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Official: Wizard fixes coming to Preview
rgutscheradev
Member, Cryptic Developer Posts: 188Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Hello everyone!
Currently on Preview you should be seeing a bunch of bugfixes to Wizards (list below).
Still to come is a more thorough balancing pass -- mostly changes to magnitudes of various powers, but a few functional changes as well. I'll post more details when that lands (I'm hoping in a few weeks).
The focus of this pass on Wizards is on bugfixes and balance -- it's not complete revamp of playstyle or how the class feels. We just want to make make sure Wizards are competitive with other dps classes, and hopefully also give a few more viable choices to Wizard players.
Please help us by letting us know:
Currently on Preview you should be seeing a bunch of bugfixes to Wizards (list below).
Still to come is a more thorough balancing pass -- mostly changes to magnitudes of various powers, but a few functional changes as well. I'll post more details when that lands (I'm hoping in a few weeks).
The focus of this pass on Wizards is on bugfixes and balance -- it's not complete revamp of playstyle or how the class feels. We just want to make make sure Wizards are competitive with other dps classes, and hopefully also give a few more viable choices to Wizard players.
Please help us by letting us know:
- If any of the above fixes didn't work out.
- If there are other big bugs we missed.
- If there are other important things the Wizard needs.
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- Maelstrom of Chaos should now calculate its damage similar to other character powers.
- Maelstrom of Chaos should no longer decrease its critical damage the higher the character's Critical Avoidance stat.
- Storm Fury should no longer decrease its critical damage the higher the character's Critical Avoidance stat.
- Repel should now deal damage to control immune targets when used from the Spell Mastery slot.
- Fireball now gains a 10% bonus to damage when used in the Spell Mastery slot.
- Arcane Tempest now gains a 10% bonus to damage when used in the Spell Mastery slot.
- Arcane Conduit now gains a 10% bonus to damage when used in the Spell Mastery slot.
- Oppressive Force now correctly states that the magnitude in the Daze portion of the power as 375 magnitude. The Repel portion of the power now states 325 magnitude. Functionality did not change for this power.
- Arcane Power Field daily is now properly modified by the caster's stats.
- Chill Strike now receives the 10% bonus damage benefit from Spell Mastery when used from the Tab slot.
- Storm Spell now correctly deals reduced damage on non-crits.
- Shield spell now properly provides a 20% maxhp shield, and a 30% shield when used in the Tab slot. Previously both standard and Tab slots were providing only 20%.
- Shield now properly deals more damage on critical hits (from the AoE caused by reapplication).
- Fanning the Flame's AoE damage over time component is now properly increased by Spell Mastery.
This time around I had a couple of other people helping me, which was awesome (and gave me more time to think about the balance issues, not just the bugfixes). So if a couple of other devs pop into the this thread, that's why!UPDATE: The balance fixes are now in. These aren't 100% final (we still have a couple of weeks for bugfixes, testing, and tuning), but every spell, feat, class feature, etc. has been looked at and evaluated for possible changes. Below are the changes (they should be arriving on Preview soon, ideally some time this week).
Short version is lots of 10-20% increases across the board, with bigger (sometimes much bigger) increases to things that looked especially weak. Smolder in particular was increased dramatically, in part because Thaumaturges needed the help and in part because all the Smolder-improving Feats and Class Features were pretty pointless while Smolder was so weak. (Some of those Smolder improvements might be a lot better now, even if their numbers didn't change, just because Smolder is so much better.) Almost all buffs; only nerfs are Storm Pillar no longer serves as an AP generator during downtime (which was never intended), and Arcane Empowerment doesn't give quite as much recharge speed as it used to (although it continues to give an awful lot, and should still be very strong).
Note the goal of these changes wasn't just to give some buffs to powers everyone uses already. We also want to bring up as many powers as possible into the usable category. The hope is that some powers that were long considered "useless" might now be worth of consideration.
