Melee DPS is dead:long live casters!

[Emili]

Never once saw someone healing the barb in the video.

IF the barb would have used a weapon with frost burst how much more damage would have been added? He crit often so there would be 1d6 dmg each hit plus depending on the weapon up to 4d6 on the crits.

That barb is tweaked out near completely ... is running at high spurt dressed in the highest DPS gear and totting an eSoS... For a thf on that mob no weapon does more damage:

It's a +10 weapon and 5d6 + 10 Slash, Adamantine, Magic 18-20 / x3 <- (with IC slash is 15-20 which be why you see so many crits) plus two epic slots for whatever he want in them...

No cold bursting weapon currently in game is going to compare to the DPS of the eSoS straight up.

It can be higher in bursts with a caster that knows how to play their class. If they burn through all those SP's in the first 4 minutes of the quest and the shrine is 10 minutes away, they are now useless or having to spend real money to do more than pick their nose.

If there are shrines ahead they're usually within three or four minutes, five minutes tops. well maybe epic Chains? BUT... there are far better ways to replenish SP then spending money. You use a twisted tailisman, a bobble, an eSS, torc and con op and yes in game mana pot drops... the list is long. Experienced casters know thier game. D'ya know I have some guildies claim they've over 500 mana pots? Can'ts imagine why?

When we examine both videos however ... the barb is being healed and buffed by the bard... initial buffing the bard farther down in mana to start than the arcane's intial buffing. In fact a good potion of mana on both videos ... was the buffing. The bard doubly-dipped because he had to provide not just for the barb but also himself. Simple a non-blue bar in group costs you blue-bar.

Then we examine healing. The bard also scroll healed the barb... and inter-mixed cures draining the bards SP pool to a couple 100sp left? Least what looks like. Thus the cost for killing that mob via a Barb actually was far more than the costs involved for the arcane to kill it when I think about this. It's 'bout 1kpp in otc goods (artificial mana) to actual heal the barb ... the arcane spent zero pp and no sp on healing.

It is silly thinking the barb's DPS costs NO mana in fact being he costs commodities (scrolls) - bought mana - too.

It's a pure fact ... that both videos were not about proving anything beyond the facts that arcane exceed melee in DPS .... the caster was all out and the melee was all out. What is not pointed out is sp per dead mob - Casters do everything quicker and to be honest more efficient... What's more the arcane can easily utilize sp recharging items to continue onward to the shrine ... the bard may do so also but is actually more taxed because he must - provide for two people, he and the barb. He has to turn his Blue-bar and scrolls into dead mob and is using a melee to accomplish this.

NOW... if the bard were smart he would have grouped with the arcane instead of the barb and would be a SS rather than a chanter... the bard could cast some intial buffs allowing the caster to start closer to full ... the caster takes down the mob and has a little more mana to spare at the end of the fight and the bard may vigor him some to help replenish SP back quicker... the two go on and utilize even far less resources throughout the quest. The barb in his picture dies because the bard is not there, releases and sits out the game in Amrath his bind point.

[McFlay]

Haha so isn't that video actually showing a single arcane out performing 2 characters? I'd like to see it done again with the bard adding whatever dps it could, which probably wouldn't be much, and you'd still get people saying casters aren't op as the game is now.

[Emili]

Haha so isn't that video actually showing a single arcane out performing 2 characters? I'd like to see it done again with the bard adding whatever dps it could, which probably wouldn't be much, and you'd still get people saying casters aren't op as the game is now.

Yes technically it is comparing two people vs one. It's just a fact arcane/divine magic run the quest ... even when we speak of all melee parties with no blue-bars it's clickies, UMD, a heal scroll, SF pot, csw pot, etc... that is all predefined sp on pixel item, paper or in a bottle (all blue bar subs).

If the bard is a chanter... average I'd say would shave off maybe half a minute to 40 seconds of time and at the very most I'd say he'd shave 1/3rd the time off with the best of conditions? Remember now the bard is meleeing plus healing for two and has to break swinging for such - spells and weapon/scroll swaps.

