new aoe changes make magic pointless

Very interesting

It's got to be all that metal that makes it so vulnerable to fire. But if that's true then any metal mob should be as weak once full of fire dots.

Am curious if the fire elemental is any use at all in the clockwork dragon fight? Or is the water elemental more of use due to its healing (ss it usually is in many cases).

 

Adding a elly will add a little dmg (or heals) but won't make a big difference.

A big factor in causing that high dmg is all the fire resist debuffs (from firespec and evaporate which all stack together)

- Evaporate (douse/juxtapose combo)
- Firearrow debuff (which stack up to multiple debuffs)
- Firefist debuff (same story)
- RoF debuff

All those debuffs together lower the fire resist from mobs immensely

 

I'm actually beginning to regret being a water mage It's the fire specialization that adds the debuff effect to fire fist and fire arrow right? I'm guessing that water specialization will do something similar for ice fist and ice arrow.

Might as well finish what I started snd just pair up with fire & earth mages once I'm done levelling the skills.

Too bad about the fire elemental, was hoping that they improved it to the point where it would be useful in a boss fight. At least my water elemental will double in healing once I specialize.

Great info btw thanks!!!

 

I’d have to agree but that’s not to say it doesn’t take some trial and error with many deaths(at least for me); getting deck set up right, getting a system down, hp up to take one of his special attack crits if he’s able to get one off, and yeah spending time setting up gear to maximize attunement. It’s like everything else, you “get into it” for a hot second, pick it apart and figure out most efficient way you can clear it, siphon out arties and sparklies, then move on to the next thing you have in rotation when you get sick of the monotony. Although now that it doesn’t drop ingots I probably will go back less often to this spot. ;/

 

The duration reduction have killed non specs fire/moon mages because you need 6 Stacks to have ROF and meteor almost all the time. So unfortunatelly respected from water/life to fire/moon in order to keep playing the game.

Without spec ROF and meteor have more countdown time than duration, so if you recast your magic spell it will be weaker and weaker (5 stacks to 4...3) or you can wait the countdown more than 13 second doing Zero damage.


At least give us a Greater obsidian scroll of unlearning in this kind of situation.

 

As an earth mage, I'm finding the earthquake change makes it more worth using for sure, although the reagent costs of doing so will likely bankrupt me. Its fun, though. Still wish we had a sustainable damage effect, grouped with other flavors of mage, I always have to worry about focus management more, because I can't just six-stack and let dots do their thing. But definitely happy with the direction we're going with earth.

 

Dude that is the exact commercial ive been thinking of. youre a wizard, harry

 

You people will probably just have to drop 20 dollars to get the scroll like I did to respec. I doubt they will give you one. At any rate, if they do, well, it's to late for me. I am already respecced and ate the full cost myself. time waits for no man.... or woman.

 

The most they will do is make it so that you get 100% of your experience back when unlearning the skill. Takes a bit longer to transfer the points but the result is the same.

 

Why not leave the duration as is and just cut the damage in half if it is too high?

 

He wasnt addressing the damage as much as he was addressing the automatic nature of using the AoEs. And its an example of taking feedback into consideration as nerfs to damage has in the past been alot less popular than this has shown to be

 

I see. I'll adapt and move on, then.

 

I'm going to be playing with magic on my main toon today during stream today and tomorrow to see how my magic build was affected. Feel free to join me. And please be kind. twitch.tv/communityoftheavatar, 9AM-1030AM CT every weekday.

 

Ok Elgarion asked for more feedback on this issue so here is mine...

I am mostly neutral on this issue since I am not a fire mage but wanted to add my observations. My specs are taming and blades so I don't do well against multiple targets. I had recently tried to add ring of fire to some of my decks to allow me do better in those situations (knowing it would never do a lot of damage and I'd never be able to use it in groups with fire mages). With the recent changes I have found that there is no point in me using it because the time it is active for is not worth the amount of time and focus I put into it - wearing heavy armor I fizzle a lot and as taming I have less focus so if I fizzle 3 times in a row I am pretty much out of focus. But if the idea is that a blades/tamer should not be using this skill at all I am ok with that.

