Deathmage God Mode

@Chris , is this going to stay the same? Massive damage and heals in the same spells plus AOE. I really want to dump everything and play this but im afraid a massive nerf is coming.

Please give a heads up on this if you can thanks.

Citizen of novia

 

Yes let us all be Deathmages and just let off other schools and skills.
One build to rule them all *sarcasm off*

The Seer of Gladsheim predicts a NERF

 

Im not asking for a nerf, just if its going to stay the same most of my guild is going this path and usually that means bad things coming. I usually jump onto something right before the BIG hammer hits.

 

I saw its uberness a long long time ago, watched everyone switch to it... gave it a try myself (I actually really hate the play style of having to pump life and focus) and gave up on it thinking it would be nurfed... many many months ago and its still uber. On the flip side, I got 1 month of uber earth spells and they nurfed that real fast. Wonder why?

 

I totally agree that Death is overpowered in its current form. However, if the only changes we make are to "nerf" death, then the only thing we'll be doing is making something else over powered. This is one of the fundamental problems we have with using a combat system based entirely on DPS.

If we're serious about fixing anything (death magic for example) then we have to look at the combat system holistically and make massive changes as to how it works holistically.

Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about:

Corpse Explosion is over powered. It's an AOE attack that can CRIT multiple opponents in PVE and result in fast and easy experience points. To fix this, we might do something like "make it so it can only be used once per corpse". This will limit the number of times that a single corpse can explode, and yes that will certainly make the spell far less effective.

However, that doesn't fix the other AOE spells that are still out there and can be used over and over again quite effectively. Chain Lighting and Earthquake, for example can be used over and over again and they don't even require a corpse! So what we actually "fixing" here? Nothing. We're just making Chain Lightning and Earthquake the new Corpse Explosion. There's nothing being balanced, just a shell game of power.

Another example would be if we were to look at all the AOE spells. Why does Fire Ball require manual casting and have a 3 second casting time? If you had two people fight against each other, one could only use Fire Ball and the other could only use Lightning, it's easy to know who would win. The guy that doesn't need to manual cast his spell. So why would anyone use Fire Ball over Lighting? Or better yet, why would we change all these things with the Lightning spells but never change how it was cast? True balancing will require us to look at all the spells and how they're being used in a practical sense, not just what's OP and what's not this month.

If we apply this same logic to Death Magic in general. It's easy to think that we should lower the damage or healing rate of death magic so that it's less effective than it currently is. But again, all that does is make something else more powerful and more desirable. It's NOT a good way to balance anything. In my opinion every school of magic really needs a way to heal, otherwise Death magic will always be "OP" unless it's damage and heal rates are reduced to the point the entire school of magic is no longer viable.

But the REAL PROBLEM with this combat system remains that we do not have enough counters and we have ZERO counters to counters. DOUSE is a great counter to fire, but if you're a fire mage, what's the counter to someone using DOUSE? There isn't one! The counter is "stop using fire".

@Chris, I've been saying all of this for years. I hope you're finally ready to fix this stuff.

 

And then the Undead overran New Britannia...

 

Well there is and maybe will be no balance, because of SP
Everyone need to be able to solo everything, its a selective MP Game with SP on and offline, there is no "group content".

Why does Sun mesmerize up to 6 targets and moon just 3?

There are a lot of things like that.

 

I'm quite curious why having not seen it until now in the last two weeks I've seen a string of "death is really op".

In my experience (as more death knight than death mage) it's not. But this was a subject I intended to look into this week at some point by going heavy mage.

Magic in general is op (especially stone arrow and npc fire users) would be a more accurate statement with a 800ish point health pool. Death just has the benefit of also being useful for survival.

Corpse explosion can be hilarious if you have enough stacked corpses but first you have to make the corpses.

 

One thing to consider when balancing death magic is that it is basically useless against the undead, which is like a third of our mob encounters.

 

"""However, that doesn't fix the other AOE spells that are still out there and can be used over and over again quite effectively. Chain Lighting and Earthquake, for example can be used over and over again and they don't even require a corpse! So what we actually "fixing" here? Nothing. We're just making Chain Lightning and Earthquake the new Corpse Explosion. There's nothing being balanced, just a shell game of power."""

this makes no sense based on how those two spells currently work.

the focus cost of CL is outrageous, plus the damage is low. CL is also limited to 2-3 targets.
please people get off the CL is OP wagon

 

Moon lasts longer, but it's also manually cast.

