Raid DPS - How can we fix it?

[Voragath]

Well, it's not just that. Malleria didn't mention all the funky code that goes with pets and their nukes. The reason fire core works the way it does on the fire pets is because of those restrictions. They tried 2 or 3 other things to help the fire pet out and they just didn't work.

Twincast was one of the abilities that the fire pet couldn't do.

Pets just can't be set up to do such serious dps as the raid mage needs atm. They can be bumped, but ultimately it's gonna have to come in a very large part from us. Simply due tot he fact that we are vastly more versatile.

[nahseev]

Make me a battle mage. Just give us a huge melee proc with a limit counter and improve our stone core (or give us an alternative to compensate) since we'd need to be engaged in melee to increase dps from swings between casts. It isn't limited to having a pet out but using a pet would help tremendously for survivability. An ability like this would be stronger for raiders since they should be able to take hits and greater ae's compared to group geared players yet doesn't exclude them. It also limits itself while soloing with the mob still able to eat through the shielding from pet and kill us since we still aren't meant to be tanking directly while using the ability. I figure this is also pretty fair since mages don't have any class spells for runes, heals, or cures affecting players making us in my opinion the most vulnerable caster out of the four. The dps off procs should be easily controllable for tuning and lends itself to easy aa improvements in the future (great design space) because you can adjust the counter for procs, the dmg per proc, the reuse time between casts, or even change the proc altogether like an innate chance that it'll do greater massive dmg on constructs. Implementing such an ability would fall under decisions about design more than technical limitations so I don't think we can argue about it being doable or it's difficulty.

I don't like the idea of improving fire pet much or giving it special burning abilities. I'd love to see it tuned for general use and increase it's dps in that regard but giving it some kind of burst really has very little risk involved to the pet or caster. You can just spam summon companion and keep the agro from that pet low without losing much dps compared to doing that with other pets that need to be positioned and in melee range.

[svenalo]

Making us melee for DPS won't help us in the slightest, and limiting it to constructs would be a joke (there are so few of them on raids it would be a waste of time). We are spell casters - our spells is where our DPS should be coming from, not from our extremely weak melee capabilities.

[nahseev]

Making us melee for DPS won't help us in the slightest, and limiting it to constructs would be a joke (there are so few of them on raids it would be a waste of time). We are spell casters - our spells is where our DPS should be coming from, not from our extremely weak melee capabilities.

What are you reading? It's not limited to constructs, I said innate chance to do increased damage against them compared to normal mobs. It's also not melee dps that we are getting the boost from but a spell. Yes you need to be engaged in melee to generate the procs but the dps boost is coming off a spell, from an aa most likely, not your melee damage. It's wouldn't matter if you are swinging and doing 30 or 300 damage melee, this only regards procs.

Say the base damage on the proc is 20k for this example though it could really be any amount for balance. If it goes off between our normal spell weave on a swing then that is like a free 20k nuke between recasts. Now add the chance to crit it and that is a 40k bonus damage. If the mob is a construct maybe the spell can add a bonus 32k damage so on a crit it'll do the initial 40k damage plus the additional 32k damage boosting it's effectiveness vs construct mobs. Druid's have to get this too, well no problem. They would have the same boost available but their opportunity, situations, and how they can actually use it would differ from ours.

Your last sentence is just one opinion and this kind of change would be a design decision. Like our different opinions on pets in the end it doesn't matter what we think, it's what the devs decide to do with it. This is just another direction they should possibly look at.

[svenalo]

If done it would be an extremely dumb design decision.

[Piemastaj]

Back in I believe UF, we had weapons that proced for 4500 dmg and critted for almost 10k dmg. With a pretty hefty proc chance on them also, they got nerfed like a month into the expansion or something. Lower proc rate and only like a 1k dmg proc.

This could have been in SoD, my memory is a bit fuzzy because they did not last long. But SOE made it clear that casters procing substantial amounts of DMG was not liked in melee that is.

