Downtime Notice: Wednesday, April 6th, 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM Eastern (-4 GMT)

[Monkey_Archer]

I have never taken 3 spell power feats...2 is doable with a primary and secondary. And even with taking all your destiny feats available with 3, you are still not hitting all 5 at 50%. LGS material gem set bonus is 17% spell crit damage on 6 gems...which is doable on 2 items, but you need to equip 4. How many items to get 29% Univ spell crit chance? I am guessing you need at least 16 gems so its likely 5pc enders. or higher. Never tried because you would be give up too much to be of any benefit. Let us try to be realistic in reasoning, as this seems to be a very uncovincing argument.

Sorry I knew I was forgetting something. Scion feat also adds 10%.

So any half decent shiradi build should be between 46 and 60 spell crit multiplier, depending on whether you use autumn/elders set for 15% legendary bonus or 4 piece LGS material for 29%.

[draven1]

Why not "Epic Reaper 1" or "Epic Reaper 10" instead of just "Epic Reaper" on the difficulty display?

Why don't you add "Skull Number" in LFM window when you try to enhance it?

[Lanttanno]

The personal attacks against employees in this thread and elsewhere need to stop, regardless of how passionate you feel about this release note. Cool off for a minute before posting if you have to.

Honestly, I see frustrated responses from people as a predictable outcome considering the lack of any notice and the poorly thought out changes. Despite being on a shiradi build, it doesnt impact me much as I have the gear and past lives to go a conjuration focus ice spec alch without missing DCs, but my friends that are at 4 or 5 lives each woke up to find out they couldn't do any damage in raids or endgame content anymore so 3 of the 4 have TR'd after testing their character for 20-30 minutes.

I actually don't even see it as unreasonable for people to be frustrated to the point of expressing frustration at the devs that took responsibility for the change, I know the maths behind the changes made me question my opinions. You must realize that when people invest real time and money into a character, only to have it made completely useless by an unannounced, unexpected, and unreasonable change, they are entitled to be a little bit ****ed off. RIP all those 12/6/2 fvs/wizard/sorcerer bladeforged builds that are stuck at lvl 26 lol.

Should also say, testing after the patch, my character is far more powerful in draconic but so much less fun.

[Lanttanno]

Ooooh, FVS ED setup feels sooo bad now. Basically no build options cause the mantle sucks so bad, you either use a utility mantle or go draconic and you cant get t5 EA and DI mantle upgrade unless you have a tonne of Epic past lives so you are basically encouraged to also go draconic t5.

[Zarkarion]

Shiradi Champion was insanely good for any caster build that could get multiple chances of triggering the procs.

You could kill several trash mobs just with the procs from one casting of Greater Color Spray (3 x 30% chances of proccing per mob). Not sure how the 0.1 second cooldown works for the 3 parts of Colour Spray, but I certainly saw several mobs die for each casting. Which isn't bad for a spell that does no damage of its own!

Maybe it was only two mobs that died - one from Prism and one from Stay Good/Frosty, or maybe there is more than 0.1 second between the 3 parts of Greater Colour Spray, which would allow up to 6 mobs to be hit by the Shiradi procs.

To the point where I ran all my Epic Lives in Prism Mantle with Stay Good or Stay Frosty, even if the bulk of the points (and all epic strikes) were in Draconic Incarnation or Primal Avatar.

It did need a nerf, but I doubt it needed one as drastic as this.


Not sure I will be bothering with a Shiradi splash for my casters in future.

[jskinner937]

Shiradi Champion was insanely good for any caster build that could get multiple chances of triggering the procs.

You could kill several trash mobs just with the procs from one casting of Greater Color Spray (3 x 30% chances of proccing per mob). Not sure how the 0.1 second cooldown works for the 3 parts of Colour Spray, but I certainly saw several mobs die for each casting. Which isn't bad for a spell that does no damage of its own!

Maybe it was only two mobs that died - one from Prism and one from Stay Good/Frosty, or maybe there is more than 0.1 second between the 3 parts of Greater Colour Spray, which would allow up to 6 mobs to be hit by the Shiradi procs.

To the point where I ran all my Epic Lives in Prism Mantle with Stay Good or Stay Frosty, even if the bulk of the points (and all epic strikes) were in Draconic Incarnation or Primal Avatar.

It did need a nerf, but I doubt it needed one as drastic as this.


Not sure I will be bothering with a Shiradi splash for my casters in future.

