Third Wizard Tome

[Silosobi]

I made a thread about this a while ago but that was a while ago and some stuff has changed so I figured I would start anew.

First a bit of info as to where wizards stand (IMO) in later raid game (when most people actually do class tomes). Wizard dps is mediocre at the mid tiers up until 10ish. As we aquire better spells, tomes, items, and fights get shorter relative to our mana pool, we become a top tier dps in the t11+ game. Our dps can be very inconsistent since we rely on random Ultimate/Primal blasts for a fair portion of our total dps. We also have very little utility or benefit to the raid outside of dps once ports are no longer necessary. Lastly, wizards are arguable the worst class in the game for survivability.

Because of these factors, the things I would like to see a tome potentially address are: more stable dps, more utility, more surviviability, or maybe something interactive since wizards are sort of a "two button class" at the moment.

Some ideas:

Arcane Shield
Provides a 10 second stance or /cmd function that will prevent 10%/rank of incoming damage every 5-10 minutes.

Elemental Openings
This tome provides the wizard with three rare spell procs, each of which makes the target mob take 25% more COLD, FIRE, or MAGIC damage for the next 10 seconds from the wizard's nukes. This would allow an attentive wizard to react to proc emotes and get in bonus damage as a result. If you ignore emotes you would only receive ~33% of the benefit. The proc rate would increase with each tome, but still have to start extremely low and cap at maybe 1 time per minute average to avoid being overpowered.

Critical Mass
All players in wizard's grup group gain 1%/rank extra spell and meele crit.


Any other general thoughts or tome ideas appreciated!

 

[Zaela]

Tome of endurance system:

Endurance bar starts at 0%. As you spend mana on nukes, it goes up by percentages. The faster you use mana (in terms of time between spell casts as well as mana costs) the faster it will go up. When it hits 100%, your next nuke casts instantly and is unresistable. Faster increases with more ranks. Or maybe a damage bonus or cost reduction for the nuke.

 

[neonovas]

Tome of endurance system:

Endurance bar starts at 0%. As you spend mana on nukes, it goes up by percentages. The faster you use mana (in terms of time between spell casts as well as mana costs) the faster it will go up. When it hits 100%, your next nuke casts instantly and is unresistable. Faster increases with more ranks. Or maybe a damage bonus or cost reduction for the nuke.

Crits/Ultimates/Primals give even more endurance?

reminds me of Warhammers system - each cast made your chance to crit higher but increased the chance the spell would backfire and damage you also.

 

[Silosobi]

Tome of endurance system:

Endurance bar starts at 0%. As you spend mana on nukes, it goes up by percentages. The faster you use mana (in terms of time between spell casts as well as mana costs) the faster it will go up. When it hits 100%, your next nuke casts instantly and is unresistable. Faster increases with more ranks. Or maybe a damage bonus or cost reduction for the nuke.

This would be really cool. It could actually add more strategy to wizard nuke rotation rather than the standard even mix of Concussion/MC/Intensify.



Something that buffs the familiar might be neat:

Familiar Enhancement
Each rank of this tome gives your Relic: Arcane Familiar an extra 100% healing, 10% damage, 500hp, and 50 to all resists.

 

[Silosobi]

Form of the Omnipotent
Illusion:something cool, maybe wisp but there are better models for sure.
Wizard gains an innate proc which goes off at a rate of 1% per 100 mana spent. The proc triggers a 2 tic illusion with +3%/rank damage and -10/rank to all resist adjusts (Rank 4 still goes off at 1% per 100 mana, lasts 2 tics, and gives +12% damage and -40 to resist adjusts)

Something fun. Low enough proc that its not a huge benefit. Even when its up the damage mod isnt huge, the resist adjust is nice but mostly helps us not fail to RNG.

Edit: it if was hard to make the buff increase in effects, it could always be +5% damage and -25 resists, and make it proc at 1/2/3/4% per 100 mana.

 

[Rorne]

I had this idea a while back when thinking about wizard survivability and utility (or lack thereof) but I'm not a wizard so excuse me if it sucks. Numbers included are just some numbers pulled out of my ass for the sake of demonstrating the idea.

Defensive Casting
A stance that reduces wizard damage by X amount. When a damaging spell is cast the amount of damage that is lost from being in this stance is multiplied by Y then divided by 6 and applied to the group in the form of a spell rune.

