Make Time Compression go past the cap of cast recast recovery etc so wen people are capped they still get bennifit
The suggestions above make sense and are mostly in the mode of let's tinker a tiny bit with spells, ability, equipment. Along those lines my only suggestion deviating from what has already been said would be to remove the memory wipe component of illusory allies which would make it usable. Rather than tinkering around the edges, the question of the fundamental purpose and role of the illusionist made me think of some things which might not be the right thing out of the box, but might lead to a more fun end game than at present. My main idea along this line would be to envision a more melee oriented mage. Lots of the aa lines increase melee skills but to what purpose? An illusionist is still a very squishy character. However, I can imagine class armor with greateer mitigation and hp buffs, epic/class weapons with higher damage output, a choice of 2 personae reflections: an offensive one and a defensive one which might intercept damage. The other notion that occured to me, based on my recollection of the enchanter I played in EQ1 was mob debuffing. If top mobs are to be unmezzable, perhaps additional lines of debuffs they cannot resist, weaker than mez but still useful: base stat debuffs to go along with dismay/nullifying staff. Improving the penalty to the mob of chronosiphoning would also fit in with this. On power management, what if there were - aa based or standard spell - a version of manatap which stole much more mana from the mob and distributed it to the whole group but gave a considerable amount of hate and/or an extract mana which required a great deal of health, but distributed a large shot of mana to each group member? Submitted for your consideration with the advance knowledge that all my ideas are bad. =P
I play illy in Onyx and i have to ask one question of all the other illys around, WHAT DO WE HAVE A PET FOR? All an illy pet does is die in raids. I don't even cast it anymore for raids or pvp. As for the PVP side of the the pet it is worthless. Everyone in the game can debuff our pet off. So i would love to see something done with the pet dps and survivability as our counterpart can get a pet and it does way more for them. Another thing I think needs to be addressed is the illy myth. The buff it gives now is a waste of space (1 proc ). I does very little to add power. Also as a class the used to be used to provide mana the way it stands now you can barely keep the group in power so i would like to see a change there. I don't know what everyone else thinks but i remember not all that long ago an illy could parse very well in both raids and PVP. The problem with that is that was when you could crit on procs. I think illys need to get a dps boost as i am still parsing the same in the new x-pac as i was in the last one and all other classes had their dps boosted. My last thing is TIME WARP. I hate this spell with all my heart. It is such a pain in the butt when all you get all raid long is "Time warp me now plz". I really would like to see this dumb duff changed or removed all the way and something better put in. OK this is my last thing i promise. I just wanna talk a second about Illys and PVP. The Nerf to all casters dps killed the illys. We should not get thrown in a lump group with Wizzys and Warlocks. Their dps is way more than ours and now we hit for nothing in pvp and we cant crowd control at all because SONY chose to give everyone the ability to have immunity to all CC so i don't know what we are good for since we cant dps or crowd control so there is no reason for us to be there. I hope SONY takes this serious or all illys will be done with the game or class.
One thing I would love to see is some attention paid to our utility in PvP. As it stands in real pvp with a group we're basically an annoyance that isnt worth a heck of alot of notice. Solo in real PvP we're tissue paper and scout fodder. What I would love to see and what I think would make us viable again in PvP is the return of our power drains. Just over two years ago we had a power drain attached to most of our damage spells. While this is pretty useless in PvE it was killer in PvP and the main reason I even made an illy to begin with. I would love to see our power drains come back to augment our crap status in PvP.
Dojac@Vox wrote: Disclaimer: I'm not a PvPer. With all the power proccing gear (which I thought you were fading out SOE that's why you nerfed our mythical) would this really have that great an impact? Edit: Spelling fail.
