used by anyone in the raid. That would make for a very lovely upgrade for Prismatic.

Updated again.

Hey guys, long time no see! We got some good feedback at Fan Faire which I wanted to share.

I agree that Time Warp ended up being more annoying than it is fun or rewarding. Unfortunately, it was one of those things that looked okay on paper but didn't work in practice. We have it changed internally so that there is no longer an immunity timer associated with the spell, and it now grants the Illusionist the buff as well as the target. This should be coming to the test servers with (or before) GU58. If you want, you can just macro the spell to a group member and spam it as a self-buff, but I envision some players being more tactical with it. You can even spam it on yourself, but you don't get double benefit - unless, of course, you cast it on your pet. We also changed the icon so that the warning icon looks different than the actual buff, and the buff now looks like the Tsunami (Monk ability) icon, so that it shouldn't be shared with any other mage abilities.

Some of your other issues, such as buffs providing no benefit due to being capped, will be addressed with the upcoming expansion. There are some other changes that we hope to make before the expansion, but I can't promise anything yet.

Any further contructive feedback would be appreciated.

It has been 0 days since a red named posted on the Illy forums.

O.O omg a red name post on the illy boards? I almost fell out of my chair!

I think Chock rolled over in her grave.

Thanks for the reply Xelgad, I think just knowing the fact this stuff is being looked at will improve Illusionists morale a lot - its currently at rock bottom.
The Time Warp change sounds great.
I understand that some things will have to wait, however if I was to suggest some relatively quick and hopefully easy fixes that would have a decent bang for their buck, it would be:
a) Increase our base crit bonus from 1.3. You must have enough data available now to see the point we are making about our dps being in the gutter. I only suggest this as it would seem to be a relatively simple "fix" that won't have any unforeseen effects - however any changes that will make it possible for us to make a meaningful contribution to damage would be welcome.
b) Add a flurry component to Illusory Arm. It is one of our signature buffs and it sucks to have scouts tell you its worthless. Also, some other small bonus such as potency to Arms of Imagination would benefit it greatly as it just does nothing on single target fights (which are the majority).
c) I'm guessing making single target buffs persist through death is tricky to implement easily otherwise it would have likely been done when group buffs were changed. If that needs to wait for the expansion could making the pet immune to indirect AoE's be looked at. It would be a considerable help in reducing the amount of recasting needed and would also add a fraction to our dps issue (although not much, the pet doesn't do a whole lot).