YET! not one here really brought out true real power of the arcane/divine classes...

Those who been playing the game since dawn of time should know, or possibly never had thought about it before? However... over the years when we think of builds... batman, ravager, exploiter, pure kensei, monster, ... Flavour of the mod as we'd tell, If ya may note all fly off style in what they bring and often abandoned, shelved ... rerolled to the state of the new mod/update ... what's funny is arcane/divine builds rarely need much changing sure maybe a few feats here, a few enhancements there and move along. From day one ... I tell casual and new players who joined the guild in past - when they ask what's a good first character, ya can't go wrong with an arcane or divine (always useful always needed).

[Zerkul]

Few numbers (maths that i've done so far on my countless excels spreadsheets*):

• HOrc THF ESos Barbarian DPS in sneak attack, autocleave mode (5min action boosts): ~680ish;
• HElf Kensai TWF Khopesh DPS in sneak attack, combined action boosts (5min action boosts): ~700ish;
• Human Rogue-Assasin TWF Khopesh DPS in sneak attack, combined action boosts & rogue pastlife (3,5min action boosts): ~850ish;
• Ryumajin's Build (cold savant cold/force spec) max burst rotation with cold dot and xacosian VS neutral target without discount clikies/recover mana clikies (1min fight): ~1300ish.

Longer fights would require ANY Sorcerer to dump DPS output for lower profile spell rotations to gain longer mana durations: that's inevitable. This is called balance: to achieve higher dps you need to nuke out all mana and vice versa. Yet I think a slight buff to melee DPS wouldn't damage the DPS Classes balance, too much buff to it would instead.

Sorcerer's Main purpose is to be the "Arcane Cannon" and nuking mana has it's obvious limit in the mana bar (or resources if you want to spend on pots): almost limitless potential if limitless resources, but who has limitless mana pots? Anyway don't worry about CASTER dps because Wizards and Fvs dps is far behind Sorcerers ones: a competent barbarian/Kensai/rogue is much better at it than a regular double dot wiz or a dot Fvs, and this is a fact. Don't forget that Wizards and Fvs comes in with the very good selfhealing abilities, Sorcerers don't unless they are WF: the "Arcane Cannon" is usually a very vulnerable character and this balance out even more his high DPS potential: barbarians, kensais, fvs, pale masters are all but frail and dead characters you know, don't contribute to DPS at all... surf lord of blades on ddo wiki or youtube for more information on this.

EDIT: *Things change if you consider non-sneakattack DPS (after the first 5mins BarbDPS>KensaiDPS in sneak attack... without sneak attack barbarian DPS is slightly higher under certain circumstances). All these numbers for melees do consider bard song for damage and 5% doublestrike one. For TWF i used EBloodstone+Redarmor+Alchemical triple air offhand+mainhandlLit2 khopesh + abishai set with echarged. For Barbarian i considered esos, abishai+eclaw, echain and autocleave.

[McFlay]

I think I missed where balance comes into play with that analysis. After you run through a level full of trash in which casters are infinitely more useful with their superior abilities to self heal/cc/insta kill/herd groups and kite through aoe/etc, balance comes in to play that when you get to a boss they only do twice the dps of a tottally dps geared melee if they feel like mana dumping but can't sustain it endlessly?

So if you had some clickies/restore items on a caster and played a little more conservatively with your sp, and compared to some other melee builds that aren't at the top of the dps chain, you'd find the casters outperform them so bad its not even funny. Like paladins for example, whats the point of playing a paladin when clerics/fvs do everything better and now just lay out dots on bosses and can do sustained dps? Only point of paladins now is they get a cool past life feat. You can waste 22 ap speccing into smite, dump all your smites, which are a limited resource, on a single target, and your lucky if all combined and half of them crit they add a couple thousand damage, then you spend the rest of the fight as a gimped melee with cure serious wounds.

