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Cryptic OFFICIAL Feedback Thread: Control Wizard - Master of Flame Paragon Path
lordgallen
Member, NW_CrypticDev, Cryptic Developers Posts: 91Cryptic Developers ›
Howdy!
The upcoming Shadowmantle module introduces new Paragon paths for all of the existing classes.
We expect a lot of great feedback so we're setting up these threads to keep it more specific.
We'll be stopping by these threads everyday so keep your feedback coming in!
Control Wizard - Master of Flame
The Master of Flame adds additional area of effect options and has an easy access to damage over time effects to maintain damage per second.
Paragon paths contain 1 Atwill, 1 Encounter, 1 Daily, 3 Class Features, and 3 Feats.
The upcoming Shadowmantle module introduces new Paragon paths for all of the existing classes.
We expect a lot of great feedback so we're setting up these threads to keep it more specific.
We'll be stopping by these threads everyday so keep your feedback coming in!
Control Wizard - Master of Flame
The Master of Flame adds additional area of effect options and has an easy access to damage over time effects to maintain damage per second.
Paragon paths contain 1 Atwill, 1 Encounter, 1 Daily, 3 Class Features, and 3 Feats.
Post edited by lordgallen on
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This discussion has been closed.
Comments
(Concise Feedback & Screen Shots are much appreciated)
Category: Gameplay, Powers, Feats
Bug: Feat: Name
Power did not seem to do anything, audio and hit reacts were also missing. (screenshot)
Feedback: Power: Name
Power was fun to use, but could be even better if it also did this other thing.
Thanks for your help and feedback!
The Master of Flame Paragon Powers are ....
• Encounter Power – Fanning the Flame:
o You envelop your target in flame dealing damage over time. While burning, your target attracts flame from nearby targets who are affected by Smolder, causing them to take additional damage.
o Smolder deals damage over time, and if target is affected by Chill, it gains Rimefire aspect, allowing it’s duration to be refreshed by Chill effects.
o Spell Mastery: Now also deals reduced damage to enemies near your target, and adds Smolder to them.
• Atwill Power – Scorching Burst:
o You unleash a column of fire at your targets location, dealing Damage and adding Smolder.
Hold button down to increase the radius, and initial damage of your attack
o Smolder deals damage over time, and if target is affected by Chill, it gains Rimefire aspect, allowing it’s duration to be refreshed by Chill effects.
• Daily Power – Furious Immolation:
o You summon a titanic column of flame at target location that draws nearby enemies towards it’s center and blasts them upwards.
o Smolder deals damage over time, and if target is affected by Chill, it gains Rimefire aspect, allowing it’s duration to be refreshed by Chill effects.
• Class Feature – Combustive Action:
o Your Daily powers now add Smolder to affected targets, and those targets briefly take more damage from Fire and Smolder effects
o Smolder deals damage over time, and if target is affected by Chill, it gains Rimefire aspect, allowing it’s duration to be refreshed by Chill effects.
• Class Feature – Critical Conflagration:
o You gain increased Crit Severity, and whenever you critically hit with an Arcane or Cold based attack you add Smolder to your target.
o Smolder deals damage over time, and if target is affected by Chill, it gains Rimefire aspect, allowing it’s duration to be refreshed by Chill effects.
• Class Feature – Swath of Destruction:
o Increased Smolder damage, and targets affected by Smolder take slightly more damage.
o Smolder deals damage over time, and if target is affected by Chill, it gains Rimefire aspect, allowing it’s duration to be refreshed by Chill effects.
• Feat – Twisting Immolation:
o Targets swept into the air by Furious Immolation are now briefly Dazed for a set amount of time after landing.
o The debuff from your Combustive Action class feature now lasts for an amount of time longer as well.
• Feat – Drifting Embers:
o Targets affected by Fanning the Flame have a percentage chance when damaged by other attacks to spread Smolder to a nearby target.
• Feat – Arcane Burst:
o Each target hit by Scorching Burst has a percentage chance to add a stack of Arcane Mastery.
Smoulder is a great mechanic but currently its the only thing holding it together and its not doing a good job at that. Firstly it does not crit, which makes it less desirable.
Also it does not stack. Currently the paragon path is very weak in comparison to spellstorm, However this could be remedied if you change smoulder to either crit (which i could imagine would be hard) Or stack. I would suggest by trying stacking it at 3 times. and go from there.
• Encounter Power – Fanning the Flame:
Mastery only applies 1 tick of the DoT to nearby enemies. If this is intentional it is far too weak.
