Hey folks, I notice a lot of activity in some of the other class forums I participate in regarding a more updated "Class Issues" list. Developers are definitely "looking". I'd like to see us get together a list of 10 or so issues that are *important* to the class. Here are a few of mine that I'd like to see addressed, I'm sure we can come up with others. I'm hoping we can get a cross section of issues here, not only the "Our VP armor sucks" but the problems our class has while leveling, grouping, soloing, etc. 1. No current Tier Haste spell! This is a huge issue for me, and most Illusionists I know. The mobs I need to kill to see this spell are DoF era! I've gotta say that the "reasons" I've heard for this are increasingly weak. Troubadors can Haste their entire group for one concentration slot, and that Haste is 47. Troubadors got an upgrade to their Haste in this Tier. Most Illusionists are stuck with Adept 3, meaning we can Haste one person for 59 for the same concentration. I would love to see the spell re-tiered so that we have one in each tier. Even if it means that T8 is 59 Haste at Adept 3, the chance to actually see that Master would be nice. I still think this buff should be group from the get go, there really isn't that much difference between it and the Troubador buff. Give the Mythical a 20% Double Attack bonus, and just make the spell group wide for everyone. 2. The limitations on Mana Tap greatly reduce it's usefulness. The range on Mana Tap is extremely short, meaning that often a group member will "miss" getting it. The update that made power heals show up in combat bubble text made this extremely obvious. What happened to changing power drains to damage? Mana Tap is in fact a power drain, but does no damage. 3. I'd like to see Illusionists get Charm. I honestly don't think it's an unreasonable request. Coercers now have a three concentration pet very similar to our Personae. Where we cannot "choose" the class of our Personae, ours does zone with us. I'd like to have a three concentration Charm, and an AA to make it hold better. Edit: To clarify - I don't want to give up our Personae, I want Charm as an additional option. Coercers have two pet options, we have one currently, and a much less flexible one. 4. Can we please do something with Illusory Allies? As it stands, it's a crappy dumbfire pet or an equally crappy mem wipe. Let's pick one and make it actually good. If it's a Mem Wipe, fine, make it a Mem Wipe and leave off with the pets. A 15 second delay on mem wipe is horrible. If it's a dumb fire pet let's skip the mem wipe portion and make it a decent option for DPS. Alternatively, let's make it a hate bleed. For the duration of the spell, all hate generated by the group goes to the Illusions, losing the Mem Wipe on termination. Just a way to bleed off a little extra hate. In any event, we need to do something with this spell. 5. Let's do something with Phase, Empathic Soothing and Sever Hate. Yes, this will help Coercers too. None of those spells should work on Fighters. That's all. Just make them not work on Fighters. They are cool ideas, but way too dangerous as they currently exist. Inevitably, the tank will Rescue just before you crack Phase or Sever Hate . . . and now you've really put yourself in a bad spot. 6. Please take a look at our Stun. Against an Epic target, we can't get the DD portion in most situations since the DD is applied at the end of the duration instead of at the beginning. (Epics are usually immune to Stun, either on their own or because someone else stunned it earlier and triggered a timed immunity) This makes no sense to me. The power drain was applied at the beginning of the duration, let's apply the DD at the beginning and make sure the DD portion works on Epics who may be Stun immune. I'll try to keep the post updated as we get other ideas.
Banditman wrote: /meekly peeks her head in. Just to clarify for ya'll, Possess Essence allows us to copy a mob. Yes it is 3 conc and no it cannot zone, however you have to stand within 20m of said mob during a rather long cast time in order for it to work. If the mob walks away.. .fail. If you're too far away, it doesn't tell you until after the cast timer completes. Due to the short range and long cast time you will frequently get agro in the process. The main complaint on this also is that in a raid/group situation you often can't get close enough to something without gaining agro to possess a mob... so it's often considered a solo tool. Also the possessed pets seem to be weaker, but have more HP than charmed ones. (Tanks last a bit longer, but mages hit softer.) Charm has a longer range, the charmable mobs are much more restricted, more powerful (generally) and break charm randomly. Also, the only things that makes charm "stick" better is subjugation... so WIS line (that both chanters have) and for us 5 AAs in the coercer tree which improve resistability of Charm by a total max of 15%. Not here to debate whether you should or shouldn't get it... just tossing some info your way. Happy Hunting!
PE can also be cast during combat, so you can mez the mob, possess it then kill it. Or, you can wait until your tank pulls something and possess it during the fight. There are trade offs with PE versus Personae, but I think that in the end they are fairly equivalent spells. The point I was trying to make is that an Illusionist has NOTHING like Charm, and Charm is a much more powerful ability. It's certainly a very situational ability, just as it is for a Coercer. Mainly something we'd use while solo'ing.
