What should be done for L65 Mage?

[Thade]

Assuming such information is forthcoming where would we think it reasonable for Mage DPS to be in relation to say Wizard/Rogue/Monk?

Higher than monk, close to wizard/rogue/necro. Generally our parses look like Rogues/wizards/necro at the top, then monks/rangers (monks get gog because raralith is bad and rangers don't). Our mage just recently started playing again, so not really sure where he falls.

 

[Kedrin]

What if SB buffs would stay on pets even after they die and get re-summoned? Perhaps even make a high end self only mage pet weapon that will do the same.

 

[Thade]

What if SB buffs would stay on pets even after they die and get re-summoned? Perhaps even make a high end self only mage pet weapon that will do the same.

I'm pretty sure the pet dps isn't the problem. looking at some parses from yesterday in sharvahl trying to farm stuff for bango, I see windbeutel (sintasia's pet) doing about 220 or so dps on most things. As far as dps is concerned, I think their dps itself isn't that bad. Against two targets sintasia+windbeutel does pretty similar dps to nwaij, who has way more tomes/exp etc.

The problems aisling has always conveyed is 1) how hard it is to keep a mage pet alive (The heal sucks, the only thing worth a damn is aa heal/rust clickie). 2) any situation where you can't rain, your dps is ass terrible. 3) if you cast bladewind, you're generating a lot of aggro, that you can't get rid of. Rains are low aggro, bladewind is normal aggro. 4) Rains being penalized on crits (Each tick has it's own chance to crit, and it's at 1/3rd crit chance).

Edit: In regards to three, that's also part of the reason the refuge spell sucks. It's four dd's, all high aggro. And then it has to pass four different resist checks and only at -175 instead of -300 like the wizard ones.

 

[Tparim]

The problems aisling has always conveyed is 1) how hard it is to keep a mage pet alive (The heal sucks, the only thing worth a damn is aa heal/rust clickie). 2) any situation where you can't rain, your dps is ass terrible. 3) if you cast bladewind, you're generating a lot of aggro, that you can't get rid of. Rains are low aggro, bladewind is normal aggro. 4) Rains being penalized on crits (Each tick has it's own chance to crit, and it's at 1/3rd crit chance).

Out of this entire thread, this is about all I see with valid points tossed out. Granted, the heal sucks. But as said before, I don't know how long ago and from who. Magi's aren't clerics. They shouldn't be able to sit there and chain heal there pet. I've been playing my magi for 5 years on SOD and a Magi on live for about another 4 or 5 years(?) now and I personally wouldn't want to see any changes. The DPS I feel is on par vs other class' because when your not nuking (And your pet is alive still) your still getting that DPS. Its just split. So in reality, a magi's DPS is outstanding.

And from a previous post above, Magi's shouldn't get dots. I want to say more of a Lore aspect. Magi's are direct in there spell casting.

If I were to ask for ONE thing to see added to a magi. Would be like an on par Cold Base nuke like the level 64: Storm of Steel. I feel like there's a number of mobs and zones in general that are highly resistant to Fire and Magic base spells (Not that that number is very high) at that point, Magi's become very useless. It would just be nice to have that option. As much fun as it is to cast Elemental Barrage. Its a mana sink.



And for the record, I've been told Tparim's parced DPS sits just under the Wizards on our raids. Single mobs or Doubles.

 

[Bridger]

While I agree with Thade's analysis above it only brings out some of the problems.
So let me add
(1) When your pet dies (and it happens with great regularity because most healers give low or zero priority to keeping it alive and its resistance to AE's is pathetic) then it takes forever to get a fresh pet up (10 casts in my case) and even then it will have lost raid buffs and the decent pet weapons.

(2) If you should die you have similar problems but worse.

(3) Immune/Reflecting mobs

A mages competitor is not so much Wizard rather monk/rogue.These enjoy a huge advantage in armour. can escape aggro with FD. do not need med breaks, are ready for action virtually as soon as they are rezzed, have no problems with immune mobs.

If that is indeed how crit is calculated for rains then it is just plain WRONG.
Suppose you have a 3000 nuke with a 3% crit chance, then your overall damage is 97% of 3000 plus 3% of 6000 ie 3090. Now if your 3000 is split into 3 waves of 1000 each with a 1% of crit then your overall damage is 3(1000x.99 + 2000x.01)
ie 3030

 

[Nuli]

And from a previous post above, Magi's shouldn't get dots. I want to say more of a Lore aspect. Magi's are direct in there spell casting.

Spell: Wrath of the Elements (55) is classified as a DOT, so Mages already have a DOT.

 

[Tparim]

Spell: Wrath of the Elements (55) is classified as a DOT, so Mages already have a DOT.

And do you use it? No.