Dots are a failed experiment, turbine should just remove them.

[FengXian]

The "Glass Cannon" definition is kinda missing the "Glass" part right now.

And store pots are NOT the only way to get unlimited mana. There are plenty of threads about this, but we still occasionally get the same arguments. The DPS/survivability proportion is not met right now in game.

I think we're waiting on the enhancements' update to restore balance, and there's still a chance it doesn't. Meanwhile we can enjoy up to 6 months of unbalanced classes^^

[grodon9999]

Dots are a failed experiment, turbine should just remove them.

/signed

[Emili]

The "Glass Cannon" definition is kinda missing the "Glass" part right now.

And store pots are NOT the only way to get unlimited mana. There are plenty of threads about this, but we still occasionally get the same arguments. The DPS/survivability proportion is not met right now in game.

I think we're waiting on the enhancements' update to restore balance, and there's still a chance it doesn't. Meanwhile we can enjoy up to 6 months of unbalanced classes^^

Whatever a "cannon" may be any competent player avoids building them out of "glass" and are more often then very capable of doing things like http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php...95#post4302295.

There are reasons more arcane/divine post solos than other classes do, Divine/arcane do so more commonly due it's far easily more attainable on those classes. When I see a divine/arcane manage thier mana like such I think cool, When I do see a melee do the same it turns my head and even moreso shall it be a pure melee. (Yes melee are also actually managing mana when they're alone).

There are reasons the very knowledgeable arcane/divine class often usually the last class standing before a quick wipe - and it does not have to do with melee being in "the thick" although the melee are. The proportions for survivability/risks are not the same ... an experienced player's arcane/divine are just as survivable as their melee are - and most often more.

TO Quote CrankVulcan: "It didn't take too long due to my rate of SP regen compared to DPS output."

The red bar race... the game is simple and I've told this to the many I've met along the way while teaching them about raids. Every difficult raid/quest is a "bar race" in the end it's the boss' red bar vs my blue bar (shall I be clericing behind a group of melee)... as long as his red bar depletes quicker than my blue bar we win very easily... and shall my blue bar run out then the situation becomes far less in our favour. The risk for failure increases greatly. (To put another way failure is lack of DPS per Blue Bar SP being used).

I stated earlier magic runs this game... that is a fact. Magic is not only dps it is survival... it is dps (Dots to rages), skills (GH to recitation), Damage reductions/ac (Blur, displacement, stoneskin, resists. protections) ... even boat buffs, clickies, potions and scrolls are predefined magic (those are mana) while blue bar it's generic form and may be any of those things...

[Alex301]

Dots are a failed experiment, turbine should just remove them.

If they remove dots then casters won't have any meaningful sustainable damage output. Without that classes such as the sorcerers just have lower average dps than a melee and lower DCs than a wizard, leaving people with no real reason to run one.

[FengXian]

Whatever a "cannon" may be any competent player avoids building them out of "glass" and are more often then very capable of doing things like http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php...95#post4302295.

We're making the same point. "Glass Cannon" is nothing about player skills, it exactly means that high dps should be balanced out by (low) survivability. DPS vs Survivability vs Utility if you prefer.

Now a melee can have one of those, a good melee will have two maybe (even then, top dps and good survivability often means you're living on SF pots and they're not exactly "free"), while many casters can have all 3 of those pretty easily.

Nor do I think removing DoTs is the solution. Give them an evocation based save for half damage, prevent infinite mana syndrome by limiting shield usage by caster (DR), still sounds like the best option.

[Zerkul]

Whatever a "cannon" may be any competent player avoids building them out of "glass" and are more often then very capable of doing things like http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php...95#post4302295.

That's a generic caster build with fairly low DPS for his own level.

We're making the same point. "Glass Cannon" is nothing about player skills, it exactly means that high dps should be balanced out by (low) survivability. DPS vs Survivability vs Utility if you prefer.

