LUCLIN, part 3

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Adonhiram
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LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Adonhiram »

Here the final product :

https://youtu.be/E_D0i3-cuZ8

Sorry I didn't find the edit button to modify the other thread :-)
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nasbus
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by nasbus »

Nice
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Danille
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Danille »

Wow that looks awesome!
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Adonhiram
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Adonhiram »

Thanks :-)
Working on a 4th and last video (I need to take a break...) which will be The Darkwind video, should be ready end of May.

Danille, it's sad to see how quiet these boards have become, I remember the heated discussions 2006-2011 from DoD to HoT during my D'Pikeys era... are there so few mages left both on live and on prog... ?
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Adonhiram
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Adonhiram »

/rofl Danille, I just saw in your signature you have 150k+ mana, lol that sounds so surrealistic :D Do you sometimes go to old raid zones solo or in a small group configuration just to see what you can do ?
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Danille
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Danille »

Yeah the numbers are all relative though, the problem is that prior to the nerfs, we really enjoyed working so hard to raise our stats. I have not logged in for over a year but yeah I used to log in and wipe though the hard core raiding zones from years back. :)

My perspective may be a bit dated have retired last year but .....

With the changes in our lives and the limited time some of the magician working stiffs have to play, when they killed the solo/molo game, that ended it for many quite a few of us.

Don't get me wrong, the raiding game and social aspects of the game are still fun, but when i left, mages are back to being 3rd class dpser from a raiding perspective and on top of that developers no longer create raids that utilize a magician's unique utility. DBG cut their funding so much, it is pretty sad with them now lacking the talent (layoffs, developers being recruited away) and work not being done to keep the game fun.

The boards got a bit quiet right after the 2nd major round of nerfs and with Pie and several of the typically passionate mages going away, a lot of the class pride has evaporated.
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Adonhiram
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Adonhiram »

Ohhh sorry to hear that Danille :( I didn't know you retired completely. I wish you all the best overseas in real life !!! Heads up
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Sancus
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Sancus »

Worth noting that things have actually improved pretty significantly for Mages in EoK, at least IMO. We're still nowhere near where we were, but we're also far from the low we hit with TBM.

Unfortunately many raiding mages already quit over repeated nerfs to and stagnation of our DPS, and many grouping/soloing mages quit after numerous pet nerfs, like Danielle explained. The content also was pretty terrible on live for a couple of years, which I don't think helped convince any to stay. I suppose it's subjective, but EoK seems quite a bit better in this regard, though obviously still much smaller than expansions used to be.

What's left of the Mage community still talks, but mainly either in serverwide or via /tells in game. It's a shame IMO as it's a lot easier to post/format data and discuss class changes on a forum, but c'est la vie.
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Adonhiram
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Adonhiram »

I see, thx for your explanations... What pet nerfs are you referring to on live ? Is live affected too by mark of the old ways and aggro transfer ? What's again the serverwide mage channel, I should have that on /autojoin if it is possible on progresssion servers.
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Sancus
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Re: LUCLIN, part 3

Post by Sancus »

Pets have been repeatedly nerfed on live pretty much every expansion in one way or another, but it got quite bad in CotF and even worse in TBM. Thankfully though we don't have to deal with any annoying buffs like Mark of the old ways or anything like that. Here's a Edit: not so quick recap of what happened:

CotF

Towards the middle of CotF, one particular warrior went on a crusade against pet mitigation (AC). Pets had much higher raw AC than players, which was true of most NPCs because they didn't suffer from soft caps at all. The tradeoff was radically inferior activated abilities, aggro, and avoidance relative to player tanks. There was some truth to the data in that pets probably did mitigate too well, but nearly all of the posted parses compared tanks using no abilities/discs to pets doing the same, and also completely neglected avoidance (focusing instead on DI charts).

While the devs did nerf pet AC, to their credit the changes had explanations behind them and went through several iterations before being pushed live. The first iteration was incredibly punishing, but by the time the nerfs went live they were fairly reasonable IMO. It was without a doubt a massive nerf, but we were still viable moloing.

TDS

I don't recall any direct nerfs to pets during TDS, but for a level increase we got significantly less than we normally would. We basically got a ~15% increase in HP with no parseable improvements in AC/avoidance/etc.