 

[Xardon]

Mages are most effective on multiple targets, for optimum DPS. However, multiple targets means that you have to heal multiple tanks (potentially depending on the tier). Technically speaking for your healer mana to mage damage ratio in theory it would be inefficient. Most players know this and thats why they would just rather kill single mobs at a time and bring another Wizard or Necro or other DPS. If you always had 3x mages in a raid, then that would be different and then probably more beneficial to always pull two.

If changes need to be made to the class, I believe it should be made with a focus on the pets since that is suppose to be what they are primarily about. Pet items or abilities or spells designed to enhance their pet, obviously their longevity would have to be addressed too.

Most people look to pure nukes as the measure of DPS, but I think Wizards fit that role just fine. Mages rain and PBAoE DPS should stay about where it is, but for their single target DPS boost, do it through the pet in some balanced fashion.

 

[Manguadi]

Are mages actually higher than monks? I think it switches depending on the particulars of the fight. I'd say pretty close overall including grouping and raiding. I seem to recall aisling a bit under in pure spell damage but his pet usually tipped the scales by a bit.

 

[Thade]

Looking at my parses from tonight on -REDACTED- Mind you, pets are all pretty much dead on this fight really early, and won't be coming back (OH MAN MASSIVE STRAT LEAKS)

DPS
Temellin + rakatheel, 171k damage
Nwaij + Pets, 152k
Sstilki 148k damage
Teijin 145k Damage
Nifera 144k Damage
Sintasia + Pets 141k damage
Caer 114k
Manguadi-bot 110k

Sintasia did ~11k less damage than nwaij, and his pet lived 96 seconds, doing 12k damage. The fight lasted another 480 seconds, without the pet. Had it actually lived, and continued its dps of 133 he'd have done 204k damage. had temellins pet done the same, it'd have done an additional 21k damage at 44 dps. Putting him at 192k.

On another fight in the same zone earlier in the night that requires a lot of movement (I Probably missed a lot of caster dps on this fight)

Nifera 166k
Nwaij 165k
Sintasia + 159k
Temellin + 150k
Sstilki 140k
Caer 134k
Teijin 124k
Marchie 120k

Once again, sintasia is near the top, beating out better geared toons. The accuracy of this parse is a little bit flaky but still.

As long as the pet stays alive, AND they can rain, their dps is fine. The problem is keeping the pet alive is hard without your healer having to step in, and far to often raining isn't really possible (Cc'd mobs, close quarters, etc)

Really, the mage needs to be able to keep his pet alive without anything past any group heals the rest of the group is getting. I'd also say it's probably acceptable for a dps loss when things have to be cc'd; there aren't that many mobs that need cc'd on raid fights, and usually you can manuver to avoid it. However, the close quarters raining all over yourself craps all over mage dps and impacts them on far too many fights.

 

[Cyzaine]

As long as the pet stays alive, AND they can rain, their dps is fine. The problem is keeping the pet alive is hard, and far to often raining isn't really possible (Cc'd mobs, close quarters, etc)

This has pretty much been my assumption for quite some time. Having some real world numbers is good to have. Having some more would be excellent as well.

For survivability some options exist that I promise will be live tomorrow, some of you are vaguely aware of them. We'll see if it helps.

 

[Dimmi]

Looking at my parses from tonight on -REDACTED- Mind you, pets are all pretty much dead on this fight really early, and won't be coming back (OH MAN MASSIVE STRAT LEAKS)

DPS
Temellin + rakatheel, 171k damage
Nwaij + Pets, 152k
Sstilki 148k damage
Teijin 145k Damage
Nifera 144k Damage
Sintasia + Pets 141k damage
Caer 114k
Manguadi-bot 110k

Sintasia did ~11k less damage than nwaij, and his pet lived 96 seconds, doing 12k damage. The fight lasted another 480 seconds, without the pet. Had it actually lived, and continued its dps of 133 he'd have done 204k damage. had temellins pet done the same, it'd have done an additional 21k damage at 44 dps. Putting him at 192k.

On another fight in the same zone earlier in the night that requires a lot of movement (I Probably missed a lot of caster dps on this fight)

Nifera 166k
Nwaij 165k
Sintasia + 159k
Temellin + 150k
Sstilki 140k
Caer 134k
Teijin 124k
Marchie 120k

Once again, sintasia is near the top, beating out better geared toons. The accuracy of this parse is a little bit flaky but still.

As long as the pet stays alive, AND they can rain, their dps is fine. The problem is keeping the pet alive is hard without your healer having to step in, and far to often raining isn't really possible (Cc'd mobs, close quarters, etc)

Really, the mage needs to be able to keep his pet alive without anything past any group heals the rest of the group is getting. I'd also say it's probably acceptable for a dps loss when things have to be cc'd; there aren't that many mobs that need cc'd on raid fights, and usually you can manuver to avoid it. However, the close quarters raining all over yourself craps all over mage dps and impacts them on far too many fights.

damn...tiny numbers...how did you manage to kill anything?

