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#76 Rimmy

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Posted 07 November 2010 - 07:56 AM

Jeez Rim stop trying to get Monks nerfed :P

But yes, I can see where you are coming from. Many times I have annoyed my opponents because they have finally managed to decrease my HP to about 1/4 only to see it go back up to nearly full instantly.

But still, I dont find Monks particularly hard to kill by other people (maybe i just die too easily haha).. but then I guess you would have to be pretty skilled (or just simply silence or sleep) in terms of some sort of locking/juggling ability to prevent Monks from using skills. And of course, a decent/high attack.


In most PvP match-ups, I've found that there are really only 5 situations in which I'm ever in danger of dying w/o a chance to heal:

1) Getting juggled in the air w/ no chance of escape (or after failing my attempt to escape w/ AR).
2) Ground locked by a paladin.
3) Frozen by a wizard's Blizzard/Snow Blues combo.
4) Silenced.
5) Being swarmed by everyone left on the opposing team.

Or some combination of the above.

Now, I realize that not every monk is going to have super-high DEF/MDEF or good avoidance skills, but if we're talking about someone who is evenly matched w/ their opponents in terms of gear/skills, it's pretty darn hard to kill a monk without using one of the tricks above. Sure, it is possible -- other classes can manage to lock a monk long enough to kill them, too, if they're lucky/extremely skilled -- but for the most part, monks will easily find time to heal unless they are being infinitely locked or they have been temporarily disabled in some way.

And that's the way it should be -- I mean, we should be hard to kill, since we can heal. But we shouldn't be SO hard to kill that we have to be locked perfectly for the entire length of time it takes to bring us from full health down to 0 in order to ensure that we fall.

If they increased cooldowns or MP cost for heals, it would at least force us to be a little more conservative w/ the use of our skills and give certain other classes a fair shot at bringing us down.

Now, there are situations in which you'll be darn glad the heals have such low cooldowns, b/c sometimes your teammates' health plummets like a meteor when they're stuck in a high-damage combo. And we should have a chance to save them in such situations, but again, it should come at a more significant MP cost and w/ a longer wait in between attempts.

Again, just my opinion.

Edited by Rimmy, 07 November 2010 - 07:57 AM.

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#77 invazn

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Posted 08 November 2010 - 01:43 AM

Well, if heals are ever going to be nerfed, I'd prefer MP cost increase. I think the cooldowns are fine as they are. Instant heal is pretty reasonable with its CD, but perhaps slow heal is a bit fast. But it's not like slow heal heals THAT much anyways. Besides, it's spanned over a duration too, so it probably wouldn't matter that much.

I suppose healing can become a bigger annoyance or issue now that it is much easier to stack health, with the introduction of cash sets and randomizers. >.>

Edited by invazn, 08 November 2010 - 01:44 AM.

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#78 Cherrin

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Posted 09 November 2010 - 05:45 PM

Yeah, I was speaking from a PvP perspective, mostly... But not entirely.

First, for PvP: If you stack health, you can easily heal about 15-20K+ damage per Instant Heal (and that's not taking into account the fact that Instant Heal can now get to Level 10, which is supposedly 85% of caster's max HP) -- and that's total overkill in PvP. The real issue is that in PvP, it can take a loooong time to chip away at a player w/ decent gear -- especially sorcerers, who benefit from an extra 30% damage reduction on top of all the other DR available (and every attack and all the MP that was used to do that chipping becomes wasted as soon as a heal is applied). Add that to the fact that Instant Heal only has an 8-second cooldown (AND monks have access to Wide Heal, which, w/ Casting Acceleration, is nearly an instant cast w/ an even shorter cooldown, healing 70%+ of a caster's max HP), and you're looking at a class that can tip the scales in any battle like a sack of bricks, just through healing ability alone (especially if the monk's teammates are smart and help keep them alive so they're available for healing when necessary). Oh, and let's not forget Slow Heal (which can now get to Level 10) and, if you really want overkill, HP Restore too.

