Arcane Supremacy: Nice enhancement, would make more sense for Sorcs.

[Nadion]

Having had a chance to look around the open beta I was gratified to see that there have been some wothwhile tweaks to the Archmage tree. Whilst it still lacks secondary SLAs and decent DCs for the Arcane Bolt/Blast abilities I can see some effort has been made to improve it since alpha.

One of the the new abilities is the Tier 5 Arcane Supremacy (10% chance for a damage spell to trigger 10 secs of +25% crit chance and +100% crit damge, max once per 90 seconds). This is a very nice DPS booster, but Wizards not meant to be the primary nuking class in the game - thats the role of Sorcs. Wizards are supposed to excel at DC casting, CC, and Instakills. This enhancement does not mesh with the core purpose of wizards. Moreover, when it triggers it creates a use or lose situation where the wizard is induced to switch from CC casting to Nuking to avoid wasting an abililty whose timing cannot be controlled.

Ideally the bonuses from this should be changed to something that can benefit all spells being cast, not just damage spells.

For example changing it to +3DC, +3CL/MCL, 10% crit Chance, +50% crit damage. Duration 10 sec, acticate at will, cooldown 120 sec would be more thematically appropriate, and more useful to most wizard builds.

A similar comment can be made with regards to the implementation of spellcraft. Why is skill at casting being equated solely with higher spellpower?. Logically it would make sense for sufficiently high spellcraft values to provide bonuses to other spellcasting stats like spell pen, DC, CL,MCL, crit chance and crit damage.

e.g. Instead of of simply giving 1 point of spellpower per point of spellcraft instead give 0.5 points of spellpower per Spellcraft and additional perks for reaching specific milsestones in spellcraft.

e.g.

+1 Spell pen at Spellcraft 10
+1 DC at Spellcraft 20
+1 CL at Spellcraft 30
+1 MCL at Spellcraft 40
+5% Crit chance at spellcraft 50
+25% Crit Damage at spellcraft 60
+2 DC at spellcraft 70
+2 CL at spellcraft 85
+2 MCL at spellcraft 100
etc

Doing it this ways would be more sensible logically, and would give DC casters a method for raising there DCs enough to function in endgame content.

[Wizza]

Wow, I had no idea this was in place.

They take away Spell critical damage to Arcanes and then give this to Wizards? Who the hell thought about this?

Terrible.

[Deathdefy]

Many smart things

I agree completely with Nadion.

DCs for wizards need to be addressed. Be it through enhancements, or be it through Spellcraft, both sound like fine (and fun, incidentally) mechanisms.

[IronClan]

Speaking as someone with an archmage force SLA shiradi I like that ability,just fine and don't like your pigeonholing idea at all. Put it in the sorc trees too, but please don't try to talk the devs into making classes more cookie cutter. I agree sorc need some atention but the DPS side of non PM wizards was sorely lacking before, especially given the DC problems. There have always been blurred lines and overlap between D&D classes just the way it should be.

[Wizza]

Speaking as someone with an archmage force SLA shiradi I like that ability,just fine and don't like your pigeonholing idea at all. Put it in the sorc trees too, but please don't try to talk the devs into making classes more cookie cutter. I agree sorc need some atention but the DPS side of non PM wizards was sorely lacking before, especially given the DC problems. There have always been blurred lines and overlap between D&D classes just the way it should be.

I would make it an OR.

Sure, give it to Sorcs also (that's obvious) but make it a choice of:

+2 DC to EVERY SPELL FOCUS

OR

10 secs of +25% crit chance and +100% crit damge

Everyone happy.

[Cetus]

Eh, I don't like it after playing with it.

12 seconds every minute and a half...most of the time I don't have it, so I'm not missing it.

better to go the other route, max out palemaster and pick up the tier 4 DC from archmage - nets u 1 higher necro DC.

[Nadion]

Speaking as someone with an archmage force SLA shiradi I like that ability,just fine and don't like your pigeonholing idea at all. Put it in the sorc trees too, but please don't try to talk the devs into making classes more cookie cutter. I agree sorc need some atention but the DPS side of non PM wizards was sorely lacking before, especially given the DC problems. There have always been blurred lines and overlap between D&D classes just the way it should be.

What the devs has done with this enhancement is exactly what you claim to object to - pigeonholing us into being cookie cutter DPS Shiradi Wizards whilst offering nothing for other wizard roles. An enhancement that boosted DC/CL/MCL would to be useful in a much wider variety of builds, thus giving us more viable endgame setups.