I've just come back to NWN and having played the TR extensively before I left a year ago. Now that I'm back I'm looking at the CW. When I left the oppressor skill set was more or less understood to be inefficient. I might be looking in the wrong place, but it appears not much has changed. I'm glad I saw this thread.
I would love to play a CW who's bottom of the damage chart, but has controlled mobs so effectively the rest of his group gives him the VIP ... Just the same as perhaps a Cleric might for healing. Making this an effective build means more team work.
Damage considered as 'control' doesn't sit well with me either .. as mentioned elsewhere we'd all controllers fighting for the same piece of action by that line of thought.. It maybe on aspect of control, but it appears the effective builds out there underline damage primarily
Not saying a CW as an AoE damage dealer shouldn't be on par with other clases, but rather that I agreeing that making the 'control' aspect more viable sounds promising and something I've always preferred to pursue in a wizard class.
I haven't looked extensively, but my searches for builds using oppressor didn't come up with much. Is there one right now?
No... the rest of the spells are effective on their own and don't need any help.
Not true.
Shard only works when the mob is already bunched up. When it's not bunched up, you have to use Singularity to bunch them all together. Aha! Synergy between Sing and Shard!
Same deal with Icy Terrain and Steal Time.
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silverquickMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
Shard only works when the mob is already bunched up. When it's not bunched up, you have to use Singularity to bunch them all together. Aha! Synergy between Sing and Shard!
Same deal with Icy Terrain and Steal Time.
Lol,
Naw you can throw a Shard into any mass of mobs that are 2 or more and it will still explode and do a great deal of damage.
It doesn't need any help. It only has a condition that it hits more than 1 mob before exploding. But it does work all on its own very well without help. You can't do that with Icy Terrain, its just not a control spell and never has been.
EDIT: What they really need here here man... is an actual class that is a controller... the CW no matter which path you take... just is not it and never has been, and cannot be.
Its an AoE damager with possible controller elements... but not an actual controler.
You can throw 5 shards, one each into each pair and it will blow them all up separately.
Or, you can use Sing to gather up all 10 mobs, and then blow all 10 up simultaneously.
Which is more effective?
Same deal with Icy Terrain and Steal Time.
You can throw down an Icy Terrain under a bunch of mobs. And it will freeze them. Eventually. Provided that they all promise to stand still.
OR, you can throw down an Icy Terrain under a bunch of mobs, AND use Steal Time to *make* them all stand still.
Which is more effective?
I don't think individual encounters should be judged strictly and *solely* on its own merits. Sure that is one important way to assess an encounter. But they also should be judged by how they work with other encounters.
BY ITSELF, Icy Terrain is kinda crappy. It applies chill stacks quite slowly, and the mobs have to promise to stand still in order to agree to be frozen. But working WITH other encounters, Icy Terrain *can* be effective in slowing and freezing mobs.
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silverquickMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
You can throw down an Icy Terrain under a bunch of mobs. And it will freeze them. Eventually. Provided that they all promise to stand still.
Naw Shards will actually blow them up and do its damage. Icy Terrain will tick once or twice, then you'll be swarmed by mobs with little actual effect to the mobs unless you've feated it for the debuff. Then you can nuke the heck out of them. It acts as a really good debuff expecially with a good weapon enchant... but a control spell... it is not. I tried everything I could to make this spell useful, all you CAN do with it, is use other spells to do its job for it.
Shards is a damage spell and will do that on its own without any help from anything else and the mobs all come to you, you can even drop it in a crowd of mobs beating on you and it will hit all of them despite the number caps so long as you use a point blank hit. It will save your butt when the **** hits the fan.
Icy Terrain cannot and never will be able to act on its own even if you doubled the chill per tick. Its just not good enough to do its own job.
Seriously I have tried everything I could to MAKE a controller out of this class. Because there was a time I did not have the sheer power or gear score I have now. And being able to actually control mobs rather than just nuke them would have been much more efficient...
But at the end of the day.... that's what I HAD to do was make it into something it was not.
I did not ever have to "make it" into an AoE damager. It was that from the beginning, the rest of it was just me trying to give it something it never had or stretch its abillities in directions they were not well suited to go.
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silverkeltMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,235Arc User
edited April 2014
Release the Warlock, tons of people will play them and there will be less CWs about...
Firstly, I'd like to look at the last sentence there for discussion. What is our role? We're called Control Wizards, so in my opinion this is crowd control, not damage dealers. The idea that raw damage is a form of control is a very blunt definition to me! Control could also include party based buffs, such as Prestidigitation.