Exactely Juzam, you that played with me, you know that a Sorcerer to achieve high nuking abilities and good crowd control ones has to suffer his own "fleshy" vulnerability. Ryumajin as every other "fleshy" sorcerer, is vulnerable. If you talking about the other caster classes (pale master for example) they don't have that high DPS they just have a decent DPS that's all.

The point is that You guys are talking about CASTERS as if CASTERS were all the casters classes at same time: there are neat differences between them. Each one can do something that another cannot do or do properly. A caster can wield DPS, Utility and Survivability but they cannot have high grade of all those. Usually Pale Masters, FVS, Clerics have high Utility/Survivability but their DPS is not high, not comparable with the one of the standard melees because it's much lower.

(Wizards =/= Sorcerers =/= Clerics =/= Favored Souls)

but

(Arcane/Glass Cannon = Sorcerer)

Sorcerers are "Glass" but Wizards/FVS/Clerics are not. What break these classes is not their DPS potential, because just the sorcerers one is high, but the fact that they can be extremely "tough".

[FengXian]

I can agree on fleshie sorcerers, not very keen on them but I did some research since I considered a life as one. You have to scroll your heals, and while you can reach great dps and decent (necro/enchantment?) dc it does require some past lives (for spell pen at least). It looks to me like they do give up SOME survivability for dps/cc.

But adding evocation dc-based saves to dots and limiting shields shouldn't affect fleshie sorcs that much. You're already taking at least one evocation focus, throw in some items and your dots will be landing for full damage often enough. Without a shield you won't be able to rec mana that easily (Torc/con opp still working as usual, just no turtling up to fill your bar on purpose, random procs when hit, that is) but let's face it, mana is virtually unlimited atm.

Don't you feel like a caster should be giving up a good chunk of casting ability in order to tank raid bosses, for example? Many can do it with very, very little sacrifice.

Some people are just screaming for nerf, I'll give you that, but many of us are reasonably asking for more specialization. Even bringing casters to have ONE thing they shine at plus ONE they're good at would be a step forward. My first life PM I rolled just to farm chrono was way too good and easy to play, considered I'm not an expert in playing casters, and I was doing great on him. Not just in chrono, also in eadq1/2, evon6, tod etc...never tried lob on him but I hear casters are pretty good in there too.

I see nothing bad in more specialization. I understand some people will prefer having their jacks-of-all-trades toons, but let's face it, there's basically nothing a melee does that a caster can't do, while there are plenty of things casters do that melees will never be able to do. I recall someone arguing that melees could CC in epics too.
Sure, my monk can stun every 6 secs, but can you really compare that to mass hold?
I can drink a SF pot and get -10 to all stats (also spending 200ish pp), how is that even close to a quickened reconstruct? Or to death aura?

[McFlay]

If they remove dots then casters won't have any meaningful sustainable damage output. Without that classes such as the sorcerers just have lower average dps than a melee and lower DCs than a wizard, leaving people with no real reason to run one.

If the extra 1k mana is so trivial its not even worth mentioning that alone speaks volumes about the state of "limited" resources in the game, and also about the crappy difficulty scaling which is generally just inflate hp where a caster dps'ing a trash mob is a total waste vs insta killing.

Aside from that, wouldn't a better solution have been to use their new prestiges to carve their niche as casters vs what wizards do, instead of giving all casters ridiculous new dots that can let them do sustained dps like a melee, even though they already perform every other function better?

Last tr I did, I ran quite a few of my mid level quests with someone playing a savant, and quite frankly when you run through a whole level and every time you come across a few mobs see an aoe appear around them and mess them up pretty bad, if not outright kill them rather quickly, why on earth should that same build be able to outperform the melee on a single target when you get to a boss? Where's the balance there?

Dots in this game make about as much sense as giving melees throwable aoe weapons that proc a lightning strike on everything in its aoe range.

