AA Suggestions for Underfoot

[Sillaen]

Then buff your pet with Aegis, or let him proc iceflame. The blocker will absorb the Direct Damage spell from the mana regen AA.

And while I personally like this AA idea, it will never happen because of that very reason. That's a no risk instant a lot of mana. So the big dmg to ourselves is probably a better choice even though balancing it would be difficult. In the gran scheme of things, 5K mana is infinitely better and more useful to us than 10K HPs, which is essentially 1 heal potion.

[Merlaina]

Why not just have it as an uber reclaim energy? Sac the pet, get 2K mana, 30 minute reuse timer or something like that. We all like to have our pets nice a tricked out with armor, buffs, toys, etc, so the disadvantage would be you then have to either pull out a suspended pet for the rest of the fight or summon a new ungeared unbuffed pet. Casting and rebuffing would negate a good chunk of the mana gained from use, not to mention lost DPS spent casting. That way it's not overpowering, and could only be practically done once until you have downtime to resummon and rearm a new pet and suspend the old one again.

[Merlaina]

IIRC the reason the 5 minute timer came in was because Mages were turned into mana rod machines so other classes could use up the rods and refill mana at will.

Ah yes, I remember the days of "summon a rod, drop it in front of the cleric, summon a rod, drop it in front of the cleric" for 5 minutes before a big fight.

[Calebe]

Any mage that thinks sacking your pet for 2000 mana is a good idea needs to remember. Your DPS went to 0 as you did that. Any and all buffs your pet had are gone. So lets say you suspend it. Well can't do that if in combat. So that won't work. So your out of combat ok, but if your pet lived it is still buffed. So you suspend it. Make a pet then canni it for 2000 mana, and med. Not worth it if your going to med and out of combat 2000 mana is not needed, because you can regen that rapidly anyway.

We need to stop looking at our pets for mana by offing them, and look to a mega rod where we get instant mana from now. It is how we do it. Now if you say a AA to tap the pet for 10,000 hit points with a 20-30 minute cool down period for 500 mana per tick regen for 4 ticks (also 2000 mana), your pet lives, and you can hit replenish companion to heal it back up or hit the companions replenishment. Either would work depending the pet is being hit when you use it.

That would make more sense. We should never advocate killing our pet for any reason. Tap it as we do now for a lot more mana with a cool down timer. Fine, but the pet won't die and that is the important part (well unless you use it with the pet at low health of course). So good idea just modify it, we are mages our pets are our defense, never advocate killing it.

Calebe

[Klymaxus]

How about some AA that gives an innate chance for a DA or huge melee mitigation or Rune buff casted on us when out pet dies. This is sort of like the priest line when they die, group has a chance to get a DA casted on them.

[Merlaina]

I'm not suggesting you suspend your current pet, make a new one, and then sac it. I'm suggesting you already have a pet buffed and suspended before a fight, sac the current one, and then pull out the suspended one. There seem to be quite a few people who do something similar already anyway, having a pet suspended with FBO on it so they get two FBOs in one fight.

Also how about an AA that increases the proc rate of the AtA line of spells (the 32K damage proc). Maybe a 3/6/9 progression adding an extra 1% chance per rank, so you can get up to a 5% chance for a proc.

Another suggestion (and this could be an archetype instead of class) is an AA that increases the minimum focus of focus items. Maybe 5 ranks that add 10% of the items focus to the base. As an example, say you have a 50% damage focus effect, so it currently increases spell damage up to 50% per cast. At rank 1 this would raise this 10% of max, so you'd do 5%-50%, rank 2 would increase it to 10%-50%, etc up to rank 5 which has the focus give 25%-50% damage bonus. This wouldn't raise max damage, but would be a nice boost to sustained DPS, and would still be gear dependent so people with better focus items would get more benefit from it. Your average expected bonus would go from 25% to 37.5%.

[qibrme]

10,000 hit points with a 20-30 minute cool down period for 500 mana per tick regen for 4 ticks (also 2000 mana),
Calebe

The problem I see with all these "MANA TAP" / "UBER RODS for HEAVY HP's lost" is that the amount of mana you guys are asking for is way low for the sacrifice.
With current spell cost at lvl 85, how many spells can you cast with 2k mana?
With mana saving focus and regen, maybe 5 or 6 in a JOLT, BOLT, FICKLE weave before you are OOM again?
You can't cast RS even with a GOM proc.

We have a new expansion coming out and while most things are only a guess, one thing I will bet the house on is that the mana cost on our new spells will be even higher than they are now, which means that the spells we use for the Underfoot weave will most likely average close to or over 1k mana per cast.

With that said, normal Underfoot expansion mana rods need to give 2k mana to be even relevant with future content.

Therefore any mage only mana tap/rod/reclaim/etc needs to at least allow one cast of RS which presently cost around 3.2k IIRC, so the Underfoot RS has to cost at least 3.5k to 4k mana.

IMO we need to ask for at least 5k mana,
I would prefer a way to get 1/4 of our mana pool for say 1/2 our HP's that way it scales for level and gear.
Not sure if that is realistic, but reuse timers can be set to whatever wizards harvest is so as not to have the 4 letter word "overpowered" pop up.


Suediwenae...

[dorfillya]

.....Therefore any mage only mana tap/rod/reclaim/etc needs to at least allow one cast of RS which presently cost around 3.2k IIRC, so the Underfoot RS has to cost at least 3.5k to 4k mana.......



Suediwenae...

I don't think there will be a full compliment of spells, as SoD had, since there will be no level increase. Therefore, I would expect no Underfoot RS. Sony has said (I think) each class is to get a few spells (2-3?) and they would be unique spell types, as opposed to the routine bigger nukes and bigger pets type of spell increases of past expansions. I do have a fear that this expansion might give big increases to melee, while casters get minimal increases, but, that remains to be seen.

[Piemastaj]

We got a garg pet in DoDH and TBS when there were no level increases iirc. So, SOE might surprise us and give us another garg pet.

Just my 2cp.

[Malleria]

We got a garg pet in DoDH and TBS when there were no level increases iirc. So, SOE might surprise us and give us another garg pet.

Very unlikely. We didn't have a current max level version of the spell at either DoDH or TBS.