Nurf Chain Lightning Part: 3

First off, spells CAN be blocked now, so not its not 100%, I have seen lightning, death ray and obsidian arrow get blocked. Secondly, earthquake does WAY more damage then CL and can hit more then 4 targets. Thirdly, CL has super high fizzle, earthquake does not. You can wear armor with high avoidance with earth magic, not so with air.

Lets talk about what you avoid talking about that I keep saying over and over. What is your air attunement? Do you use any skills to try and counter air magic? Remember the jack pirate, amara john fights that lasted ten minutes, and forced them to go naked? If air is so op, why could they not kill each other with it then? Could it be, they actually built up the skills to counter it? OH yes they did, I know because I talked to them all the time about it. Now, bodyslam being broken, as in not working broken, IS a problem, and perhaps that should be your focus is getting that fixed, instead of asking for nerfs.

The MAIN problem with air in r31 was the bugged lightning bolt. No matter what skills you used, it was 100% stun every time, that is fixed now. Body slam was bugged at 100% too then. As for the damage you guys are complaining about, I will say this one last time, get some dam attunement then. That HUGE damage, gets reduced big time. I remember being hit for a 64 crit from amara john who had 132 air attunement. I saw jar laxle hit for 290 with his polearm, dont hear me crying to nerf melee, I just upped my resistance.

 

Damn another reagent cost that will hit mostly starting and casual mages. Give us more pearls in game!

 

yeah.. of all those oysters, only one of them spits out the perl.

 

Great, so despite the fact that its already been nerfed into the ground about three times, we're going to make it even more expensive to cast and nerf the damage again? I can't wait.

 

I'm interested in hearing more about this "blocking" of CL. Do you mean to tell me that all players need to use a shield? Or are you saying that all players need to be trained in Air Magic to have a high attunement?

That doesn't make sense to me. As a pure caster that has chosen not to study air magic, and that doesn't use a shield because I'm too busy wielding my staff (for one example) I don't see how that's very balanced. It seems to me that fire has douse and CL has nothing.

I agree with you that there are other spells that fall into this category like earthquake, and I'd like those to be balanced too. But you mentioned Death Ray. All of the Death, Life, and Moon spells can be very easily countered by Celesstial Blessing, that starts at level 1 with a 30% resistance of the entire schools of magic! This is not the case with the other spells we're talking about. If there were a single spell that gave me a 30% reduction of all Air Magic at level 1 you can bet that I would be using it. But instead there's a steep requirement of pooring all of your skill points into innates while also using a shield in your off hand.

 

Not really quite a steep pouring off all your skill points. I can get most trees, with all their skills, up to 40 with ~120k experience. Relatively cheap to get those skills up there for some attunement resists. After that you can go back to the rest of your build, and focus on what helps you kill others. CL does not have the highest damage in the game. It does cost a significant chunk of focus (31 for me currently, without stillness). I have stated this several times before. The problem is not that this is overpowered or blah blah blah. It's the fact that many things are underpowered. How about we start buffing some other stuff to bring them up to snuff? This asking for nerfs anytime something seems OP to one person, or a few, is only going to be a cyclical problem. This is OP? Nerf. OH, this is OP now??? Nerf. Rinse and repeat. We should focus on what isn't feeling powerful right now, because honestly there is FAR more of this, than there is of the other.

EDIT: **FOR THOSE THAT MISSED IT, I AM SAYING BUFF MELEE/OTHER BUILDS INSTEAD OF NERFING SOMETHING INTO USELESSNESS**

 

Vastly overpowered compared to what?
I can think of another spell with no reg cost, 1/3 the focus cost, that ignores armor, and hits harder than CL. I guess that one will be next ;P
Seriously though, not trying to be argumentative but I'll reiterate - there's more than one way to balance things, by batting things down or by buffing other things up.
Seems we never see any of the latter.

The way I see it, is I pay 3000 gold per hour for reagents because I want to kill things quickly. I should be killing things more quickly than classes who don't have the running costs. If we compare magic to melee to ranged, magic users, having the highest running costs, the highest focus costs, the lack of any sort of autoattack capability, and wearing the lightest armor should have the highest damage output.