In PvE, you really shouldn't have to heal too often at all, except occasionally for boss fights. Lavalon's breath, well... His attack patterns are pretty darn easy to read, since he turns his head in the direction he's going to aim long before he unleashes it, so if someone gets hit, then more often than not they just weren't paying attention.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to heal massive amounts of HP, but that kind of power should have a slightly longer casting time, a higher MP cost (monks more or less never run out of MP), etc.

Ultimately, maybe they ought to just increase the cooldowns on heals so we have to use them more sparingly, or, as I suggested earlier, nerf the heal amounts a bit. IMO, the current heals are just unnecessarily OP for PvE and imba for PvP (and I say this from the perspective of someone who absolutely loves the class and has made it his main from day one, playing since THQ*ICE's open beta). Again, that's my opinion. But there it is.


I agree with a nerf.. it might be easier to just nerf it in PVP which makes it fair. I'm from OBT too, don't get me wrong. Actually played CBT in another server then moved to OBT to THQ. It's really not that hard to kill a monk.. as long as you focus on him. Then again, it's easy to kill anyone who's focused. Like any other PvP type of gameplay, you need to focus on the low HP players (mages), especially monks because we can heal ourselves and most importantly, others. It's about team coordination and knowing who to focus on. TBH I think Harlequins are the most dangerous in PvP (or whatever they're called now).
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#79 ApeKing

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Posted 11 November 2010 - 12:54 AM

Well, if heals are ever going to be nerfed, I'd prefer MP cost increase. I think the cooldowns are fine as they are. Instant heal is pretty reasonable with its CD, but perhaps slow heal is a bit fast. But it's not like slow heal heals THAT much anyways. Besides, it's spanned over a duration too, so it probably wouldn't matter that much.

I suppose healing can become a bigger annoyance or issue now that it is much easier to stack health, with the introduction of cash sets and randomizers. >.>

Level 10 Slow Heal + Perfect Seal


That is all.
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#80 invazn

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Posted 11 November 2010 - 01:29 PM

Level 10 Slow Heal + Perfect Seal


That is all.

If you have perfect seal on, you wouldn't need any heals at all lol.
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#81 Rimmy

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Posted 11 November 2010 - 06:38 PM

If you have perfect seal on, you wouldn't need any heals at all lol.


I think Ape was referring to your statement that Slow Heal spans 30 seconds, pointing out that Slow Heal + PS can mean you will quickly regain most or all of your health w/o fear of damage.

Of course, I don't really ever see monks use PS in PvP anymore, except once tonight in BattleSquare. It's kinda pointless, b/c 95% of the time you're just delaying the inevitable.
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#82 invazn

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Posted 11 November 2010 - 09:00 PM

I think Ape was referring to your statement that Slow Heal spans 30 seconds, pointing out that Slow Heal + PS can mean you will quickly regain most or all of your health w/o fear of damage.

Of course, I don't really ever see monks use PS in PvP anymore, except once tonight in BattleSquare. It's kinda pointless, b/c 95% of the time you're just delaying the inevitable.

sigh, they nerfed it to 10sec at lv1. waste of SP to get it now :P
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#83 sXcDennis

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Posted 02 December 2010 - 04:24 AM

Durability for weapons is a big pain in my wallet T_T
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#84 iceranger

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Posted 15 December 2010 - 04:02 AM

Killing the mage class in general is just a chore.
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#85 Tarmendeos

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Posted 15 December 2010 - 01:41 PM

I think Ape was referring to your statement that Slow Heal spans 30 seconds, pointing out that Slow Heal + PS can mean you will quickly regain most or all of your health w/o fear of damage.

Of course, I don't really ever see monks use PS in PvP anymore, except once tonight in BattleSquare. It's kinda pointless, b/c 95% of the time you're just delaying the inevitable.