So for an example lets say Tim the wizard is casting a nuke for 4000 damage, he goes into the Defensive Casting stance which reduces his damage by 25% (-1000). We take this 1000 and multiply the value by, lets say 2x, and is then divided by 6 and applied as a spell rune for 333 to each group member. You could also skip some of the math steps by just taking the flat value post-stance reduction, dropping it a bit, and applying it equally to the group. Don't get hung up on the numbers as they are fairly meaningless as this is just an example.

Anyways I think the merit of this is that since it's based off a wizard's own damage they would be able to strategically decide when and what to cast for maximum soak effectiveness (dropping a large less efficient nuke prior to a large ae, casting faster cast stuff in constant magic damage scenarios) and it would lend survivability to other casters in caster group on raids. But like I said I am not a wizard so if it is awful thanks for reading and I am sorry I stole those seconds of your life!

 

[Silosobi]

Could be fun, idk what numbers you would use though.

 

[Silosobi]

Drakeswarm

This tome allows the wizard's spells to proc swarmpet style drakes that assist the wizard in combat. Each drake spawns at 1% per 100 mana on offensive spells, and remains alive for 12 seconds before despawning.

Rank 1: Protective Drake: Blue drake that reduces spell damage taken by the wizard by 10%.
Rank 2: Offensive Drake: Red drake that increases damage dealt by the wizard by 5%.
Rank 3: Intuition Drake: Gold drake that adds a -50 resist adjust to the wizard's nukes.
Rank 4: Ether Drake: Black drake that increases the chance of critical spells by 5%.

This would provide random little boosts to the wizard, drakes are fun.

 

[Silosobi]

Ok I have thought about this long and hard and I have THE SOLUTION.

Wizards biggest issue is the inconsistency in our dps. Ultimate Blasts do so much damage that even though they are uncommon, they account for a large portion of our dps. The breakdown for my character looks like this:

28% of my damage is from normal nukes.
42% of my damage is from critical hits.
29% of my damage is from ultimate blasts.
1% of my damage is from primal blasts.

Critical blasts already make our dps somewhat inconsistent, but ultimate (and the rare primal) blasts are the real kicker, randomly appearing and taking wizard dps from sub-par up to the best in the game with enough luck.

I am going to suggest a tome that helps to make wizard dps more steady, while benefiting any wizard that would complete it.

Focused Evocation
This tome increases the damage of normal and critical blasts, while reducing the damage of ultimate and primal blasts. *It also introduces the Cataclysmic Blast, the rarest of all critical nukes*
Normal nukes get +6%/rank
Critical nukes get +4%/rank
Ultimate nukes get -6%/rank
Primal nukes get -10%/rank
Cataclysmic Blasts trigger off of 5%/rank of primals and do 10x base damage.

*I tried to think about why people wont like this tome, and the best reason I can think of is that ultimate/primals are rare/fun and to dampen their effect makes them less fun. By adding a next level, and even bigger nuke I think it preserves that effect. Any wizard at the point of doing these tomes is probably already regularly seeing ultimate blasts, and even primals are a daily occurance, so while this tome weakens the effect of those, it introduces an even rarer and bigger nuke to preserve that fun aspect, and it will be rare to the point that its actual effect on dps is negligible.

This gives me an extra ~6% damage for 4 ranks of a class tome, but more importantly it makes wizard dps far more consistent than it already is. It is far more effective in making dps consistent than all those numbers even indicate. It narrows the gap between normal nukes, crits, and ults. Most fights consist of these three nukes. Right now, if I have poor luck and ultimates happen half as often as usual I do ~800dps. If I get lucky and ultimates happen twice as often as usual I do ~1200dps. Thats a huge dps difference, and on difficult fights, 400dps can be the difference between winning or wiping. After this tome, those same number of crits/ults would turn into ~930dps and ~1070dps.

Wizard dps inconsistency has been a big issue to me for a long time. I thought about suggesting just removing ults, and adding in alternate dps methods, kind of like whats being talked about for necros right now, but they are such a core part of our class. I think a lot of people think that ult/primals are just a fun little quirk that are really inconsequential in the big picture, but they actually play a far far larger role. Without ult/primals wizards would be the worst dps class in the game. We are heavily reliant on them for our dps, yet they are just a function of RNG, and we don't nuke enough per fight for there to be any consistency whatsoever.