I have stopped using Phase pretty much altogether. Way too many times has Phase teleported the creature ON TOP OF ME instead of the 31-38 meters away. Forget about wiping hate. They are usually pissed as heck after botched teleportation (can you blame them?). I just dont use it unless I feel like playing the lotto with my xp debt. Illusory Allies has been also very inconsistent functioning-wise. I have used it and I swear the mem wipe works only 50% of the time. I would also like the ability to cast an illusion on my pet only. Even after all this time I find it rather disturbing to have a copy of me following me around. Shrink Pet has been wonderful, but I would like to take it a step further.
Banditman wrote: Thats because Manatap isnt the the spell that matches with Third Eye. That would be the Coercer's gorging thought line that has the same mana tap ability and int debuff. Third eye lines up with the Illusionist extra mez. They get extra mana spell, we get the extra mez. Sounds balanced to me.
Regardless of what you compare to, Mana Tap compares unfavorably for reasons I listed. We could easily go into the whole "mobs don't use power" issue, which further exacerbates the shortcomings of Mana Tap. Let's have a spell with some usefulness instead of another chain filler to use when all the other spells are recycling.
I agree with all bu the charm part of the list. i realy think my personae is very usefull, and wouldent change it for a charm... no way! its one of the things that does illus special, and the personaes CC abilitys is very good. if we should get a charm, make it an option if we should charm or use our personae (sicne its 3 cons we cant use both at the same time) but for love of god, cookies, whatever, dont remove the personae! (and TBH im doing very fine without a chamr and wouldent mind leting coercers being the only class who has that ability, its very much thier "thing" to charm.. they are coercers after all) Now... what i thought about myself that annoys me/ sucks with being illu: 1. Our classhat... i mena OH MY GOD! its so terrible that wearing it should ahve the effect omaking anyone seeing it blind! geezes! please! 2. Illusory group: does this even work? (not on my hotbar even becurse its useless nowdays) 3. The illu epic (deserves its own post realy...) 3.1: The look of it... its horreble! 3.2: its a dam wand! whats so wrong with giving us a dagger... locks got one... and i been working so hard to avoid using those ugly looking pice of junk wands untill lvl 80 (skiping somewhat better gear to not use that insult towards mages) then to be kinda forced to at lvl 80, made me sad 3.3 the mythical addition to rapidity, change it to add a proc to spells casted while flash of briliance is active instead! or realy.. anyhting usefull! Realy.. that been the top 3 things that been bugging me alot. hope some of them gets changed atleast
I think a thread like this would stand much stronger if it wasn't, yet again, a comparison with coercers. Personally, I don't think there is much wrong with illusionists these days. We do good DPS and have a lot of utility, what more is there to ask for, really? From a raiding perspective, anyway The 2 spells that need to be looked at are illusory allies, as pointed out above, and spell shield. Both were awesome once upon a time, and therefore nerfed into oblivion. Would be good to have something useful for what was supposed to be "special" ancient teaching spells.
Spellshield realy was odd when ROK came, felt pointless, but in RE2 it rocks! well.. it got its former glory back atleast and yea, illus are a very nice class, with most things balanced, not much to bother about tho... exept that dam epic... and the hat and *shuts up*
1 and 6 are good requests. The others are kind of meh. Corecers charm, illusionists have illusions. That's fairly fundamental to the two classes. I don't think illusionists should charm anything. I also like the way phase and sever hate work. The fact that it takes some skill and there's some risk involved in using them seems natural to me; with enough skill, these problems aren't usually significant.
1. Not an Issue. 2. Effect Radius needs to be changed. Power Drain, probably should be as well. 3. No, period. 4. Definitely needs to be changed to something else. 5. Disagree. They are fine the way they are. Sometimes you don't want a certain tank tanking a mob, but you don't want to memwipe the mob. 6. You're half right, half wrong here. It's not because of the Stun Immunity, it's because of something else that is causing it to break. You can land the Stun just fine on Stun Immune mobs, and the timer will start going off for the damage, but most of the time the damage just doesn't go off for some reason. Spellshield needs to be made into a 3-trigger magical only trigger stoneskin with just a direct power cost and a recast that starts right away and increase the recast to 2 minutes, while dropping duration to 30s. Also, to people saying our Epic needs to be changed? I disagree. Our epic suits our class better. We now buff melee a bit better, which is what we needed considering our buffs.
Only thing I would change in the class is take away the memwipe on illusory allies, make the stun damage hit up front like a proc, and I want a target illusion that makes me look like whatever I have targeted (kind of like puppetmaster, only making me look like that)... the last one is just a personal wish. I like the upgraded spellshield idea. As far as charm..... other than maybe making the AA one last longer for those who like that kind of thing, I don't see it.... I remember how nuts coercers got when they added status items with charm effects, and honestly, they had every right to be.
