Wizard archmage Enchantments no longer able to pick a minor second school for slas.

[EllisDee37]

EP does change this. You can now be an archmage/palemaseter.

You almost have to; I'm not even sure the archmage tree has 80 points to spend.

My problem with wizards in the EP isn't a problem for me, but a problem in general. When I sat down to plan out my wizard's enhancements I jotted down every single enhancement from both trees I might want. When I was done, I had a grand total of 86 AP in the list. Cutting 6 AP was a breeze; I essentially ended up with everything I wanted.

The problem is this: I was never interested in other types of wizards, but now (from my perspective) other types of wizards no longer exist. No more "which elements should I choose?" variety, no more "should I be a lich or maybe specialize in a school or 3 and spam SLAs?" decision, no more decision of almost any kind. The only choice now is "should I use forms or be a WF?" Because every archmage can easily afford undead forms now.

So while the "one wizard to rule them all" is all well and good for a guy like me who only wants one wizard, we sure have lost a lot of build variety when it comes to wizard.

For comparison, my ranger, paladin, cleric and fighter all had well over 100 AP in the initial list of everything I might want. Most were over 120. Paring down those lists to 80 hurt (in a good way) and left me feeling like I could roll up a second version of the class that had a totally different flavor.

[danotmano1998]

Arcane Supremacy:
Your offensive spells gain a 10% chance to trigger arcane supremacy.

Arcane supremacy: +25% Spell Critical Chance, +100% Spell Critical Damage. 12 Second Duration. This effect may trigger only once every 90 seconds.

Is it just me, or are all of these new proc happy additions to the game annoying to everyone else too?
So out of 90 seconds, 12 of those are going to crit more, and harder. Yay.
Nothing I can plan on, or use in a pinch, just a random chance for a couple of spells to hit harder once in a while.

Give us a clickie for this at least, so we can trigger it when we need to. THEN it would be a worthwhile addition, IMO.
As it stands, (and all the other little random proc boosts), these are not all that good of a choice.

[Ironclans_evil_twin]

Is it just me, or are all of these new proc happy additions to the game annoying to everyone else too?
So out of 90 seconds, 12 of those are going to crit more, and harder. Yay.
Nothing I can plan on, or use in a pinch, just a random chance for a couple of spells to hit harder once in a while.

Give us a clickie for this at least, so we can trigger it when we need to. THEN it would be a worthwhile addition, IMO.
As it stands, (and all the other little random proc boosts), these are not all that good of a choice.

Don't you have enough cooldowns to stare at?

I hate long cool downs, I hate trifling 12 seconds of fun followed by 90 seconds of meh, and I hate hate hate more clickies in a game that is lousy with clickies... So your idea turns a tolerable but lame automatic ability that is barely worth paying attention to and is not going to be picked by almost any arcane (because it locks out tier 5 in other PrE's right?) into a ability that is lame and trifling, has a long cool down, that I also have to click on (and thus would almost certainly forget to do so when things get hectic with such a long cool down that I am all "OH YEAH I should have clicked that) that almost no one is going to take because it locks out tier 5 in other PrE's

[Ironclans_evil_twin]

Take a look at the Archmage Tier 5 ability "Arcane Supremacy".
It's the bees' knees.

Take a look at the Archmage Tier 5 ability "Arcane Supremacy".
It's the bees' knees.

I hate to sound snippy but 90 seconds of no fun for every 12 seconds of fun, is lame, and not the bees knees, unfortunately DDO Developers don't actively play the game in a realistic real world setting. so they don't know how unfun it is spending more time staring at cooldowns on hot bars than the on screen action. Granted this effect can be ignored because you don't need to activate it.

Do this experiment Feather: take Cleave, Greater cleave, Lay waste and Momentum swing, and try to use them with NO "button mashing" (hitting the same buttons over and over in random order)... Time how much your eyes are focused on the 4 hot bar icons versus how much you're actually seeing the action on screen.

I dare every DDO Dev to do this and tell me the cool down management simulation mini-game is FUN.

When players say they like "active combat" you guys seem to have interpreted that as "cooldowns and bursts and boosts, vorpal stackings (i.e. never actually stacking), incrementing counters and such" what we actually mean is: I can dodge a fireball, they mean the skill ceiling (to borrow a FPS/MOBA term) is higher than other MMO's that use point and click movement.

When the pass preview first came out there was a thread where an amazingly unanimous cross section of usually very disagreeable forum goers all said: stop with the long cool down short durations, the clickie abilities, the counters/vorpal stacking.

This game needs more passive abilities or it needs to put cooldowns into an "action pool" like SP or Ki so we can use abilities without tunnel visioning on hotbars, but still be limited.