Likely you have colors of the queen active as well.

[Zarkarion]

Likely you have colors of the queen active as well.

No, as I say, I was only using a splash of Shiradi. (8 points to get to Prism Mantle and Stay Frosty/Good)

[eumate]

The 5% with 50% SP or the revised 7% with 100% SP means that no caster will ever use Shiradi again, it will be a ranged only tree.
Just halving (15% or 50% SP or 0.5 cooldown) would have been enough for a first step, now it's just useless for casters.

[Jerevth]

This update should not have flown without a preview for feedback in Llamania.
Spell power damage reduction for Shiradi, from 200% to 50% is a ridiculously significant reduction for a proc chance based attack.

Reducing the possibility of it happening, on top of the result if it happens (now reduced damage result) is counter-intuitive. If you make it a rarer occurrence, you should have left the damage valuation alone.

Finally, In future updates please include the pre-update value for a single view comparison. i.e "Shiradi's Prism, Stay Good, and Stay Frosty now have a 5% chance of proccing their damage on spellcast. (Reduced from 30%)"

[jskinner937]

No, as I say, I was only using a splash of Shiradi. (8 points to get to Prism Mantle and Stay Frosty/Good)

Colors for the queen is an epic stance not an ED.

[jskinner937]

In light of the balance for shirardi and considering the lack of the CC portion of this tree being useful to spellcadters, can thought to bring in back nerve venom for caster be given again? At least in some form?

[Zarkarion]

Colors for the queen is an epic stance not an ED.

Good point. Well you can assume from the fact that I had forgotten that, that I did not have it active. (In fact I don't have it at all)

[Hashrabal]

We appreciate the work you've done to provide us with detailed feedback on our Shiradi adjustments in today's patch. We said yesterday that we were open to making further change, and we want to follow up today with some of our plans. There are a few things we need to clear up, though, first, so we are on the same page before going into the details:

1. The procs from caster to ranged shiradi mantle are isolated from one another - changes to one do not affect the other (unless we'd like them to) so your ranged shiradi characters shouldn't see any changes at all. This is specifically all about casters!
2. The scaling on caster procs is 100%, not 200% - this one is definitely on us for keeping a bad tooltip around.

With that out of the way, we've been taking a close look at the feedback so far and have planned a follow-up adjustment to Shiradi that you'll be able to preview shortly. They involve the following changes:

• Changing the proc rate to 7% up from 5% (since 7 is a lucky number, and the old-ED version had 7%, so 7s it is)
• Adjusting the damage scaling back to 100% from 50%
• Changing the dice of the procs to a slightly more 7-focused dice layout (Hint: there are 7s in it. The goal here is higher highs and a lower floor, emphasizing the random thematic element of the tree while still achieving what our original change was meant to do)
• And finally... changing the options of what's available, element-wise, to cater to a broader but slightly different group of casters (Hint: this means including Sonic, Poison, and Force. OK, that one wasn't really a hint at all. )

As always, we appreciate your passionate feedback!

Do you have any idea how much good will you just killed? Any at all?
After the RL belt disaster we as a community pretty much accepted that devs are disconnected with their own game and did not give a <censored> about casters at best - and wanted them nerfed into unplayable states at worst.

Then you made the ED revamp*1 - which the community was rightfully worried about. You've not 100% nailed it, but it was really good still. You've gotten back a lot of trust from those of us that actually play the game. For some, such as me, it was the very reason I came back to play the game. A job well done.

And then you go and massacre all that trust, all that feeling that the devs maybe actually do have some clue of what they do, in one day, with a patch you need (and need is the right word here) to revert/fix almost immediately. Why? Why do that to yourselves? What if I hadn't found your buried reply here? That would have been me gone again.. sigh.

What is the problem with adjusting numbers in slow increments? Why are you so against doing that? Shiradi is to strong - ok nerf it some, heck most*2 of us agree it needs a nerf, say by 30-50%. See if that feels better. If not, nerf it again. But your original proposed and implemented nerf was 1200%! If I was off in my kind of work, by 1200%, I know my boss would call me incompetent (and tbh fire me). And he would be right.

This was an absolutely unneeded break of trust. Why should we believe you know what you do in your game, yet again, after this? Do we need to always be on our guard that you do not over nerf classes you clearly hate for some reason? Why? Can we not have a stable, working raid caster for more then a couple months? Why is that such a huge issue for you and your team? I am not saying other companies always nail it 100% either, but look at the way Blizzard balances WoW or for example the way LoL is balanced - in small iterations. It seems to work out a lot better in general then your ...special.... "nuke it from orbit and see if anyone complains" way. Why do you conceive your way to be better? If we as a community understand that, then we can maybe get somewhere with this discussion. As is we (or at the very least me) feel unheard and frankly baffled by your decisions.




