You know the game is not balanced properly when...

[maddong]

Wrong swashbuckler was buffed when we had monkchers and shiradis were dominating the endgame... you see where that's going.

Ok, those aren't single classed characters. But I'm all for fixing those.

[Ancient]

Ok, those aren't single classed characters. But I'm all for fixing those.

This is why I don't fight back when someone goes on an ill-informed rant about how bad Shiradi is. Because there are always groups of people who want to dump on anything in the game that is doing well. They live in fear that someone out there somewhere... is having fun.

[elkorm]

Hey thanks Ash, I was about to write the same thing you saved me a lot of time
Elk

Eto, I am starting to wonder what if any caster you are playing. As I said before, I challenge any melee dps out there and I am fairly certain that I will out kill them by a decent margin.

Top Barb builds are pushing a little over ~5K dps when they are boosted which is amazing. However, with EE trash mob clocking in over 10k that still means they take a couple of seconds to remove them from the board.

However, my caster can cycle between Wail (54 sec cooldown; 6 mobs), CoD (27 sec cooldown; 4 targets), FoD (7 sec cooldown; 1 target), Consume (2 min cooldown; 5 targets); Mass Hold + Energy Burst/BDF/Hellball (when soloing EE WGU.. everything you mass hold dies to a Energy Burst.. with a full party you will need EB+DBF and maybe Hell ball).. when all of that is on cool down you still have mass hold + ~3k melee dps (on helpless mobs ~2k if not helpless). If you don't bother with Melee you can cycle in Dragon Breath when Energy Burst is on timer. With insta-kills alone I am killing 44 mobs every 2 min (or 1 mob every ~2.5 sec) and that doesn't even count the mass carnage that I can do with Mass Hold + Evocation spells (which is where a majority of my death counts really come from) that in a high mob density quest is another 30-40 mobs every 2 minutes. Meaning that if there was a quest with high enough mob densities (which there isn't) I could be killing a mob every second or so.. and that doesn't even take into consideration my Melee DPS.

The closest any quest gets to that mob density is Breaking the Ranks.. looking at the latest speed run (Set by a [shiradi] caster) that quest is 159 mobs in 7:25 or about 1 mob every ~2.5 sec or so.. which is the same speed as Insta-kills alone, not counting Hold + Evocation or Melee DPS. That shows that as a Wizard I can pretty much kill mobs at will (and I do). Worried about orange named with tens of thousands of HP.. that melee might be beating on it for 8-12 sec.. as a PM it is as simple as PW: Stun + Energy Drain + Enervation (maybe) + Ruin ... I can do that all at range as I am running up and not even break stride.

A well played and built PM only takes their finger off the run key when they hit a red/purple name.. then if they are pure.. your right, they have an issue. They can either wait for the rest of the party to catch up and let them actually do something, or dump their blue bar on it (bad idea.. blue bar is better used for killing trash). If you are a DC-Melee build you can swap over to melee mode and push out ~1.9k-2k dps and melee it down. Sure it is low dps compared to the fully decked out Barb, but that dps is better by far than the what the average pugger is running with and more than enough considering how quickly you ran through the rest of the quest.

Yes, to get a PM to the level I described above takes a lot more work than it does to get a Pally or Barb to that level .. but that is okay. Some classes take more effort than others, the point is Casters are fine.. no they are not and "easy button" class.. but imo that is a good thing. You don't see speed runs with casters due to red-named dps.

If you are playing a DC caster and melee's are out killing you then the issue is with you or your toon.. not casters or DC casters in general.

Casters are fine and well balanced, any change to boost their power would be silly.


P.S. Sev and the Dev team, be very very careful with the DC's needed for ToEE.. while casters are fine now, it wouldn't take much of a mis-calculation on Mob Saves to make them near worthless. Please be very careful there.

