The Magician's Tower

Elidroth wrote:The only real solution is to make group and raid specific abilities that cannot work outside of those environments. Of course, this makes things that much more complicated on our end having to create double the abilities.

Or you make abilities that scale based on the size of the "party" doing whatever encounter. Someone soloing would get the base effect. As you get to a full group it would get say maybe double the effect. If that group is in a raid, then the number of people in the raid could further boost the effect by some factor.

As a theoretical example of this scaling idea, let's say it was an AA which lasted 2 min and it was designed to boost raw damage. Solo mage could use it and maybe it did 50% boost to the base damage of any spell they cast for those 2 minutes. If they were in a group, but not a raid, each additional REAL person in the group would add 8.5% more to the boost, making a full group of 6 giving them 100% to the base of the damage spells cast. If they were in a group in a raid, and assuming the current 54 person max raid size, then the boost could another 3% more to the boost for each person in the raid, taking them to 250% of their base damage of all spells cast during those 2 minutes. All focus effects and whatnot would then stack on top of those.

Would the solo mage use something like that? Yes. Group mage? Yes. Raid mage? Yes. Could the percentage numbers be adjusted, or the scheme augmented with some kind of increasing ranks? Again yes.

The world is ending because (Piemastaj) spoke up in a thread I know, but this is not the place to keep stirring up drama. If you would like to keep your vendetta up take it to PMs.

Some of us are trying to use this thread constructively.

Elidroth wrote:The reality is swarm pets were never intended to be more than just a visually-flavored DOT. In truth, they were supposed to be fire-and-forget cool little things. That they've grown beyond that is unfortunate for MANY reasons, not the least of which is the sheer number of swarm pets that end up on raid targets these days.

I see nearly EVERY CLASS ask for 'more burst dps', so I'm curious.. What does Burst DPS mean to you? To me, it means you can boost your short term DPS, but with a price. If you can do it every single raid encounter, then it isn't burst. It's a normal part of your dps. In short, MY opinion is 'burst' abilities should have a LONG cooldown. 2 hours or more. Either that.. or the boosts need to be shorter duration, or less powerful.

Simply put, EQ is so complex today that any ability given is VERY hard (nigh impossible) to accurately predict how it will affect the class as a whole. We give players something that works well in the group game, and in the raid game it's CRAZY overpowered as a result of buffs, attributable DPS, and so forth. If we give people something that works well in raids, the group-centric players don't feel it's worth their time.

The only real solution is to make group and raid specific abilities that cannot work outside of those environments. Of course, this makes things that much more complicated on our end having to create double the abilities.

Eli, the problem is this does not apply to any class curently. So if you guys are starting to try this new technique out on mages its a kick in the nuts after we repeatedly got shutdown in beta for fixes/help in the DPS department. Rangers can literally burn 65k every fight if it lasted 2minutes they only really require a glyph to do so (if u would like to see parses I have plenty of them), Beastlords are out-sustaining us in the high-end, and since there is no trash in SS( I am happy about this dont get me wrong) it takes 10 minutes to get from fight to fight.

Todays EQ is all about burst DPS. Since most mechanics get re-used and such. The only way to make events hard is to make them have adds or nasty AEs. The solution to those things? Kill the named before too many adds are up or before he can cast the AE a lot. If your guild is clearing SS in less then 3 hours (7 events total) 1 disc that is good every 2 hours would ALMOST be a waste.

Burst to me means how much damage one can put out every 2min fight. That is generally what is considered a burst in EQ. With necros bursting wll over 35k, wizards over, 50k BL over 50, zerkers over 50k, rangers over 65k I find it hard to believe us asking for next expasion to reach 55k or so with some discs is getting turned down. 10 to 15min repop on them would be fine, anything longer would almost defeat the purpose of getting them.

Elidroth wrote:
The only real solution is to make group and raid specific abilities that cannot work outside of those environments. Of course, this makes things that much more complicated on our end having to create double the abilities.

Eli. I have played games (I can't remember what they were at this time) where a "limit break" or powerful attack was made after many group battles (for EQ read "raid battles") had accrued.

Port over your Crown Loyalty Timer and have it run during raids at some accelerated pace, with the result being equivalent to some (longer) glyph functionality that are used during something flagged as "raid."

One idea.

Bara

Lots of classes can burn far harder than mages atm, we have sent in and posted data on 2 min burn fights left and right. Clearly other classes can burn more often than 2 hours. I understand you wanting to be careful so we don't have another pallie issue and I can respect that.

Burst burn dps (which more and more guilds are moving towards) is critical for mages to continue to get invited to raids. Currently we can't really contribute to the raid on 2 minute fights. This is a shame and is a real downer to see that your just a drain on guild resources while on the raid. When your burn is 25-30k dps and the ranger next to you is 60-65k dps, it makes you not even want to play anymore.

