Caster DPS needs nerfed MORE (or not boosted from current dps), SLAs are enough

[crazydamage]

This is a funny thread alright. It definately makes me wonder what level of content those who have contributed are familiar with. Casters can solo farm Epics for scrolls currently. They are making mobs easier to kill in U9, which will make the practice even more lucrative. The power of casters isn't in the raw DPS they can achieve by emptying their blue bars into a mob. It's the fact that they have many ways to incapacitate and neutralize most mobs which they can then kill at their leisure. Or by kiting through AoE spells while not being in any real danger themselves. In U9 they will be able to do what they can do in all pre-Epic content now, which is run around and insta-kill everything once they are geared and have good enough DC's. Mobs will have less HP too and with the changes being make nuking will become viable too. Melee can't effectively do any of that. They don't even have a melee exclusive HP equivalent to Major Mnemonic potions.

Yep its funny cause the people in here that actually do high lvl raids and epics are agreeing with me.
And the others that troll clearly have never played anything beyond shroud.

BTW astraghal it IS the sheer dmg output of a caster that allows them to farm epics.

Gather 10 guys. Mass hold/web/disco balll. Now Eardweller + Festival Clicky and Meteorswarm + Delayed blast fireball + Cone of Cold + Firewall = Dead mob.

Farming epics is both about Surviving, and Killing fast (SPEED).
The more monsters/mobs you kill in 1 hour the better your chance of getting a scroll.

Not only can casters run fast (haste), teleport, self heal, immobilize monsters, they also have massively more Range + AOE than melees.

Melees can partially compensate for haste/teleport with items, can really really poorly self heal with UMD or silver flame pots. Can single target stun with Stunning blow.
They will never have range nor AOE.

[crazydamage]

You're absolutely right! Ranged weapons don't exist, the Cleave abilities aren't getting buffed to actually be usable, and these changes are absolutely final and can in no way be changed at any point in the future.

You've never gone beyond the harbor have you.

[steelblueskies]

This is a funny thread alright. It definately makes me wonder what level of content those who have contributed are familiar with. Casters can solo farm Epics for scrolls currently. They are making mobs easier to kill in U9, which will make the practice even more lucrative. The power of casters isn't in the raw DPS they can achieve by emptying their blue bars into a mob. It's the fact that they have many ways to incapacitate and neutralize most mobs which they can then kill at their leisure. Or by kiting through AoE spells while not being in any real danger themselves. In U9 they will be able to do what they can do in all pre-Epic content now, which is run around and insta-kill everything once they are geared and have good enough DC's. Mobs will have less HP too and with the changes being make nuking will become viable too. Melee can't effectively do any of that. They don't even have a melee exclusive HP equivalent to Major Mnemonic potions.

actually they kinda do have the melee equivalent to major mnemonics. heal shard trinkets. rest of eladrin. and more. of course you said melee exclusive. so if you had a bar that was consumed on attacks in general to balance that out you would be happy? gotta dance in the fountains so you can resume autoattacking if you run out before the opponent dies?

have to agree on the "when fully geared" this rampaging becomes an issue on trash everywhere, on those built for it in some content, and irregardless of build in other content. and of course the new crafting arrangement is making increases to spell dc's previously only attainable by extended raiding, coupled with epic farming, available through grinding craft skill, thus increasing the general capacity level there, as it *should* for melee as well.

then again there are quite a few more things that can boost a melee's output compared to a caster in general, so the baseline naked output is of course skewed to a different curve.

then again two classes are divine, two arcane, and all the rest are fully melee capable, if not focused.

i am of course left to ponder why there are no complaints over a geared to the teeth ranger being able to generate massive dps each manyshot cooldown. oh well. i've seen this exact debate and mess in too many games. diablo2 had the balance issues seen here. right down to finding a way to nerf firewall.
actually wow had the same baseline melee vs caster balance problem and still does in an ever evolving flux.
so have pretty much every other mmo with a similar system. it feels, when one rounds the gamut, that actually achieving a balanced system between the two just isn't going to happen in a combat oriented realtime game. not without smarter ai, such that crowd control may be casting an aoe to herd mobs not kill them, and randomizing their stats and resistances and placements. probably not even then going from observations elsewhere.

