Ask developers, not me. Though I suspect they have no idea either. Something went wrong somewhere. Truespirit Rift as a pet, as far as I know, and developers have been changing pets several times over the years. My guess is that the pet gives his stats, or buffs to the caster and it does it each time. Something similar happened to a geomancer pet when Ascension classes were introduced, but the other way around. The caster gave his stats to his pet making the last incredible powerful. It was fixed very fast.
Ok, so to correct a bit of misinformation. The issue is with Truespirit Rift and the way it interacts with our epic 2.0 spell Combat Awareness. Prior to the 2.0 if you cast Truespirit Rift and had your character window open so you could watch your stats, you'd see exactly what you see now. It grants a temporary boost to our WDB and increases the min-max damage on our primary and ranged weapons. The duration of Truespirit Rift is 15 seconds and has a 15 second recast. However the actual temp increase to WDB and base primary and range weapon damage is only about 7 seconds before you'll see the stats drop back down to normal. What is currently happening with the epic 2.0 is while Rift works the same, when the 7 second boost drops the WDB returns to it's normal amount, the damage applied to primary and ranged weapons doesn't completely fall off. So to use me for example. Fully geared, solo buffed (no rift running) with the Hogfish Fricasee and Pome Pome food/drink (eating in a solo zone when I have the Grace of Norrath buff to increase my stats) running, my 2h weapon is at 34mil on the low end (can't see the high end due to using default ui and can't widen the character window). My bow is at 29mil low end dmg with over 400 WDB and 6k+ DPS modifier. When I cast Rift for the first 7 seconds my WDB jumps up to just shy of 700, and the 2h goes to around 55mil, bow to about 43mil. Once Rift falls off WDB drops back to exactly where it was but we retain a slight boost to the weapon and bow. My 2h will drop down from 55mil to 41mil. The bow will drop from 43mil down to 34mil. So we will retain a permanent increase to our weapons damage. The amount will vary from person to person based on how high your DPS modifier and WDB are. But basically you can expect to get anywhere between a 4-11mil permanent increase every 15 seconds you can recast Truespirit Rift. So while you could sit in a zone and pre-buff yourself for an hour by casting rift every 15 seconds and get your 2h weapon to over 1 billion on the low end of dmg it's not efficient. Run heroics/challenge modes/raids normally and as intended and you'll kill/clear faster. So you're thinking "Great the longer a fight goes on, the longer I'm in a zone the more dmg I will do because I can keep buffing myself higher and higher". Or, you may be thinking "OMG exploit, nerf Channelers". First this is not an "I win" button that makes you able to solo raid mobs or anything like that. When you die (and you will die) your stats return to normal and you have to start the whole process over again. Second it doesn't carry over when you zone, so everytime you change zones you have to start over. Third no raid or group leader in their right mind is going to zone everyone in to an instance and say "ok, everyone but the Channeler go AFK for an hour while we let them buff". Fourth, Carlos (aka Gninja) has said that while they are aware of the issue they aren't going to fix it. Trying to would cause issues and break so much other stuff. Technically they could fix it if they wanted to, but it would be a major overhaul. They would either need to wipe out the left side of the Channeler Prestige AA tab to remove the ability to spec in to Rift and create a whole new left side tree. Or they have to get rid of our epic 2.0 spell and create a new epic ability. Now someone on the previous page of this thread asked if this is how some raid guilds were getting those early flawless kills. No it's not. It's a combination of 2 other things, though the Channeler if they stayed alive through the whole raid zone helped, it wasn't the deciding factor on getting those flawless kills or byspassing scripts. It was having multiple players with the old version of the red Aniquilacion rune set which in it's previous incarnation added an obscene amount of fire dmg to every spell so players who had that rune set were doing way more dmg than intended. That has been fixed. The Aniquilacion set now instead of adding fire dmg to every spell is simply a proc that can trigger once every 1 - 6 seconds on a spell/CA hit. The most egregious issue is with charmed pets. Classes like Coercers, Wardens, Necros (charm undead) and any other classes that can charm are more powerful than God himself. I don't have any classes than can charm so I don't know if charmed pets get dmg based on the stats of the player that charmed them, or if they're just set to a default amount in the game, but whatever it is 1 charmed pet will do more dps than an entire raid combined, or in heroics/challenge modes more dps than the entire group by a large margin. You can run challenge mode zones right now with no tank, 2-3 charmers, 2 