I'd like to point out a discrepancy in the final ability nukes for sorcerors in the TSO aa lines. The wizard ability hailstorm has a recast of 30 seconds, compared to our plaguebringer at 50 seconds. Why is this? Traditionally ae attacks have longer cast times and longer recasts than single target attacks due to higher dmg potential. So why does the wizard ae ability have the same cast time and a MUCH shorter recast than our equivalent? The dmg from plaguebringer is fine, but the recast should be shortened to match the wizards final, I dont see any reason for this bias.
I Have also been concerned by the differences between Plaguebringer and Hail Storm. Prompted by this thread, I decided it would be interesting to check the spell efficiency on these two spells. By looking at ACT on a nightly basis, it was easy to see that Hail Storm was a more efficient spell, but it was difficult to find a way to do the math for it as gear and AAs etc quickly shift the efficiency of a spell. I made two toons on Test copy. One erudite wizard and One erudite warlock. I buffed both to lvl 80. They were both given matching gear with the exception of the belts being slighly different, so i made a second wizard, buffed it and put the belt in the shard bank to give to the warlock so they would have matching gear. I equipped the gear and did nothing with the AAs on either toon. Examining Hail Storm and Plaguebringer I used this equation, one I have seen time and time again on many forums to calculate spell efficiency: Displayed Damage / (Cast Time + Recast) = Efficiency*. Here is what I found. Taking the top end of each spell: Hail Storm is on a 30 second base recast, 2 second cast time. Plaguebringer is on a 50 second base recast, 2 second cast time. Hailstorm does an accumulative dmg of 12811 damage on a single target, more if you have multiple mobs being hit at the end, but i wont clutter my post with that, i think my point will be made quite clear sticking to the single target efficiency. Plaguebringer does 9649 dmg wearing the same gear. SINGLE TARGET: Doing the math, Hail Storm gets an efficiency of: 448.72 [12811/(1.75+26.8 ) ] Plaguebringer gets an efficency of: 208.17 [9649/(1.75+44.6)] That means that Hail Storm is over DOUBLE the efficency of plaguebringer, and this gap would grow with better gear and more AAs. Hail Storm also recieves a tremendous boots to efficiency if more than one mob are part of the encounter, or are in AoE radius. This is extremely concerning to me and needs to be addressed. *The equation came from a wizard forum, please correct me if efficency equations work differently for DoTs, however i do not believe that they do. Edit: got rid of the silly smiley face that shouldnt have been there
Even if the efficiency equation isn't 100%, the simple dps calculation there should be more than enough. Same cast times + more damage on just single target (not even including AE) for wizzy version + lower recast = MESSED UP MECHANICS. If I remember correctly, this was brought up on the beta boards for TSO, but most locks were so happy to get plaguebringer upped to it's current usefulness that there wasn't enough of an outcry to get the wizard and warlock ones balanced against each other. This should definitely be fixed. Thanks for bringing it up. I had completely forgotten about this one.
Damage is fine imo... even if ours is weaker than the wizard counterpart. Just fix the recast on it and it'll be fine. It's fine already... but yea if we want to bring up the comparison of the two, yes wizards is stronger. So fix if you must.
yeah I agree the damage is fine. the main discrepancy and the reason for the difference in efficiency is the huge recast advantage of hailstorm.
Korrupt@Najena wrote: efficiency is based on cast+recovery recast is a factor that goes into overall dps but yes... that is the main problem for the dps output of the 2 spells.
I agree reduce the recast time of Plaguebringer to bring it in line with the Wizards TSO Endline ability. Lare
Still wanting a developer to respond to this. I posted about this on beta forums last year and only got met with a bunch of wizards defending their better spell. Id really like to understand why the wizard TSO endline is not only more powerful in terms of damage output, but also on a lesser recast.
isis23 wrote: I agree. I just don't understand how the devs could have not done the very simple math here to ensure the spells were balanced, but I can understand missing some balance stuff when an expansion is released. However, I'm far more confused as to how they can continue to ignore the issue for this long when it was thoroughly explained during beta and again since then.