[nahseev]

A lot of the solutions that people seem to like increase sustained dps, not our burst. Increasing nukes or giving a lower recast boosts our sustained. Increasing pet power like the fire pet to be a raid pet also increases sustained dps. Giving us a new nuke increases sustained. See the common problem with all of this. If they wanted to just boost our effectiveness for a short duration with tools we already have they could easily do this with available aa's or hacking those aa's to create new similar ones but they aren't willing to do this either it appears. We need out of the box thinking and come up with something that hasn't been suggested before, not keep complaining about how we really need this or that increased when they clearly aren't giving it to us.

The procs placed on a weapon is sustained dps. It's the part of the weapon's damage since there is no limiting factor. Casters don't have the same bonuses for weapons as melee and I thought the introduction of larger procs were to compensate and increase weapon damage for us. The recent trend for caster procs were to make it spell based intead so we don't have to melee which kind of defeats the point of having a weapon in my opinion. Use augs for the spell based procs for weapons and give weapons back it's melee procs. Anyway of the casting procs on weapons from all the resists to pet procs are considered sustained. Giving us a procs from an aa they can limit it in any number of ways. They can make it a 30 second duration...not sure how many procs that will actually equate to if we are weaving spells but that is that. They could also limit it further giving a counter on it say like 4. Yes those numbers are low but that is usually how they tend to introduce things and design space was brought up a lot at panels at fan faire. These are the kinds of restrictions an ability needs to be boosted greatly just for burning situations. Starting low gives the aa room to grow if they like it or discontinue it without much disruption if they don't like it.

I guess another but more boring way to get the same effect as my battle mage suggestion is modifying the type of spell on our current robe clicks. Instead of having the pet proc a multiplier buff it could proc a buff that adds a fixed number spell cast proc. Activate the aa to buff the pet that procs a recourse on us. When we cast our next spell that recourse adds the bonus dmg to our spell damage like the mana flare line. This restricts it to being usable only when a pet is up which I like.

With the recent caps to % mods I don't think we should ask for anything percent based. Capping the specialization mods is just one example. Fire core is % based multiplier and because of that it makes it difficult to balance going forward. It might be great for one expansion but say we should get a big upgrade to a spell now that % increase is greater than intended either leaving us with a weaker upgrade for the spell or aa. Giving us numerical based modifiers appears to be the better solution for a lot of things. Basically we would need something that is added at the end of whatever the calculations are so there is no focus effects or any other type of modifier that can affect it. If we ask for something that is just an added non changing damage increase to whatever we are trying to boost no matter what kind of increase one thing gets you always will get the same boost and they can control future increases a lot better if we need adjustments.

Another idea probably for beta or another discussion about pets is bring back MS line but modify it greatly and make it a raid drop spell. MS spells usually were a little more difficult to get back in the day and I don't see why that can't be brought back. Instead of being like a regular pet it would be more like a hybrid pet. When you summon it is self buffs with a DT at a certain duration. This pet wouldn't need to be affected by pet focus since it would be a raid drop type spell but would be heavily modified to be doing huge damage like the swarm type RS pets. By making it a regular pet with that DT buff we could control it like a regular pet but it would be limited by time. Maybe five min duration with an ten min recast. Force the use of suspend for downtime if the fights are long and better pet control when the pet is up so it doesn't die. Would be horrible pet for group game since it isn't perm and massive restrictions on recast and what not yet opens up some new possibilities for a raiding pet.

[Piemastaj]

Giving us better nukes increases burst and hurts our sustained. Because with more nuke power comes more mana spent in casting those nukes. We saw this happen with the recent change to Spear. We gained something like 700 DMG for 3 or 400 mana. That hurt our sustained more then helped our burst, but giving us raw increases in our nukes deffinately helps our burst.

Our robe currently has a spell proc on it or a pet proc on it. It depends on what the RNG does to it to make it land on us or hit for the pet though. I personally don't like this method at all. IMHO it should stay as a mini-FBO for future robes. I have not done parsing (it would be crazy hard to fully get the parsing done), but I am pretty sure it does less DPS then our Anguish robe or our robe from SoD.