1. A general game issue, not class specific. 2. Would love the radius to be increased. 3. Awful idea, it's pretty much what makes a Coercer a Coercer. I'd sympathise if you were suggesting merging the sub-classes back into Enchanter though (along with all the others). Not that it would ever happen. 4. Definitely. Spell is still App IV as I can't find a use for it. 5. Quite like this idea. I see where Pinski is coming from but I've never experienced that need and presumably a Coercer could deal with that from their group. 6. I have no clue what is broken about this but the damage portion needs fixing. Spellshield - remove the level restriction on it? Mythical - I like our mythical just the way it is.
I have to say I don't think I'd want a charm... I like the way the personae is set up and the fact that my pet isn't going to randomly break and turn on me in the middle of a crappy fight. I use my personae alot (when soloing of course) and use the conc slots for other things when needed. As far as the epic goes... I don't use the dang thing. I have the Dagger of Deadly seduction and its what I chose to use. I don't need one more mana regen spell. When I get mythical (10 years from now at the rate I'm going...) I'll use it and enjoy the fact that haste is FINALLY a group wide buff. But for now. Its just a bag slot filller for me and will stay that way unless some changes are made to it. But thats just my 2 cents Take 'em or leave 'em.
From a Coercer that uses both spells and has also played an Illu, let me explain. Illus: You have Personae. This can be used while solo or in raid and makes a copy of yourself and from what I understand, has the level of spells equivilant to the level of the Personae spell that was cast. It is good ranged DPS and can be cast again if killed by and AE. You also have AA that effects this spell. Also this is a "pet" class spell which will not brake or get debuffed. (From what I understand.) Coercer: We have 2 "Personae"s. Charm and PE. Charm: more powerful yes, but VERY limited. It can not be used on named, event mobs, epic mobs and quest related mobs. AKA, you can charm ^^^ Heroic and lower trash mobs, that is it, and even some of those are now "locked" from charm because they were flagged as "over powered". Being a good solo Coercer I can tell you, charm is used to pull and to take a hit or two between stuns. By no means are they a primary sorce of DPS while solo-ing. Also, charm has a resistance check every 15 to 45 sec (depending on the charm and charm level), so while an enemy is charmed there is a chance it could turn on you. Then you have your pet AND what ever it was fighting to deal with. PE: A PE-ed mob will have 10 ~ 33% more HP than if that mob was charmed and will output 1/3 (on average) the MELEE damage of a "charmed" version of this mob, spell damage is reduced to an almost laughable state. Thus this spell is much weaker than charm, however, is useable on Epics (still not named or some event mobs). Also PE is a "copy" of a mob so we don't have to worry about this breaking. This spell has a 13 ~ 20m raidious (which is bugged currently, it's supposed to be 20m static.) and on raids can only be cast in combate. We do not, however have AA to improve casting time on this spell, thus keeping it around a 7 ~ 10sec cast time depending on Casting haste mod. Biggest difference Personae and PE have is 1) When spell is able to be cast and 2) Type of damage. Personaes can fight ranged and avoid AEs and still push out some decent damage, in order for a PE mob to even be worth casting it has to melee making it a lot vonerable to AEs, reposites and un-useable on a small few named battles.
As an Illusionist, I don't want charm. Its still a lot stronger than the personae btw, despite XFnarX's comments. But the risk/reward there seems about right. (Except suicide charming - that means coercers can go wherever they want basically) I agree on the hate stuff - Illusory Allies is a joke, and people pretending that phase works if you are 'expert' enough, are just playing russian roulette. No current tier haste - hard to get too upset over that. The level cap was 70 for a long time. Ancient teachings are more annoying, and for every class. SoE should just give up on trying to get people to play that tier, 'cause it ain't working, and make them, or token upgrades for them, drop in T8. One issue I haven't seen - T8 named mobs immunity to mezz. Given how slow it was to solo them in lower tiers I think this is unnecessary. It just means we can't compete with other classes, that CAN solo named.
Anduri wrote: If you don't have a Coercer in their group, what then? TBH, the best change to Phase, would be to change it to work like Sever Hate. Target a Person and whatever target they have has their hate position and threat reduced by a certain amount based on your level and quality of spell(think Rescue except the complete opposite). There is no level restriction on Spellshield. The way it works is, it shows what the vs. an even con is, and as you fight harder mobs the chance lowers. The problem is, mobs don't use those abilities often enough, which makes it garbage.
I think our haste is fine. I agree that our memwipe sucks as is. I don't think we need or deserve a charm. I fully support increasing the radius on Mana Cloak. The stun thing... meh, if you can't get into it's head (mind) to stun it, why should you damage it?