Hellswrath@Blackburrow wrote: I'm not going to try to say that everything is perfect with warlocks. It certainly isn't. That said, I'm pretty happy with the class overall right now. I like plaguebringer. ALOT. Would I be happy as a clam about shortening the recast, well sure. I guess, what I'm trying to say is that the endline abilities don't necessarily have to be perfectly balanced as long as the classes overall have reasonable balance. Btw, I tend to think that poison mastery does more for us than heat mastery does for wizards based upon the spells that we each have. I also LOVE the shortened duration on our DoTs that it brings. Edit: typo
If plaguebringer is noxious then it is affected by your debuff which is Group encounter . Your damage increases with that . the wizards is neither heat nor cold and the resist on this spell is ridiculous . causing many to just not use it at all . In the wizards community big complaints and aurguments for both sides as to if this one should be on the toolbar at all it is so ineffective . I do use it but only when I am not really trying to dps my best and with a group with a good tank since our spell draws out of encounter mobs as adds wherever the mob is located . Your recast is longer prob because you can actually land your spell more than 1 out of 6 times cast and increase its damage with your own debuffs , I believe the wizards version is magic based or something stupid like that .
I think when you look at the classes overall, spell for spell when you compare them(fission vs rift, ice comet vs apoc, ball of lava vs distortion, hail storm vs plaguebringer, RoD vs acid storm, wizard debuff with dmg vs warlock debuff without, etc etc), wizards almost every single time get the spell with more efficiency and dmg potential. Compound this with wizards getting more use from base dmg potential, the bias of single target debuffs vs group, and mobs now clearing themselves of dots, you'll see why warlocks are getting really tired of being the "other" sorceror that soe feeds the scraps to. Yes warlocks are capable of putting up decent numbers, but we can't match a wiz except fights that are specifically tailored to us(numerous mobs all having many hps). And even that edge is being eroded away bit by bit. Warlocks as a class have a history of being silent, either due to there being very few knowledgeable warlocks, or simply not wanting to appear whiney. Wizards on the other hand have been very vocal about things that they view as broken, things they would like to see, and they have devs playing their class. This is the cause of the constant slant towards the wizard. I'd like warlocks to become just as vocal and just as knwledgeable about the game in general and class comparisons so we can attempt to influence the direction of our class as well. Someday maybe a dev with some pull in class design will attempt to play our class and learn first hand, until then we'll just have to feed them the info(side by side facts, not just opinion) and let them choose to ignore it or not.
Igdaliah wrote: I 100% disagree with this. Plaguebringer is jokingly nicknamed "resistbringer" among warlocks on forums. Im sure ours has the same annoying resist rate yours does. On ACT in raids hailstorm offers more than twice the DPS (upwards of 3x) that plaguebringer does, sometimes almost as much as absolution on encounters. I will check again tonight on ACT, but in a raid set up i feel confident saying that they both have similar resist rates. Edit: also note that Hail storm specifically reads "cold damage" so your debuffs work fine on it.
The reason these spells are resisted so often is probably because despite the high resistability modifier they have no mastery attatched. Most of our damaging spells go off of disruption as their mastery which helps a little but these and most AA based abilities have no mastery assigned to them.
having watched in two raids now-- we have 2 warlocks, 1 wizard. Raid one: both warlocks, oddly, had the exact same hit rate on plaguebringer -- 97.14% Wizard had a hit rate on Hailstorm of 98.84% Raid two: One warlock had a hit rate of 97.3% the other had a hit rate of 97.74% Wizard had a hit rate of 98.44% Fairly similar numbers in terms of hit rate. However, the biggest diffference lies in the DPS it offers. Plaguebringer averaged about 500 DPS, whereas hailstorm averaged 900 DPS between the two raids.