There's a lot that doesn't make sense. I've reported all of this over the years but unfortunately we're "balancing" based on what's popular and not what makes practical sense. The design has been broken from inception. There's a lot of good stuff in this combat system, but it's never going to be balanced until we get away from the current design, add counters and counters to counters and make DPS less of a "thing".

Here's one more example of what I'm talking about.

Take a spell like Searing Ray. It does the most direct damage of any spell. Yet it really doesn't require a lot of focus or have a high casting time and it's range is nearly equal to every ranged ability or spell in the game. It doesn't require manual targeting, so why use anything else? It even gets bonus damage on Undead, even though there's a Life spell that's primary function is to "banish" undead.

We could give examples like this all day long.

 

Ive seen it in the guild first as people were all changing play styles, then the other day when I saw a single person run into one of the cabalist camps and killed the enginers and all the trash mobs in a few seconds all I saw is a ton of crits and heals and that whole camp was gone, the plaYer was fully healed and lifetapping before rinse and repeat.

Ive also listened to our guys solo the phonenix and demon in solous caverns all death mages its a simlple 2+2 for me I just want know if this is intended cause I want some of this action.

 

You only need one corpse, and one mob close to death. When the corpse explodes and kills the injured mob... a chain reaction will occur and kill up to 7 mobs that are all full strength. That is more buggy than OP unless it is somehow intended in a way I do not know. Used at serpent spine and twins foothills ad infinitum.

 

You're talking about mobs with 250 hit points I can kill them nearly as quickly with 1-2 whirling blades with good crits. I was making huge piles of corpses with those guys long before I started working up death skills.

Yes I've seen exactly that on the same mobs when I was leveling corpse explosion

As I figured this boils down to "people are soloing stuff and I don't want people to solo stuff". My experience with death to this point is it keeps me in the fights while I poke them for melees lower damage which is important rather than "lol huge damage".

 

How about we just take away that BS ring of the lich and stop catering to POT owners who are full Death mages and know its broken because of giving 75 attunment makes any sense. >>>>>

 

The overall ballance of game play is way off. Yes death is so broken its crazy they havnt put the breaks on it an yes valor thats before that insanity of a ring was added.

Polearms lol aint even gonna comment.

Bludgeon even with chris's sunday fix I wouldnt wast time on it.

Archery getting nefered and its almost the only pure single target dps in the game (-multishot) also massivly effected by cover and missed gg guys.

Swords decient enough but even so far far behind the mage trees and getting same nerf as archer.

Air and earth trees in the sweet spot.

Death magic tree omg do u even test this stuff?

 

That wouldn't balance the combat system. It would only remove one example of imbalance making something else OP.

I have told Chris multiple times that I thought no artifact should ever have more than +25 points of attunement, including the Lich ring. My logic is that the difference between being a master of one school of magic and being a grand master is exactly +20 points of attunement. The extra 5 points would be what you would normally get for wearing a ring of that school.

What this would do is make it so a character that is proficient (around level 40 to level 80 in a school of magic) can become a master. A master (level 80) can become a grand master, using the artifact. A grand master (level 100 in all spells for that school) can become something more (level 120) but not a "god".

I agree that +75 or anything close to that (+50 for some other artifacts) is stupid if your goal is any type of balance in pvp or pve.

 

I disagree with that. They nurfed Stone arrow way to far. I have GM's in earth, 950 actual attunement, 170ish buffed attunement, hight str and +50% damage with Stone arrow and I barely hit mobs for 100 now. Far to high of a nurf.

 

I dont really look at earth as a pure dps tree anyways more support with stone attow and when stacking I crit better on stone arrow than I do in archery and ive got about 1000pts in the tree and a +14 bow. I only boast 600ish in earth.

My air tree is awesome but now i fizzle more with a bow ;(.

 

Its +50 and has been for 2 releases now. It also does have some serious side effects other rings do not. There is no other way to heal if using death magic than death magic really with the massive negative effects to life due to tap soul(each tap takes 11 or so from life and lasts 2 minutes), Chaotic feedback adds -300-400 or so as well and the ring adds -100. Also with the ring it has a -50% healing modifier.