*1 And quite a few other good pieces of work, but the big standout was EDs obviously and since we are on the topic of EDs....
*2 Unfortunately you nerf single-target and AoE at the same time, which is.. awkward. Non-nerfed shiradi caster (not talking about ranged!) is already the worst still viable option for raid dps in endgame raids. They are bottom tier. Just barely acceptable. They are literally around 20% of the damage any ranged build does single-target (they are the massive outlier here, but since you heavily favor ranged builds (gotta sell that new tree) you won't do jack **** about it). They are not "close" to good.. they are... most of the time charity pickups, with a max of 2 casters or so. And that is the 100% un-nerfed version! The new version will just again mean that there is 0 (!) viable caster builds for endgame raiding, since SP run out and throwser / bows don't. I do get that you want to try to force casters to support your game by chugging store pots - but that is another can of worms, even if we ignore the moral aspect of it... The best pots restores what.. 600 average SP? In epics that is... nothing. A single-target rotation with say, Ruin (75 every 12 to 15s), Greater Ruin(150 every 12 to 15s) and some 9th level spells like Iceberg (40 every 4 to 6s) and Thunderstroke (40 every 4 to 6s) eat that up in a around 20 - 30s of nuking. You cannot seriously expect people to chug pots every 30s to do subpar damage in raids. You either need to fix pots to restore say around 3000sp average in epics or you know.. not nerf the only sustainable way to do raid damage if you want to keep casters in the raids. Or you can again pretend that there is no problem and just accept that certain play styles are not represented at all in one of your endgames. Do the right thing this time.. you were on such a good course.

[Edwardt]

I like to play sharadi nuker/mm spammer and I’m playing them for a couple years now. My character besides my main is a 10 Sorc / 6 Wizard / 4 Fav build and it’s a pain to level in heroics, since the epic destiny changes also terrible in epics until level 29. It takes a long time and it’s not that easy to gear such a toon when the main focus is spell critical. Once at cap it is fun.
The magic missiles are mainly the transmitter of the damage from the procs. Pretty unreliable damage, because one doesn’t know what will go off and when. With double rainbow there also might be a nice blast, it also might be a useless trap, a fun pork barrel, or a big heal for the enemy.
The build was good for clearing trash in ee and in lower reaper, but on harder mobs it was far behind other classes. In higher reaper the build is useless.

Now with the new chance of getting a proc it feels broken. I tested the changes for two hours in different quests and I had a rough time even on ee sometimes. The runs took ages compared to the times before.

I’ve to say I don’t like the change at all.

What were you thinking when choose to dismantle a build option which wasn’t overpowered?

A while ago Severlin was really upset about some people who stated the devs, or some of them are evil and like to take the fun from players. I’m on his side there, because it just doesn’t make sense.
So with the evil option out of the way there is the option of mindful thoughts, responsibility and … let’s say just thoughts.
There had to be a problem large and impactful enough to spend resourceful time on it. The base of problem solving is gathering a valid amount of reliable information, data in this case over a given amount of time. After that process is done you might pinpoint the problem in its core and search for solutions in a way where the collateral damage is reduced to a minimum… But I’m sure you all know that and have done that a hundred times.
Who would be so stupid and pull the main power breaker in the house when only the water cooker is overheating, right? It would solve the problem, though.

The initial power loss of over 90% must have come from somewhere.

Wasn’t there enough time to gather data across all the build options?

Wasn’t there enough time to elaborate a fitting solution?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t ideal. If it was the lack of time, maybe it was not the time for a change like that in the first place.

The process behind decisions like that are communicated rather poorly, if they are at all. I have the feeling the player base would appreciate a few clarifying words on significant changes (maybe even before those hit) and with that many would be more acceptable to those decisions without getting angry, or being just sad and frustrated.

It’s a game we love, because it’s so unique and fun. Please be a little bit more mindful next time.

[Jerevth]

Disregard the post that was here previously (It wasn't inflammatory, but I chose, after posting, to wait for the changes and then discuss.)

Different train of thought:

When will the changes be pushed out?
When will the preview be held?
There were a lot of fixes waiting to be rolled out previously (They came with the latest update) but it was over a month for some of those changes to go live.