It would be very easy for everyone to think we need a buff, but as the Dev said, there's a lot of dials and we provide too much damage. I therefore would expect a nerf before a buff, and I suspect any changes will come in small stages so they can evaluate the impact and balance.
Presuming all bugs get fixed (a long shot, but hey!) I'd like to ask readers three questions: 1) Regarding Feats: which ones are overpowered? Which would you never choose?
2) How would you make the paragon paths more role defining?
3) How would you make the class more interesting (and less cookie cutter perhaps) to play?
As i have heard, control @ D&D means fight against multiple enemies at The same time; and Wizard means damage on everything else. So, as you said its your opinion and your base is wrong, i stopped reading there.
To admins: Change The title of this thread, lead to a fake content.
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
Removing the effectiveness of Eye of the Storm from Spellstorms is akin to removing Smoulder from MoF. Would you really advocate that?
Silver, what you're missing is that Encounter powers giving EotS a chance to proc per hit and not per cast is likely unintended. Spells like ST and COI applying "on encounter" effects per ticks instead of per cast will likely be fixed.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but just guessing that's what's going to happen, so I'd be prepared for it.
"Meanwhile in the moderator's lounge..."
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silverquickMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
Silver, what you're missing is that Encounter powers giving EotS a chance to proc per hit and not per cast is likely unintended. Spells like ST and COI applying "on encounter" effects per ticks instead of per cast will likely be fixed.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but just guessing that's what's going to happen, so I'd be prepared for it.
I'm pretty sure it was intended.
Its been a year now and that hasn't changed. They've known about it all along. And because it scales with the number of mobs, its likely intended that way to scale according to the number of mobs on the party as a form of damage by numbers. This way they keep the base damage the same, but in order to "save the party" this gets escalated up and up by the number of mobs you throw at them. Then decreases the fewer and fewer mobs there are.
I'm not making that up, it literally works that way. Not only does it escalate during "sht hits the fan periods" but it de-escalates all by itself once that crowd is gone.
And I am repeatedly seeing a common pattern... mage gear almost consistently with Crit/Power/Recovery... but strangely always missing ARP.
This looks like an incredibly intelligent design decision for crowd control... not a screw up.
On top of that, they apparently balanced Master of Flame on the Spellstorms abilities.
I am playing MoFs now, and even using them on my same character so we're talking same stats and all. The two are equal, the Spellstorm is more powerful AoE specialist and burst damager, But the MoF is a very very subtle damager that keeps sustained damage on mobs even during encounter cooldowns. I am able to do the same things with an MoF that I am with a Spellstorm... the tactics and how you do it is different, but the general power level and what they're capable of is the same.
If Spellstorm loses that portion of EoTS, I can guarantee you that MoF will have to lose a great deal of Smoulder potential. Right now what keeps the two Paragon paths in line, is Smoulder's slow burn vs the fast strike capability of EoTS. They are actually equal in power.
Remove that, and there will be a serious imbalance.
Ergo causing more problems than they solve and not even solving the problem they were trying to.
Release the Warlock, tons of people will play them and there will be less CWs about...
HA problem solved for awhile.
Agreed! If cw cant be a dps class and other classes are clearly buffed every week then I want a pure ranged/mage dps too to be released which requires some thoughts/skills to use!
W/o this lame debate over "oh this is only for control".
And unlike the hunter mechanism which is well...
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silverquickMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
edited April 2014
Well that's what I've been trying to tell you,
The CW is not an actual controller per se in the sense most people think of it, its only an AoE DPS class with control components that can be added, its not really an actual controller. It was designed as a damager.
Which is probably why they haven't and never will release any Warlock class. I suspect the real reason the Master of Flame even exists is as a substitute for it. We already got our Warlock... its called Master of Flame. They can't release a whole new class because the CW actually fills that role and always has.
I suspect if they just changed the name from Control Wizard to just Wizard, it would help people view the class much more clearly.
Its just that the actual feat, power, and spell mastery slot are so versatile it allows you to configure multiple powers to be able to add components of control while not actually having true controller abilities.
I'm actually preparing a topic with my point of view on the whole class. I will take my time reading it all before really replying to it.
My point of view isn't about what is overpower or such but more what we need to change to better feat in our role.
1- We aren't a support class.
>> DC are a support class, it's there job to put debuff on mob and to give us buff. But an huge part of our power (feat/...) give attenuation/mitigation/etc. Even our 4-pieces bonus is all about it. As example, a MoF thaum will debuff 5 targets for 21% with only CoI.
I suggest to remove most of our debuff to only keep some for PvP purpose and minor one. It will help support class and damage balance.
2- We are a control class, in both PvP and PvE.