healers, some other dps/util classes and every named mob will melt in 10-20 seconds and can ignore most scripts. As long as you can keep the charmer, charmed pet alive it's a cake walk. If you're still playing this game with the mind set of thinking it's just like every other expac, the same stats still mater, but you're wondering how people of every class are doing incredible amounts of damage but you're not, this is how. Spells, Combat Arts and Ascensions are no longer the end all - be all of dps. Spending hours if not days on a training dummy or running groups and analyzing ACT data to work out a perfect rotation doesn't matter. If you're spending millions upon millions of plat to buy master or grandmaster spells on the broker you're wasting money. Auto-attack damage is now king of the BoL expac. When gearing a toon regardless of class, the only stats you should be concerned with now are crit bonus overcap, wdb overcap and ability mod. If you see a piece of jewelry drop and you're going to pass on it because you're a mage and it has no dps modifier, 50k ability mod, 24 block and 24 mitigation TAKE IT. When you reforge, that 50k ability mod will turn in to about 700 dps mod. You want to use weapons that are affected by auto attack stats and modifiers. That's why everyone including mages who knows what they're doing is using a crossbow now instead of wands. Wands are not affected by auto attack stats. Crossbows are. I'm not sure about the fighter ranged weapons like bandoliers, pouches, throwing stars, throwing axes... But bows and crossbows are definitely affected by auto attack modifiers so use them. Bare minimum stats you should want to shoot for to see massive bumps in your dps are: Casting speed - 200 Reuse speed - 200 Recovery speed - 100 DPS Mod - 6k+, 8k+ even better Haste - 200 since excess no longer adds to flurry AE Auto - 100 Accuracy - 100 Strikethrough - 100 Multi Attack - 1600+ Added benefit if you can get it to 3k but that's hard for most people to hit. Flurry - 140+ WDB - As high as you can get it. Ability Doublecast - As high as you can get it. Crit Bonus - 6 - 7k+ Get a weapon with a Decisive Strike proc for the boost to CB and Potency when it goes off. You can get a weapon with Devastation Strike as well for the AE dmg proc. It parses quite well. Use the 4 second weapon delay modifiers in the Marketplace on your 2h and ranged weapons. This way with your stats, they will have a 1.8 second weapon delay. Yes, the min-max damage numbers will go down on the weapons (rating stays the same), but you will hit faster. Faster hits = more procs = more dps. To get the flurry look for the cloak, neck and waist that have them. Those are the only 3 items that have flurry. For solo zones, you can get the flurry belt out of the bizarre bazaar zone from the first name. The neck comes from the final boss in the Venom of Sssra event zone, and the cloak you can get it from the 4th named (Va'Dyn) in the Maiden's Eye instance. Since everyone should be using a bow/crossbow now for a ranged weapon get yourself some of the good arrows/bolts. Get comfortable changing your autoattack method depending on the fight. Open your character window, click on the tab for options. Scroll down to the bottom and if you're most likely on Automatic or Off, set it to Forced melee or Forced Range/spell. If it's a fight where you can get in and stay within 3-4m of the mob use forced melee as your 2h weapon will do more dps than your ranged. If you need to be at range due to fight mechanics or are a mage and want that sweet 18m range for Unda use forced range/spell so your bow/crossbow is doing it's thing. Spec'd properly auto attack damage should be in the top 5 for your dps. For us Channelers autoattack should be #1 and account for about 80% of our dps. For other classes it may not be #1, but it'll be in the top 5. Finally use snacks and the tinkered gears/powerlinks. Crafted snacks stack with each other. So you can eat 4, 5, 6 different snacks and get the unique benefits that each one offers. Craft those tinkered gears that you can add to armor/weapons that lasts for 8hrs and will add crit bonus and cb overcap. Use those Veilwalker and Voidpiercer potions you get from Overseer reward chests that probably get dumped in the guild depot or your home depot and read the effects on them. Some are quite helpful. Sorry for the long rambling of my post, but I hope it clears up the confusion with Truespirit Rift and helps to illustrate that it's not just the Channelers that are doing good dps right now, but that it's everyone is doing amazing dps. That may or may not have been the devs intent for everyone to jump up as high as they have and for everyone regardless of class to be able to sustain billions upon billions of dps but that's where we are with the constant level, gear and stat creep.
Never said we weren't bugged. Just said that Gninja is aware of the interaction between Truespirit Rift and Combat Awareness, but it's not worth it to them to attempt to fix it because going over the spaghetti code of the game would cause more issues in their attempt to correct it than just leaving it alone when it's not a game breaking issue.