Base Class
* Magic Missile: Mag increased from 40 to 50
* Shield: Mag increased from 230/253 to 300/350; Shield amount increased to 30%/40%; casting time reduced from 1.6s to 0.53s
* Arcane Singularity: increased Mag from 800 to 1000
* Ice Knife: increased Mag from 1800 to 2000
* Arcane Presence: increased from 0.5% to 1.0%
* Orb of Imposition: increased from 20% to 25%; added "Your control powers do 5% more damage against control-immune targets."
Arcanist
* Storm Pillar: will no longer generate AP if you don't hit any targets
* Arcane Bolt: increased Mag from 60 to 100
* Lightning Bolt: increased Mag from 200 to 300
* Steal Time: increased Mag from 260 to 300
* Arcane Tempest: increased Mag from 300 to 350
* Arcane Conduit: increased Mag from 200 to 250
* Maelstrom of Chaos: increased Mag from 600 to 1200
* Arcane Empowerment: increased damage bonus from 10% to 20%; decreased recharge speed bonus from x5 to x3
* Eye of the Storm: decreased internal cooldown from 20s to 10s
* Storm Fury: increased Mag from 50 to 150; fixed a bug where it was critting every time
* Arcane Power Field: Fixed a bug where it didn't accept buffs or mods. This should be a significant power increase.
* Alacrity: increased cooldown reduction from 2 seconds to 5 seconds
* Snap Freeze: increased Mag from 40 to 60
* Chaos Magic: increased proc chance from 5% to 7%
* Elemental Reinforcement: increased damage bonus from 5% to 7%
Thaumaturge
* Scorching Burst: increased Mag from 30-80 to 50-100
* Chilling Cloud: increased Mag from 65 to 80
* Fanning the Flame: increased base Mag from 100 to 400, tick mag from 33 to 100, and reduced cooldown from 21 to 18
* Conduit of Ice: increased Mag from 230 to 300
* Fireball: increased Mag from 250/550 to 300/600
* Furious Immolation: increased Mag from 700 to 800
* Ice Storm: increased Mag from 600 to 1000; eliminated knockback and replaced it with knockdown
* Swath of Destruction: increased bonuses from 5%/2% to 10%/3%
* Combustive Action: increased AP bonus from 1% to 5%
* Frost Wave: increased chill stacks from 3 to 6; fixed bug where it failed to Freeze
* Relative Haste: increased max cooldown speed bonus from 10% to 20%
* Smoldering Recovery: reduced Directed Flames bonus from 1.5% to 0.3% (still a net buff due to changes to Directed Flames)
* Glowing Flames: increased damage from 20% to 30%
* Icy Veins: increased range from 15' to 20'
* Frigid Winds: increased damage bonus from 1.25% to 1.5%
* Directed Flames: reduced damage from 80% to 25%, but can now proc every second (down from every 12 seconds, although there was a bug that meant it wouldn't even proc that often)
* Smolder: increased damage per tick from 40 to 150. Note this will affect a number of Smolder-related Feats and Class Features as well.
Known Issues
* Lightning Bolt: Does not reliably hit its targets, especially on rougher terrain. (fixed, or at least much improved)
* Arcane Empowerment: UI can get slightly out of synch with actual ability to cast powers, especially in the presence of lag. (See discussion below.)
* Combustive Action: triggering is very unreliable (fixed)
* Relative Haste: does not count Chill stacks correctly (fixed)
** Update: Fixed; functionality changed and Feat improved from
"Speed up the cooldown rate of your powers by 1% for each stack of chill on your targets. Maximum 20% speed up."
to:
"Speed up the cooldown rate of your powers by 5% per Chilled enemy nearby. Maximum 20% speed up."
* Directed Flames sometimes fails to proc every second if you are casting quickly. (fixed)
Note not all of these fixes have arrived on Preview yet (check Preview patch notes).
(10/5/22)
Second round of balance changes. The purpose of the first round was mainly to bring up some weaker Wizard powers to be on par with the stronger Wizard powers. This second round represents a roughly 15% increase across the board, with the intent of bringing Wizard up to other dps classes.
* Spell Mastery tooltip clarified (no functional change).
* Arcane Empowerment rebuilt to subtract 1s from Encounter cooldowns every 0.5s (instead of speeding up Recharge). NOTE: This change is experimental and may be reverted.