In PvE, our job is to control in mass. And in PvP, it's our only way to survive.
I propose to increase the target number cap for reducing the CW stacking in dungeon. For Daily power, I see some think like 12/15 for control power (AS/IS/MoC) and 8 for more damaging power (OF/IF).
I propose that Repel can affect 3 targets when outside of tab and 8 when slotted, for Shield explosion and Steal Time too, and also for Shard maybe.
3- our 3 path should be useful and more clear.
If I keep my logic in #1, a lot of feat will need new effect since they don't give debuff/buff. Starting with the big one.
I propose to make a standardization of each tier in the path. So globally we can have :
tier 1 - situational feat like more damage if target below 30% HP, give damage buff if target have chill on them, etc.
tier 2 - Survival feat (see #4) like the one that repel on hit or that give temporary HP.
tier 3 - At-Will feat like the thrid strike of CC give a damage buff.
tier 4 - Encounter feat like more damage with shard or cooldown reduction on kill.
tier 5 - specific feat with both PvP and PvE effect
for the last feat, I propose :
Oppressor - Chill Strike increase Crit chance by xx% for y second, increase the max number of target to 3/8 and affected target receive 3 more chill stack.
Thaumaturge - CoI increase damage by xx% for y second, increase the max number of target to 3/8 and affected target have a chance to receive a chill stack.
Renegade - Entangling Force increase recovery by xx% for y second, increase the max number of target to 3/8 and give you 2 more arcane mastery stack.
4- survivability
Outside of slotting shield, we don't have a lot of survival specific tool for damage absorption/prevention.
I propose to add some feat that proc a shield on some condition, to extent the length of the repel (because of tenacity), etc.
we are not a control class in pvp anymore. 0.5 sec ccs. awful. gwf have more. anyway we suck in pvp at the mo. any more nerfs would flat out kill the class imo. pve maybe some tweaks here and there. but changes powers in pvp/pve would a be a start. then again this games devs are the most slack i have ever seen so that won't happen. not when there are more <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> mounts hock.
Lower our AOE damage and buff our single target and we are back on track... Then give us a pvp buff and we're all set.
No... that won't help at all.
Our PvP spike damage was actually nerfed. So it won't help any. The way PvP actually works is by decreasing actual damage by a percentage. And its for all classes. So in a nutshell you'd have to overbuff the single target damage. Which would make it way overdone in PvE.
The other classes were Single Target damagers. So they have much more powerful Single Target damage and this shows in the PvP side by a wide margine. This was intended... the flipped side is... they can't fight off mass mob attacks.
The other classes actually do their job VERY well... but their job was completely excluded from the dungeons. You don't need to adjust CWs at all in PvE.... and even doing so still means the other single target damagers still will be just as worthless there.
The PvE fix is an easy one... that one is just a content adjustment so the other classes roles will actually be needed in dungeons. Because right now, nothing needs to be tanked... and there are FEW if any actual single target mobs that need sustained damage on them. It's just massive numbers of mobs thrown out there which of course... cater to the strengths of the CW and the entire class design, while excluding the strengths of all the other classes except a few.
So of course most of the other classes are completely useless.
The other classes can do their job just fine... but... there's no job for them to do.. and won't be even if you did adjust CWs PvE damage downward.
So far that tactic has only resulted in more CWs needed to get through content... and hurt the other classes... not CWs.
CW "adjustments" are only going to make the problem worse, not better... as is usual everytime they nerf things. Just like in PvP... they just created more problems than they solved.
3) How would you make the class more interesting (and less cookie cutter perhaps) to play?[/B]
Give us a T2/T2.5/T3 or pvp archmage set.
6-12 months ago, the T1 archmage set was one of the best CW gear sets in game.
After some nerfs and bug fixes (AP gain of entangling force on tab), the set became only mediocre.
Many high-end pve CW's use high vizier which is for debuff and dps.
IF CW powers are nerfed, please compensate by giving us a fun gear set which enables us to do more control.
Give us a new archmage set with better stats than T1.
Before tenacity, I often wore the archmage set in pvp because it was good at control and fun to play.
But after tenacity, the T1 archmage set is too weak for pvp against players with tenacity.
Give us an upgraded/enhanced version of the archmage set for CW's who enjoy control more than dps.
They can tinker with all the classes all day long and frankly some could use it, but it still boils down to one thing.. Cryptic did a very poor design job with alot of these dungeons, they could HALF the adds and BUFF the elites by double, and make it that certain elites are unavoidable damage..
This solves most of the issues you are talking about, creating a need for melee positions, and not as much need for the CW. You want every class to have a niche.
