If for example illy was planned to be the next class for an overhaul of it's issues, what would you want changed?? What would people be in favour of to give illy's a boost back in the right direction?? Periodically I'll try and edit this OP with coloured text for suggestions coming from the thread, if I'm not too busy I'm 1 of the only 2 regular shammys in our raidforce, and recruiting to replace our last illy for raiding is so hard I made an illy raid-alt inspite of that, so I only have a part-time newcomers perspective on playing this class, but these are some of my thoughts: Illy's are 12 times worse at helping a raid keep mana, they only help their group keep power up. For mana management to stack up against the whole cross raid group manaflow of a coercer: The same groupwide manaflows? or Illy myth proc raidwide? (possibly too powerful for a proc not active ability) or Manatap and Manacloak made raidwide? (probably not as powerful or as a clutch ability as groupwide manaflow, but a steady trickle raidwide) {3 triggers of manacloak for each raid member, most will be unused of course) or Savant goes raidwide? (giving it good clutch utility when it's up) I think option 3 is best personally, it keeps coercer 12x better manaflow unique but lets illy's help cross-group i.e. raid mana despite the 12x worse manaflow ability. It would give us reason to cast manacloak and manatap far more, which will lower our dps further of course. Far too many Temp Buffs: fold destructive mind into peace of mind, so taking the aa just adds the bonus affect to the pom spell - they're on same recast anyways fold illuminate into flash of brilliance, so getting the illuminate aa just adds the 50% less resistance buff into flash of brilliance - they're on same recast anyways you can't keep adding a new temp buff every expac, eventually what time is left? Buffs, making them more worthwhile: Adding some crit bonus, potency, accuracy, flurry, +all primary stats, or a damage proc in order to remain meaningful as buffs percentage to all melee buffs so they are useful for names not just trash, and make redundant stats less redundant? This includes Arms of Imagination (aoe melee useless on most meaningful non-trash fights), Rapidity, Illusory Arms Making Arms of Imagination and Illusory Arms into 'until cancelled' group buffs that persist thru death - the amount of single target buffing is just crazy on this class. make time compression self also, it's nuts when for an example the warlock has UT and you want TC but can't and have to put it on a melee healer or troub or scouts. Trouby and dirge buffs can go on themselves - whatever old argument that might have used to exist for non-self TC is invalid. Allow TC to go overcap for cast speed, recovery and reuse - restoring it to it's former desireability. Make single target buffs persist after deaths/zones/pet zones would make life a lot less annoying? Combining both the red adorns for synergism into 1 adorn. giving the prism adorn 3 extra triggers like coercers adorn, not 2 as currently. Timewarp... needs a redesign. I raid next to my gf who is number 1 dps in our raid with her mage. even with the rarest opportunity that gives us that most don't have, to perfectly synchronise timewarp by request, lining it up with her best spike abilities - it still adds a pitiful amount of dps (and part of that dps originates from non TW spell double attacks), which is worse considering the amount of hassle it takes. What TWarp adds to any other caster is truly pathetic. I'm not sure that managing timewarp, taking illy time off dps, and encouraging mages to hold back spike abilities incase of TW's they are probably still immune for (but no1 can see because of bad log parsing too many buffs, no maintained icon etc) doesn't lower dps overall frankly. TIMEWARP either needs a) groupwide 10sec duration, 2min base reuse, or b) groupwide 5sec duration, 1min base reuse. channeled focus needs a boost. Doppelganger providing a Xhits stoneskin to make it relevant. Let the doppelganger be cast on the hostile target, and have it absorb the next X (3?) actions of the hostile target. Fix spellshield, make it raidmate targetable, make it a persistant buff, give it a X% chance to stoneskin a non-physical damage. Illy Personal DPS: A blue aoe! All 'on termination' damage AA abilities should be burnt at the stake for starters, convert them to potency boosts, dot duration reductions, and/or on first tick spikes - no more, on termination. Duration for prismatic chaos could be upped to 40secs, just to make it running out on slow pulls less annoying. Prismatic chaos should be castable on either the mob or a player, on a player, all hits trigger it, on a mob any incoming hits from any player trigger it. Timewarping needs to double up adorned extra triggers of prism aswell. Possibly, prismatic chaos could be converted to be triggered by any ability/spell/hit from the group of the person it's casted on (unless there's tech problems to adding this better solution) - so it's still different to coercer but not quite so badly handicapped in comparison. Give the personae reflection better mit and crit mit and hp's (perhaps duplicating it's owners), and a lot more hp. it dies constantly in raids, often it's not even worth casting. Even better, make Personae damage immune.. the personae pet should be unable to take any damage, but also unable to gain any hate - this could be an effect applied to the mythical/enervated, so personae doesn't insta-gib on every aoe/frontal/taillash/add arrival/mob turn/positon change etc etc. UV beam aa's need to up it's potency and crit bonus, effects that are relevant to SF gear, not the effects they have. All aa's for casting speed need to have potency substituted instead. Give Illy's a genuine spike damage ability, something a smart player can usefully combine with timewarp and/or dispatches and so on, e.g. a 5k per tick, 5 times, over 5 seconds dot. Nice suggestion for illusory allies to be a activated storage ability that records what the illy & his groupmates do in heals and damage for X seconds and then a percentage of those heals damage are output by the illy on illusory allies termination. CC - At least a third of our spells are worthless, or actively harmful to group and raid play e.g. memwipes teleports etc. All the aa's for these skills are therefore worthless too. There are a lot of CC opinions, some think it's too broken to fix, others see it as being central to chanter play in an ideal implementation which requires a whole new approach to encounter design, some would like debuffs for those epic immune type spells, others want to dps not be a debuffer etc. whatever way it goes, masses of our spells are redundant and masses of our aa's too, with the strong likelihood that CC will remain broken for at least another 5 expansions whatever the 'ideal world future intentions' might be - it's worth actually giving illys decent changes in other areas to compensate until that probably never day when most group/raid encounters have meaningful CC that is still fun for everyone...