I think the power drains would be far more useful in some maps than others, even with 5 pieces of power procing gear my mystic regularly runs out on gears maps for example, but far less often in the dens matches becaue of more downtime, running around to get to the next fight, or guarding center etc. Overall I can see more power drains on a pvp basis being a good illy (chanter) distinction, but only in addition to illy damage being looked at, illy damage is so bad, so is illy survivability, and CC is easily circumvented, and matches often are way too 'fluid' for buffing to be anything but annoying in pvp - no time to play because someone constantly needs a rebuff. It's a shame draining a mob of power isn't really practical (takes far too long you can kill it far easier) and doesn't seem to do anything in pve/raid settings.
snowline wrote: You can drain a raid mobs power completely. It's very easy to do infact. The kicker? It does nothing. The script continues on just as planned and abilities still fire off.
that's exactly what I mean - a) draining it does nothing to reduce a mob's output and use of abilities/aoes b) it can take a really long time to drain a raid mob so even if it did do something it it's still unlikely to be worth it. I'm not sure if it's worth adding some encounters where removing mob mana could be important, but it could be interesting to try. It could make a range of abilities and gear have more meaning outside of pvp.
I don't see a problem with the extra damage on termination spells. I have it on the 2 green spells (chromatic shower and storm) The duration on that is 10 and 9 sec not that long to wait, especially on epic fights. With that in mind I wouldn't complain if they just took that termination damage and add it through out the DoT. I think this is such a minor issue. Rapidity for the most part is fine, though you could fix it by lowering the haste value by 20 ish and add some thing else to like recovery speed, reuse speed, casting speed, flurry. Something that fits with increasing speed. With that our myth needs to change from 10% DA to crit bonus or potency. Some stat that isn't capped. Which brings us to IA, change it to 8-10% Flurry chance then scouts would drool over IA again. As of now nobody really cares if they get IA or not. From the TSO tree on the Illusionist line Manaflow needs to be changed here. Make it lower its reuse time by 3 sec per rank and at the 5th rank make it groupwide. Right now its sorta useless. I like the idea to make illusory allies not memwipe. That would make the spell useful. A coercer should never ever ever ever do more DPS than an equally geared Illusionist, just as an Illusionist should never out DPS a coercer (unless they got a Troubie) Well those are a couple ideas.
Solution for our Prismatic Adornment problem(wasted charges): Make unused charges end up in direct damage.
I know snowline is the OP, and they wrote this repy, but just to keep the thread on track this last reply sums it up nicely Big issues are, A third of the illy's spellbook is pointless (crowd control) or even actively harmful to game play dynamics e.g. memwipes teleports etc. If your raid is low on chanters, coercer manaflow is 12 times better than illusionist. precisely 12 times better. manaflow is the tool to address power problems raidwide. There are so many single target buffs that with people regularly dying in harder encounters, there is a huge drain on your time to play your character, you're constantly rebuffing other peoples characters. Many buffs are wasted due to caps. Lots of time co-ordinating who even needs what buff. Timewarp is suposed to be the class defining ability for SF. It totally sucks in everyway. It is another single target buff that has to be co-ordinated and applied every 30+ seconds, the dps it adds is pathetic for the amount of hassle in using it with immunities, and a useful 5 second window that is so small that server lag and encounter scripts etc waste most of them. I suspect timewarp probably lowers dps, due to abilities being held back for these tiny 5second windows that are mostly wasted/stunned/stifled/kb'ed/spike abilities missed/server lagged/ported/too busy to use/not noticed. Even using it on my own illy in the rotation, for best timing control, I'm lucky get 2 spells into the window with illy cast times (not that Illy's have good spike abilities and prism chaos our best dps ability doesn't get double triggers properly), it's just FUBAR. Illy personal dps is much worse than coercer, and their utility especially in power is much worse also, especially considering illy's traditionally have troubs and coercers don't. The gearflation means that the chanter balance advantage of fast cast speeds are meaningless now, coupled with proc's becoming less useful it really hurt the personal contribution. Honestly - what more do u need to know?
I'd really like to see our personae reflection pet given aoe/aoe melee immunity - any type of built in warding as an alternative that would keep it alive in hard modes would be unbalanced for solo. Having the personae gives an illy a nice class distinction, yet it dies constantly on any harder content. Perhaps, the personae should be unable to take damage, but also unable to gain hate? I cannot imagine anyone even at low levels soloing, using it to tank something they couldn't 'tank' themselves better, but if that was the case, the 'no incoming damage no hate possible' personae effect could be added to the mythical/enervated.
