The Good, the Bad and the Other Stuff I had really hoped someone else would have come here and thrown up the information. I did not want to be the one to put the information out there. It's not great. However, I think that the best option we have is to get as many Illusionists involved as possible, as quickly as possible, in the hopes of making some changes happen. Wow. Where to begin? 1. Mythical Nerf - It's pretty huge. Soothing Mind has been reduced to only one trigger instead of three. It's just as painful as it sounds. We need a pretty big outcry to have any hopes of a re-evaluation on this one. We aren't the only ones feeling the pain, as I'll explain in further detail below. 2. Crit Bonus - With Sentinel's Fate, one of the "mechanisms" being used for class balance is the inate crit bonus. Currently on Live, this bonus is 1.3. On Beta, right now, all Mages, except for Enchanters, have an inate spell crit bonus of 1.5. Our crit bonus remains at 1.3. Call it a nerf by ommission, an indirect nerf, whatever you like. Inately, all Mages are 20% more potent than we are. 3. Power Regen - Has been hit pretty hard, especially items. Healers (and everyone else really) are going to be struggling with power in Sentinel's Fate and looking to us for answers we don't have. Our tools remain largely the same as they are now as far as spells and abilities go, and obviously our Mythical took a nose dive. It's currently looking pretty grim, no one is really sure where our power is going to come from. 4. Crowd Control - I sincerely hope that no one expected this to get fixed. Same old same old here. All the places you would really want this to work, it doesn't. All the places you don't need it to work, it works. There are some new terms you'll see thrown around: 1. Potency - I'm sure you all know how the Bloodthirsty Choker works; 10% increase to spell damage. In Sentinel's Fate, this item will have a blue stat that reads 10 Potency. Same thing as 10% base damage increase. 2. Ability Modifier - We currently call this +Spell damage or BOE. It's now called Ability Modifier. I don't make these things up. There are a few "decent" things, but none of them really answer the problems we're going to see. Still . . . 1. Time Warp - This is an Illusionist only ability. It grants a single ally increased spell double attack, DoT ticks, Regen ticks and Reactive ticks . . . for five seconds . . . on a sixty second recast, with the caveat that the same person cannot recieve it twice in a row. 10 seconds and you might have something, 15 and you can get excited. 2. Channeled Focus - This is an Enchanter only ability. It grants your group 100% reduction to power costs for 30 seconds . . . once every 10 minutes. I know. I don't code the abilities. 3. Chronomagic - Adds up to 5% spell double attack to Time Compression. Yay? I should mention here that Bards can now cast UT / BC on themselves, yet for some reason we cannot cast TC on ourselves, even when solo'ing. I shouldn't be surprised I suppose . . .
Nice writeup of how things look in SF. Sadly its all correct. Also, we cannot use our T9 Pet without the penalty of 3 concentration slots until we do the Quest to turn our myth into a buff. So that means we will be using our T8 Pet for a bit longer. For the Illy's who haven't gotten their myth yet, but have their fabled. You can do the quest at 90 to get the myth buffs as well.
*sigh* I would have taken the hit on dps without complaint if they finally made us actually useful for CC. Sony hasn't gotten chanters right since eq1. It's a real shame =(
Bandit has the right idea. All enchanters need to get on SOE's case for there lack of effort and knowledge. In my opinion at the start of beta we had hope and at the end of beta we don't. The SF illy killer list: 1) Not putting PC triggers/crit bonus/abilty mod component on Perpetuality. 2) Time Warp is extremly poorly written but a neat concept. The 5 second duration and a bizzare gap of when casted and when it hits. The recast was much lower but now at 1 minute. So you get 2 targets and rotate. :< To fix this spell: 5 secs - 30 second recast 10 secs - 45 second recast 20 secs - 1 minute recast 3) Mythical Nerf the Dev's think it's overpowered and just proves the point of how clueless they are getting when it comes to the illy. The down to 1 proc for power isn't even close to correct. The mythical power proc was criting in beta, but I will assume the Dev's will take that away come expansion. 4) Crowd Control Why not? 5) Crit Bonus - With enchanters staying at 1.3 when the other mages go up to 1.5 it's simply the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Again it comes to lack of respect or knowledge of our EQ2 dev team. It puts illy's now with 9 temp buffs verus 11 spells that do Health damage. The amount of temp buffs verus health damaging spells is a NERF we don't need any more of that help. Things that I still have doubts on. Time Compression - should we be able to cast it upon ourselves? Of course we should. It's getting to be more rules and restrictions that make the game no fun to play. Channeled Focus - The way this is written if you have 4 enchanters in a raid force you can totally work over any name for 2 minutes. But the recast of 10 mins is high but if the buff works right it maybe kindof cool.