If they lower damage, this will just make them worse in pvp.. they could I guess lower target caps, but that will make certain instances DEMAND more CWs not less to complete.. YA 4 cw runs are now mandatory.
By designing content that requires no tank/healer all they did is switch the focus to the CW. I think they should work back towards the trinity not away from it.
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kraarg123Member, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 4Arc User
They can tinker with all the classes all day long and frankly some could use it, but it still boils down to one thing.. Cryptic did a very poor design job with alot of these dungeons, they could HALF the adds and BUFF the elites by double, and make it that certain elites are unavoidable damage..
This solves most of the issues you are talking about, creating a need for melee positions, and not as much need for the CW. You want every class to have a niche.
If they lower damage, this will just make them worse in pvp.. they could I guess lower target caps, but that will make certain instances DEMAND more CWs not less to complete.. YA 4 cw runs are now mandatory.
By designing content that requires no tank/healer all they did is switch the focus to the CW. I think they should work back towards the trinity not away from it.
This boils it down pretty nicely. Since most bossfights are either straight burns or addfests and the boss damage is rather negligible also, there is no real incentive to take single DPS classes like TR or partly HR (due to addfests - straight burn is ridiculously easy anyways) and GFs (since the boss damage is so low it can basically be tanked by anybody - only thing - only think GFs are good for is kiting stuff - could run frozen heart or spellplague all day long, but never anything else)). Same thing with trash - it's always insane amounts of adds which falls quickly - no need to control.
Healers are kind of superfluous too from a healing point of view due to low healing potential of cleric skills and high hp gain from pots) although I think that a well played buffing DC still outweights another DPS class in the group. But they're on the way of nerfing the buffing DC potential already, so they're gonna be out of work soon too.
Well, that's one of the issues, isn't it: lowering CW damage but increasing their control will stop high-end speedrunners stacking CWs (because what you want for a speedrun is damage output), but will probably lead to increased CW stacking in low-end parties, since if you can't kill things FAST, you can at least keep things controlled for the entire time you're killing them.
As for finding a niche for every class, that would be nice, but it's not really the meta they went for: they've gone for a fairly "every party composition should be able to complete a dungeon"-style metagame, but the corollary to that is that (of course) "some parties will be much (much) better at this than others".
The trick is to work out how to make that "better than all the other parties" party more rainbow and less 'stacked CWs'.
For example, I pugged in PK yesterday, with an admittedly poor team, I came late, the original team had wiped at the first miniboss.
The first, in the easiest T2.
By the time we got to the last fire before the mainboss, I'd outdamaged tne whole team's output ×2. And by no means am I an overpowered cw, 13k in my socks.
No idea what my toon is now.
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silverquickMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
For example, I pugged in PK yesterday, with an admittedly poor team, I came late, the original team had wiped at the first miniboss.
The first, in the easiest T2.
By the time we got to the last fire before the mainboss, I'd outdamaged tne whole team's output ×2. And by no means am I an overpowered cw, 13k in my socks.
Well I wouldn't let that go to your head, you're not ACTUALLY doing more damage than they are,
...don't confuse what Paingiver actually is, its total damage not damage per target.
So... to simplify, the reason you will ALWAYS outdamage other classes in mass mob situations in Paingiver is because even though you're doing less damage per target, you're actually doing more overall.
To simplify... If you're doing 50 damage to each target the other single target damagers are doing 100 to one target. But 10 mobs means you're doing 500 damage to their 100 damage...
.....even though they're actually outdamaging you. That's what Paingiver lies and tells everyone YOU did, even though you didn't. You didn't really outdamage anyone... you just weakly damaged a bunch of mobs at once.
You aren't doing the damage you think you are compared to them, but Paingiver sure makes it look that way, its just an illusion... they can damage only one target at once, you damage multiple targets. So you're not doing what you thought you were.
Sure, I get that, afterall, I also went to school.
And to be honest, I didn't just "weakly damage" the mobs, I left the majority of them dead, half dead and stunned, or trying to learn to fly really really quickly.
The fact remains however, that without a cw, they wiped at the first miniboss, with a cw, they sailed all the way to the end.
PK is the most friendly dungeon to CWs, nothing but waves of controllable trash. No real elites to speak of. The hexers have some immunity but still aren't that tough. It's just Cragmire Crypts on overdrive. It's extremely easy for a good group but rough for a bad one that can't deal with the trash intelligently and I don't mean stacking CW. I took a group of three TR and a GWF through there with my cleric and we didn't have any trouble at all. BUT the first time I went through that dungeon was as a CW in a rainbow party and we struggled all the way through because we didn't know what we were doing.