It isn't strictly tanking related, but TDS was also when pet issues on raids became blatantly obvious. They had had some intermittent DPS issues before, but in TDS raids they would basically lock up and swing at ~1/2 the rate (or lower) that they would in any other content in the game. This is an issue that has continued to this day.

TBM

Players got quite massive stat increases in TBM, with both increased gear stats and Type 5 augs that added massive amounts of heroics. Pets got absolutely no upgrades related to stats/tanking/etc via passive AA, meaning they were stagnating relative to content.

During TBM, pets also were changed so that they could hold aggro over other players in melee range. This allowed us to tank for groups with melee in them, but it didn't really benefit solo Mages. Unfortunately bad tanks bitched and moaned about pet aggro (especially swarm pet aggro) on the forums after this change, and pet aggro got nerfed completely into the ground. Mages don't generate that much aggro, and I would easily pull aggro off of my pet on single targets. Additionally RS pets, whose purpose when solo is to offtank temporarily, had basically nonexistant aggro generation. The next patch boosted RS aggro a bit and fixed pet taunt, but pet aggro generation was still terrible. This was made worse by the fact that, to have any sort of sustainability in terms of mana, we were forced to use rains (which were also nerfed into the ground the previous year). It was borderline impossible to use rains with more than one mob because pets have no AE aggro and were struggling to maintain aggro on a single target.

Later during TBM, the devs consolidated mod2 stats (Shielding, Spell Shielding, etc). The issue is pets previously didn't have caps for these, unlike players, and with the gear they come summoned with had 44% shielding innately. The consolidation brought it down to 35%, in turn increasing the damage they take. While this change made some sense from a mechanical perspective, it also meant that TBM pets were in every regard worse at tanking than pets at TDS launch, which were in turn in every regard worse at tanking than the pets we had at RoF launch. And I don't mean relative to the content, I literally mean a RoF-launch level pet would've tanked TBM content better than a TBM pet, and by a pretty significant margain.

EoK

EoK beta started with no pet upgrades (again). This included Enhanced Minion upgrades which had been stuck at 18/23 for group/raid since TDS, though the CotF pet nerfs also made EM levels do effectively nothing. After some posts about it, Dzarn (the AA dev) did add a few pet upgrades, including a ~16% increase to HP and very small increases to AC/Avoidance (basically not parseable).

Unfortunately for pets, player tanks had gotten massive upgrades in terms of stats via both general stat increases and Type 5 augs leading to a massive increase in player heroic stats. Knights also gained ~34% passive mitigation during TBM, on top of plenty of normal boosts to survivability that all of the classes got. The result is tanks being extremely powerful relative to content, which led to further increases in mob damage during EoK beta. It didn't really stop tanks at all (and they can still consistently tank #'s of mobs in the double digits with decent healing), but it further hurt pets as they had basically been stagnated.

Shortly after EoK launched, the devs also nerfed the AC pets received from buffs, causing buff AC (and, for a short time, all pet AC) to be subject to AC soft caps.

Things got better from that point, though. The devs added an "Innate Defense" buff to pets, which adds 1% mitigation per EM level (18%/24% for max group/raid). In the most recent patch, they also massively increased pet avoidance, which had consistently decreased as pet stats had stagnated relative to mob accuracy values. Finally, they added an EM 24 focus for raiders which, while not a significant change, was nice to see IMO.

I don't think at any point during those expansions pets were so terrible we couldn't solo, but I personally really hated the feeling of literally going backwards, especially since our DPS was also literally going backwards until EoK.

In general tanking tuning is pretty bad right now. With both the Innate Defense and Avoidance changes, I actually think pets are borderline too powerful relative to content (I would've taken one or the other). However, tanks as an archetype are so massively overpowered relative to content that pets certainly aren't stepping on their toes. The devs have done a really bad job of managing tank survivability relative to everyone else, and at this point the gap is too massive and is part of the reason pets were doing so badly. Their solution was to push pets closer to tanks (via mitigation buffs similar to what tanks have), but it doesn't fix the issue that they can't create content that is both not completely trivial for tanks and at the same time is somewhat doable via pets, sturdier hybrids/dps classes (rangers, monks, etc), and that isn't going to just one shot anyone who accidentally gets aggro before they can react.

I suppose that's rather tangential tho...

The serverwide channel is serverwide.magicians:fluffy
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