[ice584]

[snip]...We said yesterday that we were open to making further change...[snip]...As always, we appreciate your passionate feedback!

Please, please, please ensure that ALL associated tooltips are adjusted properly. It's frustrating just because it seems like it should be such an easy thing to check and update. Last night, it looked like the Shiradi tooltips were not all correct or even consistent. Some looked updated and some did not. Please check the initial tooltip as well as all subsequent tooltips as you invest more points into it.

I realize getting actual functionality is the highest priority (and more often than not, you guys get the real game mechanics working properly) but tooltips are the initial comparison mechanism for all players, casual and masochistic number crunchers alike. Players usually don't even start doing number crunching unless we notice something fishy going on, and even then it usually takes a certain breed of player to really care enough to go dive into the weeds.

Thanks!

[ice584]

[snip]...no caster will ever use Shiradi again...[snip]...it's just useless for casters.

Maybe you're finding something I'm not (and if so, please share!) but I'm having a hard time finding better caster-y damage options for my Pale master build. Due to the target limits and internal cooldowns of other mantles, I feel like even the new Shiradi numbers (7%/100%) are definitely still a decent option for casters:
- With Magus, you get AoE damage once on an internal cooldown (currently only summons from the Summon Monster spells seem to work; Death Knight and Lich do not seem to proc it)
- With Draconic, you get AoE damage once on an internal cooldown with a DoT to follow (total damage potential is good but often pointless because stuff dies so quickly)
- With Primal, you hit one target with extra damage on an internal cooldown which summons can also proc (haven't tested specific summons for this one)
- With Shiradi, anything you hit gets a chance to proc additional damage with no internal cooldowns plus some additional helpless damage (and with tier5 can also proc a chance to paralyze or freeze)

[ice584]

[snip]...bring in back nerve venom for caster...[snip]

AFAIK, it never went anywhere:
(Tier5) Stay Still = While in Shiradi Champion Destiny Mantle, your ranged and thrown attacks and offensive spells have a 7% chance to paralyze living creatures for 6 seconds. Requires Stay Good.

[Hashrabal]

but I'm having a hard time finding better caster-y damage options for my Pale master build. Due to the target limits and internal cooldowns of other mantles, I feel like even the new Shiradi numbers (7%/100%) are definitely still a decent option for casters:
- With Magus, you get AoE damage once on an internal cooldown (currently only summons from the Summon Monster spells seem to work; Death Knight and Lich do not seem to proc it)
- With Draconic, you get AoE damage once on an internal cooldown with a DoT to follow (total damage potential is good but often pointless because stuff dies so quickly)
- With Primal, you hit one target with extra damage on an internal cooldown which summons can also proc (haven't tested specific summons for this one)
- With Shiradi, anything you hit gets a chance to proc additional damage with no internal cooldowns plus some additional helpless damage (and with tier5 can also proc a chance to paralyze or freeze)

I'd wager the 4x 1d6+6 per CL from Draconic turns out to be more dmg on a single target (if the target lives that long...) then a 7% proc chance from Shiradi. But the point is moot - anywhere you need real single target dmg (aka high-end raiding) you just do what you did before the ED revamp. You don't bring casters, least of all a PM.

Leveling will still be fine and you can serve as Mass Hold / Timestop bi... I mean DC caster for your party but any notion of casters doing good raid damage die with shiradi. It's a noob trap now.. not 6 months after the release and they managed to bungle magus because still no working bypass and now kill the only viable raid-tree for casters too. And we've thought they learned...

[jskinner937]

I'd wager the 4x 1d6+6 per CL from Draconic turns out to be more dmg on a single target (if the target lives that long...) then a 7% proc chance from Shiradi. But the point is moot - anywhere you need real single target dmg (aka high-end raiding) you just do what you did before the ED revamp. You don't bring casters, least of all a PM.

Leveling will still be fine and you can serve as Mass Hold / Timestop bi... I mean DC caster for your party but any notion of casters doing good raid damage die with shiradi. It's a noob trap now.. not 6 months after the release and they managed to bungle magus because still no working bypass and now kill the only viable raid-tree for casters too. And we've thought they learned...

Acutally palemaster, is actually quite the opposite on single target DPS. Almost everything in raids is weakened to neg damage with the PM enhancement, which make it really good single target DPS for a caster and probably only second to a drac ruin/cold sorc.