[WhiiteWolf]

Hello All,

Just a quick comment to the thread, what I see is that you have multiple TR players ( Uber ) on the same server(s) as regular players, not saying long time players accomplishments shouldn't be recognized, but you just can't have God-Like players running around with amongst the regular player population it just won't work. As you have the people who want to come on and just play as a group and finish a quest, then you have the Uber set, and because they are Multi TR's they just want to get the quest done to get the XP they need, Now there are some people that won't care because they are using someone else's hard work to get something done they normally couldn't, plus it makes it easier for these people to obtain an item or items that they normally might not get until a later time due to build quality and they themselves put in the Work/multiple level and TR's to get to an uber state to do it themselves, to become what we all are talking about so they can appear to be great at the game with the next lower group.

It's a very tough fix to get a solution to this but IMHO, there should or should have been something in place that when you get to an uber level or at a certain multi TR it is time to run with the " Big " BOYS/GIRLS if this means transferring toons to the next server for this purpose then so be it, otherwise, LFMs should be specific about the people they want in their group, and IMHO TR's should only be allowed to run with other TR's . As I stated it's a very tough fix/solution and I hope the readers will see where I am trying to go with the post.

Sincerely, W.W.

P.S. I have played for sometime now and I can say that the amount of times that I have looked at the XP sheet after a quest(s) has been for no other reason as to see the amount of XP I got for the quest(s) while in a group, but sadly, there are others that just have to look so they can brag about how their class/build out preformed someone else.

[geoffhanna]

I know there is a sub-section of players that want even *more* difficulty in existing content. We have to make decisions about where to spend our time, and we think our time would be better spent making new challenging content with new Mythic treasures to reward those challenges than trying to back track and introduce difficulty where a lot of players don't want it.

We've considered a Killer DM mode - something even harder than elite - where content always scaled to 6 people, champions have nastier effects, and monsters did more damage. The problem, outside of implementation time, we ran into is this; what could we possibly use to reward players for playing it? We don't want to add even more XP into the game. Higher level loot drops aren't really useful while leveling since it already out levels players on higher difficulties. No one is going to grind for power items if they will level past them quickly. Our data shows that such a difficulty would probably sit unused for a vast majority of the player base. As much as the idea intrigues me, I don't know if that's a good use of our time.

We believe that the best use of our time is to provide difficulty in newer content.

Sev~

Titles, that would be visible to everyone. Or cloaks. Something that lets everyone see - oh my, this is someone who pwns the Killer Mode

[davmuzl]

This is why I don't fight back when someone goes on an ill-informed rant about how bad Shiradi is. Because there are always groups of people who want to dump on anything in the game that is doing well. They live in fear that someone out there somewhere... is having fun.

Builds that are based around shiradi are simply not balanced. You get CC for free that is better than anything comparable without having to worry about DCs. You have pretty decent damage already and at that point all you have to do is increase spell power and crit and use the rest on defense. Look at the exalted angel excoriate- it has less than half the proc chance of nerve venom, only works on light spells instead of all spells and requires you to keep using healing spells to acutally make it work. It's just annoying when anyone can do better by going for shiradi procs than someone with decent DCs on normal spells.

[etotheipi]

Shiradi missile spammers can handle the content in magister... please do go on...

I didn't say that.

Eto, I am starting to wonder what if any caster you are playing. As I said before, I challenge any melee dps out there and I am fairly certain that I will out kill them by a decent margin.

Now that would depend on the quest, wouldn't it? You've offered WGU, and it's obvious why. That quest is populated with loads of trash that can be instakilled using Wail, Finger of Death and Circle of Death. It contains zero ordinary Undead mobs. So in this particular example of content, your instakilling is going to work fairly well. Now I don't believe for a second that a melee that's as twinked out and optimized as your caster is is going to have a problem keeping up with you in the kill count. You keep pretending that melees are stuck with single target DPS when providing your theoretical mathematical calculations, and that assumption is no good. What will permit the melee to keep up with your kills is AOE DPS done while standing in a pack of mobs---something you'd better not do (which also affects the efficacy of your Wail).

But even if you do slightly outpace a fully twinked out melee (and I doubt that you would) when it comes to trash killing in What Goes Up, that point is of no more interest than saying you'll outpace melees in A Devil Assault. You're obviously cherry-picking your content. I can also use What Goes Up to make one of my points. Instead of envisioning a scenario in which you have a melee to assist you with kills and aggro management (you like being helped out and rely on it heavily--wizards need minions, right?), why don't we consider a solo run of WGU instead? You know that it's going to take you so long it isn't even worth the attempt. That'll turn into a nice AFK plink-fest for you while you catch up on the last season of your favorite television show.