Also, 13k doesn't sound like much now, but it's still 1.5x the GS requirement for a dungeon that can be beat at minimum GS with a decent group of players. We were about 9k on my first run and mostly struggled due to inexperience with the waves of trash/adds.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
Well I wouldn't let that go to your head, you're not ACTUALLY doing more damage than they are
Well..yeah he is.
Damage is damage. Dealing 50 damage to 10 enemies is unarguably better than dealing 100 damage to one. About the only situation you could even try to argue this point would be if the enemies had 100 hitpoints and you could be killed by 10 but NOT by 9. And this is essentially never the case.
If the enemies have 50 hitpoints, you've killed everything and he's overkilled one.
If the enemies have 100 hitpoints, you've killed everything in the time he's killed two.
If the enemies have 200 hitpoints, you've killed everything in the time he's killed two.
And so on.
Mass AoE damage is king, and it's what CWs bring to the table.
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silverquickMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 1Arc User
The fact remains however, that without a cw, they wiped at the first miniboss, with a cw, they sailed all the way to the end.
Yeah that's the flipped side, and also very true.
If you've got say a rogue doing 100 damage to one mob that has 100 health, even though he's one shotting it... the other 9 are beating him down so fast it makes his head spin before he can kill all 10 of them. Because it will take him 10 rounds to kill 10 mobs.
As to where are a CW, even though you're doing say 50 damage to ALL 10 mobs (each with 100 health), it still only takes us 2 rounds to kill the entire pack.
That Rogue/GF/DC are going to be long dead, while the Single CW changes the entire scenario. It won't matter how much you'd nerf the damage as its still going to make the CW the best tool for the job. And the other single target damagers are still going to be just as worthless as they were before comparatively.
They're still going to get steamrolled repeatedly by mass mobs because their class wasn't designed to handle that.
The solution to include a full rainbow type party and make them more useful will not be achieved with any amount of nerfs or rather "adjustments". Because the basics of the problem are the same even if you did that.
The CW outside of the GWF is the only class in the game capable of handling Mass Mobs... and... that's the only mobs in the dungeons.
The Devs are barking up the wrong tree again... and likely to make the situation even worse than before.
Just as you said originally
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited May 2014
The point being...is if dungeons weren't just a landslide of adds, the CW wouldn't stand out. If you made a dungeon that was primarily groups of one or two elite adds, and maybe a couple smaller guys, CW's would be at or near the bottom of the Paingiver list every time.
No, then you'd just end up in the same situation we have now for GFs and frozen heart. There'd be one dungeon that people take single-target deeps for, and everything else would stay CW+GWF stacked.
A bigger mix of mob types in each and every dungeon would be nice (not least for variety): karrundax is kinda fun for this (if you actually fight the giants).
Another idea (that I keep spouting in the hope devs will magically read it) is to have cross-class synergy effects. Class X does Y more damage if monsters are affected by something only class Z can provide (like using frontline surge or other knockdowns on frozen monsters does bonus 'shatter' damage or something). So if you had a whole mix of dudes in your team you could get crazy multi-class bonuses (bleeding, stunned, knocked down AND frozen? MONSTER ASPLODES), whereas if you stacked one class you wouldn't.
You can kinda play this way now ANYWAY, if you're prepared to be a team player: singing stuff onto the melee etc, rather than just ignoring them and killing everything yourself. It'd just be nice if this was actually more beneficial.
Comments
I would love to play a CW who's bottom of the damage chart, but has controlled mobs so effectively the rest of his group gives him the VIP ... Just the same as perhaps a Cleric might for healing. Making this an effective build means more team work.
Damage considered as 'control' doesn't sit well with me either .. as mentioned elsewhere we'd all controllers fighting for the same piece of action by that line of thought.. It maybe on aspect of control, but it appears the effective builds out there underline damage primarily
Not saying a CW as an AoE damage dealer shouldn't be on par with other clases, but rather that I agreeing that making the 'control' aspect more viable sounds promising and something I've always preferred to pursue in a wizard class.
I haven't looked extensively, but my searches for builds using oppressor didn't come up with much. Is there one right now?
Not true.
Shard only works when the mob is already bunched up. When it's not bunched up, you have to use Singularity to bunch them all together. Aha! Synergy between Sing and Shard!
Same deal with Icy Terrain and Steal Time.
Lol,
Naw you can throw a Shard into any mass of mobs that are 2 or more and it will still explode and do a great deal of damage.
It doesn't need any help. It only has a condition that it hits more than 1 mob before exploding. But it does work all on its own very well without help. You can't do that with Icy Terrain, its just not a control spell and never has been.