On my first impression from this info, I am not impressed. Looks like I'll be shelving my illy much to the dismay of my guildies, as buff bottage is just plain dull and illy dps has been nerfed repeatedly in the last two years and I can't be bothered to go through another round of it .Shelve the illy wait a year for some recognition of how dumb this all is and some fixes come, reactivate illy. Sound about right?
There is a lot of ability reuse stuff in SF, so you can pretty much consider everything close to 1/2 recast when it comes to equip. Despite that fact I really doubt how illy will be able to replenish power in some tough fights. I see myself sitting to a coercer.
I ran a myth coercer for a long time, and now have a myth illy and always had a little twinge of wanting to go back to coercer. But now it looks like it may be the best thing for my raid force. Just the one coercer spell Channel will make all the difference for the middle of the named fight when everyone is OOP, and the groupwide mana flow that can go to any raid group. Other than that what do we have as illy's? I've always spammed the other mana regen taps/spells on hard fights and honestly between the coercer and Illy have never really seen very much power out of them, certainly not enough to handle power management by themself. But that's what Illy's will be relying on. I just don't get SOE's complete LACK of understanding and lack of CC for us. It's like they sat in a conference room and said "Hey, the games not empty enough, let's drive away enchanters and see how empty we can make the game". Going for some kind of reverse points or something.
Can someone pls explain to me wth illy's are talking about when not being able to keep power? Unless it's a healer not attacking which still can easily be cured with mana flow I can keep my grp/raid grp at full power all the time. Savante and drain mana is all I do and if i remember i'll throw on mana cloak. I usually have to power feed the coercers grps healers and just keep my grp at full. Doesn't sound like the power nerf will be good, but really a decent to even semi crappy illy should be able to keep their grp at full these days. The power nerf doesn't come down to just us either it's happining with all the classes with good power regen. I think with this SoE is trying to actually make us work to keep power to our grp up rather then just click savante at beginning and when it's up and mana tap ever time it's up. It's
Quaill wrote: the main reason is that since RoK all is about dps. before that you could do mediocre dps and heal through as long as you didnt run out of power. now everything designs around dps. even in heroic instances you have to kill mobs within a time limit. Also in Raid instances you get penalties if it takes too long or even worse, additionally you get a fail condition if anyone drops below 50% mana. Also du to this development people feel they achieve something if they deliver good dps. That is something showing their value. placing a buff on a few groupmembers at raidstart isnt much of an accomplishment. The requirements to kill a mob is still the same. dps. Nerfing most usesful manaproc items AND at the same time nerfing Illusinist abilities to keep up with that just sucks. Even more, it is neither fun nor benefiting to the raid to play "mana-healer". If mana gets a requirement, betray to coercer and you have a 100%full-in-a-second spell - while doing still more dps after the nerf/expansion. Nerfing has always been the worst way of progression. No player ever likes it, even if it may sometimes be necessary due to abysmal errors in previous design. What players detest even more is getting hit over and over and over again. If every change in the game means you lose something directly or in comparison to others it hurts people. They lose fun in playing their toon. They overreact with everything that hits them again. If devs do it wrong and in a wrong way they shouldnt blame people to react like any normal human being.
Quaill wrote: Are you describing your illy in beta? Because they haven't changed anything on the live servers yet.
Well I was asking about in live servers, I always find people saying they have a problem with keeping power to their group members but to me it comes really easy? maybe i pay attention and they don't i'm not really sure. As for what Ebarel was saying I agree with and am fully behind not nerfing us. I have been working almost non-stop to up my dps wheter through AA lines or casting orders etc, and am not really excited about having to spend extra time power feeding members and lowering my dps even more. Not having played beta I am really hoping that it doesn't effect us too much but I'll have to wait and see. Also anyone know a worldwide channel or site to chat with other illy's, not a fan of going to eq2 flames because it's just a bunch of morons bashing people who are trying to better their toons.