 

[Thade]

This has pretty much been my assumption for quite some time. Having some real world numbers is good to have. Having some more would be excellent as well.

For survivability some options exist that I promise will be live tomorrow, some of you are vaguely aware of them. We'll see if it helps

I'll keep parsing all week. Do you want me to throw the logs up somewhere when I Finish (i'll make a new one each day) Or just pm you numbers or drop them here. ALso hopefully we do something a bit more parser friendly.

 

[Cyzaine]

Actually I'll just spill the beans here. When I say mages, I generally ALSO mean BSTs. The assumptions made during their creations (they've been nearly ready for about 2 months) are as follows:

Mages are competitive with all other casters from 1-65.
Mages are competitive at low tiers.
Mages falter when their pets die.
Pets die due to crazy AE's.
Pets scale worse then spells as you tier up.

The gist of it is pet scaling with gear (it was actually the reason for the pet backend rewrite) via tomes. The tomes are so you must reach a certain level of progress before you can gain these abilities. The first tome in the series is fairly low AA req ( around 20-27 aa's ) and is vendor bought. The others are different.

184     Companion Bound Magic I
184     Companion Bound Magic II
185     Companion Bound Magic III
186     Companion Bound Magic IV
[I]187     Companion Bound Health I[/I]
188     Companion Bound Fire I
189     Companion Bound Fire II
190     Companion Bound Fire III
191     Companion Bound Fire IV
192     Companion Bound Cold I
193     Companion Bound Cold II
194     Companion Bound Cold III
195     Companion Bound Cold IV
196     Companion Bound Poison I
197     Companion Bound Poison II
198     Companion Bound Poison III
199     Companion Bound Poison IV
200     Companion Bound Disease I
201     Companion Bound Disease II
202     Companion Bound Disease III
203     Companion Bound Disease IV
204     Companion Critical Strike I
205     Companion Critical Strike II
206     Companion Critical Strike III
207     Companion Critical Strike IV
208     Companion Critical Strike V
209     Companion Armor I
210     Companion Armor II
211     Companion Armor III
212     Companion Armor IV

Companion Bound <element> adds 25% of your resists unbuffed resists to your pet per tome. If you have 100 FR and max our Companion Bound Fire I, your pet i summoned with an additional 25 FR.

Companion Critical Strike adds 1% crit strike to your pet per tome completed. This bonus stacks with the BST pet critical share tomes.

Companion Armors adds 25% of your unbuffed AC to your pets. If you have 800 AC and max Companion Armor I, your pet is summoned with 200 extra AC.

Companion Bound Health adds up to 50% of your unbuffed HP to your pets max hp. It costs as much as a tome of power however.

 

[Thade]

Question 1. do these apply to necros.

Something to note. Sintasia had citadel weapons all night. that could have skewed the damage on windebeutel a bit. Something may need to be done in the way of pet weapons (It's totally silly that the summoned weapons still have a recast). Also, how do you handle the fact that when a mage can't rain his dps is pretty pitiful? That's just as limiting as the pet dying far too fast.

Also, using "unbuffed hp/ac" doesn't make sense when beastlords get more base ac/hp then any other pet class does far and away giving them a far bigger boost from this. May want to use Hp/AC from gear and go with a higher percent?

 

[Tparim]

exciting. :dance:

 

[Cyzaine]

Buffs are spells thade. I didn't say base.

BSTs pets WOULD be better with gear in this case, since their gear would automatically help these things more than caster gear. I don't think thats a problem frankly.

Atm yes necros would benefit as well. These are archtype tomes. Wizards, druids, and shamans can also use them if they so choose.

They affect monster summon and swarms as well.

There is work on a pet haste share tome as well, but its been running into development issues.

 

[Thade]

Cyzaine I know exactly what you said.

Take a look at aisling versus vexiz. Aisling has 6223 hp, but 4030 hp from items, and 1513 base.

Vexiz has 7714 hp, 3965 from gear, 2518 base. Basically, vexiz gets more benefits off of these tomes just because melee classes get more starting ac/hp.

The bst pet is going to get massively better than the mage pet, and aren't mages supposed to be the premier pet class?

 

[Rorne]

The bst pet is going to get massively better than the mage pet, and aren't mages supposed to be the premier pet class?

I always thought beastlords were the premier pet class. Relic mage pet just craps all over any other pet so at worst this may allow beastlord pets to be competitive.

 

[Arcen]

For rains, can it be coded so that:
If you don't have 2 targets available, it does 1.75x damage to the single target? Then it would always be preferable to have 2 targets, but if not, you aren't gimped in damage?

Maybe prevent aoe hitting mezzed targets, similar to pets not willing to attack mezzed. In a roleplay sense, you can already place your "cloud" above a spot of your choice. You just push the cloud away from mobs that you see asleep.