We can consider character power from a variety of different perspectives. You're not doing that. The fact is that melees do not face any obstacles (except for one rare exception that affects pure melees---lack of ranged DPS in the almost zero content in which it is required, such as, e.g., Fall of Truth or Lord of Blades). You're happily overlooking all the obstacles casters do currently face and instead trying to make your point that casters are fine by cherry-picking content in which casters do perform fairly well (when they are assisted by melees!). The melees, on the other hand, perform just fine without assistance. This is why casters are not "just fine". They are now relegated to the status of second-rate toons that need melee backup. Now you may be fine with that because when you log in, you have all your melees ready to be your "minions" and help you patch your weaknesses, but you need to learn how to see things from more than one perspective.

However, my caster can cycle between Wail (54 sec cooldown; 6 mobs), CoD (27 sec cooldown; 4 targets), FoD (7 sec cooldown; 1 target), Consume (2 min cooldown; 5 targets); Mass Hold + Energy Burst/BDF/Hellball (when soloing EE WGU.. everything you mass hold dies to a Energy Burst.. with a full party you will need EB+DBF and maybe Hell ball).. when all of that is on cool down you still have mass hold + ~3k melee dps (on helpless mobs ~2k if not helpless). If you don't bother with Melee you can cycle in Dragon Breath when Energy Burst is on timer. With insta-kills alone I am killing 44 mobs every 2 min (or 1 mob every ~2.5 sec) and that doesn't even count the mass carnage that I can do with Mass Hold + Evocation spells (which is where a majority of my death counts really come from) that in a high mob density quest is another 30-40 mobs every 2 minutes. Meaning that if there was a quest with high enough mob densities (which there isn't) I could be killing a mob every second or so.. and that doesn't even take into consideration my Melee DPS.

This is paper napkin math. It notably doesn't take into account the fact that your DPS is limited (by your blue bar) while melee DPS is not. And your blue bar isn't just going to be used for DPS. It's going to be used to keep you alive at a fairly high SP cost. (You'll have less worries staying alive if you let your melee buddy assist you by drawing aggro before you pop in to toss your instakills, of course, but you're the one who thinks it's fine for casters to need minions to cover for their weaknesses.) I hope this business of insisting that casters should need to run with others isn't going to be something you keep sticking to.

The closest any quest gets to that mob density is Breaking the Ranks.. looking at the latest speed run (Set by a [shiradi] caster) that quest is 159 mobs in 7:25 or about 1 mob every ~2.5 sec or so.. which is the same speed as Insta-kills alone, not counting Hold + Evocation or Melee DPS. That shows that as a Wizard I can pretty much kill mobs at will (and I do).

This is more cherry-picking, only this time you've switched to Shiradi for some reason. You've selected a pretty much ideal quest for a Shiradi caster. Shiradi single-target DPS is pretty horrible. I'm also not sure why you're so focused on Stormhorns content. Is it because you enjoy it since it happens to be content that plays to your trash-killing strengths?

A well played and built PM only takes their finger off the run key when they hit a red/purple name.. then if they are pure.. your right, they have an issue. They can either wait for the rest of the party to catch up and let them actually do something, or dump their blue bar on it (bad idea.. blue bar is better used for killing trash). If you are a DC-Melee build you can swap over to melee mode and push out ~1.9k-2k dps and melee it down. Sure it is low dps compared to the fully decked out Barb, but that dps is better by far than the what the average pugger is running with and more than enough considering how quickly you ran through the rest of the quest.

The assumption that you're so uber that melees aren't going to be contributing until you run into a red-named is pretty funny. Maybe you just don't run with any good melees? Perhaps your group hasn't figured out how to make melees work yet? The average pugger? Since when were we talking about the average pugger? So your solution is that casters should pack a melee option now? My point is that that is not a good solution. Your argument that casters are "just fine" is based on your opinion that (i) they need minions (need to group), (ii) they should have a serious melee option, (iii) they should run in Shadowdancer, and (iv) they should be next to impossible to build to do that effectively. It's hard to see how you could possibly be serious.