still feels like the damage spam is the worst direction to go for real balance across classes. instead of upping cooldowns and mucking about with damage and cost, muck about with CAST TIME. 30 seconds to cast aoe instadeath with near guaranteed success? awesome. now we need somebody to distract the mobs they likely cannot kill outright while the cast is being done, and if the mobs are smarter and will try to get the person casting such a thing to interrupt the cast above all else...

hells bells we actually have quests centered around this idea. weapons shipment for example. one npc casting summon warforged titan butt kicker. and it takes a looong time. once there however, that pit fiend can be left to the titan for all the comparative good the players are doing. but this kind of thinking winds up in another repetitive action boredom pit strategy wise, and of course someone else would start bemoaning how the kill count they are enabling one method to grant one player is wrong considering their efforts, or how it is not close enough to literal pnp rules. and then we get into the sorcs as faster casters inherently balancing as well.

bleh, the entire balance work in progress is just ugly and painful no matter how you slice it. it is good, and the results should be good. but man is the process something else on the way there.

edit: funny thing i am noticing, a lot of khyber personnel, and very vocal on lam. crazy, shade, sirgog, myself, i think junts, and more.

[Chai]

-So why don't we see more than 1-2 casters per raid? Artificial bubble world where devils are fire immune. (And even still a good eardweller caster using cold/force can pull his weight).

I will take 4 or 5 casters into a shroud, np.

-Why don't we see 6 caster epic groups? We could, except there arent enough COMPETENT casters on the servers. 6 caster epic group would tear everything to pieces Pre U9 until they hit a red name with ridiculously high HP.

They will tear that up too.

There are plenty of competent casters. There are not enough well informed group leaders, and they think limiting raids to one or two casters is mandatory.

[jkm]

Honestly, I don't think you have any chance of balancing caster damage until you make a decision on how you handle the kiting aspect of casters.

1. Jump Casting - there was a time when you had to stand still (or jump) to cast. Then they gave us all combat casting and we still jump because 1/2 speed was still too slow. Eliminating the ability to cast spells while jumping would cripple me, but if I had to stay on the ground I wouldn't have near the surviveability that I have with it.

2. Facing on DoT Spells - Making sure that casters always have to face their DoTs would keep them from becoming OP'd. Any spell with facing is a pain in the rear and something that you have to concentrate on to get right. A LOT of firewall's versatility was that it was an omnidirectional target spell. Of course, this assumes you fix the stupid "Out of Range" bug at some point.

The other aspect of balancing casters is Damage Mitigation

1. Warforged Self-Repair - It really becomes God-Mode when you can do all that damage and self-heal. Removing Quicken and the sorc fast cast time from repairs and making it a concentration check like all the other races have with heal scrolls would dial back WF from so far ahead of the others.

2. Having other stat requirements on PrEs/Metamagics - Sorcs/Wizzies with D4 tend to have more hit points at end game than Rogues and even Monks. That's because the basic template is max casting stat/max con.

Whether you do this with metamagics (Quicken requires 13 Dex or something) or you make tiers of PrE's require stats Air Savant1 Min 14 Dex, Air Savant2 Min 16 Dex, Air Savant 3 Min 18 Dex it doesn't matter. The key is that you should give up surviveability for damage.

[crazydamage]

I will take 4 or 5 casters into a shroud, np.



They will tear that up too.

There are plenty of competent casters. There are not enough well informed group leaders, and they think limiting raids to one or two casters is mandatory.

Well the truth is, at least on Khyber you often have trouble finding even ONE caster who is competent enough to cast a DQ1 / OOB or Chains of flame, or into the deep etc.

I can only imagine how hard it would be to find 6 of them.

