What can be done about caster balance?

[Hitstorm]

I am wondering what can be done about balancing casters. It has almost become pointless
in trying to make anything other than a sorcerer or alchemist if you want to play on higher
reaper difficulties. All i see is fire sorc or fire alchemist, with a unicorn cold alchemist every
blue moon.

Druids :

persistant AOE damage is just not a viable playstyle anymore. Earthquake lasts 1 second in R10 (blink and its gone).
Fire elemental druids are hopelessly outdated. Cold elemental druids are a little better, but still mostly just healers in
higher difficulties. They badly need to scale better. Also, i think druids should get turn to frog as a spell.

Bards :

Sonic is just totally outdated. Scaling is horrible. Please, do something for Spellsingers.

Favored Soul and Cleric Divine Disciple :

It needs to be possible to make a light caster which actually manages to kill things. Please update scaling and spellist.
I miss Bladebarrier, please make it relevant again.

Warlocks :

They have been nerfed too hard. Anything other than a DC caster is pretty bad.

Artificer Arcanotechnician :

Again, extremely outdated. They at least need to break lightning immunity at T5 and get a spell/scaling pass.

Wizard :

Palemaster is decent, until you meet deathwarded mobs or iron golems. I know there is an update planned for the Archmage tree, i hope it will
make it relevant besides spec'ing for illusion instakills.

This is just to get the ball rolling, please comment and brainstorm.

[Satyriasys]

They just need to nerf alchies into the ground. They need be be nerfed so hard nobody bothers to play them.

[Hitstorm]

They just need to nerf alchies into the ground. They need be be nerfed so hard nobody bothers to play them.

They are obviously OP (using Epic Defensive Stance needs to go), and i'm sure they will be adjusted at some point. It doesn't help the other casters perform any better though

[SkyJ89]

I play spellsinger. Oh yeah..GIVE ME MORE POWER!!!!

[Monkey_Archer]

• Nerf the obviously over-performing spells (meteor swarm, multi-vial, energy burst, etc...) There is no reason why these few spells should be literally 3x more powerful than everything else.
• Make single target spell deal more damage than AOE spells. (why this isn't already true is absurd....)
• Add a unique spell scaling mechanic for epic levels that buffs all spells by approximately 50%, so that currently under-performing spells (everything except meteor swarm, multivial, etc..) become viable in epics.
• Completely remove the CC duration reduction in reaper so that webs, earthquake, ottos sphere, etc... become usable again.
• Replace cc reduction in reaper with bonus to auto pass saves (ie. monsters in r10 may automatically save on a 15+, rather than only on 20 roll)

[Hitstorm]

• Nerf the obviously over-performing spells (meteor swarm, multi-vial, energy burst, etc...) There is no reason why these few spells should be literally 3x more powerful than everything else.
• Make single target spell deal more damage than AOE spells. (why this isn't already true is absurd....)
• Add a unique spell scaling mechanic for epic levels that buffs all spells by approximately 50%, so that currently under-performing spells (everything except meteor swarm, multivial, etc..) become viable in epics.
• Completely remove the CC duration reduction in reaper so that webs, earthquake, ottos sphere, etc... become usable again.
• Replace cc reduction in reaper with bonus to auto pass saves (ie. monsters in r10 may automatically save on a 15+, rather than only on 20 roll)

These are good suggestions. I also think single target spells should do more damage than AoE. It makes no sense to use singletarget spells (unless you need to keep that vengy alive) if
AoE is the best choice all the time. Even on bosses. There should be a meaningful choice to take out that dangerous champ with a few singletarget spells, compared to just nuking everything
from orbit. I personally like the tactical playstyle of casters (hence why im currently a wizard), but i recognize that both styles should be equally viable. Right now however, nuking AoE wins
(almost) every time. I think scaling singletarget spells to do more damage (in epics at least) while reducing the scaling or damage multiplier of AoE spells would be a good thing for the game.
When a few spells from a few classes totally overshadows any other spells it makes the game one-dimensional and unbalanced.
My personal gripe is that persistant AoE damage over time spells are now mostly useless in high reapers. Hence my last life as a druid i was mainly healing and using tsunami and mass frog. The rest of the class abilities were basically just scratching mobs or wasn't worth casting most of the time. I tried to keep dot's on the boss, but that's about it for playstyle/involvement.
I also agree that CC needs to be looked at. It seems some CC is top tier/not affected much by reaper reduction, while others (like the iconic web/otto's sphere/earthquake you mention) are
hit hard. For example, otto's irresistable dance seems to last the time it should, while the sphere just barely registeres. If the development team wants heroic CC effects not to work well
in epics, they need to replace them with several options in destiny trees which work for most casters (however, i don't agree with this as it would homogenize casters). I see they have the colorspray spell from the feywild enhancement tree now, which is a step in the right direction. However, to fix the current playstyle/scaling issues with the classes mentioned above, it needs to be looked at from a broader perspective of scaling and balance.
''

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

They just need to nerf alchies into the ground. They need be be nerfed so hard nobody bothers to play them.

Heroic or Epic ? Do you want Heroic to be destroyed, too ?

[Satyriasys]

Heroic or Epic ? Do you want Heroic to be destroyed, too ?