[EllisDee37]

Arcane Supremacy is essentially for dotting raid bosses. Let's do some quickie math to get a rough idea what it adds. Ballpark assumptions to make the math super quick:

Arcane Supremacy stats (modified for simpler math)
100% proc chance every 90 seconds for 12 seconds (instead of 10%)
+33% chance to crit (instead of 25%)
+100% crit damage (actual value)

Caster stats
33% base chance to crit
+100% base crit damage

Dot stats
1 tick every 2 seconds @ 100% damage

90 seconds without Arcane Supremacy
45 procs, 15 of which crit (30 @ 100%, 15 @ 200%)
Total damage: 6000% of base

90 seconds with Arcane Supremacy
45 total procs, 6 of which occur during arcane supremacy, 39 without
39 normal procs, 13 of which crit (26 @ 100%, 13 @ 200%)
6 supremacy procs, 4 of which crit (2 @ 100%, 4 @ 300%)
Total damage: 6600% of base

6600-6000=600, 600/6000=10%

Arcane Supremacy adds ~10% damage. That's not bad, certainly, but I'm not moved to lock out the PM tier 5s for it. For anything other than raid boss fights, though, it's essentially random noise you can't count on and thus can ignore.

[danotmano1998]

Don't you have enough cooldowns to stare at?

Yes, this is true. To me, though, having it as something I can choose to use is a LOT better than something that randomly happens once every so often..

But you agree then. This "bees knees" ability is anything but..

Turbine PLEASE, quit making the random proc stacking stuff for our characters. If you MUST do this because you think "it's fun", might I suggest you keep them on the items, not on the character. This lottery style of random stuff is nonsense.

Here's a better version:

Give +6% crit chance and 25% crit bonus damage permanently. Done.
NOW it's worth something.

[Satyriasys]

Arcane Supremacy stats (modified for simpler math)
100% proc chance every 90 seconds for 12 seconds (instead of 10%)
+33% chance to crit (instead of 25%)
+100% crit damage (actual value)

I think this would be interesting. You could actually choose when to use it, wouldn't need a clicky and wouldn't be a random proc.

[Nadion]

What I actually find the most loathsome about Arcane Supremacy is that the devs responded to everyone objecting to Archmages not being able to work up DCs high enough to count in endgame content by giving us an intermittent DPS buff. Wizards don't want to be forced to play like 2nd rate Sorcs. We want to be able to make effective use of CC and instakills, and right now the Wizard tree just doesn't offer that capability. A clicky DC/CL/MCL buff would be much more appropriate thematically, and would actually be useful to Wizard builds that aren't based on abusing shiradi procs.

[Ironclans_evil_twin]

What I actually find the most loathsome about Arcane Supremacy is that the devs responded to everyone objecting to Archmages not being able to work up DCs high enough to count in endgame content by giving us an intermittent DPS buff. Wizards don't want to be forced to play like 2nd rate Sorcs. We want to be able to make effective use of CC and instakills, and right now the Wizard tree just doesn't offer that capability. A clicky DC/CL/MCL buff would be much more appropriate thematically, and would actually be useful to Wizard builds that aren't based on abusing shiradi procs.

Don't be so quick to speak for Wizards... personally I've never found it much fun to build specifically for DC's because it's more of a math problem, and less of a playstyle. I like to have good DC's with a solid nuking option that costs next to no SP that I can spam in between great CC/DOT's and AOE's. To each their own, but I've loved the Archmage Force nuker since way before Shiradi made it a flavor of the month.

[Nadion]

I'm not arguing for Wizards being unable to build towards useful damage output, I'm saying that

a) building towards DC based casting for endgame should be viable, not the futile endeavour it is now, and
b) nuking Wizard builds should derive the a large part of their effectiveness from high DCs which prevent mobs saving against their DPS spells - not from an intermittant crit bonus which does nothing to help any non damageing spell.

Making Arcane Supremacy a DC/CL/MCL buff would make it relevant to all kinds of casting, including nuking, whereas as a pure crit booster its' only useful to one particular type of wizard.

[RedHost]

Take a look at the Archmage Tier 5 ability "Arcane Supremacy".
It's the bees' knees.

It's really kind of garbage... I mean, bust damage is nice. And uncontrollable bursts of damage certainly aren't a bad thing. But they are a long ways from being good.

After looking it over every way I could think of, even on the WarForged Wizard that I really wanted the AM Capstone for, I still ended up doing T5 abilities from PM in the final build. Once you get to where you are running the harder EEs and you have to debuff mobs to the point that you are blowing a tenth of your blue bar on each one the DC increases don't mean anything any more. Arcane Supremacy is something I would pick up as a nice side bonus, but the lack of control over it really devalues it. So 42 points spent in the AM tree, and it still isn't really worth taking the T5 choices from it!