Does not seem to take crit severity into account.
• Atwill Power – Scorching Burst:
The damage of this is mediocre, 1 smoulder tick (with swath) does more damage than this spell, the damage at full charge should be increased.
It should be casted where you point rather than locked onto a target, currently it is cumbersome to use effectively.
• Daily Power – Furious Immolation:
Only effects 5 targets, damage is low. If it is not increased to 15 or more targets not many will use it (if any).
• Feat – Drifting Embers:
Works fine but is made redundant if using critical conflag
• Feat – Arcane Burst:
Works fine.
and also the featured satirical comedic adventure "A Call for Heroes".
- Any power that requires the wielder to sit still for a lengthy animation or charge time for full effect needs to have a significant benefit to offset that disadvantage.
- Perhaps more importantly, it just isn't very fun to constantly wait for long animations and charge times because it interrupts the flow of combat. Maybe I'll change my tune with more practice, but my first impression is that it's jarring to use.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
while this is an at-will and an AoE, it literally replaces storm pillar as a charge-up at-will. and it doesn't seem to crit or pull the 1000+ damage it's supposed to do unless it divides it among multiple targets. not really the kind of at-will that does well when creatures are advancing on you.
feedback: power: fanning the flame
this has great potential as a mastery favorite. but i agree with the comments grimah made about it. i also maxed out the feat drifting embers for this encounter. hitting single targets with conduit of ice and ray of frost before covering them with flames... it did crit but definitely not seeing the kind of damage that i get with shard of the endless avalanche or other pve encounters.
feedback: class feature: critical conflagration
i like the way this sounds but i'm not sure it's working. i'm not even sure what smoulder looks like... so when my cold or arcane based attack crits, i can't tell if smoulder is getting added or for how long.
feedback: daily power: furious immolation
i like this daily but thought that the animation left a bit to be desired.
additional notes:
based on the tool tips, magic missile is still the highest damage output at-will we CWs have... i was kind of hoping for fireball or maybe replacing chilling cloud. but i may need to re-associate myself with d&d 4e paragons. i had started building a new mage for the new paragon path, but i'm kind of the fence about that now... i like it, but i don't think it's comparable to my existing mage's damage vs cc.
Seemed to hit one less than mob size -- if there were 4 only 3 were hit, if there were 3 only 2 were hit.
(Somebody used "<" instead of "<=" in their loop methinks
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
I'm not sure if it's inteded or a bug:
Scorching Burst and Fanning the Flame are not procing armor pen (Furious Immolation does procs).
I was sooooo stoked (get it?) to be a fire mage but if it's not even worth it...
smolder has to crit I think. Should be the BEST thing about fire CWs. Spreading smolder and chill should be what you want to do, not a chore. CWs need to be rewarded for trying to get smolder on as many targets as possible.
As with all channeled abilities in this game, it should be WORTH IT!! The new at-will is cumbersome and the damage is meh.
Daily only affecting 5 targets?? really?
But honestly, GF's and GWF's have more survivablility, cc, and damage than us. I would just rename the class to something else so you don't give new players the wrong impression on what type of class they are thinking about playing.
Since it can buff Cold based powers, why couldnt it buff Fire based powers as well? The new at-will is really underwhelmed, even Ray of Frost is way better in utility/damage wise, IMO.
BOOORING AND BIG FAIL.
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ Gankdalf The Icehole █ ▇ ▆ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁
Smolder not Critting: This power should eventually be able to crit, but doing so currently would put it in the bad situation of having a dot that could crit forever.
Daily: Regarding the target cap, 5 is generally the max targets for powers to have. Powers that have really high target caps have generally proven to be rather abusive.
Anyhoo, thanks for the initial round of feedback.
"Masters of Flame" have more Ice powers than flame. It is a little silly. Possibly either rename the paragon path to something more generic like, "Elemental Mastery" or replace all ice based powers with flame.
The entire path feels underwhelming in comparison to Storm/Lightning, both in efficacy and (visual) effects. Using fire-based spells feels weaker than the ice spells because at least with ice-spells things freeze over eventually but with fire-spells it felt like I was annoying enemies with my flames, not actually killing them.
I actually tried that but the thing is, it doesn't work better than Magic Missile for example or even Ray of Frost but the worst aspect of it is that you have to repeatedly click and while you're focusing on one enemy others will swarm you anyway.
And the problem with that is...?
The poster formerly known as LordOfPit, and his blog.