[Zerkul]

If the extra 1k mana is so trivial its not even worth mentioning that alone speaks volumes about the state of "limited" resources in the game, and also about the crappy difficulty scaling which is generally just inflate hp where a caster dps'ing a trash mob is a total waste vs insta killing.

Aside from that, wouldn't a better solution have been to use their new prestiges to carve their niche as casters vs what wizards do, instead of giving all casters ridiculous new dots that can let them do sustained dps like a melee, even though they already perform every other function better?

Last tr I did, I ran quite a few of my mid level quests with someone playing a savant, and quite frankly when you run through a whole level and every time you come across a few mobs see an aoe appear around them and mess them up pretty bad, if not outright kill them rather quickly, why on earth should that same build be able to outperform the melee on a single target when you get to a boss? Where's the balance there?

Dots in this game make about as much sense as giving melees throwable aoe weapons that proc a lightning strike on everything in its aoe range.

I usually use that 1k extra mana you talk about debuffing mobs before landing any kind of instant kill or crowd control... that gives me the opportunity to use those spells without having the star-high DCs a wizard have. It's less efficient mana-wise and often spells don't land that much, but it's needed to make a sorcerer do something else more than simple DPS.

Plus melees already have meanings of doing AOE damage, it's just that people don't build for it because everyone wants to focus on single mob beating. Barbarians are a classic example: glancing blows, cleaves have a nice AOE damage output. You know a barbarian that hits for 100 damage on an attack is doing 60 damage around him and a cleave attack does both on aoe each time you push it.

Sure it's true, casters in general are a step ahead on some things than a melee can but there is another sad truth: melees are more gear intensive than casters are. A melee depends on his weaponry/gear to efficiently run quests and his power level scales more with gear than level itself; as counter a caster power level scales much more with his level than with the gear he posses: as result of this high level casters are usually more viable/useful than high level melees.

[Litestrider]

This doesn't have direct bearing on the problem since DDO is obviously capable of making vast strides away from PnP, but this entire discussion really reminds me of the discussions about 3.5e balance (if you didn't know, its nickname was "caster edition", for most of the reasons you've mentioned in this thread about DDO). The magic reliance of 3e basically led to 4e making every class a "caster", you just replaced "magic" with swordsmanship, tactics, leadership, or whatever the class was dependent on.

For DDO, if they want to make melees a reliable backbone for a party, they're probably going to have to either release a ton of utility items and weapons for melees to use, or introduce a lot more abilities for them. The possibilities are out there, for example, the paladin could get an ability to regenerate SP and boost healing efficiency while meleeing, effectively making them a front-line healer and an alternative for a cleric/fvs/ton of clickies. The rogue could get a save or die poison, the barbarian can get a boost that temporarily makes their cleaves extremely potent. It would mostly be replacing blue bars with use-per-day abilities and new mechanics.

The problem is, both solutions, new abilities and new equipment, while certainly within the scope of the engine, would require a ton of work.

Again, this dilemma is a direct parallel to PnP, the pure melee was at the DMs mercy as to whether he was useful or not, because he got a few mildly effective feats and little more, and thus relied heavily on magic items to round him out and give him utility. The casters on the other hand relied on the DM to ensure they didn't get so powerful the game became broken, with scrying spells, detect lies and evil, teleports, illusions and other things, a campaign that isn't carefully constructed could be (and very often was, there are lots of hilarious stories out there) utterly decimated by a clever caster.

As a disclaimer let me mention that I'm by no means experienced at DDO, and made this post under the assumption that melees are in fact underpowered, yet I make no judgement on the matter because I honestly don't know well enough at this point. I just thought it would be worthwhile to bring up the very real and present parallels between DDO and D&D 3.5e, hopefully some study of that problem and its resolution, both by individual DMs and by 4e, will provide some additional light and ideas on the subject.

[Alex301]

If the extra 1k mana is so trivial its not even worth mentioning that alone speaks volumes about the state of "limited" resources in the game, and also about the crappy difficulty scaling which is generally just inflate hp where a caster dps'ing a trash mob is a total waste vs insta killing.

