Wizard Tomes

[Silosobi]

Everyone else is making class tome threads and I couldn't be left out.

Wizards have two tomes right now which leaves room for one new one, but for now I'm just going to look at our current tomes.

Yesterday was a full day of SoD involving 6man, raids, and exp. I figured this would be a good sample to parse.

I cast 2357 spells and had 152 resists in 332 minutes of parsing (it only runs during fights).

The parser doesn't tell me what % of each nuke was resisted, but I can say it was mostly Moon Comets, with some RRRs, Intensifys, and Concussions. I can also see quite a lot of resists from Abstraction of Flame and I would assume these only provide 1/6th of 15% of the spells cost. From all that I will estimate the average cost of resisted spells to be 500mana.

That means on the day I gained ~75*152=11400 mana. Accounting for Mana Conservation and specialization bonuses, that is about 24 Moon Comets, which average 10.000 damage if I have AoD and am very lucky (which is not the case most of the time).

So... I'm gaining 240,000 damage across 332 minutes per rank of tome. That comes out to a gain of 12 damage per second per rank of tome. In all of my numbers and estimations I rounded very far in favor of pushing the dps up: average spell cost would be lower; and average damage would be far lower. The kicker is that damage is only applied in a situation where you can actually run out of mana (exp, sometimes on raid trash, rarely on raid bosses/6man).

This tome would have been a powerful effect when I was leveling up, but there are a number of factors which make it weak for just about any character that will be getting it:

A) The line between a mob resisting spells very frequently and resisting them almost none at all is very thin. If I get more than 30% resists on raid/6man I will switch to using lures, but most of the time a mob is debuffed to the point that i land near 100% of at least one of my spelltypes.

B) New experience zones tend to have very low resists. This is a very welcome and needed change. A wizard will provide far less dps for an exp group than any on-tier meele dps could simply because we are restricted by mana regen and they are not. When resists become significant the difference is just absurd.

C) In raids and 6man mana just isn't much of an issue for wizards. These encounters have to be balanced around numerous classes and other classes just tend to run OOM faster than we do. We can spam RRR to catch up, but thats usually not a viable option and even when it is, its only slightly better dps for horrible efficiency.

Every now and then there is a fight that hits that sweet spot where Moon Comet resists 10-20% of the time, but you still cast it because that's better than any of your other options and I'm happy to have done three ranks of this tome, but in the big picture, comparing to other DPS classes' tomes I think this one is very lacking.

I would really like to just see it be remade to something more interesting, but if some sort of additional effect were added that could be viable:

This tome gives 15/30/45/60% mana back on a resist and 15/20/25/30% spell haste on your next cast. A resist really hurts a wizards overall dps, so adding that bit of spellhaste on the next cast would just help us recover slightly.

I know that was way way way too much information for that one tome but there is one wizard who somehow thinks its good so I felt the need to post parse numbers and do all the math and in depth explanation.


And the other current wizard tome gives us back mana when we get the killshot on a mob. This tome I do like, but it is limited to situations where you can get frequent killshots(exp). I'm not opposed to a tome that's primarily useful in exp, but if that is going to be the case it seems like the power of this could be... adjusted a bit. The problem I see is that a couple instances allow tons of easy killshots (EF bees), while most exp zones don't have anything close to that. Would it be possible to base the mana gained on the total hp of the mob? With rank two done, I think I about break even on my last cast of Moon Comet or RRR when I kill a mob, which helps, but overall isn't much when you only kill 1-3 mobs per minute (and obviously I cant get every killshot). On the otherhand, I can let a few waves of bees build up in emberflow, cast abstraction, and go from 40m to full. It seems a bit too good in one situation and lacking in the other. If it was possible to tie the mana to mob's hp that would really be ideal and seem balanced to me (getting killshot on a raid mob could fill my manabar, but I'd only maybe break even or gain a bit on my emberflow bees)

 

[Silosobi]

Here are cliffnotes since that first post is pretty aids:

Forbidden Harvest works out to be a weak exp tome and nearly useless raid/6man tome.