Quaill wrote: There has been no changes on live, it's all still on beta. So you won't notice a difference. Yes on live currently Illy's should have no problem keeping a group topped off with power, except for the occasional templar who doesn't melee/spell at all. But that's all going to change big time when it hits live, and you can expect to not keep the group topped up. Part of the responsibility is the groups to have power proc items (which were all nerfed also btw), but it's been 18 months of the group relying on the chanters so we'll see how the general population handles it. As for DPS, get ready for a rude awakening. Some estimates have us at 1/3 of the dps of T1 dps, although once again it's still beta. Even bards are parsing much higher than us from the reports I've seen. And of course there is no CC to be seen anywhere, especially not on raids. We are still gimped wizards with what used to be good utility, but now is gimped utility, and very good CC that collect dust in the bank.
Aanadorn68 wrote: I doubt the dps nerf was that bad, people tend to completely exagerrate things when they're upset about nerfs. I'm also not seeing how illu utility is gimped now. Reduced, sure, but they still retain several powerful buffs, which also fall under the utility category.
Moransis@Nektulos wrote: It's what I'm seeing and parsing on beta, and what I'm reading other chanters who are posting their parses as well. I have a dirge and I'm surprised at how high his parses have been, they definitely got some loving. Of course it's all subject to change, it is beta.
The folks in beta have had some time for the changes to sink in... our anger has now shifted to "how to fix it"... Can you folks see the thread in Beta forums entitled: Why Illies aren't getting love Its a good post and should be moved to the Illy boards IMO. It puts in perspective a lot of what the dev's maybe are thinking.... Here was the first post anyway by Vexrm: So, I took a step back and started to look at why we aren't getting fixed or made fun to play. I'm not sure how accurate some of this is, but it makes sense to me and I'm not sure how to get past most of this. 1) We are wanted in raids and groups. People demand chanters. This, incorrectly, leads folks to assume we are over powered or the best class in the game or even fun. 2) Following in the footsteps of 1, if we got a power boost (in the eyes of the community) the rest of the community would become extremely angry. There are classes out there that are worse off than we are and other classes who rarely if ever get raid invites. Giving power to classes that obviously need a boost won’t cause global outrage, but boosting a class that is almost always included in groups and raids? That will. 3) There doesn't seem to be a clear vision about what role the class should take. As there isn't a clear vision and 1 and 2 stand true, there isn't a need for the devs to offer a clear vision. 4) Our community is split. I've seen posts complaining about not enough DPS, not enough power regen, not enough crowd control, not enough buffs, too many buffs, the pet is too weak, we shouldn't have a pet, etc. This comes from 3. We, as a community, don't know what our vision is or what the devs vision is. Any fix is going to have some illies really angry because it isn't the vision they had in mind. 5) Our spells are hard to balance. Crowd Control is hard to balance. Buffs are hard to balance. If we had as many Power Regeners as we had Healers Power Regen would be "easy" to balance. Since we don't, so Power Regen is hard to balance. We aren't a pet class so our pet is hard to balance. We aren't supposed to be the mage dps class so our damage is hard to balance... So the question is how do we get past these issues and any others that I don't see? Getting a clear vision of what it is the class is about would be a great place to start. For example, I know I'm all about the power regen, but I know there are others out there that aren't. So what are we supposed to be?
Quaill wrote: I presume you play with your mythical off? If not, try doing what you say without it. By the math, it's 2x the total of all your other manafeed abilities combined. Pull a raid on switchmaster with your myth in the bag, then come back and talk about it.
i was hoping that illusionists would have gotten some love since its not easy too solo and illusionists are always needing help too get quests done and such if you solo play. Coercers on the other hand have the best of both worlds can solo play and do the illusionist work when in group. To many professions have a mix match spell set and most spells that a illusionists have are pretty unless in raids in my opion. illusionists can dps that well always at the bottom of the parse list and they don't do crowd control anymore really and if its need a coercer does it. And too hear that SOE is checking things off on the illusionists list is depressing compared too the shadown knight which got some love.