The first thing that needs to be done is defining what the class is any more. Over half our spells aren't used end game. A few of our spells are out right detrimental to cast. Many of our spells do absolutely nothing and while that's better than, say, Illusionary Allies, it's still not good. So, what is an illusionist? If we are to be crowd control we need more crowd control that does something. Enchanters are the only classes in the game who are supposed to be able to crowd control epics. Only it's flat out worthless. So if this is to be part of our power it needs boosted. If we are utility our utility needs boosted. We hit too many things that get capped. Timewarp is a joke. You spend half your time rebuffing folks. If we are mana regen... there will be mass rioting in the streets. Though if that's the case, we need more mana control and regen abilities. We need ways to take people from 0 to full. We need to be able to tell the wizard to mana burn because they will still have power at the end. The class is not a DPS class. I think every one recognizes that. There's a huge argument over where our DPS should be. I will say this, for what we add now, our DPS is horribly lacking. Right now, I resent spamming the buttons and adding very little. I'm spazzing out trying to keep everything queued up and going, but doing so much less than any one else. I wouldn't mind spamming buttons if it counted for something. This is the big thing I want change. A sense of accomplishment. However, till the Devs state what their vision for this class is, it's going to be a broken class. We are split too many ways with too many ineffective abilties being Class Defining (tm) for us to matter.
vexrm wrote: Really Vex, did you not learn on the flames that your were not an authority and should perhaps just leave you comments to /support as far as the class development goes? Please, please, please go learn something before pretending you know something.
As vexrm says the first thing to do is state what an Illusionist is. They certainly are NOT what is described at character creation. Mana management is about the only thing ok about the class atm. Making it raidwide won't improve the class much if at all. Agree on all the buff stuff. All good ideas for DPS too. I'd say the pet should just be straight immune to non-direct AoE's. Its an illusion after all and hardly powerful.
It's right there in our spell description. It effects epic targets. I'm not saying it's doable in todays day and age. I said "supposed to be able to". I believe coercers are the only other class to get that.
vexrm wrote: It will work once and briefly is a paraphrase of the descriptions, then the raid mob gains immunity. this is still how it works, and yes, .00002 seconds is still briefly working apparently by soe standards. If you ever thought that implied they were supposed to have viable uses on epics, then i am sorry, you are as i initially stated, out of your mind.
desinence wrote: No, but I can believe that SOE factors this into our "power" as Chanters are the only ones to get this I'm sure it's sitting on some ones class balance sheet. As I said, if we are to be mezzers it needs a boost.
Regarding the raidwide versus group mana management, I've been in several raids this summer with 1 coercer as the only chanter, and I've also been the lone illy as the only chanter in a raid - there's a very big difference between the 2, coercer can support multiple groups while keeping his group in power, illys simply cannot match that at all. If you haven't seen raids with no chanters you might not have experienced the difference firsthand, but it is there, and one important element of the chanter balance and illy package I feel. group mana from illy is okay as it is from coercer, raid mana is abysmal in comparison to coercer.
What changes does this illy want? 3.5 levels and 60ish AAs so I can retire this toon and switch to mystic and forget this toon ever existed.