Reclaiming Mana is cool, but it doesn't scale to mob's difficulty/hp. This means that on hard mobs its really bad and on lots of easy mobs its really good. If it could be tied to mob's hp that would seem much better. (another class gets a similar tome that gives mana to the entire group and im pretty sure its the same amount per rank... it seems the wizard self only tome could give more mana than the group version)

 

[Tarutao]

While I sympathize with the general angst of "wizard tomes seem lacklaster when compared to some class tomes designed 1.5 years later" especially in the case of seeing a single necro dot landing on each of 15 mobs multiple times per tick... I don't think the essence of the argument was really caught in these posts.

Reclaimed Mana is nice (not great, but nice). It's a little gift of "hey, at least you didn't waste ALL the mana from that resist" that can add up to noticeable on a long raid encounter if you have a couple of the tomes done. It's also a (rather minor) increase of long term mana gain compared to without tomes in a group exp situation.

Forbidden Harvest is situational. Most complaints revolve around an overpowered necro comparison which when working properly will not really apply. If you're willing and able to have a killshot (read: do overflow damage), you get some mana back. The reasoning behind the scaling argument has merit but may be difficult to implement elegantly. The raid use of this tome is boolean and clearly not the intended use.

Both of these tomes were designed in a time where wizards were viewed as a dubious class that was always OOM and holding back exp groups, and in raid situations were concerned with going OOM too quickly during encounters. These tomes, as well as both of the Wizard class Runic spells, fall in line with the desire to alleviate these class concerns.

There are then 2 problems as I see them. First, by the time you do these, you probably have done the Codex of Power and also have the mana pool to push beyond the raid "OOM too fast" issues, so there's a sense of "that would have been nice 3-4 tiers ago", and the Tier 5-8 issue of lackluster wizards isn't addressed. Second, they seem less powerful overall than other DPS class tomes. Rogue insidious stabs are no doubt really fun, but it's a level of "holy crap wow that's amazing" for them that wizards miss out on with "oh, sorry about that loss of damage, here's some mana" for both of their tomes.

Don't get me wrong. I love Reclaimed Mana. It's a great thing to have in an exp group or a raid encounter long enough for mana to be an issue but not long enough for you to weave in any zero mana nukes (rare instance, but it's good for exp groups and a small nudge of help in the rest of the raid encounters).

For that matter, Forbidden Harvest is a fun toy when I'm one-shotting harthuks or necking to newport to med to full by meleeing bats and snakes. There's just a sense of "you only got that mana because you did more damage than the mob had HP, you could have saved that mana and not started a nuke when the mob was at 5%, and you wouldn't still have 30 seconds to wait before you could enter a meditative trance" when you get the benefit that puts a damper on the whole thing unless you got an unexpected killshot from a crit/ub/pb or were in some sort of AoE situation.

Solosolki and I rarely see eye-to-eye on much of anything, and the function of these two tomes isn't an exception. However, we ultimately agree that one of the extant tomes could use a minor tweak and that the tome-to-be could stand to be powerful.

tl;dr -- I do like the wizard class tomes we have, but one could use adjustment, and the eventual third could stand to have the raid relevance that the current two (as well as wizard runics) seem to have been meant to have but don't have.

 

[Goldfolk]

I think the previous posters have very eloquently made the case.

 

[Silosobi]

there's a sense of "that would have been nice 3-4 tiers ago"

There's just a sense of "you only got that mana because you did more damage than the mob had HP, you could have saved that mana and not started a nuke when the mob was at 5%, and you wouldn't still have 30 seconds to wait before you could enter a meditative trance"

and the eventual third could stand to have the raid relevance that the current two (as well as wizard runics) seem to have been meant to have but don't have.

100% agree with this stuff (other than the fact that our runic 1 is great for raids).

I understand you like the tome. Its not that I hate the concept, its just that every time I parse it proves to only be of mild benefit even at its best - exp with mobs that resist MC ~20% of the time. Even if we did 4 ranks of each of these exp oriented class tomes we would still be lacking in exp groups.

If Forbidden Harvest scaled to a mob's hp and Reclaiming Mana had something more (Spellhaste for our next cast would make it way more raid/6man viable, without making resists desirable), it would make these spells more balanced and a bit more on par with the power of most other class tomes.

 

[Silosobi]

Here is my proposed 3rd wizard tome:

Arcane Retribution

Reduces damage that would be taken from hostile spells by 5% per rank. Adds 50% per rank of that damage back into your next offensive spell.

