There's something silly about the idea that my artificer if running Battle Engineer and running pew pew ranged will scale one way as skulls turn up vs if running Arcanotechnician where it will take a huge hit to damage in the difficulties I run. Neither build is a killing machine, but it's sad that the same character will suffer if using one tree vs another for choosing how to play in harder content. Having choices of how to play removed to be viable just feels bad.
Wow. Another blanket nerf on casters of all types because a few (looking at cold druids/sorcs) used the extra powers you gave them.
Sometimes I pull one out just to watch it die over and over. That's how much I hate hires.
Noone takes great leveler because of one thing and one thing only: it's too clumsy to aim (read as: impossible). AND if you couple this with ANY lag it's basically a guranteed miss.
Also, due to the nature of dungeon combat (try to line your opponents up neatly for the skill to take full effect) you're wasting time and just using basic attack skills will garner more DPS.
In the end, it essentially is a single target skill if that.
My advice is to just make it a true 360 degree "around the player" AoE.
MOAR BULLYWOGS PLZ
Heh... Someone at SSG really likes (or hates) frogs. Hopefully it's the former and not the latter!
I happen to enjoy the Bullywogs (and Frogo especially).
Reaper Changes
I saw this coming and am not surprised.
Divine Rightousness Bug Fix
Yeah... I was starting to wonder if the +threat bonus on this was working as intended. Thanks for finding and fixing this.
Cordovan's Hair
Cut it.
Dragnilar, Follow of Bahamut
Server: Khyber
Guild: ClanNotAGuild
Community Member
Good afternoon.
I am interested in creating a character on the Lammania server,
Would you please tell me how to do this.
Thank you
Ehh the nerf to caster damage is kinda weird, DPS casters aren't that effective in high reaper to begin with and end up using CC and insta kill spells instead. Finger of Death / Wail of Banshee / Slay Living / Destruction all do the exact same -100% HP in 10 skull reaper as in casual.
I love the new mount
However, its stance while not moving looks like it's at a permanent crouch as if it's got a real itchy spot that it can't scratch right between its shoulder blades
Poor kitty.
Re: caster nerfs
Some casters are definitely over preforming.
Leveling a caster is phenomenally easier/faster than leveling a ranged or a melee.
Taking a caster through quests is vastly superior to a melee/ranged, and this is by virtue of a caster's innate aoe damage and safety. This is supposed to be offset by a caster's limited spell point pool, and weakness against enemies of certain types (such as a fire elemental for a fire nuker).
However these days with lost souls, rings of spell storing, spell point pools of 5k - 8k, and immunity stripping of all varieties, casters no are longer held back by what is supposed to keep them balanced.
These changes are not the way to balance casters for a couple of reasons.
1. These changes only impact high reaper. A caster is still going to blow everything out of the water when leveling, or running skull <7 at cap. If nukers are over performing in r10, why wouldnt they be over performing lower than that as well?
2. These changes impact all casters equally. Not all casters are equally obscene at cap in high reaper. The major offenders are cold druid and sorc (at cap), and this is mostly due to the outlying spells they have access to, as well as the caster level boosts they have access to which pushes dragon breath beyond what other casters are capable of. The outlying spells are tsunami, ice flowers, dragon breath, iceberg, thunderstroke, and carrion swarm.
Id suggest removing lost souls from r7+ content, bringing the outlying spells more in line with other options, and *maybe*, reducing spell point pools in some manner, but Im not sure how to reasonably to that. Removing immunity stripping and reworking immunity to be varying levels of absorption would probably be for the best, but seems unlikely.
Ice flowers should have its cooldown doubled, and damage reduced from 1d6+8 to 1d6+4.
Tsunami needs to be limited to water elemental form in addition to the max caster level that is getting added.
Iceberg / thunderstroke need to be reduced from 1d6+28 to 1d6+24.
Carrion swarm needs its damage halved, and max stacks increased to 5. This would let it serve as a boss killer still fairly well, but takes longer to get ramped up. Maybe have the duration increased slightly so its harder to drop stacks.
Dragonbreath needs to have its upgrade only increase its damage by 50% not 100%
Last edited by Entyri; 04-07-2023 at 01:55 AM.
Agreed, capping the amount of OP spells a caster can dish out is the way to go and is the way it should be designed. Make casters think... should I use this OP maximized spell or go with a lower level one that may do the job albeit slower.
But somewhere down the road I guess casters complained about spell points?
Ice flowers I agree entirely, in fact 1d6+4 is overtuned for the spell considering it's an 8th level spell that does two hits of 1d6+8 currently so twice what it should be, right now Ice flowers averages 23 damage per CL before any scaling as an eighth level spell - ACID WELL a ninth level spell is 1d6+18 averaging 21.5. Appropriate damage for an 8th level is 1d6+8 (11.5) while 2x(1d6+4) is an average of 15 per CL.
Tsunami is an average of 25 per CL (two hits of 1d6+9) so is overtuned compared to acid well another 9th level AoE spell, I don't agree with restricting it to water elemental as the elemental form spells typically have an equivalent, there is no fire elemental form spell for 9th level and restricting it to water elemental form just skews everything even further towards cold druid within the class.
9th level arcane spells in general are rather overtuned honestly.
Carrion swarm I feel isn't quite as problematic, especially considering right now only a single person per group/raid can actually use it effectively - anybody else using it doesn't get the damage over time and just refreshes the duration, additionally when compared to dragon breath... it caps out at CL 20 before MCL bonuses.
Dragon breath is a huge balance nightmare unto itself, it's a 1d6+10 AoE epic strike WITH NO MAXIMUM CASTER LEVEL that upgrades to 2d6+20 per caster level while every caster epic strike outside primal and draconic is 1d6+6 per level SINGLE TARGET WITH AN MCL OF 20. Fatesinger's is 1d6+1 but at least it has no MCL and a 2 second cooldown. I'd honestly other epic strikes are underperforming compared to dragon breath.
Also your suggestion to nerf the upgrade has no answer to the madmen taking vortex but at least vortex requires you to be in close while working out as 5d6+50 over the duration.
Casters should not be able to complete quests without a melee there to tank. They are now are or can be all three legs of the so called mmo 'holy trinity' tank/dps/healer. It's absolutely way overboard screwed up.
And yet melees aren't even part of a trinity or even represent one aspect of it while casters represent ALL of it. I propose this new set up.
Damage reduction for spells in Reaper
[Current] ->[New]
R1: 77% -> 70%
R2: 66% -> 60%
R3: 55% -> 50%
R4: 45% -> 37%
R5: 37% -> 30%
R6: 30% -> 26%
R7: 25% -> 21%
R8: 20% -> 16%
R9: 18% -> 12%
R10:15% -> 8%