But delay means people can come save you! :)
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#86 Rimmy

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Posted 15 December 2010 - 01:46 PM

But delay means people can come save you! :)


Usually, once a priest/invoker uses Perfect Seal, someone on the opposing team disables them (Frog, Sleep, etc.) and then your opponents ignore you and focus their attention on killing your teammates -- who will, in that case, have to survive w/o your heals. It really doesn't work out too well. :)
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#87 tunafish

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Posted 15 December 2010 - 03:18 PM

Usually, once a priest/invoker uses Perfect Seal, someone on the opposing team disables them (Frog, Sleep, etc.) and then your opponents ignore you and focus their attention on killing your teammates -- who will, in that case, have to survive w/o your heals. It really doesn't work out too well. :)


Well, during Perfect Seal, skills cant be casted anyway lol.
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#88 Rimmy

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Posted 15 December 2010 - 04:12 PM

Well, during Perfect Seal, skills cant be casted anyway lol.


Yeah, that's why I mentioned the part about your teammates having to survive w/o heals. And since PS often nets you a quick disable, you can't even move in range to shoot off some x-spam and try to deter opponents from locking your teammates to death.
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#89 Tarmendeos

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Posted 15 December 2010 - 10:20 PM

Next patch: PS gives superarmor. Legions of Dragoons ragequit.

Edited by Tarmendeos, 15 December 2010 - 10:20 PM.

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#90 shadowkun

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Posted 26 January 2011 - 11:19 PM

Durability for weapons is a big pain in my wallet T_T


Stop x spamming xD
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#91 HaHexfire

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Posted 07 February 2011 - 07:48 AM

Blizzard needs a higher freezing rate... Flasher is like 75%. Blizzard is only 50. Not by a lot. Probabbly like.. 10% more since it does give damage.. But this skill is like the life of a wammie. Snow blues has a 15 second cool down if I'm not mistaken.. Whats the rate of snow blues btw?
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#92 Rimmy

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Posted 07 February 2011 - 09:29 AM

Blizzard needs a higher freezing rate... Flasher is like 75%. Blizzard is only 50. Not by a lot. Probabbly like.. 10% more since it does give damage.. But this skill is like the life of a wammie. Snow blues has a 15 second cool down if I'm not mistaken.. Whats the rate of snow blues btw?


Blizzard is much, much better than Flasher. Two major differences: It hits multiple times, with a chance for the freeze effect with every hit (while Flasher is a one-shot skill that doesn't even do any damage if it misses), and Blizzard's freeze takes a WM's full Aim Rate into account, while Flasher works more or less off of a priest's base Aim Rate (so WMs have a much higher chance of actually freezing someone).

Blizzard is only 40% max, btw. But it's still better than Flasher.
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#93 Korgon

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Posted 23 February 2011 - 10:24 PM

i think pve warmages have went underpowered since the patch for pve
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#94 Idiocy

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Posted 24 April 2011 - 04:01 PM

Truth be told, warmages aren't good for a whole lot anymore.

Long uninterruptable casting animations pretty much did them in.

Thoroughly tempted to just go with a monk at this point, tbh.
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#95 Rimmy

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Posted 26 April 2011 - 10:07 AM

Truth be told, warmages aren't good for a whole lot anymore.

Long uninterruptable casting animations pretty much did them in.

Thoroughly tempted to just go with a monk at this point, tbh.


Neither are monks. The introduction of easily obtainable high evade rates + unnecessary skill nerfs (Spark Rock) did them in. Really, all we can do now that's useful is cure, heal, or add DPS to someone else's attack -- and warmages can already do two of those things quite well.

I wouldn't recommend switching to a monk until they fix some of our most important skills (particularly Witch's Curse and Barbarian) to be more useful.
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#96 Idiocy

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Posted 28 April 2011 - 09:44 AM

Atleast monks are cheap and effective PvE farmers.