Something I've always wondered, since the illusionist is more or less the true enchanter, shouldn't we be able to "enchant" a multitude of things? Since early eq2, mez'ing mobs has been obsolete. Obsolete to the point where not many folks keep it on their toolbar and even fewer actually like it when you mez. Example: I ran cella the other night with a group (Guardian, Illy, Coercer, Assassin (me), Trouby, Mystic or Templar (forget which)) The tank actually laughed at the two enchanters in voice chat when they mez'd the adds on the last fight (and explicitly told them not to do it again) because it took longer for us to kill them. I don't think there is a way to make mez'ing useful with end game content and raiding without trivializing said content. And rather seeing developer time wasted on it, I think it would benefit everyone if that time was spent fixing things and helping the classes (like Illy) that need it. Now how would you do that..... Doppleganger: It could be similar to the Mystic's ancestral sentry where it soaks X damage or creates a clone of the target (not a ghost) that distracts the mob. In other words, it would become the top of the hate list, absorbing a pre-defined amount of damage before it dies allowing you, in a sense, to rescue someone from death. When the doppleganger dies the mob reverts to the closest fighter. Personae Reflection: Replace one of the useless aa's in the illusionist set with a buff to the pet that, again like the shaman, grants the pet non-direct ae immunity. I also like the idea someone else suggested about making the pet ae-immune and generating zero aggro. This way, it is still very useful in solo/group/raid situations, but not able to "tank" like the pets of summoners. Now, on to use being enchanters...with the way SF changed blue stats, some of the illy buffs need changed. We should be able to "enchant" our groups weapons, armor, pets, even their minds, to aid them in combat. And our buffs need to be for the stats that, in order to be useful, have no cap. On top of that, to help the pvp crowd, the majority of our buffs need to be group wide with a small handful of single-target, cross-raid castable, buffs. Everything from raw potency and crit bonus on the offensive side to mitigation and crit mit on the defensive side. I'd love to see a single target, can only be placed on one person, CA double attack buff that gives the target something like 5 or 10% chance with each CA to have that CA double attack. Replace the mez's in the spellbook with more utility and damage too. Give us one single target, long duration mez and one blue, short duration mez. Replace the other two with a blue damage spell and one of the buffs mentioned above. Combine blink and phase into one spell that teleports the caster back X meters, the mob off in a random direction away from the caster x meters, lowers hate of the caster by X and has a % chance to wipe the hate list based on level and quality of the spell. Epics targets are immune to the mem-wipe and teleport. Call it Blink. With that newly opened slot, create a new dps spell or group/raid buff. I'm sure I'll come up with more crazy ideas, but that's it for now.
Can we just plz scrap TW all together, I hated it with a passion first time I read about it, Hated it in beta and it is a joke on live. The propsed changes to TW will only increase wizzy dps even further. How does increasing wizzy dps help illies? By making it less of a PITA for us maybe ? Well I can just decide not to cast it at all, thats less of a PITA! But hey there are certain people or guilds that require/demand it. I was a die hard TW protester as an illy and refused to spend the aa on it. Of course I have and use it now because of peer/server pressures. I also agree that TW in its current form probably decreases DPS in most circumstances heh. SCRAP TIMEWARP PLEASE !
Sykosys@Crushbone wrote: Illie's are also a SUPPORT class... soo... that'd prolly be why its there.... >.>
Stampede for mystics for example or RO / VC for bards etc are examples of SF definining support class abilities that increase raid/group dps in a meaningful fashion. Timewarp is an example of a SF ability that completely fails to properly support anyone. Timewarp probably lowers raid dps, due to the time taken from illy, the abilities held back by potential recipients with all the immunity mess, the tiny miniscule 5 second window which often gets wasted, and the general headaches of cordinating it.
For next expansion give us the option to increase the duration of self-timewarp up to 10 seconds, keep the duration for the 2nd target on 5 seconds.
Added the illusory allies as a group dps/heal storage then burst via illy on termination, neat idea. I don't see problems with my group too much for mana when playing illy, so triple myth triggers wouldn't help that much, what I see is I am 12, yes precisely 12, times less effective at using manaflow to deal with cross raid power problems via manaflow than a coercer. Manaflow is THE tool to help power issues raidwide - we have nothing to compare to coercers in that dept. manatap/manacloak raidwide as a potential suggestion I envisioned as 3 triggers of manacloak per raidmember, yes a lot of manacloak triggers would be wasted without regular aoe's, but it would be something at least if we don't get the coercer type manaflow.
