Casters :o

[riv]

My main is a Supp RM on Excal: my gear isn't my final MP (as i'm waiting for a guildy to sc that), but i've managed to cap all but my energy resist with my current stuff. My spec is [47+11] Supp, [26+11] Dark, though I'm more and more inclined to respec either full RC or full Dark, since Supp seems to suck.

There was a bit of a scuffle between the defending middies and the attacking albs at Caer Nazgul today (which you might know as Benowyc), and I managed to find a nifty spot where I could cast on some unsuspecting stealthers who were sitting below the walls near the right side climb spot.

Using the top Supp DD i had to cast on this one stealther who was sitting afk, 12 times to kill him. 12 times! That was my entire mana pool (with PoM5 & Pbt2 cancelling each other out).

Conversely I've been 2/3 shotted so many times by archers, or 1 hit killed by infs (through blade turn), its a tad demoralising.

I was under the impression that Supp was supposed to be damaging, just mana hungry.. or is it just general caster gimpness?

I can hardly kill tanks- they resist or purge root, or determination makes it pointless. the same goes for the dd snare- the damage it does compared to a tanks' hitpoints combined with resists.. makes for one dead caster. if a tank reaches me, no number of quickcasts can save me- its slam, hit, hit, hit, dead. the taunts don't help.

I can kill other casters, but thats about it really. We don't seem to be the massive damage deals we're supposed to be. We can't carry anything, so much so that even str debuffs could root us. We have low hitpoints. We have hideously low amour factor, our spells really don't do that much damage, our anti tank measures - i.e. root, mezz, snare are almost useless- and bladeturn.. well half the high end styles seem to go through it.

Am I playing my class wrong? is it my spec that makes me so.. useless? is this just middy casters? or is this casters in general?

clueless

 

[Aoami]

Darkcarver is the only way to go to be even slightly successfull as an RM really imo.

48rc, 24 dark something along those lines.

Gives you - Spec bolt, Baseline Bolt & DD dmg, AE dd, GTAoE, and the all important 50% cold resist debuff. My cap at rr4 with this spec (+14) was around 570 which is quite nice.

 

[Ardrias_Mid]

Only viable until 1.64 tho

 

[riv]

what happens after 1.64? surely they're not nerfing casters??!

 

[Sharma]

Bye bye resistance debuffs.

 

[riv]

so if the resistance debuff is being nerfed, is there any decent spec for a rm?

 

[Sharma]

PBT bot? otherwise, probably not.

 

[old.Xanthian]

Er.. Someone has missread the notes.

Previously, resist debuffs counted double versus resist buffs. This has been changed to make them count normally against item, buff, and racial resists.

&

- The Diminish Immunities line in the Cabalist Vivification list, the Vex of Cold line in the Runemaster Runes of Destruction list, and the Amplify Heat
line in the Enchanter Empowering line have been reduced from 15 to 8 seconds. These three lines debuff damage types the caster herself can cast, which makes the leeway provided by the increased "teamwork" duration the other resist debuff lines have unnecessary.


Both in 1.65.

All it means is, the debuff doesnt last as long, and the chances of debuffing below 0% is alot lower..

 

[xplo]

With the 2 healer, 3 sm, 1 sham, 1 skald, 1 warrior setup you can have a nifty caster group. Buffbot the pets for max intercepting, if you get mezz in, do 9 sec stun and you'll kill a FG in no time.
Nolby Pride was doing this setup on excal I think, were very fast killers afaik.

 

[Flimgoblin]

strange... my earth/ice wiz seems to nuke things down fine - then again I only ever go for casters (or assist on other things)...

but I can get 300 damage on some targets... 200 on the high resist ones - 12 nukes is well over 2k damage .... yet to meet a stealther with quite that much.

but yeah, caster damage sucks at the moment then again if you were a tank - how much damage would you be doing from that keep? (assuming you didn't have a trebuchet of course)

How much were you doing per nuke? sure you weren't using a lower level nuke (I mean it's not like casters get to nuke much these days and given yer supp specced you'll be pbt bot with your group demanding you sit down and regen power instead of nuking) or that he wasn't being healed?

Shoulda gone 50 suppression for the top snare/nuke imho

And it could be worse - you could be an earth theurg with no nukes, or a wizard with some crap nukes and nothing else
*mumbles something about poor man's mana eldritch*

 

[Ardrias_Mid]

SM's are fine, runies are not

As Sharma said, pbt bot is the last viable spec. Many thanks to our fine RM TL for effectively killing all other specs than the one he was capable of playing.
ie "afk! pbt on! gonna watch wwf and eat t-bone steak"

And you think 300 damage is fair damage for the tradeoff in survivability you do? I sure dont

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

I actually get out-damaged by tanks and since tanks are pretty much unmezzable, unrootable and unkillable before they get to me the only thing that adds a few seconds to me living is the intercepting pet.

As said - slam, hit, hit,hit, dead.