UPDATE: This change has been reverted. (The reversion also fixes a bug where the cooldown reduction was applying to Artifacts.)
Most Wizard spell Magnitudes increased by around 15%. (Note: "further increased" means this is on top of the previous pass.)
Base Class
* Magic Missile further increased from 50 to 60.
* Ray of Frost increased from 55 to 65.
* Entangling Force increased from 500 to 600.
* Repel increased from 500/200 to 580/300
* Ray of Enfeeblement increased from 450 to 520.
* Icy Terrain increased from 350/385 to 400/440.
* Shield further increased from 300/350 to 350/400.
* Arcane Singularity further increased from 1000 to 1200.
* Ice Knife further increased from 2000 to 2300.
* Oppressive Force increased from 325+375 to 370+420.
Arcanist
* Storm Pillar increased from 30-80, 40 to 40-100, 50.
* Arcane Bolt further increased from 100 to 120.
* Lightning Bolt further increased from 300 to 350.
* Disintegrate increased from 400 (600) to 500 (750).
* Steal Time further increased from 300 to 350.
* Arcane Tempest further increased from 350 to 400.
* Arcane Conduit further increased from 250 to 300.
* Maelstrom of Chaos further increased from 1200 to 1400.
* Storm Spell increased from 100 to 120.
* Storm Fury further increased from 150 to 200.
* Arcane Power Field increased from 50 to 60.
* Snap Freeze further increased from 60 to 70.
* Striking Advantage increased from 100 to 120.
Thaumaturge
* Scorching Burst further increased from 50-100 to 60-110.
* Chilling Cloud further increased from 80 to 90.
* Fanning the Flame further increased from 400 to 500.
* Icy Rays increased from 520-720 to 600-850.
* Chill Strike increased from 575/225 to 660/300.
* Conduit of Ice further increased from 300 to 350.
* Fireball further increased from 300/600 to 350/700.
* Furious Immolation further increased from 800 to 900.
* Ice Storm further increased from 1000 to 1200.
* Shatter Strike increased from 250/150 to 300/200.
What does this mean?
Arcane Power Field is a feat. It is a feat that was never used since mod 16.
The reason was never used is because it is bugged and does not give the damage bonus.
That is why arcanists use the inferior choice of Chilling Presence feat.
I will not talk about thaum because is dead and buried and a waste of everybody's time,
.
1.The most important thing that arcanists need is cutting in half the animation of Arcane Empowerment.
Even though noworries stole 2 dots from us when he cut the Steal Time animation, we got an improvement in damage by making the casting time reasonable.
Not only the casting time puts us at disadvantage during arti calls, but being locked in place for such a long time kills us.
We understand that wizard specificity is long casting time, thank God we do not have concentration too as condition.
But half of Arcane Empowerment animation is already long casting time. We must do 3 perfect rotations afterwards to keep up with 1 button daily classes.
And those 3 perfect rotations from our side result in false cooldown times of encounters during Arcane Empowerment.Meaning encounter enter in cooldown without doing dmg, stay in cooldown, or does not show being in cooldown. I presume the problem is between server/client response for such fast actions and it is not much anybody can do about it.
2. For ST balance just increase Storm Spell magnitude -fast and easy.
3.For AOE balance we need a new aoe encounter. Lightning Bolt does not work, an increase in mag would be useless.
Thank you for taking the time to look at our class.
Then how is now Arcane stacks calculated.
And should be an additive to the feat A Step above Mastery too.
Arcane Power Field has no business calculating my stats.
It is a feat that should add bonus to other stacks, then the resulted bonus should calculate my stats.
I do not understand how this feat now works with basic class mechanic of arcane stacks , and if it works with A Step above Mastery.
.
Maelstorm of Chaos feels like a waste of time for me. Every arcanist uses basically 4 dailies: Arcane Empowerment for bosses with large health pools, Oppressive Force for mobs and stuns, Icy Knife for quick fast 1-shot and the one that pulls every mob from the area (forgot the name). Never saw anyone using Maelstorm. In my opinion it should just be changed for something else completely. Maybe Lightning based daily?