[crazydamage]

actually they kinda do have the melee equivalent to major mnemonics. heal shard trinkets. rest of eladrin. and more. of course you said melee exclusive. so if you had a bar that was consumed on attacks in general to balance that out you would be happy? gotta dance in the fountains so you can resume autoattacking if you run out before the opponent dies?

have to agree on the "when fully geared" this rampaging becomes an issue on trash everywhere, on those built for it in some content, and irregardless of build in other content. and of course the new crafting arrangement is making increases to spell dc's previously only attainable by extended raiding, coupled with epic farming, available through grinding craft skill, thus increasing the general capacity level there, as it *should* for melee as well.

then again there are quite a few more things that can boost a melee's output compared to a caster in general, so the baseline naked output is of course skewed to a different curve.

then again two classes are divine, two arcane, and all the rest are fully melee capable, if not focused.

i am of course left to ponder why there are no complaints over a geared to the teeth ranger being able to generate massive dps each manyshot cooldown. oh well. i've seen this exact debate and mess in too many games. diablo2 had the balance issues seen here. right down to finding a way to nerf firewall.
actually wow had the same baseline melee vs caster balance problem and still does in an ever evolving flux.
so have pretty much every other mmo with a similar system. it feels, when one rounds the gamut, that actually achieving a balanced system between the two just isn't going to happen in a combat oriented realtime game. not without smarter ai, such that crowd control may be casting an aoe to herd mobs not kill them, and randomizing their stats and resistances and placements. probably not even then going from observations elsewhere.

still feels like the damage spam is the worst direction to go for real balance across classes. instead of upping cooldowns and mucking about with damage and cost, muck about with CAST TIME. 30 seconds to cast aoe instadeath with near guaranteed success? awesome. now we need somebody to distract the mobs they likely cannot kill outright while the cast is being done, and if the mobs are smarter and will try to get the person casting such a thing to interrupt the cast above all else...

hells bells we actually have quests centered around this idea. weapons shipment for example. one npc casting summon warforged titan butt kicker. and it takes a looong time. once there however, that pit fiend can be left to the titan for all the comparative good the players are doing. but this kind of thinking winds up in another repetitive action boredom pit strategy wise, and of course someone else would start bemoaning how the kill count they are enabling one method to grant one player is wrong considering their efforts, or how it is not close enough to literal pnp rules. and then we get into the sorcs as faster casters inherently balancing as well.

bleh, the entire balance work in progress is just ugly and painful no matter how you slice it. it is good, and the results should be good. but man is the process something else on the way there.

edit: funny thing i am noticing, a lot of khyber personnel, and very vocal on lam. crazy, shade, sirgog, myself, i think junts, and more.

Can your ranger solo the entire Startfight of epic chrono in 3 minutes and then go on to eliminate epic devil legions from the market place (40 kills?).

Can your ranger clear out the front room of epic Wizard King.

There is a VAST difference between what a caster can do and what a melee can do.

[Ziindarax]

Casters do not need to be nerfed (any further), and the Savants are in dire need of boosting to match the potency of the Cold Savant (no turbine, you should NOT nerf the Cold Savant, just boost the other 3 savants so that they're equal).

[Saravis]

Why in the world does this matter?

This will only impact the perfectionists, the same people that make groups that have a pathetically specific party makeup.

Me, I don't care about that, I hope for the day when I can accept just about any class into a raid. Where a group consisting mostly of arcanes has just as much chance to bring down Harry as a group of melee. In other words, I'm tired of getting turned down because of the "we got enough of that"

[Aaxeyu]

I hope for the day when I can accept just about any class into a raid. Where a group consisting mostly of arcanes has just as much chance to bring down Harry as a group of melee. In other words, I'm tired of getting turned down because of the "we got enough of that"

This is more true today than it will be when U9 comes. That's why I'm proposing an easy change to stop the madness: Remove the debuff.

[steelblueskies]

Casters do not need to be nerfed (any further), and the Savants are in dire need of boosting to match the potency of the Cold Savant (no turbine, you should NOT nerf the Cold Savant, just boost the other 3 savants so that they're equal).

this sums up a big part of the problem yet again. you said "casters" do not need to be nerfed any further, then proceeded to focus only on the savants which are sorceror only. the balance mess even setting aside anything not arcane casting, stems from this pattern exactly. balance the spells, then build a pre that doesn't blow them out of reason. not make a broken pre then shovel all the spells for everyone to make them fit the pre.

and this would have to apply to all the arcanes' enhancement lines.archmage, pale master, savant.

fix whats shared then balance those independently. we are starting to see some evidence of them looking at doing that now, but it is still chaotically all over the place.