[Ancient]

So while the "one wizard to rule them all" is all well and good for a guy like me who only wants one wizard, we sure have lost a lot of build variety when it comes to wizard.

For pure wizards... I agree. But until they revitalize DC casting, I think splash is the way to go. A wizard can drop to 17 and still keep level 9 spells. You can spend a lot of points in other trees with 3 levels.

[Ancient]

+33% chance to crit (instead of 25%)

I thought it was +25% chance to crit? Crit chances are higher post enhancement pass. It isn't hard at all to have 25% chance to crit before using the ability. So that would be 50% after. And the +100% damage would be applied to all of those crits.

[EllisDee37]

I thought it was +25% chance to crit? Crit chances are higher post enhancement pass. It isn't hard at all to have 25% chance to crit before using the ability. So that would be 50% after. And the +100% damage would be applied to all of those crits.

Yes, it is. I tried to be as clear as possible: Those numbers were rough approximations in order to simplify "back of the napkin" math. I think I stated this outright multiple times.

[soloist12]

What I actually find the most loathsome about Arcane Supremacy is that the devs responded to everyone objecting to Archmages not being able to work up DCs high enough to count in endgame content by giving us an intermittent DPS buff. Wizards don't want to be forced to play like 2nd rate Sorcs. We want to be able to make effective use of CC and instakills, and right now the Wizard tree just doesn't offer that capability. A clicky DC/CL/MCL buff would be much more appropriate thematically, and would actually be useful to Wizard builds that aren't based on abusing shiradi procs.

Precisely. The wizard is home to DC casting, and the sorc is the damage class. With DC casting still hosed, I might 20LR into a sorc next week.

[searcher15]

[Wall of text - scroll down if lazy]
Removal of secondary specialization breaks the Archmage for good. Being able to specialize in two schools was a good trading point vs almighty palemaster. The new system pretty much removes Archmage from the game, and even further buffs the Palemaster.

In the good old days, while we needed feats and paid hefty price in sp, we could get SLA from two or even three schools. Most archmages I ever met used web as secondary spell. Illusion specced folks might have taken 1 tier of hypno to debuff saves before hitting with PK. It brought a great deal of versatility, because if primary school fails, you still have something up your sleeve, instead of being FoD only guy. I myself run Triple focus archmages of Illusion/Conjuration/Enchantment with lots of fun. The combinations were endless - enchantment/conjuration for ultimate cc, evocation with enchantment minor to make stuff dance while you kill them...

Right now, archmage is going to lose half of their power without the secondary school. At the same time, there is nothing preventing PM to take archmage necro sla and gain a huge buff. But Archmage has nothing to gain from necro three, heck, if they did want it, they would spec as necro.
From economic standoff it means that you should take necromancy focus or lose on dc. They might as well call the tree Pale Master 2.
In the end this means there will be only two types of archmage post update: Evocation Shiradi and misinformed.

Another big problem with Archmage is that: whichever school you choose, it has like ONE* spell worth attention, rest are fillers.
* SLA are meant to be spammed like crazy. Very situational spells like DD or knock and buffs cast once per shrine don't fall under that category.

Abjuration - stoneskin? - Only benefit is not needing the material components, but buffing whole raid takes ages.
Conjuration - WEB (T2) - Grease is a joke, and clouds are just situational.
Enchantment - Hypnotism (T1) - dance is point blank, and charm while funny annoys the party. For holds just use the mass one?
Evocation - chain missiles (T3). Also technically MM, but only because they already have it to cast between.
Illusion - Phantasmal Killer (T4) - You are speccing for single spell. You get all but two spells from school as a bonus. Yes, all 5.
Necromancy - Enervation (T4). But you better spec as PM here. Oh, wait, you ARE PM.
Transmutation - Flesh to stone (T5).

It's hard to imagine someone speccing only into conjuration because of lack of good spells, but it provided a great addon as secondary school. With that ability taken, Archmage looses half of the viability.

[Important stuff below]

SUGGESTION 1: Turbine, please: What we need is ability to take lv 2 SLA from another school. It could replace the neglected arcane bolt. You can even make it WEB because that's what 90% of players will take. Even if it required the feat, it would still be a great option. Put it on tier 5, so PM can't benefit, and all is well. All classes get cool new SLA, why Archmage is the only pre that looses them?

SUGGESTION 2: As an alternative, you can take another approach - Unlock the schools. Let us take conjuration at tier 1, then enchantment at T2, Illusion at 3rd... The total amount of SLA abilities we get stays the same, but we can actually choose something viable. You already made Archmage "generalist" by changing the spell crit line from selection to "buffs all". Just take it one step further. No extensive coding work required - just remove the check at core ability line. If speccing too wide is an concern, feat requirement for additional school could return.

I really hope something can be done to save Archmage. I don't want to be yet another FoD spam palemaster.