Wizard/saved posts
Elemental Lore Review
Topic: Developer's Corner - Wizards
Message #: 3169
Author: GS4-ESTILD
Date: 04/28/2016 12:24 AM EDT
Subject: Re: Estild
I'm willing to engage in this discussion as long as all parties can remain civil. If individual posters cannot do that, posts will be removed and warnings issued (that affects all your accounts, F2P and/or paying).
- PC1234
- re wizards going to be allowed to be CS casters? It appears that you are systematically destroying every CS path we have.
- 519 was the best CS spell we have. You've heard loud and cloud how most wizards feel about that spell.
- 415 was the backup, you just posted that you're going to destroy it by killing the double cast.
- 915 is worthless.
- 512 no longer does damage.
- That leaves us with 409, or 502. Neither of which are great for killing.
- Why are wizards not allowed to be strong CS casters?
Wizards are allowed to hunt with warding spells. They've received at least 2 new tools (not strictly direct damage spells) in the last year alone to enhance that role (Chromatic Circle (502) and Cold Snap (512)). Weapon Fire (915) definitely needs reviewed (or completely redesigned), and but we have yet to come up with a good design for it. If wizards want to suggest a new unique and useful attack (or any type) spell for that slot, we're definitely open to suggests. Elemental Strike (415) will be adjusted, but not until we've also released at 4 other wizard spell updates, including an updated attack spell, a potent defensive spell, and 2 level 50 spells. We're also going to be opening up the Test server to players with instant migration enabled for you to try various training paths. (Emphasis added.)
Immolation (519) was down tweaked because it was far too strong. It now more closely aligns with Divine Fury (317) and Wither (1115). One metric we use to gauge effectiveness is casts-per-kill. All other factors being even (or as close as possible), how many casts of spell X does it take to kill creature Y? And how does that number compare to other similar attack spells? Here are some of the results for 317, 519, and 1115: https://goo.gl/8mgRL7. Each cell represents 2,500 kills (often resulting in 5-10k total casts) of that creature with that amount of lore training. All builds use a normalized CS of 100 spell ranks in each circle. One thing you'll notice is that currently, Divine Fury's (317) lore benefit hardly has any impact (to be fixed in the future). Wither (1115) also requires twice as much lore training as Immolation (519).
To head off the debate, we do not balance around just the Scatter, a hunting ground that was intended to be extremely difficult to solo. Like level comparisons are what we balance against. Yes, clerics and empaths have Spirit Slayer (240), but wizards also have Rapid Fire (515) (and other pending updates in the future), each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
GameMaster Estild