I'm a wizard and oh boy the mana potion costs are killng me.
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#97 Yurai

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Posted 02 May 2011 - 01:27 PM

Atleast monks are cheap and effective PvE farmers.

I'm a wizard and oh boy the mana potion costs are killng me.


You're doing something wrong then. Resource converter and slow heal basically means that you won't need to use pots. You shouldn't have to use mana shield for PvE.
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#98 Thuy

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Posted 03 May 2011 - 02:25 AM

YEAH, back on thqice I farmed lake with my wm for weeks without using hp/mp pots. Just need lv5 slow heal and lv1 converter.
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#99 Rimmy

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Posted 13 June 2011 - 01:41 PM

PLEASE NOTE: This post is intended to tackle PvP issues ONLY. This is not a commentary on invokers' PvE effectiveness AT ALL.

All right, seeing as how we're going to be looking at a major "balancing" update in the future (possibly sometime this year), I wanted to talk about a few issues regarding monks/priests/invokers (I'll just say "invokers").

Firstly, you have to understand what the patches since the WP team took over have done to the class. Here's a brief little timeline (I don't remember the exact patch denotations so I'm going to generalize with time periods):

Time Period 1: We get Spark Rock and Rain of Fire, plus a few other minor skills that aren't very useful (namely, Multi-Lightning and Meteor Rush). At some point around this time, we also get 4th Job skills, along with all the other classes (our 4th job skills are generally much more useful than those of other classes, except for our passive, Blood Fever, which is pretty lame).

For a time, we enjoy being one of the most powerful classes, and life is good. We have a Spark Rock that locks (although it can be canceled by Revenge), Rain of Fire is good burst damage, and Lightning Magnet enables us to disable and deal heavy damage to large groups of enemies all at once. Our Barbarian, Witch's Curse, and Quagmire skills are useless against most players stacking 80+ evade because these skills don't use our full Aim Rate to determine hit %, but the combined locking ability of Spark Rock and Lightning Magnet largely makes up for this.

Time Period 2: A new batch of patches nerfs some of our most important and useful skills, including the almighty Spark Rock, which no longer locks effectively. That would be okay, perhaps, except Lightning Magnet is also nerfed, meaning that -- since Barbarian, Witch's Curse, and Quagmire are mostly useless -- we are left with no effective, reliable way to catch or lock anyone for more than a few seconds (except perhaps Chain Lightning, but lag pretty much makes that useless by this point).

You might say, "Well hey, invokers are a support class, you don't need to lock." That would be fine and dandy if we had a slew of useful support skills, but sadly, that repertoire is limited mostly to Slow Heal, Cure, and Casting Acceleration -- one of which is a buff skill you usually only use once during an entire match. So our only real purpose in PvP becomes running around spamming Slow Heal and Cure... And maaaaybe throwing down an occasional Lightning Magnet, which is unwieldy to use thanks to changes to the Awakening Gauge system that force us to run around finding safe places to charge up energy just so we can contribute in a more meaningful way.

By the way, Witch's Curse has been nerfed so the cooldown is increased by about 16 seconds at level 5, making it even more useless than it was before. Still scratching my head over that one. I mean, come on, the skill hardly ever connects and is canceled when the target takes a hit... It was a pretty weak skill to begin with.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that our trusty X-spam -- which was really our only remaining method of dealing any considerable damage to anything at all, locked or not -- was nerfed to the point that we can't use it for more than a few seconds in PvP without the damage dropping significantly. Also, irritatingly enough, there's no indication of when this kicks in or wears off, so it's kind of a guessing game and even if we figured it out, we don't have time to count down these sorts of things while in a hectic PvP match (and we shouldn't have to, it's just silly).

Time Period 3: If patch notes from other versions are to be believed, we'll be receiving further X-spam nerfs that make Double Shot an "active" rather than "passive" skill, which means it will consume MP and have a set duration and cooldown. Worse yet, if it works in the same way Diffusion Cannon does, it means attack speed buffs will be completely useless to us, further decreasing our (already minimal) damage potential.