Yes, to get a PM to the level I described above takes a lot more work than it does to get a Pally or Barb to that level .. but that is okay. Some classes take more effort than others, the point is Casters are fine.. no they are not and "easy button" class.. but imo that is a good thing. You don't see speed runs with casters due to red-named dps.

To get a PM to the level you have described is to build a PM with a serious melee option. To force casters to reach "just fine" status by turning them into SWF hybrids is not just fine. No caster should have to take SWF, ISWF and GSWF to be "just fine". This should be obvious. I'm happy to concede that your SWF PM is just fine. But it doesn't follow from that concession that casters are just fine. They are not. The only way to build a caster that is "just fine" these days is to build them with a serious melee option. And it's pretty laughable how difficult it is to build your "just fine" SWF PM. It is, hands down, the hardest build in the game to put together.

[Ancient]

Correct. A Paladin in Magister performs better than a caster in Magister!

Here you establish the destiny.

The Paladin can handle the content. The caster cannot (absent being a low-DPS gimped Shiradi missile spammer.)

Here you use the destiny for your low-DPS gimped Shiradi missile spammer.

I didn't say that.

Yeah... you did.

[Andoris]

Now that would depend on the quest, wouldn't it? You've offered WGU, and it's obvious why. That quest is populated with loads of trash that can be instakilled using Wail, Finger of Death and Circle of Death. It contains zero ordinary Undead mobs. So in this particular example of content, your instakilling is going to work fairly well. Now I don't believe for a second that a melee that's as twinked out and optimized as your caster is is going to have a problem keeping up with you in the kill count. You keep pretending that melees are stuck with single target DPS when providing your theoretical mathematical calculations, and that assumption is no good. What will permit the melee to keep up with your kills is AOE DPS done while standing in a pack of mobs---something you'd better not do (which also affects the efficacy of your Wail).

No, I chose it as it had the highest DC's needed to insta-kill. Want to go with an undead quest.. that works too -- I have fewer options, but Death to Undeath, Consume, Evocation (Ruin, Hellball, Energy Burst, Fire Wall), and Web + Melee.

Yes, Melee has AoE dps.. but their AoE dps is no where near 5k.

I agree that Melee is strong (likely too strong .. I know I have 2 fully maxed out melees) but to say Casters suck and aren't the kings of trash is just silly.

But even if you do slightly outpace a fully twinked out melee (and I doubt that you would) when it comes to trash killing in What Goes Up, that point is of no more interest than saying you'll outpace melees in A Devil Assault. You're obviously cherry-picking your content. I can also use What Goes Up to make one of my points. Instead of envisioning a scenario in which you have a melee to assist you with kills and aggro management (you like being helped out and rely on it heavily--wizards need minions, right?), why don't we consider a solo run of WGU instead? You know that it's going to take you so long it isn't even worth the attempt. That'll turn into a nice AFK plink-fest for you while you catch up on the last season of your favorite television show.

With Heavy Armor as silly as it is, I don't have any issues with dealing with mass amounts of aggro.. death aura alone keeps me up in most cases.. every once in a while I need to hit NEB or in worst case, I drop out of melee mode and circle kite the mobs while I kill them (I am a caster remember )

As for your comment on a solo run.. you must have missed the point where I said that red/purple named dps is a WEAKNESS of a DC caster.. We are talking about TRASH.

Actually though, with my current build it likely is not too bad -- I'll need to see if I can get no-fail fortitude on him (flesh to stone protection) and other than that it should be a breeze.. the Pillars and Amskar will be annoying, but not too bad (remember I also have ~2k melee dps to work with).

We can consider character power from a variety of different perspectives. You're not doing that. The fact is that melees do not face any obstacles (except for one rare exception that affects pure melees---lack of ranged DPS in the almost zero content in which it is required, such as, e.g., Fall of Truth or Lord of Blades). You're happily overlooking all the obstacles casters do currently face and instead trying to make your point that casters are fine by cherry-picking content in which casters do perform fairly well (when they are assisted by melees!). The melees, on the other hand, perform just fine without assistance. This is why casters are not "just fine". They are now relegated to the status of second-rate toons that need melee backup. Now you may be fine with that because when you log in, you have all your melees ready to be your "minions" and help you patch your weaknesses, but you need to learn how to see things from more than one perspective.

