NDA Lifted

[Piemastaj]

As to our DPS topic: /GU High Priest Vyers Rinad in 123s, 4598k @37379dps --- Piemastaj + pets 4598k @37379dps. (This was a split raid with about 30 ppl in it).

^ Was me going all out. Used Forceful, both twincasts, FBOed pet, clickies, nuke pot. I did not use Cata or have any type of ADPS except maybe druid wolf form thingy that helps nukes.

EDIT: I am still missing the new Arcanum AA, and some of our alacrity/Fury pet AAs, Elemental Union (altho it doesn't matter for this parse). I only have Detri pres from VoA, the rest is HoT Level focused.

[Savil]

I have a few comments for devs given this data...

I know for a fact that PJ knows how to DPS, I've had enough chats with him and see many of his parses to know this for fact. Not stepping on any toes here guys but in all honestly I'd put PJ as one of the best mages in EQ atm and prob the last major DPS mage that is active. So I don't believe he smurf up.

That said, 37.4k DPS with his gear (focus), spells, AA is just stupid damned sad. A 2 minute burn and thats it?? News flash, PJ and I both were pushing 35k burns LAST FREAKING EXP. With mages being a frontloaded class, and the fact hes 95 with AA and some upgrades from new exp and thats freaking it. Now I know what the normal amounts that a bard gives, and I know what he would gain from MR and that number is still STUPID LOW.

Anybody that believes this is even close to balanced is a damned moron and a fool. Elidroth, to answer your question you asked of me earlier, no, I don't think its near enough and I don't feel you guys really did much of anything for mages in this exp. NUMBERS DON'T LIE.

I dare any mage in EQ atm to prove me wrong. Find any mage that parses over 60-65K DPS. Only way your going to get near that is with FULL FREAKING ADPS working for you, and then IMHO it will be hit and miss.

This is one of the reasons I pushed vora for an answer, I wanted to see him admit mage DPS was completely under where it should be, and then look at the posts both on EQ live and on this very board where devs are saying they will "fix" us next exp. VoA has come and gone, I see no such fixes. If ANY of you think that some magic AA will come up next patch that gives mages 20 freaking K of DPS YOUR smurf STUPID.

All I see are more broken promises. Sorry Elidroth, I'm not impressed with the devs current batch of "fixes". Mages are still laughed at on raids. I don't see how you can even act like mages are even close to balanced for DPS atm when AT BEST a mage can do 50-55% of a rogues DPS, and thats NOW, in 3 months mages will be lucky to do 40% ! 65K DPS, IMHO 70K being perfect run / perfect gear vs 130K rogue / zerker runs. Ya, thats balanced.

Cue normal fanboys to defend devs now.

Savil

[Piemastaj]

It isn't terribly bad, roughly a 8kish increase from HoT. It is a far cry from what rogues got though.

Have to remember that was with nothing but magely things, not even Cata. You would have been hardpressed to hit 35k in HoT w/o Cata or ADPS.

[svenalo]

Yeah, but the problem is that even though we went up 8kish according to your parse, other classes went up far more, so relatively speaking we are worse off.

[Piemastaj]

Yeah, but the problem is that even though we went up 8kish according to your parse, other classes went up far more, so relatively speaking we are worse off.

No doubt. I was speaking merely from a general DPS perspective, when comparing us to other classes its ugly. Even though we supposedly got increased 'more then any other class' in terms of AA DPS. Believe Eli said that in our IRC chats.

[Savil]

PJ: I did miss the no cata, but I have parses from last exp where I did 35k using cata. Granted I had a lot of the encs in my guild trained to auto hit me with MR as it faded ... so I'm unsure if that was with MR or not but I wasn't grouped with an enc.

svenalo: that is just my point, when you look at the 2 sets of numbers you see that mages are Way way worse off in VoA than before. Its a point vora seems unable to see / admit, and one that elidroth seems, well... sorry to be blunt, clueless about. I can't see how elidroth could defend the spot without just being clueless.

I don't think its some great evil conspiracy against mages. I just think the devs are just completely out of touch with the game, worse, they seem to have very little understanding of how ADPS works, stacks. This can be seen time and time again in each exp, where a dev puts something in without really testing it, it turns into a nightmare, devs defend it until 1/2 EQ player base is yelling nerf and then move in with something along the lines of "well, we didn't see XXX but we can't possiblely have fully tested this blah blah blah" and then nerf it somehow ... thus pissing off the class and making a lot of hard feelings, where simple testing would have prevented it in the first place.

