Fire mages cant play together

This is where I think your logic is flawed. If you do *not* allow the stacking of DoT's, then you're actually doing the opposite, you're making things artificially harder because now the players aren't able to do 100% of the damage they normally would. As it stands there is a limit to how many DoT's I can stack myself as a sword melee: 3x rend and 1x hamstring. If I'm not shooting for 100% uptime on those 4 total instances of DoT's, my damage isn't as high as it could be. Scenario time!

Let's give a hypothetical - Group has a Sword/Board Tank, 2h Sword DPS, Healer w/ fire magic to toss in for funnies, and a fire mage - The tank is likely going to want to use rend for agro purposes and while he's at it Hamstring (rend + trip combo) as well. This means that the 2h Sword DPS is nerfed because they cannot use abilities normally in a maximal DPS rotation. Group damage is effectively nerfed or the aggro is going to get pretty interesting as the tank's rends/hammys are being overwritten. Now lets say the healer casts some fire arrows, fireballs. and a ring of fire to spice up his otherwise boring healing life during trash mobs - That fire mage is also now nerfed because they lose the DoT portion of their skills. How is this good game play?

Allowing DoT's to stack per player (with the limits already introduced) does not nerf content and make it easier; it makes it play basically as you would expect it to normally work with each person able to do 100% of what they'd normally be doing in a solo situation. What we have is effectively a giant nerf for anyone with a DoT being in a group that has someone else using the same ability.

I think what you're imagining is a setup where all DoT's can just stack ad infinitum (which I agree would be super stupid). Direct damage things, like say earth/death/bludgeon/etc. can play nicely with each other and do 100% of the damage they normally would in a group situation even where multiple of them exist.

Otherwise, since I'm totally missing it, please explain why builds without DoT's are allowed to do 100% of their damage but builds with DoT's will do less than full damage in groups where other players are using the same abilities.

 

I know what you mean, but dont forget that the amount of the damage you do with dots is mostly over 20 seconds ticking every 2 sec. Plenty of time to react against it. The Enemy could instantly recast the DoT but also lose his effectiveness based on the focus used for dealt dmg.

Well it does remove every following damage. Lets say the dot ticks 8-12 dmg every 2 sec for 20 sec, even if 3 mages spam it every second and you use douse every 4 sec, the income damage would never be the same like compared to direct damage. Even better because you remove every fire debuff with one douse what costs them more focus to apply then you to remove. So you have also plenty of other spells to use while douse every 4 to 6 sec.

Do you know how dots work? Compared to you 200dmg yes, a dot should be able to reach 240 dmg in its full potential, what would be (if we take our 20sec for every 2sec example) 24 dmg ever 2 seconds.

 

Actually it doesnt matter if dots stack or not. More important is the design fail that every fire spell has a dot and you have to use it because their are no alternative direct damage spells without damage over time.

 

Just switch to another school!

There is no place for archetypes like firemages.

If you restrict yourself deal with the consequences.

 

Or if you could see all three timners at once with various degrees of grey.

 

Could have all the mages using fireballs and fire arrows, fireball still has a good burst damage before its dots, and fire arrow as least has a little burst damage before its dots. Leave the ring of fire up to the highest damage person. But ya, this is why its nice to have diversity in a party. Just like having everyone with a harp of invigoration does not stack its effects, so its nice to have someone with invig, one with lute of inspiration, one flute of defiance.

 

Because, direct damage doesnt reapply every 1-2secs, whereas, DoT's do. If you have 8 players doing say 30hp every 2sec with DoT spells, you are doing 240hp damage every 2s, which this doesn't include the other direct damage spells that those same players will be casting while the DoT's are in effect.

 

All 3 of the Magi in your example are going to be casting at the same time. It's not meant to be like direct damage it's meant to further degrade your opponents health, and you don't have to cast it every 1-2secs. So, if you cast Fire Arrow, you have that DoT running for x amount of time, while you are a casting direct damage spells. When the DoT is ready to run out you cast again, and follow it up with direct damage or debuffs. I'm not saying Douse doesn't help btw, it does. But if you are trying to remove Fire DoT's from yourself from 3 or more magi, you are wasting your time. Better to raise your Fire Resists, and use Ice Shield/Douse.

 

You're not taking into account the fact they cast that DoT. They could have used that time to cast a direct damage spell/ability instead. Fire arrow for example does probably less than half the damage of stone arrow up front. Fire arrow's damage, and purpose, is then left to the DoT ticks in the mean time. So per your example, fire arrow may do that 30 damage DoT tick (not real #'s obviously, but for arguments sake), but if I cast a stone arrow instead I'd have done all the damage up front (or more if it procced armor ignore). DoT's have always been, since inception, a concept of "Will my DoT go full duration or will X die before then" and as a result DoT's typically tend to do a little more damage over the duration. That's just how they've been balanced and why DoTs are typically viewed favorably. Fire is basically 100% set up around keeping all the DoT's rolling on a given target. The second you take the ability away to maintain those, Fire's damage limp noodles and isn't worth using.