Most of the calls for nerfing of magic are coming from the player vs. player side where someone hasn't levelled the attunement or defenses against something and gets nailed and then comes and cries nerf. How many people are actually trying to play day to day as a mage, PvE? Every patch it gets worse.

 

I'm the purest mage there ever was or ever will be, and I don't see it getting worse at all.

I'm not a big fan of comparing how much gold you spend per hour to what your success rate is. If something is overpowered it's not going to be enough to make it expensively overpowered. People will gladly spend the money.

Regarding "bringing everything else up instead of bringing one thing down" what takes more development time?

Also, what spell are you talking about that has no regs, is 1/3 the focus cost, etc etc..? It's like a riddle! I have no idea what that is.

EDIT: Oh, it has to be Searing Ray! I got it! Yeah that thing has always been over powered. Just straight direct damage, no reagents, little focus cost, and it's quick to cast too. Totally agree.

 

Searing ray I hadn't even considered Nerf searing ray!

The gold cost to play a class has to be considered.
Otherwise why have reagents at all?
Please remove all reagent use from the game if you want mages to be balanced in power to classes that don't use them, then.

 

Actually I wish all spells required reagent for every cast. A lot less mages would be around here.

 

I just think if a class has higher costs, lighter armor, and no autoattack that this should be reflected in that class's capabilities.
Otherwise why play a mage? What's the benefit?

 

I agree, but I think that's represented in the game already. I don't understand why people keep saying it's so difficult to play a pure mage. It's not. There are really multiple paths to success. Having insanely over powered damage spells is not required and it's unbalanced. Because this game is all about DPS, it's super important not to create one path that just dominates everything else. When I look at the fire spells, they clearly do more DPS per second but they don't have a stunning effect. That's where things get really tricky.

 

I think it was represented in the game, but mages have been getting the nerfbat since I came back to the game around R29 and it just doesn't stop.
I suppose I can always go beat things with a stick instead, but I would have liked to play a caster. ^^

 

You can play a caster. I'm playing a caster.

I wear non-magical robes and shoes, no jewelry. I could do that with any of the magic schools, even moon and life (although I would need a weapon in those schools to kill things).

 

I'm playing Ranger and gave magic a try two days ago (mostly to unlock Air Elemental to try if it's a decent addition to my skillset).
Now I'm considering going full mage, because... it just feels so powerful. I just used Searing Ray and Lightning, later Chain Lightning and I didn't struggle one bit in the same areas I go with my bow.
I used the same Armor as for Archery and just crafted a plain Maple Staff.
The thing that made it so easy for me was mostly the "you don't miss" part. I leveled the Air Magic spells in no time at all (just to realize that the Air Elemental is far less useful than I hoped ^^) and it just feels too good considering the time and effort I put in it compared to Archery (aside from Air Attunement being already at a decent level due to using the Utility spells and the 2 combo-able spells for Archery).

Just thought I'd give you the opinion of a guy who switched to using magic and never tried it before some of the nerfs.

 

are we nerfing plate, bodyslam, searing ray, 2handed weapons, earth quake or archery? cuz thats stuffs op according to the assessment of chain lightning.

 

At this rate, Chris, the game will be empty at the exact moment it's balanced. Nerfing by modal metrics? It doesn't work. All it does is make ~all your customers angry. Ask Jared Sweatt how well nerfing by modal metrics worked in EQ2... yeah.

 

Now I did see a good reason CL needed to be toned down in R32. After the wipe however it feels much better (of couse with out the 100 stun rate) however as a pvp focused player I say CL is only a "problem" in group pvp. I'm not saying nerf it, but fighting 2 or more people using it can be very texting. However I duel vs air mages alot.
@Fizzlebang
I've found that with a little work in a 1v1 fight it is very possible to have a good fight. While getting attunement cut the CL and lighting damage down from 130ish critical down to 80-90ish. Also the ability to just Dodge/block the incoming spells feels like room for good counter play outside of attunement raising. What I'm getting at is yes air is a powerful tree but that shouldn't stop us as a player base from finding good ways to fight back.