EDIT: What they really need here here man... is an actual class that is a controller... the CW no matter which path you take... just is not it and never has been, and cannot be.
Its an AoE damager with possible controller elements... but not an actual controler.
Suppose you have 10 mobs, arranged in pairs.
You can throw 5 shards, one each into each pair and it will blow them all up separately.
Or, you can use Sing to gather up all 10 mobs, and then blow all 10 up simultaneously.
Which is more effective?
Same deal with Icy Terrain and Steal Time.
You can throw down an Icy Terrain under a bunch of mobs. And it will freeze them. Eventually. Provided that they all promise to stand still.
OR, you can throw down an Icy Terrain under a bunch of mobs, AND use Steal Time to *make* them all stand still.
Which is more effective?
I don't think individual encounters should be judged strictly and *solely* on its own merits. Sure that is one important way to assess an encounter. But they also should be judged by how they work with other encounters.
BY ITSELF, Icy Terrain is kinda crappy. It applies chill stacks quite slowly, and the mobs have to promise to stand still in order to agree to be frozen. But working WITH other encounters, Icy Terrain *can* be effective in slowing and freezing mobs.
Naw Shards will actually blow them up and do its damage. Icy Terrain will tick once or twice, then you'll be swarmed by mobs with little actual effect to the mobs unless you've feated it for the debuff. Then you can nuke the heck out of them. It acts as a really good debuff expecially with a good weapon enchant... but a control spell... it is not. I tried everything I could to make this spell useful, all you CAN do with it, is use other spells to do its job for it.
Shards is a damage spell and will do that on its own without any help from anything else and the mobs all come to you, you can even drop it in a crowd of mobs beating on you and it will hit all of them despite the number caps so long as you use a point blank hit. It will save your butt when the **** hits the fan.
Icy Terrain cannot and never will be able to act on its own even if you doubled the chill per tick. Its just not good enough to do its own job.
Seriously I have tried everything I could to MAKE a controller out of this class. Because there was a time I did not have the sheer power or gear score I have now. And being able to actually control mobs rather than just nuke them would have been much more efficient...
But at the end of the day.... that's what I HAD to do was make it into something it was not.
I did not ever have to "make it" into an AoE damager. It was that from the beginning, the rest of it was just me trying to give it something it never had or stretch its abillities in directions they were not well suited to go.
HA problem solved for awhile.
As i have heard, control @ D&D means fight against multiple enemies at The same time; and Wizard means damage on everything else. So, as you said its your opinion and your base is wrong, i stopped reading there.
To admins: Change The title of this thread, lead to a fake content.
Silver, what you're missing is that Encounter powers giving EotS a chance to proc per hit and not per cast is likely unintended. Spells like ST and COI applying "on encounter" effects per ticks instead of per cast will likely be fixed.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but just guessing that's what's going to happen, so I'd be prepared for it.
I'm pretty sure it was intended.
Its been a year now and that hasn't changed. They've known about it all along. And because it scales with the number of mobs, its likely intended that way to scale according to the number of mobs on the party as a form of damage by numbers. This way they keep the base damage the same, but in order to "save the party" this gets escalated up and up by the number of mobs you throw at them. Then decreases the fewer and fewer mobs there are.
I'm not making that up, it literally works that way. Not only does it escalate during "sht hits the fan periods" but it de-escalates all by itself once that crowd is gone.
And I am repeatedly seeing a common pattern... mage gear almost consistently with Crit/Power/Recovery... but strangely always missing ARP.
This looks like an incredibly intelligent design decision for crowd control... not a screw up.
On top of that, they apparently balanced Master of Flame on the Spellstorms abilities.
I am playing MoFs now, and even using them on my same character so we're talking same stats and all. The two are equal, the Spellstorm is more powerful AoE specialist and burst damager, But the MoF is a very very subtle damager that keeps sustained damage on mobs even during encounter cooldowns. I am able to do the same things with an MoF that I am with a Spellstorm... the tactics and how you do it is different, but the general power level and what they're capable of is the same.
If Spellstorm loses that portion of EoTS, I can guarantee you that MoF will have to lose a great deal of Smoulder potential. Right now what keeps the two Paragon paths in line, is Smoulder's slow burn vs the fast strike capability of EoTS. They are actually equal in power.
Remove that, and there will be a serious imbalance.
Ergo causing more problems than they solve and not even solving the problem they were trying to.
Agreed! If cw cant be a dps class and other classes are clearly buffed every week then I want a pure ranged/mage dps too to be released which requires some thoughts/skills to use!