Everyone's spells and AAs are given % based increases. They really won't make a spell worse if the spell gets upgraded because it is added into the spell. Like Wizards get a 150% increase to critical spells, that will stay good forever regardless what the spell does. This shouldn't be capped ever unless they have some hidden line of data in the abilities.

Pet with a DT seems odd to me. I am either not understanding your concept or I just don't like the idea period. That DT would have to be substantial DPS to make up for a fully AAed/pet focused pet with max buffs. Not to mention our regular pet is our sustained DMG so you would need to take into account of that aswell in the long run of a nights raids.

It is my understanding we want burst, but we shouldn't be willing to totally tank our sustained to do so. Which is why we could use a PD type ability (if your unaware how this works it doubles mana cost for heavy dmg out-put) it would wreck our sustained but it would give us a true burst ability. It would be used on those 1 to 2min fights only. It would be similar, or atleast this is my understanding of it, to our Fire Core line. Which would probably not help much in terms of burst, which is why in our AA wish-list to the devs we asked for a Crit dmg modifier similar to the 150% one wizzies have. IMHO we lack the good crits to enhance our burst. I regularly see 77k max crits, we need to see 90 to 100k max crits.

[Voragath]

Pet with a DT seems odd to me. I am either not understanding your concept or I just don't like the idea period. That DT would have to be substantial DPS to make up for a fully AAed/pet focused pet with max buffs. Not to mention our regular pet is our sustained DMG so you would need to take into account of that aswell in the long run of a nights raids.

The DT was a death timer on the pet. When you summon pet, it buffs itself with a DT that will kill it when time runs out.

[nahseev]

...two posts up

You have to future proof which I hope they try and do in development. So say they only want us to get a 15k damage max upgrade this expansion from that aa. Next expansion they might look to boost it 20k damage max upgrade with that aa. They either increase the aa mod which would mean a smaller increase in the raw spell damage or they increase the spell damage and not improve the top end of that aa much. If they can throw the damage on at the end of the spell though they can ignore all of this. They want to give us a 15k damage max upgrade fine, design the proc that amount. They want to boost it to 20k next expansion, same deal, upgrade the proc for that amount. This leaves the spells completely separate allowing them to increase the raw damage even more for better sustained without having to worry about screwing up burst. This kind of thinking goes against your idea of better crits. Instead of larger nukes its adding extra smaller spell damage on top of our current nukes to boost dps. Think mana flare but to a much greater degree.

Giving us better nukes does not hurt sustained in a lot of situations but improves it. It all depends on if you can actually use up all your mana or not. Maybe our ideas of sustained differ but I only consider sustained as to what dps we can keep on a single mob. If there are multiple mobs this doesn't matter, it still is what we can sustain on a single mob. Maybe you are considering it over the duration of an event in which case yes you might run out of mana more often. In the group game when you are killing one mob at a time you can have full mana going into every fight should you choose to med between pulls so greater nukes do not hurt sustained at all. Yeah we shouldn't have to sacrifice one thing for another but you still need to look at design from all points. balancing it for solo, group, and raid.

My idea for the MS line pet was basically as a raid only pet and very situational at that. They can create the pet to ignore focus which should be pretty easy since they only have to make one version of it and duplicate if they even need to do that. On raids you wouldn't need that pet up or out between boss kills or on trash. You can use a regular pet for all of that. When the boss comes around you then cast that hybrid MS pet after suspending or abandoning your elemental pet. Depending on how long of a fight it is that pet would give increased sustainable dps over a period of time hopefully long enough to kill that boss. If not you loose your pet and can use your pocketed pet or just nuke the rest of the fight. They can play with the duration and recast depending on what they really would want from that pet but the idea is more or less to give us an RS type pet with a longer duration and is controllable. We could use the lack of twincast on that spell as an argument for it if people would want such a thing. The idea for the DT timer or despawn timer and a recast longer than duration is that with a pet so powerful it shouldn't be used for tanking so if it ever is you risk having a mob on you without a pet as protection.

Edited to hopefully for improved clarity