Aside from that, wouldn't a better solution have been to use their new prestiges to carve their niche as casters vs what wizards do, instead of giving all casters ridiculous new dots that can let them do sustained dps like a melee, even though they already perform every other function better?

Last tr I did, I ran quite a few of my mid level quests with someone playing a savant, and quite frankly when you run through a whole level and every time you come across a few mobs see an aoe appear around them and mess them up pretty bad, if not outright kill them rather quickly, why on earth should that same build be able to outperform the melee on a single target when you get to a boss? Where's the balance there?

Dots in this game make about as much sense as giving melees throwable aoe weapons that proc a lightning strike on everything in its aoe range.

The primary role of a sorcerer is to do damage. In many quests/raids people don't care about how quickly you can deal with the trash - hence the name - but how much you contribute to taking down the boss. If you take away a sorcerer's sustained damage output then you leave them where they were before dots and the savant prestige; they were a class that didn't really have a role as unsustainable, burst dps just wasn't very useful. Melee did the damage and wizards buffed and CCed everything.

Due to the way caster DPS and melee DPS differs i'm not sure you can really find a balance between the two. Casters should achieve higher dps imo because they rely on a limited resource. However, either during a quest a caster can maintain their higher dps, therefore making melee inferior, or they can't, making casters inferior.

Until high burst dps is a valid reason to accept someone into a group, i think dps casters and dps melee are always going to have this imbalance.

[justagame]

I think I missed where balance comes into play with that analysis. After you run through a level full of trash in which casters are infinitely more useful with their superior abilities to self heal/cc/insta kill/herd groups and kite through aoe/etc, balance comes in to play that when you get to a boss they only do twice the dps of a tottally dps geared melee if they feel like mana dumping but can't sustain it endlessly?

So if you had some clickies/restore items on a caster and played a little more conservatively with your sp, and compared to some other melee builds that aren't at the top of the dps chain, you'd find the casters outperform them so bad its not even funny. Like paladins for example, whats the point of playing a paladin when clerics/fvs do everything better and now just lay out dots on bosses and can do sustained dps? Only point of paladins now is they get a cool past life feat. You can waste 22 ap speccing into smite, dump all your smites, which are a limited resource, on a single target, and your lucky if all combined and half of them crit they add a couple thousand damage, then you spend the rest of the fight as a gimped melee with cure serious wounds.

Dots are a failed experiment, turbine should just remove them.

I love how you state this as fact. For many many people, Dots breathed new life into the game. Personally, I was about to hang em up, convinced that the divine engdame was one of "hey there, it's nice that you had yout fun with your little toy spells levelling up, but now that it's boss time, or endgame time, just heal, because all that other stuff is a waste of mana. Harm on a boss? Laughable. Unless you were a melee (and thus sacrificed your offensive casting ability), you had NOTHING of consequence you could do to a boss, or stationary single target with high HP, except just stand there and heal.

Certain melee abilities (yes, paladins among them), and melee defenses in particular, have NOT scaled appropriately at endgame. That is a real problem. The caster envy around here (and especially the divine caster envy) that causes people to call for nerfs left and right, and state their opinion of the problem as fact, is starting to disgust me. Seriously, this has gotten so far out of hand it's ridiculous. Everything from dots, to items, to instakills, to heals -- heals! We have people that are shocked -- shocked, that having healing abilities actually improves solo survivability, and <gasp> that is just so unfair, that it needs to be nerfed at once (along with everything else about those classes). All in the name of "balance".