* Dec 2007 (CO)
* Oct 2008 (STO)
Oppressor tree right now still only makes use of chill. Thuama tree still gets the most benefit from chilling cloud. Renegade will still get the most from Magic Missiles. So it doesn't seem like the new At-Will is useful at all.
Have the gear and skills, but lack the friends to play with? Come and apply for Essence of Aggression. We have been here and strong since beta. (Immature, rude, and arrogant people will not be accepted)
I have Neverwinter on max settings in the preview server, and the animations for Scorching Burst, Fanning the Flame, and Furious Immolation feel pretty underwhelming. Are these the final animations for these spells, or are you saving the eye candy for when the module goes live?
Taking a break from Neverwinter indefinitely...
Well, I gave it another try... This time, I have to say things worked better and the Fire path was slightly more enjoyable. The change was, I started using the Shield spell to protect my clothy behind while things were slowly burning away. Chill and Smolder work together, yes, but it's a battle of attrition which felt underpowered for my Control Wizard unless I used Shield to keep me alive. If there was more synergy perhaps and stronger effects... I don't know, right now the Ranger seems more interesting than growing another CW or respeccing my Lv60 one.
The poster formerly known as LordOfPit, and his blog.
* Dec 2007 (CO)
* Oct 2008 (STO)
and spellstorm mage had... more ice powers than storm.
Thanks for the feedback on our feedback
I understand that players have only had access to this Paragon Path for a couple of days, so there may be more to it than initial testing would reveal, and I'm willing to keep testing to see how the new Path works as it's coded.
Quick note, though: a target cap of 5 seems extremely conservative for a Daily. If a CW wants to pull 5 targets together, Entangling Force on Tab will do the job without using any AP. I get the general potential for abuse with powers having very high target caps, but players expect their Dailies to do something special above and beyond the norm, and it's odd when powers with ginormous splat zones somehow affect only 5 out of a dozen or more targets.
Beyond being underwhelming, it's highly frustrating when you can never be sure if your AoE is going to affect the targets you actually want to prioritize.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
I'm going to try and explain calmly exactly why I think this is not a good thing. In my opinion, there are plenty of ways to get an AoE attack wrong in any game.
One is, for example, to make it a very limiting AoE attack that's cumbersome to use, but still hits all the targets in its designated area - this is an ability only slightly gone down the wrong path. It takes getting used to, but it does exactly what you expect.
Then there is what we're going to have here, if every ability's target cap was lowered to 5. Then the AoE attacks' effects will just look ridiculous as they will not match the visual effect on the screen. When you have 10 adds all gathered up roughly in the same spot and you want to use a powerful AoE like the Master of Flame's daily and only see five of them getting tossed into the air, that's just going to confuse a lot of new players, thinking that it's a bug, and frustrate many veteran players because they know it's done on purpose.
Suddenly a lot of the classes will lose their charm, especially the CW, but this means that many of the pre-Module dungeons will simply become frustrating to play. For example:
Spellplague Caverns, by far and large one of the longest dungeons in the game. With a very cohesive and organized group, all with well-thought out builds and Gear Scores above 10, 12 or even 13k, that use TeamSpeak to communicate, it's taken me well over an hour and a half to get to the final boss, with roughly another half-hour to beat it. That's before the change to Shield. Now that Shield is changed, that means we're more or less forced to fight the overwhelming waves of adds that spawn there. And if everyone can only hit 5 at a time, it's going to take forever, because more adds keep spawning in.
Many times it was said that Neverwinter is focusing on Action Combat. That is what it's doing, but in any Action Combat game of any kind, when your character makes an attack whose visual effect cleaves through 5, 8 or even 10 surrounding attackers, the player expects it to cleave through every single one the effect reaches, not simply stop at number 5 because of some mysterious code underlying the ability. At least I, as a player, expect what I'm seeing on the screen to all "click" and make sense. (Replace "cleave" with "explode" and the argument suddenly becomes valid for CWs as well)
So, food for thought. I certainly would continue playing Neverwinter if all AoE's of the CWs suddenly stopped being as AoE as before, but I'll honestly say that I probably wouldn't enjoy it as before. The same extends to all the other classes that rely on wide-range attacks.
tell me 1 good reason why its abusive with adds swarm in dungeons. This is number 1 <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> thing in this game.