I am not overlooking any obstacles.. I welcome them. I agree Melee toons are easier, I disagree with your notion that DC casters need a buff.. they are balanced as they are.

As for my "minions" comment.. you do realize that this is a MMO right? Do you know that it stands for Massivly-MULTIPLAYER Online? I didn't know that my desire to run with other people means that my toons are gimp

No, wizards are not a "solo speed run class".. but so what? They are a very powerful class that can fill its role in an amazing way -- when played by a skilled player and well built.

As for Perspective -- I play a DC Caster, a Divine, and 2 different types of melee's all able to easily run any content in the game.. prior to that I ran Ranged toons as well (just got bored of them). Outside of Druid builds (never got into them) I have played just about every major archetype out there in every EE raid and quest in the game.

What have you done?

This is paper napkin math. It notably doesn't take into account the fact that your DPS is limited (by your blue bar) while melee DPS is not. And your blue bar isn't just going to be used for DPS. It's going to be used to keep you alive at a fairly high SP cost. (You'll have less worries staying alive if you let your melee buddy assist you by drawing aggro before you pop in to toss your instakills, of course, but you're the one who thinks it's fine for casters to need minions to cover for their weaknesses.) I hope this business of insisting that casters should need to run with others isn't going to be something you keep sticking to.

I get you don't really know how to play a caster.. and based on your comments.. don't have a lot of familiarity with EE either. But, I can assure you that I do not have any issue staying alive in EE content with my wizard.. and no I don't need to use tones of SP to do it (Death Aura is usually just fine) and no I don't need a Melee to babysit me.

If you are having issues with killing trash and staying alive with your caster.. I suggest you check out that course that use to be offered around here.. I hear his "rates are reasonable"

[bs... snip... bs... ]The assumption that you're so uber that melees aren't going to be contributing until you run into a red-named is pretty funny. Maybe you just don't run with any good melees? Perhaps your group hasn't figured out how to make melees work yet? The average pugger? Since when were we talking about the average pugger?

First I didn't say that they "wouldn't be contributing" .. I did say that a DC caster is "King of Trash removal"

I am not hiding who I am or which server I play on. The most folks here know the groups I typically run with pretty well (and I wouldn't characterize them as "average puggers" but ymmv)...

How about you tell us who you are? What toons do you run? What Difficulty have you mastered? Who do you run with?

Or are you just another anonymous troll on the internet?

[Thrudh]

Most of EE quests gives low XP/min, even with sagas it wont be better than getting 1mil/hour by zerging fast high XP quests.

And yet you post you're bored out of your mind... Hmm... wonder if there is a connection...

Check my sig.

[Thrudh]

TBesides running XP/Min becomes increasingly boring with each repeat, Flagging up the Sagas on EE is much more fun.

This guy doesn't post that he's bored out of his mind... Hmm... wonder if there's a connection?

[BigErkyKid]

This guy doesn't post that he's bored out of his mind... Hmm... wonder if there's a connection?

This is not what the thread is about.

[bartharok]

This is not what the thread is about.

Its about what caused the thread, though.

[BigErkyKid]

Its about what caused the thread, though.

No.

[bartharok]

No.

It about you being bored with the game.

[BigErkyKid]

It about you being bored with the game.

No. Read the first post. You guys need to stop this whole aggro and constant derailing of threads, gets tiring.

[bartharok]

No. Read the first post. You guys need to stop this whole aggro and constant derailing of threads, gets tiring.

Its not derailing, its giving another point of view to the whole issue. Which you seem to hate.

[BigErkyKid]

Its not derailing, its giving another point of view to the whole issue. Which you seem to hate.

off you go to the ignore list

[bartharok]

off you go to the ignore list

To ignore is to embrace ignorance.

[SirValentine]

Since a game is supposed to be fun, flavor reasons are th eonly reason to play them in the first place. If you play the game to get uber, you have lost something on the way in my opinion.

But it's not fun if your flavor is gimp.