I liked zaela's idea a lot too, it would be fun and add a bit of strategy to nuke rotation, but I think what I posted above would go a lot further in actually improving the wizard class to be more consistent rather than always a roll of the dice.

 

[Boehm]

Though your spell set has little variety aren't you functionally playing a gambling class? Part of its charm being when you get 4 aces rather then a ace and change. If the class became more predictable would it have less appeal for you?

 

[Silosobi]

Its certainly fun getting lucky and doing huge dps, but at the end of the day I would trade it for consistency. I play the game to hang out with my friends and slay dragon and loot phat pixle swords. When we die because my RNG was bad that fight and its such a huge part of my dps, its one of the most frustrating things in this game.

Im also not suggesting total equalization, my tome would leave a fair amount to chance, just not the same degree as it is now.

 

[Silosobi]

Tome of endurance system:

Endurance bar starts at 0%. As you spend mana on nukes, it goes up by percentages. The faster you use mana (in terms of time between spell casts as well as mana costs) the faster it will go up. When it hits 100%, your next nuke casts instantly and is unresistable. Faster increases with more ranks. Or maybe a damage bonus or cost reduction for the nuke.

Please make this happen! With AoD changes wizards arent parsing so good anymore, so giving us some dps in a tome would be really nice!

also to replace our now worthless reclaiming mana:

Elemental Intuition: This tome reduces the effect of offensive magic on the wizard and allows them to focus on specific element types to do additional damage.

Basically, the tome adds 2% spell mitigation per rank, and whenever a nuke is cast, the wizard will do .5%/rank more damage with that element type for 30 seconds. The debuff stacks. It would be almost the opposite of the necro version, probably with a bit less damage mod in exchange for the spell mitigation. If I'm not concussing, I can land 5 MCs in 30 seconds. In any raid setting I'm using intensify as one of those spells, so with 4 ranks done I could hover around ~8% bonus cold. Accounting for a normal amount of concussion, it would be 4-6%.

 

[Animand]

... seriously? Your effective DPS hasn't changed, you merely no longer get credit for the DPS added by an enchanter's AoD. The changes lowered the enchanter's DPS instead. You've known for a long time what your true DPS would look like without AoD-inflated numbers. None of this is a surprise to you. So why exactly are you asking for more DPS for wizards?

On a different note, Reclaiming Mana was introduced to stem mana loss for no benefit when casting on mobs with a high tendency to completely resist a spell. These resist changes make Reclaiming Mana as-is a moot point. So the question is if this tome idea is even needed or wanted anymore. Changing it so that resisted spells return mana comparable to the amount resisted isn't a terrible idea on the surface, as this would limit the wizard's DPS while still provided a stable platform for DPS. However, would the regained mana be useful or worth balacning around in a boss fight situation? I think this would be better explored before deciding wizards now need 2 new tomes.

 

[Silosobi]

I have not known what my true dps looks like without AoD inflation. Sure, I do exp and 6 man which gives a pretty good idea, but FWF has raided with an enchanter for the last two years. Exp is different because I am constantly fed mana from killshots and there are just no 6 man fights in the game that last a similar duration to our raid encounters to get a good estimate from.

It is easy enough to say AoD is the enchanters dps, but it has been showing up on the wizard's parse for years. Even if I know it is from the enchanter, everyone else looks at parses and sees wizards at the top and everyone is not just thinking "well thats because there is an enchanter", and even if they do attribute it to the enchanter, it still gets considered in balance discussion. Do we discount GoE when we look at meele dps? Or all the other attack buffs that come from other classes? Nope. When we compare classes on a raid parse we assume they have certain buffs. If those buffs change it changes the balance of class dps. I used to parse 1200-1400 and now I parse 900-1100.

So yeah... now that wizards are parsing on endgame raid fights without AoD inflating our numbers I think getting some dps through a tome is a lot more reasonable than it seemed before.

 

[Dinadass]

I have not known what my true dps looks like without AoD inflation. Sure, I do exp and 6 man which gives a pretty good idea, but FWF has raided with an enchanter for the last two years. Exp is different because I am constantly fed mana from killshots and there are just no 6 man fights in the game that last a similar duration to our raid encounters to get a good estimate from.