Alchemists have no place in this game and nobody asked for them.

[mr420247]

Completely 100 percent agreed the easy fix would be give us back the Shiradi ed for casters not great but you can make a hybrid that at least works

Heroics who cares only real game is cap heroics is just the day grind to get there

Nerfs won't help any of the caster classes dude hows nerfing eb gona help clerics fvs druids who already do horrible dps ya it won't

Meteor swarm n dbf is def not over performing on a pm with no am pass

Make it run off int wis cha n just all spell caster cls mcls not just arcanes same w maj since ea is garbage

And pm fix fn unholy avatar to work on everything not just undeads ez fix not great but works

And give us a single decent dps club they nerfd the only 2 good ones left and those were so bad n niche and filigree sets that do dps not dcs

And up date fix over haul un nerf epic caster feats that are insanely expensive complete garbage which is most of em

Do all that and they still wouldn't compare to pallys barbs alchs if you want to nerf stuffs

And instead of the sorc pass we've all been waitin for whats coming monk changes and bow tree re rise of the monkchers why bother round 3 for them

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

Alchemists have no place in this game and nobody asked for them.

I'll never forget me playing Alchemist on Lamannia at level 1. It was such a chore. Even my mace from Heyton's Rest did more damage !
At that point I decided not to use Alchemists, especially since I never understood their system of spells.

[Soulfurnace]

Man there's some horrible ideas here. Let's go with the obvious ones.
Nerf meteor swarm, eburst, dbreath and multvial so hard nobody uses them: Vindictive nerfs aren't a good concept to start with. This would leave all nukers useless. I understand someone said "give other spells 50% more damage". That will do nothing to fix the fact that the other spells are behind. They aren't behind by merely 50%. Many of them are not behind because of raw damage, but instead because of other issues; casting time, radius, horrible potion mechanics.
The ones that a 50% damage boost WOULD fix? You'd have a new issue; it'd be same stuff different day. You'd be one hitting everything on elite, r1, r2, etc. It'd still be OP.

Let's just pretend the spells are all balanced (that's not gonna happen, but let's pretend it for fun).

There's two issues with casters, that everyone seems to notice but be unable to deal with.
1) There's a LOT going on for caster power. You have base damage * caster levels * spellpower * helpless * crit damage, then you have all sorts of debuffs to think of.
That many different factors is hard to balance around. In a very serious sense, it's way too hard to balance all those factors. I don't disagree with stopping one or two things from affecting spells, but you'd be back to trying to balance them with a major base buff or they'd devolve into total uselessness.

2) Damage compared to DPS (Damage per second).
Casters excel at damage. They, for the most part, suck at DPS.
You don't need to care about DPS if your burst damage is high enough. It's why FOTW is viable, even though fatesinger or LD is higher DPS.

A caster could have utterly awful and abysmal dps - they do, actually - but it doesn't matter in a game where bursting is 95% of the gameplay.
If you were to nerf bat nukers to the point where their nukes are more like hand grenades, they'll fail at both damage AND dps.

I don't have a solution to (1) - lol, glhf. That's too many factors, removing any of them would leave casters in a place of worthlessness, so you'd have to remove one and buff another to compensate.

As for (2), it's a factor that affects a lot of the endgame. Mobs have about the same hp from epic gianthold to epic sharn. Not exactly, but close enough. On a melee, ignoring debuffs, comparing epic gh to epic sharn - your dps should what, triple? Quadruple? Mobs health doesn't scale that way.
You don't need to build for long, sustained dps for questing, even r10 questing on a melee; dire charge and aoe until it's all dead. On a caster, it's the same except with ranged cc.

The fact mobs have enough health to facilitate nuking is why it's even viable; if they had double the health, nukers wouldn't be worth accepting in a group. They're already lower dps than a good melee, now they can't even nuke, just tickle and look grumpy?

So aside from the confusing and difficult methods of fixing spell balance, the fact that low dps but high damage is superior (else DOTs would have meaning), all the different stacking things...
There's still the issues regarding spell flavours.
Reflection of wave is garbage tier. Spiral no longer benefits fire (at least, not as much).

The reason you see fire used most often is LGS, at least for alchs. If they aren't using LGS weapons, all elements are more or less equal, aside from poison.
As for sorcs, hello, you literally get medium armour AND a good set AND it stacks with the KT ring for MORE crit chance than robes. And a sorc gets no ASF on med armour with enhancements.
Ice? LOL. You get reflection of wave; a 2h staff that's useless even for an ice sorc after SSG nerfed it. 2.5k runes/5 scishms, 2 quest items... and it's worthless. Nice.
Electric? There's that KT mace.. thing.. that roughly nobody uses because it's bad.
And acid? It has the worst spells in the arcane list. Assuming you reach spell parity (again, not gonna happen), acid has no worthwhile gearing.

Even with all spells fixed and equal, fire still wins for both alch and sorc because of gearing.

So yeah; burst damage > dps (can't hurt their burst, because they already have weak dps) - gearing favouring one element - spells being impossible to balance - an emphasis on burst damage for meta - too many factors going into casters.

I don't think SSG can rightfully fix casters. But nerfing multivial, DI abilities and meteor swarm isn't among the solutions. You'd just leave them all as DC casters or carried slots.