=================================

on another note, crazy, in your response above you missed what i was saying. as usual something will be more powerful. you on a melee and any arcane walk into any quest in u9 naked and who has the better chance of success? the problem stems there, and cannot be fixed without basically turning arcanes into rangers functionally. actually i don't even have a ranger at present. can i conceive of anyone essentially soloing a small volume of trash in echrono with one? yes i can, at least until an abishai air patrol wandered by at the wrong moment.

right now that cold savant can out dps quite a few geared and dressed builds, while naked. and pull parity with others. that right there is broken. but instead of scrapping the flawed savant setup, or radically altering it, the base spells get changed.

say we had a melee weapon with a 10-20 crit range, and x4 mult. now give a class a pre which lets them double the crit range and crit multiplier for any weapon, and it stacks with other such things on gear. that would be guaranteed autocrit with that weapon. it would be a brokenly stupidly powerful arrangement and people would flock to it, in love or disgust, and much attention would be spent. now the devs will modify mobs to balance against this new uber dps the one pre of the one class has with this weapon. this will hurt everyone else without the pre. then we will muck about with the good weapon because upping mobs wasn't enough. now noone is fulltime autocrit because the weapon is gone, but builds using it to try to be competitive on other classes are now hurt further.

this is what they are doing spell wise, at least in appearance.

and all of that not even considering how it hurts melee to balance in this way.

on the positive side, everything's up in the air, and while we are seeing some pretty crazy changes subjectively, i get the feeling that this is more so people have had them in play, seen they didn't really work, and when they take another direction later, they know how bad some of the alternatives really would have been overall.

[Ziindarax]

this sums up a big part of the problem yet again. you said "casters" do not need to be nerfed any further, then proceeded to focus only on the savants which are sorceror only. the balance mess even setting aside anything not arcane casting, stems from this pattern exactly. balance the spells, then build a pre that doesn't blow them out of reason. not make a broken pre then shovel all the spells for everyone to make them fit the pre.

and this would have to apply to all the arcanes' enhancement lines.archmage, pale master, savant.

fix whats shared then balance those independently. we are starting to see some evidence of them looking at doing that now, but it is still chaotically all over the place.

=================================

on another note, crazy, in your response above you missed what i was saying. as usual something will be more powerful. you on a melee and any arcane walk into any quest in u9 naked and who has the better chance of success? the problem stems there, and cannot be fixed without basically turning arcanes into rangers functionally. actually i don't even have a ranger at present. can i conceive of anyone essentially soloing a small volume of trash in echrono with one? yes i can, at least until an abishai air patrol wandered by at the wrong moment.

right now that cold savant can out dps quite a few geared and dressed builds, while naked. and pull parity with others. that right there is broken. but instead of scrapping the flawed savant setup, or radically altering it, the base spells get changed.

say we had a melee weapon with a 10-20 crit range, and x4 mult. now give a class a pre which lets them double the crit range and crit multiplier for any weapon, and it stacks with other such things on gear. that would be guaranteed autocrit with that weapon. it would be a brokenly stupidly powerful arrangement and people would flock to it, in love or disgust, and much attention would be spent. now the devs will modify mobs to balance against this new uber dps the one pre of the one class has with this weapon. this will hurt everyone else without the pre. then we will muck about with the good weapon because upping mobs wasn't enough. now noone is fulltime autocrit because the weapon is gone, but builds using it to try to be competitive on other classes are now hurt further.

this is what they are doing spell wise, at least in appearance.

and all of that not even considering how it hurts melee to balance in this way.

on the positive side, everything's up in the air, and while we are seeing some pretty crazy changes subjectively, i get the feeling that this is more so people have had them in play, seen they didn't really work, and when they take another direction later, they know how bad some of the alternatives really would have been overall.