It doesn't really matter how many people we have or how much the DoT is ticking for as long as it is a balanced DoT. If the DoT is balanced that it's worth casting and not so OP that it's all you cast, then it needs to then do that damage to be worthwhile. There's no middle ground here. Otherwise everyone will just do direct damage and do a similar amount of damage over the same period of time.

Does that make sense? It doesn't matter how many people we're considering. That's total non-issue entirely since direct damage counterparts can simply do basically the same damage over the same period of time without this limitation.

 

I wasn't suggesting casting Fire Arrow(or any other Fire spell for that matter) and then continue to use that spell for direct damage, because you would accomplish nothing more than restarting the timer for the DoT aspect of the spell. That's why it's a good idea to communicate with your party and predetermine who will cast what. That way, you can make your party the most effective it can be.

This is precisely the reason why you wouldn't want to allow DoT's to stack for every player, and why the direct damage of Fire Arrow/fist,etc., is less than other spells.

 

First off, I didnt ask for anything,
just pointed something out;
a fire mage grouped with another fire mage directly and massively affects the dps output of both fire mages, - No other class has this issue except with swordsman (Rend, not a meaningful amount of dps to break multiple swordsmans grouping, coup de grace more than makes up for it) and archery (Rapid fire overwrites rapid fire, quite a big hit for archers here unless timed between them allowing for 0 dps loss (most likely a bug that will be fixed)) and polearms (puncture, negligible). Debuffs such as Fireflies, Blind, break armor and such shouldnt be considered since they can be exploited BY EVERYONE who targets the affected.
That is all. It doesnt bother me that much, just dont understand why everyone else gets to spam their glyphs and dont suffer crushing dps loss when grouped with others using the same trees.

 

Isn't this exactly what you want, a meaning to specialization. You can only have one person with a skill specialty in the party so others will have to pick a different one or be the best in that skill type so they get chosen for the party. Which essentially proves how important it is to specialize already in the game.

 

System is imbalanced by Design, adapt to it and change your deck.
If i say it's imbalanced because this and that nobod

It was meant sarcastic.

 

I just wanted to point out that all heal over time spells are also restricted. This is a balance issue. My life HOTS do massively more heals then anyone else's and they are also overridden if any party member casts the same spell so fire is not the only tree prevented from stacking skills with party members. This however is a good thing. You really wouldn't want two of me healing Sara with six HOTS that do 800hp per sec. It would be quite funny though. You can however split your party in two and both use fire field then hit the same monster and see which person gets the kill for most damage....

 

Actualy, the effect is quite the contrary because everyone will feel the need to be versatile (again).

If you are a specialized fire mage (with 100M xp point or more), for exemple, and you get in the wrong party where you have already a fire mage, you're screwed.

If you are versatile (aka the easy way in SotA), no problem. Getting fire skills to a base level (80) is not so long (less than 25M for every single adventurer skill improved to 80) even for a casual player and as you can invest experience points in other trees as well, you will switch to another school and you can even use some of your fire skills in the best circunstances.

Sounds like you are using bad logic. Everything points out that specialization is not even an option in this game.

PS : note that I'm ok with the way how two same spells can't stack with each other ; I'm just saying that it's simply one more thing that won't help with specialization.

 

Fireball and fire arrow still have a burst damage effect on them, you can still play together. Just have to make sure who is doing the ring of fire is the strongest person in the party with ring of fire. I really don't know what you expect to be done, having everyones abilities to stack would be insane. Could you imagine how fast things would die with having 8 fire mages all with 5 stack rofs hitting all the enemies? Everyone and their dog would be fire mages.

I want triple andar power healing grace, would be sexy .

 

This isnt supposed to be about stacking ANYTHING.... this is about the incredible dps kill that occurs that is exclusive to the fire tree. The 2 MAIN damaging abilities of fire mages are immolation and ring of fire and they dont stack AT ALL. Not even more than once. This dynamic crushes the opportunity to bring along more than 1 fire mage. This cannot be said with ANY other tree. Not even a healer. Its especially annoying when another type of player also uses a weaker version of immolation and ring of fire because they arent true fire mages (melee for example, a lot use immolation). Just this simple thing kills the fire mage dps.

Dont get me wrong, I like it this way.
This wasnt a complaint, I was just pointing it out.

 

I'm guessing it's working as intended, with the idea being that other people in the group would specialize in other forms of magic, and let the best fire mage do the fire mage thing. However, given how badly fleshed out many of the caster trees are (explain please why water has 2 single target nukes for damage - PERIOD - and why Ice Field can't be cast on the move anymore...) I am not surprised everyone is defaulting to fire to do AE DPS - there are no other choices.

I bet this would be less of an issue if caster trees were more robust.

 

Now just think if all npc mages could suddenly all stack their fire dots on you. Talk about instant death. It's not always about the players only the monsters are also effected by the changes to skills since they use them as well.

 

Unless this was a recent change, you can cast Ice Field on the run. There was a time when you couldn't, but they had fixed that. I am mainly a Water mage, but I do supplement my build with other damage spells/debuffs.