Yes, its good. Our other two tomes are quite lackluster when compared to nearly all tomes of other DPS classes. Both our other tomes are almost entirely geared towards improving wizards in experience groups.

Wizards have the least survivability in the game. Lore suggests we are are the kings of offensive magic, so it might make sense that we could have a tad more survivability when that magic is being used against us. The second part of the tome allows us to channel some of that offensive magic an opponent is using on us back towards them.

If it were not possible to add the damage into our next nuke, It could simply be a "damage shield" type thing, where it is instantly reflected back.

So at rank 4, we prevent 20% damage and deal 200% of that back. We are still squishier than meeles, who have ~25% more hp. The most AE damage I see in any of our guild logs is ~100k on Warchief and Custodian. With 4 ranks done a wizard would reflect back ~40k damage, which is maybe 10% of the total damage they will be expected to do on those fights. On 95% of fights there is far less AE damage.

I think this tome fits in very well with Wizard lore and our niche in the raid game. It would give us a suitable situation where we for once aren't ultra squishy (although half the raid would still have more survivability than us).

And to recap current tome suggestions:

Reclaimed Mana: Marginally useful as is. Add 10% per rank spell haste to the next offensive spell cast within 10 seconds, so that we can recover some lost dps in addition to mana (this is not abusable).

Forbidden Harvest: Cool idea, would be better if it scaled to a mobs hp/difficulty. Also if it could add more mana to be competitive with the necro version that adds the same mana, plus hp, to the entire group (ours just adds mana to ourselves).

 

[Tarutao]

I almost entirely agree with Solosolki on this one (and God knows it took a long time for us to agree on this).

I'm a little unsure on how I feel about it being 5% per rank of AE damage prevented, but that's an issue best handled after it's seen in practice.

I'm not sure I agree with Forbidden Harvest needing a buff, but the similar necro tome needs either a large nerf or to become as intended "only while in stance".

(Oh, and Arcane Acuity needs to be replaced by Shock of Saitha still as the murk spell >_<, but that's a discussion for another day)

 

[Silosobi]

I think it was Infection Mastery that was intended to be stance based.

They are strange tomes because there are places where you think "Wow I just can't run out of mana", yet other exp zones you will hardly see a benefit, and even completion of rank 4 wouldn't help this much. I'd really like to see them scale, but I don't know if that's possible. It would also be nice to see something to make the wizard version unique without just nerfing necros.

 

[Nwaij]

Let me chime in to say that I also agree with Solosolki.

Necros getting a tome that does the exact same tome, just better and for the whole group, is something I never understood to begin with, even more so considering how much mor utility they allready have/had.

(Also, Tarutao is very right and Arcane Acuity needs to be replaced wit Shock of Saitha still. I can confirm by now that Arcan Acuity in fact does what it allways was supposed to do: I found a 100% spellreflecting mob, and thanks to Arcane Acuity, I was able to land 2 fastnukes over the course of a 5 min fight. Yay for being 0.1 DPS instaed of 0 DPS, and can we get rid of this thing now pretty please?)

 

[Silosobi]

Arcane Retribution

Reduces damage that would be taken from hostile spells by 5% per rank. Adds 50% per rank of that damage back into your next offensive spell.

Our other two tomes are quite lackluster when compared to nearly all tomes of other DPS classes. Both our other tomes are almost entirely geared towards improving wizards in experience groups.

Wizards have the least survivability in the game. Lore suggests we are are the kings of offensive magic, so it might make sense that we could have a tad more survivability when that magic is being used against us. The second part of the tome allows us to channel some of that offensive magic an opponent is using on us back towards them.
And to recap current tome suggestions:

Reclaimed Mana: Marginally useful as is. Add 10%/rank spell haste to the next offensive spell cast within 10 seconds, so that we can recover some lost dps in addition to mana (this is not abusable).

Forbidden Harvest: Cool idea, would be better if it scaled to a mobs hp/difficulty. Also if it could add more mana to be competitive with the necro version that adds the same mana, plus hp, to the entire group (ours just adds mana to ourselves).

I still think these comments are accurate. Wizards have the least survivability in the game, and it makes perfect sense we would have improved mitigation vs arcane attacks. I also think the suggested "retribution" method is really cool, but if this were impossible to code, maybe we could just get a +damage buff with duration and/or damage bonus dependent on the rank of tome or damage received.