From listening to other people's feedback it seems that the highest fire mages were less affected by this change than the mid level fire mages. I think this is common with a lot of the 'balancing' that has gone on and can be very frustrating when you feel you are going backwards as a mid level character. Unfortunately I don't have any good suggestions as to how to reign in the top players without hurting the rest of us. Since the top players keep power leveling I think this issue will only get worse over time. Personally I hope that we will be able to play scenes at a chosen difficulty level in the future so that the content of the scene will be enjoyable by a larger percent of the population.

 

The duration of ring of fire and meteor shower should be at least 30 seconds even when first starting to use it. They should just give it a standard duration that doesn't change if its charged or stacked in my opinion. Things like that don't need to be so complicated.

 

I have this and 2 other threads to accumulate data from (as well as from the second stream on this topic today.) I'll have Kill Joy in voice explaining a deck config he utilizes to help with the changes, and Glepo One likely in chat showing off his deck design. Catch me today, 9AM+ on twitch.tv/communityoftheavatar if you'd like to participate in "learnin' me up."

 

Here's the raw data I submitted to Chris along with a few copy and pastes from people who hit the nail right on the head. It was collected here, on stream and on 2 other posts.

Keep in mind, there were some surprises amongst the items but between this report and other people sending in info, Chris has got some more things to ponder. Keep in mind, there is no guarantee there WILL be changes, but he already happened to be addressing at least one of the items below when we talked this over. I'm sure he'll have more to come on this during his upcoming streams about combat balance.

(these are NOT in any sort of weighted order)

- balance changes are reasonable to some
- altered combat style/deck, known high end fire mage has adjusted well to changes with minimal concern
- challenged to learn new techniques to accommodate changes, adjusted well to changes
- chose not adjust to changes, retained current style and simply utilize ROF and MS less due to durations.
- do not like making changes to their playstyle at all, especially if prompted by nerfs.
- reagent usage has surged due to high% reagent consumption per cast (2x Black Pearl, 2x Mandrake, 1x Spider Silk, 1x Sulfurous Ash) and more frequent recasts
- reduced duration results in skill spam reducing available time to cast other skills, encourages casting less aoe's, not fully stacking, or not utilizing skill at all.
- challenging to maintain 5/6 stacks of each while having time to cast other skills (more with locked styles and unpracticed dynamic styles)
- want return of long durations or duration hits not to be as large
- do not like dynamic system, only want to use locked, changes seem to greatly affect AOE skills on locked bar and have little effect vs experienced dynamic users
- changes have not affected focus pools as intended for this nerf
- changes HAVE affected their focus pools as intended for this nerf
- wish to untrain affected skills or trees and desire 100% XP return for these items
- anything but 5 or 6 stack does negligible/pointless damage
- ROF and MS now useless
- wish more testing occurred before going live
- wish changes could be incremental and smaller to allow for gradual study
- changes to benefit PvP should not inadvertently hurt PvE
- (new feature) separate pvp and pve balancing efforts (implies skills take on different behaviors depending on target)
- (new feature) want respec XP returns to instantly apply to newly selected skill to save time for respec'ing/time lost
- (new feature) applicable duration type AOE's are "maintained" (channeled, allow for other actions while channeling) and drain focus at a X rate while active, cast once, focus drains until canceled
- (new feature) want multiple versions of same skill (test versions) on QA and each tested/compared side by side original
- shorten DOT length of ROF, not duration length
- dislike ratio of time to cast 6 stack, AOE duration does not increase significantly enough to make 6 stack worth building
- allow ROF dot stacking to encourage group play
- high level fire mage indications no change to dps, keeps 100% focus bar still, ROF has only a 2-3s downtime before new 6 stack up (through use of dynamic slotted ROF and Mind Lock techniques)

These are all great discussion points -- thank you guys!