Hello Palllie stupid OP'ed AA that let them burst higher DPS than mages.

No matter how you slice it, if your honest and look at history and have even 1/4 a clue you can see that this is true. Most of the fanboys will not answer this in any way other than blind defense of the devs, even tho the numbers and past history more than prove me correct. Before anybody says it, I'm talking about the current batch of devs just as much as the previous devs. I've seen stupid crap added into the game by them all. I just seems to get worse as time goes on.

The really sad part is, all they devs would have to do is pull a few of the *good* members of each class (which may or may NOT be members of the current CRT group) and ask them "how can you see an ability X being abused if we put it into the game?" I think you guys would be shocked at how honest the answers would be. Not many people really want an OP'ed ability that they know will be nerfed and end up having events tuned around them.

Something so simple could prevent so much, yet the current devs all seem to think they don't need the help. Clearly this isn't the case. I would honestly make a crack about "how would you like playing class X that isn't good because of Y??" .. but there isn't any point. We all know most of the devs don't play EQ anymore. Cue somebody to say "if you worked on X all day would you want to play X when you got home??" Well, the first devs sure as hell played... Pretty sad.

Savil


Savil

[Savil]

Yeah, but the problem is that even though we went up 8kish according to your parse, other classes went up far more, so relatively speaking we are worse off.

No doubt. I was speaking merely from a general DPS perspective, when comparing us to other classes its ugly. Even though we supposedly got increased 'more then any other class' in terms of AA DPS. Believe Eli said that in our IRC chats.

Ya, "we have doubled the normal DPS upgrade for mages this exp, instead of 1 dmg you now to 2!!", this "upgrade" took an AA dev, Spell dev, and random_dev_01 fully 1 year to add. I wonder how many days it will take elidroth to make AA's for DEC release that upgrade us to a massive 3!

Savil

[svenalo]

Reminds me of when I was in the hospital after one of my bone marrow transplants. The doctor came in and said he had good news. I said "I get to go home finally?" He said "No, but your white count has doubled!" Of course it had only gone from 0.01 to 0.02... I told him to get out of my room.

[dorfillya]

One problem I see with HoT was: raid bosses seemed to be very fast fights, which means the only dps stat that made much difference was the 90-120 sec burn dps, of which the mage was not very good.

I am hearing that maybe VoA bosses are going to take more time to kill, requiring not just a 2 minute burn, but 4-5 minutes, or more, of burning to take down raid bosses. If this is true, then maybe 90 second burns are not so important anymore. Maybe total DPS for longer time periods is a better judge of raid desirability.

SOE can't tune every class to be champs at a 90 second burn. Maybe mages true strength should not be a 90 second burn, but rather, maybe we should be tops in, perhaps, 3-4 minute total dps.

I personally always thought, wiz should win 90 second burn, mage should win 3-4 minute burn, and necro should win on burns over 5 minutes. If SoE did have various lengths of raid boss fights, where different classes would shine because of their inherent damage output/mana regen abilities, that would cure alot of the class envy we are seeing today.

Maybe melee classes should fit into similar categories. Maybe a rogue should win at 90 second dps, maybe berserker/monk at 3-4 minutes, and maybe rangers at 5 minutes or more.

These are just some thoughts I had regarding current DPS problems/class envy. Unfortunately, even though wiz and necro might fit the above scenario, mage probably still needs alot of help if we were to take top caster dps in the 3-4 minute category. In fact, I don't think mages can come close at any time interval to being top dps'ers.

If I were designing the game, that is the way I would try to tailor the dps.

Also, according to some peoples definition of "burn", it refers to only the highest dps possible once all disciplines/AAs activated. I am using burn to mean the total maximum DPS possible during the specified time period, even though our AAs do not necessarily last the 3-4 minutes to which I am referring.

To me, hearing that a rogue did 90k dps for 90 seconds does not mean much, unless I can also know what that same rogue did in a 3-4 minute fight, as well as a fight of over 5 minutes. Then we can see what classes real strengths are, who is over-powered, and who needs help.

[deadman1204]

There has been an idea nagging me which I hate to say, but /duck
I really think this will be the last expansion with this level of unbalance
Now that they have the dps tools to watch fights and track real-time dps, they will truly understand how each class rates for dps.
Mages need huge dps gains just to be competitive much less the best, but at least this expansion will show them where everything lies in black and white