Did you take a look at Lightning Bolt encounter? What is your take on it? I think it should work similarly to Cleric's Javelin, because as it is right now, whenever it's used on not-even terrain it just glitches. Not to mention it's not exactly easy to aim the thing while moving.
Speaking of dailies, is there any chance to increase the cap on affected mobs by dailies such as Furious Immolation?
Fanning the Flame in theory is a nice encounter power, but problem is - mobs are dead before it can actually do it's thing. Not to mention low magnitude.
Any chance that Chilling Cloud at-will would deal AoE damage with every hit, instead of just the final one?
Thank you for trying to make wizards better
storm fury useless as a dps.
repel on tab is like a sin between players... unless you want to be kicked from group. do not push mobs away from group.
fireball on tab is a bad idea unless you have another wizard in group to use ray of enfeeblement otherwise you are losing tons of dmg.
arcane tempest on tab is terrible as range is terrible its 100% better on other encounter slots.
arcane conduit is worse than ray no point in using it.
arcane powerfield fix that every wizards cries and wants is actually to work with arcane stacks (10) from step above mastery. the mag dmg every 2 secs is useless so its irrelevant.
chill strike is a nice fix as its a good encounter to use on aoe in tab slot on thaum.
storm spell will be weaker? oh boy ...
shield encounter... we are not tanks... i dont even know why this is in our encounters list... and dmg from it is terrible as is the cooldown on it.
fanning the flame... bring back the old fanning the flame... dots on aoe do not work! everything dies very fast... icy terrain works cause its not applied to a target and doesnt dissapear when he dies... make it the thaum version of arcane tempest pls.
Encounter cooldown bug needs to be fixed asap as its one of the worst bugs we have as wizards.
Icy terrain root duration is very short, could it be doubled?
Sincerely, these "fixes" do not make any sense. And I think you have absolutely no idea about what the Mastery slot actually does. The named spells have mostly some alternative functionality on mastery slot, including a change in magnitudes. It did not miss the respectful bonus, it is a different spell.
e.g. the Fireball. AoE in normal, single target in mastery. It does not need additional 10% increase in damage in mastery - as it has completely different mechanic and magnitude already. And no sane wizard with a tinge of self respect would prefer it to RoE anyway.
(If you want to buff the Fireball, bring back the wider AoE bonus on mastery slot. You know, to return at least some reason to slot it in - for solo-play.)
First and foremost, please do not make the change "Storm Spell now correctly deals reduced damage on non-crits." unless there are plans to increase the chance to process, increase the magnitude, or make some other adjustment to at least keep damage where it is, although, honestly, it should be increased, not decreased. This change would be another step in the wrong direction for wizard in my opinion, and the proposed storm spell nerf makes me sad. Wizard has always been my main, and I play the two I have less and less, and these changes aren't going to encourage me to play them more.
Other classes get class features that increase damage significantly, we get class features that do a few percent, or one that has only a change to process, and now even that one will do less damage a good percent of the time, when it does actually process.
Personally, if these changes bring yet another nerf to storm spell, I say leave them out of the game all together.
- Mike aka Talia (main CW), Taja (alt CW), Tarragon (DC), Tabbatha (OP), Tanya (GF), Tasha (SW), Tanara (HR), Tamir (GWF), Tabrie (Bard) and Tagear (TR)
Easily reproduceable when in a dungeon and the player travels through a teleport from an area to the next (within the dungeon).
If the player dodges and presses F to use the portal while having that wizard specific "in combat animation", there's a strange camera transition which can take even up to 10+ seconds from some far out of bounds dungeon location to the wizard's new location.
Viperion - DragonTribe guild.
Playing Ranger/Paladin/Bard/Fighter.
Arcane empowerment casting is long, the encounters we cast often don't deal damage but go on cooldown, the cooldowns regularly lie to us - come off cooldown, then go back.
Singletarget Fireball on tab makes very little sense for thaum, enfeeblement is still probably the best option there - having an aoe Fireball with bigger range would at least make it viable in aoe/solo.