The OP is calling for casters to be made essentially useless; I simply don't believe they should be nerfed any more. As I understand it, only the cold savant is "over-powered", and that's because the other 3 savants have either been nerfed (I.E. Earth Savant via the Acid spells getting a heavy-handed nerf), or have useless/semi-useless spells (Air savants are sorely lacking in viable DPS spells, for better AoE, I propose a cloud spell that acts as both fog and procs a call lightning effect on those within, and fire spells are not precisely ideal toward late/end-game).

[crazydamage]

The OP is calling for casters to be made essentially useless; I simply don't believe they should be nerfed any more. As I understand it, only the cold savant is "over-powered", and that's because the other 3 savants have either been nerfed (I.E. Earth Savant via the Acid spells getting a heavy-handed nerf), or have useless/semi-useless spells (Air savants are sorely lacking in viable DPS spells, for better AoE, I propose a cloud spell that acts as both fog and procs a call lightning effect on those within, and fire spells are not precisely ideal toward late/end-game).

PRE U9 casters are ALREADY THE MOST POWERFUL CLASS.
Why are we buffing the most powerful class??

Why does the most powerful class need more DPS.

Isn't free SLA's for sustained nuking so gimp casters don't feel "useless" in shroud good enough for you.
Isn't uncoupling FIRE/COLD to allow you to take a 2ndary that bypasses immunity good enough for you.

Why do you need ridiculous curses that add more DPS.

[Saravis]

Snippity Doo Da

I don't know about anyone else, but the first word that comes to mind is No. Please stop trying to blur what defines a wizard and what defines a sorc, wizards are all about DCs and spell versitily, sorcs are all about damage and fast casting.

This topic is about damage and so thus this topic is about Sorcs. If wizards become inefficient compared to sorcs then that does not mean that sorcs need their abilities toned down, it just means that wizards need toned up and perhaps even enemy abilities turned up as well. If a sorc can instakill an enemy just as well as a wiz, but can also out damage one too, that doesn't mean that you should turn down the sorc's damage, it means that you should create a larger gap so the sorc can't instakill as well as the wiz.
Blurring is bad, defining is good.

PRE U9 casters are ALREADY THE MOST POWERFUL CLASS.
Why are we buffing the most powerful class??

Why does the most powerful class need more DPS.

Isn't free SLA's for sustained nuking so gimp casters don't feel "useless" in shroud good enough for you.
Isn't uncoupling FIRE/COLD to allow you to take a 2ndary that bypasses immunity good enough for you.

Why do you need ridiculous curses that add more DPS.

Because this is the route that Turbine HAS been taking, if you don't want Sorcs to have sustainable damage then fine, take away the PMs and AMs sustainable damage as well and its interesting that you mention epics because epic DW is going bye bye, that means PMs are going to be useful in epics, so unless you want to be further outclassed by PMs this needs to happen.

[steelblueskies]

PRE U9 casters are ALREADY THE MOST POWERFUL CLASS.
Why are we buffing the most powerful class??

Why does the most powerful class need more DPS.

Isn't free SLA's for sustained nuking so gimp casters don't feel "useless" in shroud good enough for you.
Isn't uncoupling FIRE/COLD to allow you to take a 2ndary that bypasses immunity good enough for you.

Why do you need ridiculous curses that add more DPS.

example of problem above. casters are not a class. they are a type, and there are two classes that are primary caster types. you like others are again stuck on transliterating sorceror for caster.

another thought. what is the kill order on trash during your epic chronoscope bloodplate fights? do you kill the casters, then armorers, then get on bloodplate and clear trash that remains when he ports away before next wave? i'm guessing this is what you do too. now ask why?