W/o this lame debate over "oh this is only for control".
And unlike the hunter mechanism which is well...
The CW is not an actual controller per se in the sense most people think of it, its only an AoE DPS class with control components that can be added, its not really an actual controller. It was designed as a damager.
Which is probably why they haven't and never will release any Warlock class. I suspect the real reason the Master of Flame even exists is as a substitute for it. We already got our Warlock... its called Master of Flame. They can't release a whole new class because the CW actually fills that role and always has.
I suspect if they just changed the name from Control Wizard to just Wizard, it would help people view the class much more clearly.
Its just that the actual feat, power, and spell mastery slot are so versatile it allows you to configure multiple powers to be able to add components of control while not actually having true controller abilities.
we are not a control class in pvp anymore. 0.5 sec ccs. awful. gwf have more. anyway we suck in pvp at the mo. any more nerfs would flat out kill the class imo. pve maybe some tweaks here and there. but changes powers in pvp/pve would a be a start. then again this games devs are the most slack i have ever seen so that won't happen. not when there are more <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> mounts hock.
Overpowered 60 CW ~ Thaumaturge 14.5k
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~ GF Buffs were great we are much better, please fix the bugs now... Thank you!
No... that won't help at all.
Our PvP spike damage was actually nerfed. So it won't help any. The way PvP actually works is by decreasing actual damage by a percentage. And its for all classes. So in a nutshell you'd have to overbuff the single target damage. Which would make it way overdone in PvE.
The other classes were Single Target damagers. So they have much more powerful Single Target damage and this shows in the PvP side by a wide margine. This was intended... the flipped side is... they can't fight off mass mob attacks.
The other classes actually do their job VERY well... but their job was completely excluded from the dungeons. You don't need to adjust CWs at all in PvE.... and even doing so still means the other single target damagers still will be just as worthless there.
The PvE fix is an easy one... that one is just a content adjustment so the other classes roles will actually be needed in dungeons. Because right now, nothing needs to be tanked... and there are FEW if any actual single target mobs that need sustained damage on them. It's just massive numbers of mobs thrown out there which of course... cater to the strengths of the CW and the entire class design, while excluding the strengths of all the other classes except a few.
So of course most of the other classes are completely useless.
The other classes can do their job just fine... but... there's no job for them to do.. and won't be even if you did adjust CWs PvE damage downward.
So far that tactic has only resulted in more CWs needed to get through content... and hurt the other classes... not CWs.
CW "adjustments" are only going to make the problem worse, not better... as is usual everytime they nerf things. Just like in PvP... they just created more problems than they solved.
What? CWs shouldn't have good single-target damage capabilities. We aren't TR's.
Give us a T2/T2.5/T3 or pvp archmage set.
6-12 months ago, the T1 archmage set was one of the best CW gear sets in game.
After some nerfs and bug fixes (AP gain of entangling force on tab), the set became only mediocre.
Many high-end pve CW's use high vizier which is for debuff and dps.
IF CW powers are nerfed, please compensate by giving us a fun gear set which enables us to do more control.
Give us a new archmage set with better stats than T1.
Before tenacity, I often wore the archmage set in pvp because it was good at control and fun to play.
But after tenacity, the T1 archmage set is too weak for pvp against players with tenacity.
Give us an upgraded/enhanced version of the archmage set for CW's who enjoy control more than dps.
Do we make this type of sentence in an MMO...?
Sure. In that minute I roll a Gwf or Hunter...
They can tinker with all the classes all day long and frankly some could use it, but it still boils down to one thing.. Cryptic did a very poor design job with alot of these dungeons, they could HALF the adds and BUFF the elites by double, and make it that certain elites are unavoidable damage..
This solves most of the issues you are talking about, creating a need for melee positions, and not as much need for the CW. You want every class to have a niche.
If they lower damage, this will just make them worse in pvp.. they could I guess lower target caps, but that will make certain instances DEMAND more CWs not less to complete.. YA 4 cw runs are now mandatory.
By designing content that requires no tank/healer all they did is switch the focus to the CW. I think they should work back towards the trinity not away from it.
This boils it down pretty nicely. Since most bossfights are either straight burns or addfests and the boss damage is rather negligible also, there is no real incentive to take single DPS classes like TR or partly HR (due to addfests - straight burn is ridiculously easy anyways) and GFs (since the boss damage is so low it can basically be tanked by anybody - only thing - only think GFs are good for is kiting stuff - could run frozen heart or spellplague all day long, but never anything else)). Same thing with trash - it's always insane amounts of adds which falls quickly - no need to control.