One other note: Our healing skills -- at least, Instant and Wide Heal -- will be nerfed to have much higher MP costs (a % of our max MP). This, at least IMO, is a good thing, and I've been asking for it for a long time (mostly b/c we won't have to feel guilty about using our two best healing skills anymore). But when set beside all of the other nerfs (past and proposed), it seems to me that we're going to be left with very little purpose in PvP. Slow Heal? WMs can do that, and they're better for offense and locking, anyways. Lightning Magnet? Most players can overcome it with just a little evade or move speed stacking. So we're left with... Cure as our only way to make a reasonable contribution to a match (maybe Spark Rock too in some cases, but for the most part it's a joke).

I'm trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel here, but so far I don't see it. What's the purpose of playing a class that only has 1 or 2 unique and useful skills? At one point, it was our healing ability that made us special, but WMs can perform almost as effectively in that department with Slow Heal. Our DPS, too, used to be a force to be reckoned with, but now that's been stripped away. Heck, we can't even say we have reliable debuffs anymore (Barbarian, Witch's Curse, RIP). Something has got to give.

Anyways, here are my suggestions. I'm not saying these should all be implemented simultaneously (perhaps choose some and forget others), but we really need a lifeline here. Here goes (they're all quite simple):

- Reconsider the X-spam nerfs. It really wasn't all that OP to begin with since it can only be used effectively on ground-locked targets, and it's really our only decent damage-dealing technique.

- Give us a better 4th Job passive skill. Blood Fever is horrendous. HP/MP Recovery? Really? How about a passive that gives us a slight % chance to avoid status effects? (When I say slight, I mean like 5% max). Playing off of our curing abilities. I don't know, something, just about anything would be better than this.

- For the love of all that is holy, make Barbarian, Witch's Curse, and Quagmire take our full Aim Rate into account when determining hit chance %. As they are now, these skills aren't really even worth the risk it requires to use them.

- Give Spark Rock its locking ability back. Nearly every other (or perhaps every other) class has a way of indefinitely keeping someone either air-locked or ground-locked. We can't even do it for more than a few seconds at a time. Spark Rock really didn't need the nerf, it doesn't deal THAT much damage, and evade means it was already useless enough against several classes. (Note: I'm not bringing up Lightning Magnet, because I think that if we got Spark Rock back to the way it was, returning Magnet to the way it was would be unreasonable -- and honestly I'd much rather have the old Spark Rock back than the old Magnet.)

- Give us more buffs or debuffs -- IE, more *support* skills. If you want to force us to play the supporting role, that's fine, but at least give us enough useful support skills to make it a worthwhile endeavor.

--- Anyways, that's it. I just wanted to bring this up before we head down a path that will forever leave the class beyond repair.

Edited by Rimmy, 26 June 2011 - 08:44 AM.

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#100 Rimmy

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Posted 26 June 2011 - 08:55 AM

After careful consideration and testing, I've amended my opinion in the post above about Blood Fever, the invoker 4th job passive. Considering both the incoming increase in MP cost for the majority of our skills, as well as the potential of MP Recovery/MP Recovery Speed (which I've been testing extensively, with some surprisingly positive results), it seems Blood Fever may actually become quite useful for fueling our costly skills. This is not just with respect to normal or one-time use skills, either -- during my testing, I found that with proper MP Recovery/MP Recovery Speed stacking, skills like Lightning Magnet and even Healing Wave can become considerably more useful on a more frequent basis, and we can use them more or less to our heart's content without worrying too much about the MP cost (which is one of the major drawbacks of both of those skills).

Of course, my new opinion doesn't take into account the effects the amplification system will have (if everyone ends up with an extra 5-10K MP from amplified intelligence or if people tend to die much more quickly due to higher CD stacking, that might again change my opinion). I'll update this topic further once we have access to that system.
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