This spell deal way too low damage compared to storm pillar(its like 3-4x lower dmg)
But this atwill is really cool, just increase its damage like storm pillar has.
smolder effect is awesome and deal fair damage especially when it will be able to crt.
love new passives and that new encounter.
the only minus in this new path is dmg of scorching burst.
i'm a little confused about the max caps that are being implemented on the control wizard. to me, it's clear that an area of effect spell... in a "physical" setting... would affect everyone that it touches. maybe the spell divides its damage among all that are affected, but its purpose isn't necessarily mass damage, it's crowd control. the same would go for any class that has an aoe skill... if a blade were swung across 5-10 zombies, the first zombie is going to get hit the hardest and the last one not so much. but all of them would be hit... not just 5.
now, i understand this is an mmo and certain concessions need to be made for class balance as well as pve balance... but regardless, i am still having a hard time wrapping my head around it. how is it that high target caps have been proven to be abusive? and if this is true, why are control wizard encounters/dailys being scaled back to 5 when they weren't before? and does this mean that all control wizard AoEs are slated for the same nerf knife?
the problem is... all of these targets that we're "missing" with our shield pops and area of effect daily powers are going to keep coming at us. no amount of recovery is going to make those cooldowns countdown faster than their attacks. add stamina for kiting and then we're left with either at-wills or bunny-hopping away and mashing at our greater potion of health key hoping someone else takes the aggro off of you.
and this isn't even like... a pvp issue because the cap is 5 and in domination it's 5v5. or is it gauntlegrym where a single cw could take out more than 5 by popping them into the pit? un-tabbed shield by itself isn't even a great "shield". it's a little better when its tabbed but for the most part, shield's main purpose has always been as a panic button to pop away the meanies when they get too close... after all, CWs are squishy glass cannons.
it's not like CWs can't or won't come up with different builds or strategies if their AoEs are capped. but it kind of takes the whole 'control' out of 'control wizard'. leave the caps off. reduce damage based on the number of targets.
thanks for listening.
But no one will use it. But as i said before if smoulder does not stack 2-3 or crit. then i do not think this paragon is a viable path in any situation.
and also the featured satirical comedic adventure "A Call for Heroes".
It's clunky, not intuitive
Have an "ultimate" attack that only hits 30% of what you're aiming at? seriously?
This is something that makes Neverwinter feel like a F2P game and not a great title.
Capping cleave, sure. Capping weapon master strike, sure. Capping shield, okay maybe. Capping a daily you get at level 50 to 5 targets? REALLY? It's a joke.
Even if you guys make the damage scale harshly after the first 5 it would be a LITTLE better. However, right now... capping targets is a joke. Sorry
I spend few hours playing the new Paragon Path and as I see it... you should scratch all out and try again! This paragon path is no where near the Spell Storm one... Not only from damage output perspective or efficiency but also play style wise. It's not fun and it's confusing as well!
At-will power – Scorching Burst:
The damage output is ridiculous... not only that but the casting animation and the way it's made is just bad! Why don't you make a fireball spell instead where on impact shatters and add smolder to nearby enemy's for example? (a.k.a. Chill Strike) Maybe adding a control aspect to this ability as well, will be nice... for example slow/daze/stunt/knock/flee etc.
Daily Power – Furious Immolation:
This daily power is okay but not as good as the others! The animation looks cool but still the flames are a bit weak! Dealing damage to 5 targets only and not able to crit... say what? Also the control aspect of this daily is nothing compared to any of the other ones... You made 1 sec daze effect if you spend 5 points in Oppressor Path... Let's face it none will spend points there because the whole tree is no where near the other two... This feat should be moved somewhere else or best will be to removed and add the CC effect to the Daily instead... and maybe improving it!
Feat – Arcane Burst:
"Each target hit by Scorching Burst has a percentage chance to add a stack of Arcane Mastery"
I'm sorry but I will never spend points in there... (at least in the current stage of development for the Master Of Flame path) I prefer to use Entangled Force on TAB and gain my arcane stacks faster (without the need of spending 5 feat points), plus this spell gives me more control and huge a mount of Action Points! I think that Entangled Force works best so far for the "Master of Flame" path. It is not only that increases the damage of all my fire ability's but also gives me more control which this build apparently lack... and on top of that I can spam Furious Immolation more often!
Overall the new path is lacking a lot things... to make it desirable or even playable! But I'm whiling to spend more time testing it out!
I do not wish to discuss the other problems with the feats and in general "Power Skill Tree" for CW's or any other class in that matter! You even made PvP completely unplayable... and now you have added more things to make it even worst! Good luck balancing that!
I REALLY hope that I am reading too much into this comment , a paranoid person could think that you might be intending to wreck Arcane Singularity by giving it a max cap of 5 enemies , I really hope this isn't the plan ... then again I don't really care since I'll be a Ranger when this goes live xD