I say this as someone with as many capped melees as casters. The caster experience before the spell revamp was sorely lacking, especially with bosses, and especially at endgame. There needs to be a melee pass. But go on, keep calling for caster nerfs. Especially, make sure those divine casters get put back in their place. The twisted part of me wishes you all get what you're asking for, and I happily leave the game smiling while looking at lfms of 10 barbs who wonder why there aren't any takers to heal their uber selves. (And even then, asking to remedy the problem with a special barbarian version of lay-on-hands, only one that regenerates.) But then again, I like the game enough not to actually wish for that

[McFlay]

I usually use that 1k extra mana you talk about debuffing mobs before landing any kind of instant kill or crowd control... that gives me the opportunity to use those spells without having the star-high DCs a wizard have. It's less efficient mana-wise and often spells don't land that much, but it's needed to make a sorcerer do something else more than simple DPS.

Plus melees already have meanings of doing AOE damage, it's just that people don't build for it because everyone wants to focus on single mob beating. Barbarians are a classic example: glancing blows, cleaves have a nice AOE damage output. You know a barbarian that hits for 100 damage on an attack is doing 60 damage around him and a cleave attack does both on aoe each time you push it.

Sure it's true, casters in general are a step ahead on some things than a melee can but there is another sad truth: melees are more gear intensive than casters are. A melee depends on his weaponry/gear to efficiently run quests and his power level scales more with gear than level itself; as counter a caster power level scales much more with his level than with the gear he posses: as result of this high level casters are usually more viable/useful than high level melees.

If you wanted wiz DCs and to play cc/isntant killer, you could have just, you know, played a wizard? If you wanna go that route, well then my paladin doesn't stun like my monk, crit like my barb, or run as fast as either of the two. He doesn't get as many feats as my fighter or can't do as much sneak attack damage as my rogue. He's so gimp he can't even heal like my fvs or cleric does. Guess paladins are in for some huge buffs.

Sure melees can do some aoe with cleave, but the reason most people build single target focused vs aoe on a melee is becuase the caster aoe's are so far ahead in usefulness, your better off just making a caster for aoe, which sadly you are for single target dpsing now as well. Why would you want to herd a group together to cleave them and more then likely need a healer watching your back when you could just be a self healer and kite them endlessly through bb/fw/etc? And really, casters being better at aoe, like that always have been on ddo and in dnd, isn't that big of an issue...

Apparently breaking the game enough with sp regen items that you can get infinite sp with in a lot of the content and such readily available sp pots that 1k extra mana is trivial, then trying to remedy it with ridiculously op dots that push casters even further ahead of melees then they already were because sorcs need a boost in comparison to wizzies is a step in the right direction for ddo.

That whole argument aside, I see even less justification for a divine dot. If you want to dps raid bosses on a divine, cool, splash a few monk or fighter levels and go to town. Heck its not like you even really need that splash with the right build and gear.

Now all that ranting aside, I've still yet to see a high level caster throw on a weapon, cast tensers on themselves, and run in to help with dps when they get low on mana on a boss. The means for contributing dps after you mana dump for a bunch of fast damage was already there, nobody ever used it, so what the heck, lets just give them all OP dots.

[FengXian]

All of this is getting embarassing.

I think Ryumajin has a point, with that extra 1k sp he has the cc/insta-kills of a wizzie (sorta), moar DPS, less self healing...so roughly on par with a wizard as a fleshie sorc. That is ok with me, this is not about sorcs vs wizzies after all.

On the other hand, it's funny how some will still defend the "casters are ok" position. There are a gazillion threads about this and almost in every one of them there is proof that things are not ok. It's also already been said that enhancing melees to current casters' power level is NOT a solution. The best solution is a slight buff + a slight nerf.

/sarcasm on

Oh and as a side note...yes, all of us who have been asking for a rebalancing of casters play ONLY BARBS. I can't stress this enough, we are all barbs, we will never play anything other that a barb, let alone a caster. In fact, while we envy their allmighty powers, we want those to be added to barbs instead because we can't roll a caster and take advantage of their awesomeness.
And when DoTs will have saves for half damage, and pure-ish casters will be limited in shield usage, we'll end up with LFM's full of worthless melees and the game will die.

/sarcasm off

[Emili]

That's a generic caster build with fairly low DPS for his own level.

Why do you think I selected it as a recent example?