if those enemy casters did as little damage as the melee mobs where would they land in your kill order? if the devils, and armorers did as much damage as the casters where would they be in the kill order?
==================
nerfing earth savant line by nerfing the acid spells. the acid spells are now nerfed for everyone, whether they are a class that can take the earth savant line or not. the numbers a savant can hit that noone else can are just plain too high. trying to level the playing field for the different savants by adding more equivalent elemental spells for each type to use, will still result in acceptance based on content demands. if the content makes it slightly better overall to go fire, or cold, or air because it works in more places, then the other become novelties, and shunned in groupings. an ability to fall back on standard damage ranges in places immunities exist to a chosen savant means that must be viable too, and faced with a choice between maxed out and meh, there will be a favoritism towards one over the other. so essentially the savants as a dps focused pre must boost things but not overwhelmingly so. at which point you find yourself right back where you started, have added flavor and rendered it moot. the acid change needed some work to balance out monsters using the same spells as well, at least in part however. which is the third caster element at work here. your spells are the mobs spells too. lord help us if we walk into a quest and find a sorceror class mob with the savant abilities. would probably happen in epic bargain of blood.

===========================================

I don't know about anyone else, but the first word that comes to mind is No. Please stop trying to blur what defines a wizard and what defines a sorc, wizards are all about DCs and spell versitily, sorcs are all about damage and fast casting.

This topic is about damage and so thus this topic is about Sorcs. If wizards become inefficient compared to sorcs then that does not mean that sorcs need their abilities toned down, it just means that wizards need toned up and perhaps even enemy abilities turned up as well. If a sorc can instakill an enemy just as well as a wiz, but can also out damage one too, that doesn't mean that you should turn down the sorc's damage, it means that you should create a larger gap so the sorc can't instakill as well as the wiz.
Blurring is bad, defining is good.


Because this is the route that Turbine HAS been taking, if you don't want Sorcs to have sustainable damage then fine, take away the PMs and AMs sustainable damage as well and its interesting that you mention epics because epic DW is going bye bye, that means PMs are going to be useful in epics, so unless you want to be further outclassed by PMs this needs to happen.

the ability to output damage is a shared factor. melees, casters, heck even divines in both the negative dps(ie healing) or positive.

to say a wizard should be less efficient then a specialized sorceror, in straight numbers, setting aside casting speed and cooldowns which impact results, is excellent.
trying to arrange for all spell damage and balance to cater to one classes pre, that is bad.

and given the spells are being balanced for monsters, wizards, and sorcerors, you need to expand the box you are considering, not collapse it.

==========================
furthermore to those noting solo scroll farming by arcanes. as confirmed yet again by a dev recently, scaling occurs in all difficulties. high burst damage combined with reduced mob health from scaling, especially if that damage is aoe, was key in that. adding players reduces effectiveness.

[Ziindarax]

PRE U9 casters are ALREADY THE MOST POWERFUL CLASS.
Why are we buffing the most powerful class??

Why does the most powerful class need more DPS.

Isn't free SLA's for sustained nuking so gimp casters don't feel "useless" in shroud good enough for you.
Isn't uncoupling FIRE/COLD to allow you to take a 2ndary that bypasses immunity good enough for you.

Why do you need ridiculous curses that add more DPS.

1) I am not a caster; I always play a melee.

2) too many worthwhile spells have been nerfed (firewall was one thing, but numerous acid/earth spells was a bit too heavy-handed).

3) casters are only the most powerful of the archtypes so long as they do not run out of mana (and most casters might not be comfortable spending a feat slot on Echoes of power so they can cast a couple level 1 or 2 spells once they run out of mana until they reach a rest shrine).

4) In terms of class utility, multi-class non-casters can become quite effective; especially those who take on rogue levels for a reasonable amount of UMD. With a high enough UMD, a melee class can, in a sense, become more dangerous than a caster because their magic is only limited by the number of scrolls they can carry/afford, and they can cast both Divine AND Arcane spells. Don't play the "Casters are too powerful" card. Casters have an obvious strength, but they also have obvious weaknesses as well.

5) Casters are SUPPOSED to be among the most powerful classes in D&D; refer to the Linear warrior, Quadratic Wizard. At epic level, casters are supposed to be nearly as powerful as a God.

All that said, some of the nerfed spells should be de-nerfed, and casters should be left alone once everything has been balanced to a degree that all savants and wizard Pre's are equally desirable.

[sirgog]

I will take 4 or 5 casters into a shroud, np.



They will tear that up too.

There are plenty of competent casters. There are not enough well informed group leaders, and they think limiting raids to one or two casters is mandatory.