This bug is game breaking since it makes mockery of the current combat system and gear progression. Given equal stats, all classes will do great DPS, Channelers will do insane DPS. The longer they stay in combat the bigger the DPS will get. They will out dps every other class and you can't do anything about it. Also the Channelers doesn't even need great gear, they can do this silly DPS in legendary gear, no runes or even experts spells. Gear just speed up the process. If this is not game breaking, I don't know what is? Its easily exploitable by raid forces and stack Channelers DPS before they pull a mob. Class imbalance like these are not great for the game, specially when they are due to a bug. If the dev wants to fix this or not is up to them, but many mages are already on the verge of quitting, maybe once word gets around about Channelers, I am sure some scouts too will want to quit since whatever they do with the character is pointless.
Hey Bludd, just like Beyonica already said, it's because when you target the mobs and see the permanent buff they have where it says increases resolve by 3520, increases multi attack by 400, increases casting speed by 100.... that's how much the mobs are debuffing you. So to keep yourself at the hard cap you need to increase your stats that much over those numbers.
Oh and thank god, the Channelers have been fixed even though it wasn't put in the patch notes, or in dreamweavers follow up post in the server maintenance thread. Truespirit Rift has had it's duration increased from 15 to 15.8 seconds. Whether that little change was enough to fix it or if they finally figured out the interaction in their spaghetti code, but now when rift falls off it drops the primary-ranged min/max damage back to exactly where it was. So no more pre-buffing for an hour to ramp up damage. We can now go back to Swash and Beastlords being the king of dps, and all the flavor of the month Channelers can go back to playing what they used to. I can finally be a healer again instead of having to dps. HUGE Thank You Gninja.
hm I cant remember seeing any casting speed avoidance buff packages but maybe i am just not remembering right or do raids have different buff packages?
So after the fix to Truespirit Rift, I am still parsing overall DPS with autoattacks. I take it Khal of Dragons post still holds true for all classes?
Of course it does, autoattack is the way to go this expansion, forget about your spells and combat arts damage, they are here just to proc something.
Fixed or not I still parse 2nd or 3rd in heroics. They sold channelers as a T2 dps priest back in the day (We dont bring ANY utility) so I still think dps needs boosted a bit. Im only doing 3-4 billion, we have dps classes over 10 billion in heroics so its still low to where it should be, since once they fix summoners i'll be dead last again. DPS from a channeler should be comparable to a bard/rogue. That was the trade off of only have 1 rez (on a 1.5min cooldown) and no buffs or utility. However, powerfeed is a nice change.
No. Just no. Thats so crazy to even suggest I dont even know what else to say other than no. You obviously have no idea just how strong the intercept concept is and just look at damage meters, for a priest type class... Like what? It was also you that said channelers would suck big time on TLE servers and it turned out they healed 20-30 more than other healers.. Maybe it was better to learn how your class worked at a fundamental level before suggesting changes mate.
Right now Vunder my personal opinion of where Channelers are at is about as good as I could have hoped for. With the tweak to Rift we're no longer doing 50-60% of the entire raids overall DPS. But we still do good DPS. In my raids, I am typically the highest parsing healer for DPS depending on the group I'm in that night and if our Inquisitor is on. If I get stuck solo healing the mage group my DPS goes to crap because I am having to concentrate a lot more on casting Healing Arrow, Vector of Life and making sure the mages are in front of me so they get hit by it and Salubrious Invocation. Plus near constant use of Thir'slaa's Shell to help keep the squishiest alive. If I'm in the main tank group where I don't have to heal as much, or I get lucky enough to be in the God group where I'm receiving Dirge buffs, Inguisitor buffs, Swash resets, Illy reset and brawler Combat Mastery my DPS will put me around 8th-11th on the parse which I think is damn respectable out of 24 people. You mentioned you parse 2nd-3rd in heroics still. Depending on your heroic group makeup that could be good or bad. My typical heroic group usually consists of a Monk, Beastlord, Swash, Assassin, Illy and me solo healing. In that group I parse dead last. Mainly because nothing lives more than 10 seconds. Between Dragonfire, 3 Daggerstorms and Mimic I might get off 1-2 Barrage or Vengeful Arrows. There's no time for me to run rift, construct sacrifice and run through seeking cascade, soulshot, eye shot.... But like you I can still parse 2nd or 3rd (sometimes 1st) in some heroics if I go in with slightly less geared/knowledgeable people than I usually play with. So you're right they sold us as T2 DPS and I think they have now hit that mark damn near dead on.
I didn't suggest it. That is what the class was sold and designed to be at. I used to be top 10 raid parse in ToV. As for TLE. They changed the spells for TLE and the class went into OP mode. I am currently happy with my channeler once again.
@Khal Just want to thank you for some genuinely interesting insight. I would just say, regarding your last post and comments re: heroic group parsing, I think your conclusions are as much a comment on class imbalance than anything else - being grouped with a BL, sins, monks and swash, of course any other classes present will come last lol