Healers are kind of superfluous too from a healing point of view due to low healing potential of cleric skills and high hp gain from pots) although I think that a well played buffing DC still outweights another DPS class in the group. But they're on the way of nerfing the buffing DC potential already, so they're gonna be out of work soon too.
No really if CW have better control than actually. Mob will just take more time to kill.
As for finding a niche for every class, that would be nice, but it's not really the meta they went for: they've gone for a fairly "every party composition should be able to complete a dungeon"-style metagame, but the corollary to that is that (of course) "some parties will be much (much) better at this than others".
The trick is to work out how to make that "better than all the other parties" party more rainbow and less 'stacked CWs'.
The first, in the easiest T2.
By the time we got to the last fire before the mainboss, I'd outdamaged tne whole team's output ×2. And by no means am I an overpowered cw, 13k in my socks.
Well I wouldn't let that go to your head, you're not ACTUALLY doing more damage than they are,
...don't confuse what Paingiver actually is, its total damage not damage per target.
So... to simplify, the reason you will ALWAYS outdamage other classes in mass mob situations in Paingiver is because even though you're doing less damage per target, you're actually doing more overall.
To simplify... If you're doing 50 damage to each target the other single target damagers are doing 100 to one target. But 10 mobs means you're doing 500 damage to their 100 damage...
.....even though they're actually outdamaging you. That's what Paingiver lies and tells everyone YOU did, even though you didn't. You didn't really outdamage anyone... you just weakly damaged a bunch of mobs at once.
You aren't doing the damage you think you are compared to them, but Paingiver sure makes it look that way, its just an illusion... they can damage only one target at once, you damage multiple targets. So you're not doing what you thought you were.
And to be honest, I didn't just "weakly damage" the mobs, I left the majority of them dead, half dead and stunned, or trying to learn to fly really really quickly.
The fact remains however, that without a cw, they wiped at the first miniboss, with a cw, they sailed all the way to the end.
Also, 13k doesn't sound like much now, but it's still 1.5x the GS requirement for a dungeon that can be beat at minimum GS with a decent group of players. We were about 9k on my first run and mostly struggled due to inexperience with the waves of trash/adds.
Well..yeah he is.
Damage is damage. Dealing 50 damage to 10 enemies is unarguably better than dealing 100 damage to one. About the only situation you could even try to argue this point would be if the enemies had 100 hitpoints and you could be killed by 10 but NOT by 9. And this is essentially never the case.
If the enemies have 50 hitpoints, you've killed everything and he's overkilled one.
If the enemies have 100 hitpoints, you've killed everything in the time he's killed two.
If the enemies have 200 hitpoints, you've killed everything in the time he's killed two.
And so on.
Mass AoE damage is king, and it's what CWs bring to the table.
Yeah that's the flipped side, and also very true.
If you've got say a rogue doing 100 damage to one mob that has 100 health, even though he's one shotting it... the other 9 are beating him down so fast it makes his head spin before he can kill all 10 of them. Because it will take him 10 rounds to kill 10 mobs.
As to where are a CW, even though you're doing say 50 damage to ALL 10 mobs (each with 100 health), it still only takes us 2 rounds to kill the entire pack.
That Rogue/GF/DC are going to be long dead, while the Single CW changes the entire scenario. It won't matter how much you'd nerf the damage as its still going to make the CW the best tool for the job. And the other single target damagers are still going to be just as worthless as they were before comparatively.
They're still going to get steamrolled repeatedly by mass mobs because their class wasn't designed to handle that.
The solution to include a full rainbow type party and make them more useful will not be achieved with any amount of nerfs or rather "adjustments". Because the basics of the problem are the same even if you did that.
The CW outside of the GWF is the only class in the game capable of handling Mass Mobs... and... that's the only mobs in the dungeons.
The Devs are barking up the wrong tree again... and likely to make the situation even worse than before.
Just as you said originally
A bigger mix of mob types in each and every dungeon would be nice (not least for variety): karrundax is kinda fun for this (if you actually fight the giants).
Another idea (that I keep spouting in the hope devs will magically read it) is to have cross-class synergy effects. Class X does Y more damage if monsters are affected by something only class Z can provide (like using frontline surge or other knockdowns on frozen monsters does bonus 'shatter' damage or something). So if you had a whole mix of dudes in your team you could get crazy multi-class bonuses (bleeding, stunned, knocked down AND frozen? MONSTER ASPLODES), whereas if you stacked one class you wouldn't.
You can kinda play this way now ANYWAY, if you're prepared to be a team player: singing stuff onto the melee etc, rather than just ignoring them and killing everything yourself. It'd just be nice if this was actually more beneficial.