Nah, it's mostly that, like rogues, poorly played casters are terrible against purple nameds.

The number of people I see on level 20 casters with 2pc Glacial Assault set (non-trivial to get) and no Telvi's Sash (trivial to get and outclasses the GA set; unless you want the non-set bonuses of the items) is staggering.

Or you find people that unload Reflex save-for-half spells on Harry (27 Reflex Save) without attempting to Exhaust him first (to get his saves down so that your spells land ~60% of the time rather than ~45%; the defensive benefits of exhausting him are a bonus).

Or worst of all, people playing 20th level casters that use 20% of their SP on the Shroud part 4 trash, then do absolutely nothing while Harry is down and finish that part with 80% SP.



Those people give casters a bad name in raids; just like rogues that sit in the back row and 'plink plink' away with a repeater, or rogues with 260hp and no Fortification.

[crazydamage]

1) I am not a caster; I always play a melee.

2) too many worthwhile spells have been nerfed (firewall was one thing, but numerous acid/earth spells was a bit too heavy-handed).

3) casters are only the most powerful of the archtypes so long as they do not run out of mana (and most casters might not be comfortable spending a feat slot on Echoes of power so they can cast a couple level 1 or 2 spells once they run out of mana until they reach a rest shrine).

4) In terms of class utility, multi-class non-casters can become quite effective; especially those who take on rogue levels for a reasonable amount of UMD. With a high enough UMD, a melee class can, in a sense, become more dangerous than a caster because their magic is only limited by the number of scrolls they can carry/afford, and they can cast both Divine AND Arcane spells. Don't play the "Casters are too powerful" card. Casters have an obvious strength, but they also have obvious weaknesses as well.

5) Casters are SUPPOSED to be among the most powerful classes in D&D; refer to the Linear warrior, Quadratic Wizard. At epic level, casters are supposed to be nearly as powerful as a God.

All that said, some of the nerfed spells should be de-nerfed, and casters should be left alone once everything has been balanced to a degree that all savants and wizard Pre's are equally desirable.

So you've never even played a caster and yet you're trying to argue with me.

I have a capped bard, capped wizard, capped fvs, capped fighter.
I have run every single epic quest in the game multiple times.

[crazydamage]

I don't know about anyone else, but the first word that comes to mind is No. Please stop trying to blur what defines a wizard and what defines a sorc, wizards are all about DCs and spell versitily, sorcs are all about damage and fast casting.

This topic is about damage and so thus this topic is about Sorcs. If wizards become inefficient compared to sorcs then that does not mean that sorcs need their abilities toned down, it just means that wizards need toned up and perhaps even enemy abilities turned up as well. If a sorc can instakill an enemy just as well as a wiz, but can also out damage one too, that doesn't mean that you should turn down the sorc's damage, it means that you should create a larger gap so the sorc can't instakill as well as the wiz.
Blurring is bad, defining is good.


Because this is the route that Turbine HAS been taking, if you don't want Sorcs to have sustainable damage then fine, take away the PMs and AMs sustainable damage as well and its interesting that you mention epics because epic DW is going bye bye, that means PMs are going to be useful in epics, so unless you want to be further outclassed by PMs this needs to happen.

How about YOU stop trying to pigeon hole sorcs or wizards into what you think they can do.
There are plenty of wizards that nuke just fine on khyber
And a few sorcs that have excellent DCs and versatility with UMD.

Just because you dont know how to play a high lvl epic caster, dont try to impose your standards on other people

[Astraghal]

aside from the clear abuse. you failed to address that enemy casters are casters too. in calling for reduced damage you are inherently asking for less damage output from the enemies you face as well.

see note about kill order in epic bloodplate. think about why. now please provide us with a reason that enemy casters should be less of a threat, expanded to justify why we should be less of a threat. it all has to work together because that is how this game is built and has been. if you want that fundamental item to change then you better have one wonderful plan laid out.

You can't compare mob AI to players.

If mobs had halfway decent AI they could make current content orders of magnitude more difficult.

The reason we target casters first is because they can do massive spike damage and temporariliy immobilise or incapacitate us.