Without the ability to start pushing out around 20k dps more on every single fight mages will start to get turned away from raids for a large number of guilds. We will turn into the next beastlords which is what were trying to prevent. Many guilds already are turning away mages as it is. The class would need at least 10-15k dps NOW just to be at the lower end of damage, much less in the next exp.

The SoR pet idea is due to the fact its almost useless now, it does less damage than a single cast of RS pet (another ability thats fire and forget btw). We came up with this combo idea for pets / personal dps to try to get all mages onboard .. as it gives something to all of us.

The single best way to fix us is to just change Fire Core to be closer to wizard PD, and increase the bonus of it by a LOT. Anything else will not do much for raiding mages and we will continue to be out parsed by pallies. Its that bad.

Savil

I hardly can believe that they would boost SoR's dps by a very large margin AND increase its survivability, as one without the other would make it pretty useless in raid situations and would have the paradoxal effect to boost up significantly the group mage dps where Flappy has more chance of survival due to lesser and weaker aoes If they do both, than thumbs up of course, this AA was soooo expensive to raise, I am sure every mage would be happy to see his investment rentabilized.

The two directions to explore, which are probably the less complicated for SoE to implement, are indeed the Fire Core path and the RS path (bye bye pet nuke crits, as Malleria reminded in the thread about pet dps). I'd like, apologies if I say it a second time here in this thread, the gargoyle to get a form of nuke, or even better, of low resist Harm Touch with a significantly high damage, it could cast on its target right after popping to compensate the dps loss it suffers on raids due to the usually lenger path it takes to reach its target.

so i dont see why you can't increase raid and group dps.. surely rangers etc. can burst burn in group just as well as they do on raids... if it is about their raid weapons then a melee can just as easily get those as they can raid pet focus / raid gear... by that analogy you could just put more spell damage on mage specific raid gear to increase dps

No, rangers burst the way they do purely because of the ADPS effects on them. In raid they have "the pefect storm" so to speak. In group they would need to be grouped with bard / shaman / beastlord at the very least to do close to their raid level DPS.

When was the last time you saw that group out xp'ing? A lot of the extreme DPS numbers from the classes (melee) that I and others have posted are the result of having a bard / shaman / beastlord (and also having enchanter buffs doesn't hurt).

While this is uncommon in groups, its very common in raids. Given the ADPS effects in raids, pretty much ALL DPS classes completely destroy mages atm. Its not even close, even beastlords stomp us. The really sad fact is, even in guilds where the mobs are living 3-5 minutes (so the mage can ramp up and actually get out most of his burn) we still typically get beat, we just only get beat by 30-40% instead of 40-50%.

I have compiled numbers from many many different guilds out there while looking into this, and the only common factor almost all guilds have is this: mages lose parses, most of the time by enough that it becomes clear the only reason the mage was on the raid was for rods.

Savil

I sent in a PM and got back "ops, sorry, its fixed". No idea wtf but I can post again.

Savil

Thanks for posting Elidroth. It is good to know the devs see the issue and want to help the class. The issue is that a 2 hour reuse is not a burn as other classes don't have near that long a refresh time and mages shouldn't either. A 30 minute refresh the same as improved twin cast would be bearable but still only results in use twice an hour. I think a 20 minute reuse, so can burst just 3 times an hour would work out. It would mean mages would need to time it right and at times have it available when needed or not depending on how quickly they move event to event. I don't think mages bursting for higher DPS every 20 minutes would be anything but a move to correct the imbalance we currentl have in the raid game.

As for the grouping game, I tend to think of how well a grouping oriented mage compares to the group oriented wizard. The group mage should out sustain the wizard by a lot but not out burst them. As the grouping wizard has every burst ability of the raiding wizard the same should be true for the grouping mage, the difference of course is the rank 3 spells and focus effects (all including the pet focus ones). So the grouping mage should not be penalized the same as the grouping wizard isn't.

It makes sense that the grouping mage should have a burst ability for the group they are in as should the grouping wizard. The thing is exactly as you said if it is not worth it to the grouper they won't care or support it. So it has to help both, just to a lesser extent because the focus effects are lesser as group gear. As to how to do it a lot of good suggestions are on the table, but if spell based compared to pet based the mana use would be a huge drain and when the burst is over the mages mana should be hurting a bit where we will use a rod charge if we can take the hit point hit, and if a lot of AOE's we may not be able to. Or we take the down time to use our version of harvest and drop DPS for a bit. The thing is our pet will add a stead stream of DPS to help mages retain their sustained DPS that we excel in, only second to a necro's sustained DPS.

Calebe