The main pain with the class(es) in general is the dot/spike damage, dot ticks are fairly far apart (often 2-3 sec between ticks), so most of them won't deal any reasonable damage before the whole group or the mob with our dot is killed ending the dots themselves. Dots would make a little more sense in singletarget spells, as those usually don't die as fast as group mobs.
Similar stuff with control spells, they make little sense on singletarget power as most of them will be immune to them - even if we are compensated with some additional damage in these cases - the control effect is just wasted.
rikitaki, sorcio2, mignon, and arran make an excellent points. Again a lot of these points have already been made in previous threads that have been closed by the Cryptic Team. I don't know why we're chasing our tail in a never ending cycle..
- Conduit still doesn't produce Chill Stack 100% of the time
- Chill still doesn't apply 100% of the time when using Chill/Cold based abilities
- You can still stack Rimefire/Smolder by using Fi
- Dodge Mechanic on Wizard bugs out
- Ray STILL doesn't match the tooltip after the M6 fiasco.. we can change mechanics but not tooltips???????
- fireball on mastery over ray? lol come on don't make me laugh to death..
(to name a few)
This is the result we have of Cryptic inviting players who don't play a wizard on what changes they want to see in the wizard.
Well played.
I Really hope this isn't all the Wizard changes...
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Bardtholomew - Minstrel Bard
Mariah Carries - Devout Cleric
Darth Bane - Thaumaturge Wizard on Xbox
Discord ◆ Youtube ◆ Twitter ◆ Twitch
Please take your never ending posting addiction to general threads where details are not of the essence.
The most u hurt those people that actualy take there time to give Feedback and show interesst to make thinks better.
Maybe u understand this. FIRST u Roll out everychange there is than u start testing again on preview so people can give more insight and then u go back to the drawing board. Those changes u just did nobody needs to Test cause there close to non existend.
- Cooldown bug
- Steal Time: shockwave visual is missing
- Steal time: hourglass icon circling around enemies is unrecognizable because there is a bright light behind/inside of it
- Steal time is missing its shhhhh.... poof! sound when it is in the mastery slot (and seems occasionally inconsistent in normal encounter slot)
- Fireball visual is gone (I have not personally looked at this)
- Stuck in at-will: storm pillar version 1: not class specific, getting stuck in charging at-will results in unable to do anything until you cast the at-will again
- Stuck in at-will: storm pillar version 2: class specific, unable to use powers or walk but can use teleport, only fixed by restarting the game
- Stuck in at-will: ray of frost edition: not class specific, because this is a targeted ranged attack, this results in nothing happening at first - until a new mob enters your vision/reticule and your character suddenly casts ray of frost at it, continues until you cast the at-will again
- Shield is missing its re-activatable version. Instead, the re-activate effect happens when you cast it for a second time, after the full +- 25 second cooldown.
- Arcane power field doesn't double the damage buff from arcane stacks, as it doesn't work over the stacks from A step above mastery. (I have not tested this, but it's already been mentioned in this thread by others, and it was tested by Janne at some point.)
Additional thaum bugs that I do not know anything about because I don't play thaum, but have also been reported before and are not in this list:Lightning bolt does not work (well/at all) on uneven terrain - at the level of pebbles (not slopes).
Lightning bolts visual and the described area it should affect do not appear to match up, it might benefit from a rectangular casting area indicator like Fighters Shield Slam encounter.
Right clicking the mastery encounter power slot in order to change the power populates the options list with whatever type of power you last right clicked. Example: right clicking a daily slot, then right clicking the mastery slot shows the daily powers list instead of the encounter powers one. (You are not able to select anything other than encounter powers though.)
Shatter Strike does not affect the following powers when they are used against control immune targets: Arcane Singularity, Furious Immolation, Conduit of Ice.
Shatter Strike doubly affects the following powers when they are used against control immune targets: Icy Rays. (It wasn't specified whether both Icy Rays casts were aimed at the same control immune target)
Theories I've seen for the 'cinematic camera' bug where your camera travels at a cinematic pace from one part of the map to another after the player goes through a portal / gets teleported to a different part of the map:
- Was in combat animation when activating the portal
- Had recently dodged/teleported/shifted (all same thing).