It is easy enough to say AoD is the enchanters dps, but it has been showing up on the wizard's parse for years. Even if I know it is from the enchanter, everyone else looks at parses and sees wizards at the top and everyone is not just thinking "well thats because there is an enchanter", and even if they do attribute it to the enchanter, it still gets considered in balance discussion. Do we discount GoE when we look at meele dps? Or all the other attack buffs that come from other classes? Nope. When we compare classes on a raid parse we assume they have certain buffs. If those buffs change it changes the balance of class dps. I used to parse 1200-1400 and now I parse 900-1100.

So yeah... now that wizards are parsing on endgame raid fights without AoD inflating our numbers I think getting some dps through a tome is a lot more reasonable than it seemed before.

If AoD/GoG were maintained on every DPS at all times like most other buffs, I'd agree. But that's not how the spells worked, and including AoD in your baseline DPS numbers should never have been the case. An enchanter keeping the buffs on the raid was their full time DPS role... other buffs like rbow/haste/etc are cast prior to the fight and then the class that cast them is doing other things to contribute. If a raid has two wizards getting AoD doing 1400 DPS and the rest of the raid without AoD or GoG doing 800-1000 DPS, should all those other classes be given huge DPS increases to catch up? That would seem to be what you're arguing for, and would cause even larger balance issues than exist currently.

I can see adding some DPS to DPS classes since the AoD/GoG change obviously lowered overall raid DPS significantly, but increasing DPS classes to GoG/AoD levels of DPS on their own is too much. It seems like rangers and rogues got pretty decent bumps lately with the new pet and backstab damage increase, but other classes still have room for improvement.

Overall the past few weeks have been a clusterfuck. Too many changes made in too short a time, with some of the issues created having been partially addressed and others not at all. Trying to evaluate any one change in a live raid scenario seems all but impossible at the moment.

 

[Silosobi]

No, I'm not saying classes should be buffed to the level of a pre nerf aod wizard.

I'm saying that for the last two years wizard raid parses have been inflated by AoD. Now that AoD doesn't impact the wizard's parse the class dps rankings look different.

I dont think I have a single parse on Rujik/Blazewind/Taeshlin without AoD inflating wizard dps numbers before the changes. Now that we do have those numbers, it looks like it wouldn't be unreasonable to give wizards some dps in a tome. I'm not advocating a huge buff, because we don't look that bad, we just aren't topping charts with crazy AoD numbers like we used to.

I think aod/gog should be attributed to the enchanter, but for a long time they have not been, and especially considering how AoD boosted wizards more than any other class, its hard to not consider it in a dps balance discussion. Now that aod is almost not worth casting, things look different.

 

[Moraelintz]

I agree with solo that there might be a reason to look at wizards AoD was huge for them, and they are no longer far superior dps like they are designed to be. Wizards do one thing and have I one sole role and they should keep that, burst dps.

 

[darksabbath]

Though I bet most wizzies would rather just see reclaiming Mana go away, couldn't it be changed to return mana based on the % amount of the spell that is resisted? For example, you cast a nuke that takes 500 mana, and 10% is resisted (90% dmg), you would get 50 mana back for the resisted portion. Doing only 10% of your normal damage due to a resist sucks, but it wouldn't hurt as much when 90% of the mana gets returned.

 

[Silosobi]

Yes, that would probably be possible. It makes for a pretty boring tome though, and is not really in line with the wizard class if you ask me.

My vision of wizards is a burst dps class and master of arcane magics. I think most people see wizards as a burst dps class if anything?!?

The reclaiming mana just makes us more of a sustained dps class, and between intensify and arcane echo and 5 mana nukes we are already decent enough at sustained dps.

I think after seeing wizard raid parses without AoD inflation, it seems reasonable to actually give us a tome that adds a bit of dps!

 

[darksabbath]

Yeah, it makes it a "oh okay" thing, but nowhere near the "OH YEAH!" you really want, I get that. But you guys are still missing the third tome, and this way they would only have to think of the one idea.
You are right, when I think wizzie, I think big nukes dropping mob health quickly. But when that is really the only thing you do, it gets hard to design something that ellicits something more akin to the second one. But barring a tome that mixes more damage foci in, with maybe more cast speed or some such, there isn't much to boost that. And even that wouldn't make me go "Oh Yeah!"