I agree about Time Warp needing a redesign. It is easily the most irritating part of playing the illusionist class. Casting an ability on demand/request by other players is a reactive nuisance that no one enjoys. It's a far cry from the design of victorious concerto, which is an example of how to have a meaningful utility ability that is both proactive and enjoyable for a player to use. The raidwide suggestion isn't bad, though there's a few different ways to go there - just so long as it doesn't turn into a less fun version of Jester's Cap, basically. IA and Rapidity both need either crit bonus, potency, accuracy, flurry, +all primary stats, or a damage proc in order to remain meaningful as buffs. DA and Haste are trivial to cap - although players can have tradeoffs that mean some high end players can still use them, it's very much on a case by case basis and high end itemization strongly suggests unless players maintain a separate gear set to make the most out of an illusionist when they have one that the buffs will become increasingly irrelevant. They need to have properties in the buffs that won't hit existing caps. Our personal dps isn't so much weak as both annoying, tedious, and unrewarding. Prismatic Chaos is the only primary dps ability of a class that usually depends on other players, and frankly should probably be changed at this point. I realize that changing it to have identical trigger conditions to hostage would further blur the lines between us and coercers, but I really no longer care. Our red adorns do need work, since we don't really get comparable upgrades from them to other classes. The synergism ones should be combined, others should be upgraded in effect. As one note about personae - it's funny, but one of the reasons that coercers typically outperform us on trash dps clears is that their possess essence pet is better for VC than a personae is and handily outdamages it on straight-up burn fights. I don't really consider that a big deal since on major fights both are more difficult to keep alive than their work, but if high end fights were to somehow become geared to be RoK-style dps race fights in which their survivability isn't a consideration, it'll become yet another balance concern.
There is or was a post that suggested making Prismatic Chaos a mob cast so that any hit would count, that would be nice. Another suggested making it work on any hostile attack so we could cast it on mages but I think I prefer it simply being a mob cast to help ease some of our tedium.
Most of the stuff is already mentioned in the Illy issue post on top of this forum, but ok … this is want I want … First of all, we need to be on par with our evil counterpart, because as for now, we are bypassed on all fronts by coercers. Dps-wise: - increase the triggers on Prismatic Chaos (and like above player mentioned, let it be cast on mob instead of player) - get rid of the ‘on termination’ mechanics – in 50% of all cases we don’t get the full (biggest) return of the spell due to mob dying or spell overwriting. The only way we get full return now is to wait until spells run out, which is only frustrating for the illy. Since the ‘on termination’ mechanics gives us no full return, the spent AA points are just a waste. - Give our pet some survivability. As for now, I don’t care to cast my pet because it dies as soon as the mob farts. Make it do some damage or at least give it some kind of functionality. - Increase base damage of illy spells. Mashing buttons just to be outdps’d by a healer isn’t that motivating :S Utility-wise - Remove the 25% DA from Illusionary Arms, replace it by crit bonus and/or potency so it is useful to every class - Allow TC to be cast on self, in line with troub/dirge buffs - Rapidity has become useless due to all melees being capped at haste. Maybe replace it by a crit bonus, potency or ability modifier? - Redesign Timewarp. In its current form it adds nothing to a player/group/raid. At the moment just a waste of AA in my opinion. - Doppleganger is pretty useless in its current form. It dies with the first AE, adds no dps and is currently not worth casting. Let Doppleganger absorb some hits/damage from the mob ( 3 trigger-ish ?) - Redesign Illusory Allies and Phase. They just take up space in the spellbook now. I wouldn’t even care if they got removed. Casting these spells is kind of … suicidal - Redesign Spell Shield so it works also on non-profession spells or change it to another kind of protection(stoneskin) - Make buffs persist through death. It drives me crazy to give out a zillion buffs each time I die, most of them not even able to cast while running Powerregen-wise - Give something to deal with big power drains. The nerf of the myth proc and the fact Mana Flow only can be cast on one group member at a time, makes us have difficulties to bring back power to the group in emergency situations. It has been stated that we are utility, (heck, we aren’t dps for sure). And honestly I don’t have any problem with that. But being a utility class without any utility irritates the hell out of me. We need a fix and we need it fast before the illy population goes down further ….
Seems all the raiding guilds on our server are having a hard time recruiting illies, our previous illy left so he could raid a different character. Typically our illies do between a quarter to half the dps of coercers in our raid, when the illies have the good troub/fury buffage and coercers have bad, no troub, melee/tank buffage.
snowline wrote: That's an issue with your Illy then.. I will say that Illy's need a bump in DPS, but I don't think it should be 2-4x their current DPS like that would suggest. Our best geared Illy would sometimes outparse me, but usually was within 75% of my coercers DPS.
Carthrax wrote: I guess it all depends on playing style and group setup, but in my experience, Illies end up between 50-75% of the coercer's dps.
I admit it could partly be motivation/enjoyment that contribute to the 3 illys I've seen raid's low dps. 1 of those illy's is my alt in that statement, and certainly: inexperience (and healer instincts still somewhat watching the raid for detrimentals curses hp positioning etc as opposed to totally focusing on dps rotation) and of course gear (although pvp gear isn't that bad for dps just bad for strain on healers) contribute to my lower dps with illy, but with great buffs I'm seeing typically 5-9k dps so far while our coercers consistantly churn out 20-25k dps with bad buffs. Whilst the 3 coercers have better gear, familiarity and better aa's than my alt illy that's not as true of the other illy mains I've seen raiding and there's still a big gap, especially considering the 2 different buffing environments of their groups.