- Was mounted when activating the portal
- Stamina bar was not full
This seems to occur most often in Lair of the Mad Mage.P.S. Nova they specifically stated this is not all of the changes and there is more coming in a few weeks.
Edited: Fixed the unordered list tags not working together with the font tags. Now it's more readable.
Lightning bolt is incredibly unreliable. Most of the time it does nothing at all.
Icy Rays likes to show itself as available when it's actually on cooldown.
Icy Terrain has a realllllly long cooldown. It drives me batty. It would be nice if it was reduced a little.
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The ROE icon disappearing is merely the DOT effect ending.
The +10% incoming magic/projectile damage debuff lasts for its stated 10 second duration and are indicated by these icons.
You can even verify this with working backwards on the ingame math.
Character Used:
Character is pretty much naked except for the occasional transmute/non important item with generic stats.
Character
Enchants
Feats/Powers
Companions
Mounts
Etc
Assuming a non critical, non CA, non deflect hit, with no sources of Defense reduction, the base effectiveness of a regular hit displayed in ACT would be 66.67% (mathematically: 2/3) due to enemy defense being 50% and applying to damage. If you apply only the 10% debuff from RoE applying the +10% Magic/Projectile Vulnerability up, you would have a displayed effectiveness of 73.33% (non deflect/non crit/non Combat Advantage* hits) or 50.4% (deflect hits for this character's stats**).
*Note:
CA and Crits do not actually apply to effectiveness in ACT, it would just increase the base damage shown in ACT. I am listing this for completeness' sake.
**Note:
Effectiveness calculated as "Defense*Magic Vulnerability Up Debuff*Deflect Damage penalty.
For this character, specifically calculated assuming an Item Level of 8007, accuracy rating of 2400, and no other sources of Accuracy:
Defense Penalty * Magic Vulnerability Up * Deflect Penalty
(1/1.5)x(1.1)x{1/[0.9-(0.5-((8007-2400)/100,000)+0)]}
(2/3)*(1.1)*{1/[(0.9-(0.44393))]}
(2/3)*(1.1)*(1/1.45607)
(0.5036), rounded to 50.4% effectiveness by the game./i>
Combat Log:
You can see with this combat log that I am getting hits of 73.33% or 50.4% effectiveness way after ROE's ticks have ended.
If you want to audit the time, check the time difference between hit with an effectiveness of 50.4% versus the last hit with an effectiveness of 50.4%.
The first hit with an effectiveness of 50.4 has a time of 13:42:07.3 (1:42 PM and 7.3 seconds).
The last hit with an effectiveness of 50.4 has a time of 13:42:16.4 (1:42 PM and 16.4 seconds).
The difference in time is 9.1 seconds, longer than the 6 second duration you guys claim it is.
I would say that also practically confirms the 10 second duration if you account for cast time delays for when the game forces you to stop casting Ray of Frost after holding it down for ~5 seconds.
Ray of frost magnitude increased from 55 to 60
Scorching Burst magnitude increased from 30-80 to 45-80
Chill Strike Spell mastery magnitude increased from 225 to 300
Shatter Strike: Powers with control effects now deal 200 magnitude (up from 150) against CC immune targets
Ice Storm: Instead of the knockback effect have it freeze all enemies within its radius for 4 seconds for 650 magnitude and for cc immune targets let it do 750
Maelstrom of Chaos: Reduce the animation time and increase the area of effect. Currently the animation time is so long that by the time it hits the enemies have already moved from the location.
Imprisonment was disliked only because it didnt do any damage. All you had to do was add damage to the power and it would have been acceptable. Give us back Imprisonment as an aoe with 325 magnitude and Spell Mastery makes it ST 450 magnitude with the arcane conduit effect.
None of these are big changes except for Ice Storm and Imprisonment but i believe they would go a long way in making players a little bit happier with the cw.
mid-level
This will not help player bleed
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)