I find it quite an imbalance that as a tank you get a bunch of cheap RAs which allow you to have always-on passive abilities to resist or reduce mez and stun but as a caster you have expensive RAs which are usable every half hour which will actually let you cast while fighting.

I agree that in the early days it was always down to who got off mez first and tanks had a hard time getting to the target, but Mythic didn't scale up the ability of casters to survive in close combat in accordance with the scaling up of tanks' ability to reach their intended target.

The debuff nerf particularly narks me and I will readily admit its because not only do I play Mid's primary debuffing class, but I actually play the subclass of that where most of the spells available to me are different types of debuff. Its a pretty grim nerf for me coming in 1.65.
Regarding debuffing items: it never worked properly. Debuffs might have over debuffed casted resists but they did bugger all against resist buffs from items and requests for this to be fixed were in various SM TL reports.

Reducing the debuffs to 15 secs as well I find outrageous, as for PvE you rarely kill an orange/red mob solo in 15 secs if you are debuffing for the pet to attack and its difficult to kill with nukes because mob resists are off the scale now coupled with the fact that the lifetap is a relatively low power DD. Sometimes I wonder if Mythic even play the game they made.

 

[Ardrias_Mid]

I can assure you they don't. Well there's a remote chance they do, but they're americans, and they dont play the char past BG.

 

[mavericky]

You are using a lvl 41 spell with 148d, If you are going to have suppression as your primary line then take it to 50 get the best DD and dont gimp your damage. The level 50 spell is 179d and will get resisted far less.

I'm not saying that you wont have 'way' more success at 50sup, but make the most of the line you have chosen, go 50 supp so you have the most damaging spell you can have, your team lead says this is the best spec for that line too.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

179 damage is the same as the baseline dark nuke. Is it really worth speccing the DD? Or is that the one with the snare component as well? If so, is the snare component worth the extra speccing?

(Don't play a runie, so don't know, excuse ignorance )

 

[Flimgoblin]

the debuff changes were needed - because debuff/base dd casters were WAY outdamaging casters using primary nuking lines.

now all casters are equally shit they need to boost casters in general.

(incidentally high-RR buffbotted casters can get a pretty sick dps - you try doing 600 damage every 0.9 seconds with a melee weapon and that's aoe too...)

 

[mavericky]

Originally posted by Roo Stercogburn
179 damage is the same as the baseline dark nuke. Is it really worth speccing the DD? Or is that the one with the snare component as well? If so, is the snare component worth the extra speccing?

(Don't play a runie, so don't know, excuse ignorance )

50 Rune of Mazing Enemy 3.0s/30s/0s Rng: 1500 -35%/179 d (Enrg) 33 power


50 Obsidian Strike Enemy 2.6s/0s/0s Rng: 1500 179 dmg (Cold) 33 power


Not really much difference between the two on paper except, the snare and that you will get and way less variance on the suppression one rather than 26+11spec baseline.

The other thing is, why put points in a secondary line at the expense of missing out on the most damaging spell on your primary line

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Perhaps in the case of self debuffing casters the changes were needed.

Dark SMs can't debuff their own damage. Split spec SMs can debuff for the pbae but thats about it.

If a caster is debuffing for another caster however, you SHOULD be able to do a phenomenal amount of damage. Thats the whole point of debuffing and that is something they're also merrily screwing up.

 

[Jenkz]

most casters are a waste of time in general atm

a "light tank" can do more damage, faster, and can do it while getting beaten up and has the added benefit of not dieing in 2 hits

as a cleric its pretty impossible to keep alb casters alive, sorc dies instantly. air theurgist is sort of viable still with the air pet spam for interupts, but they die too fast to heal as well - only way is just letting them die and res up.

mythic really need to look at the caster situation as a whole, they are *meant* to be devestating if left alone for a while, but only a tiny number of casters in the game actually are

when you have melee classes hitting for more damage over time than a caster smt is definatly wrong - there used to be a time where a fire wiz, air theurgs, dark RM, light ments/elds? and many more could seriously harm a group, now all they do is tickle, and die :<

this "bodyguard" ToA ability looks nice, though cant say ive read into it fully

 

[Flimgoblin]

melee won't outdamage a caster over time if the caster is unmolested...

200 damage every second is pretty hard to beat - especially 200 damage at range that's not blockable/parriable/btable.

If people ignore my little briton friar-wannabe wizard I get deathspam.

It's just that if someone sneezes at me I'm dead

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

All caster damage is based on their target not being able to hit them. As soon as the target is able to hit them they cease being able to have any damage output except for ocne every half hour if they buy an expensive RA. The only exception to this in-game is SMs and even then its only a % chance.

Casters should have the ability to buy a passive concentration type RA which allows them to have a % chance to get a spell off while in melee which increases with what they spend on it.

Yeh, I know tanks don't want to see this but then as it stands now the only caster that can get his spells off consistently in melee is a bonedancer and look how much people complain about that.

 

[old.Zarff]

well my rm is 50 supp 20 rc, I wouldn't say the specc is that bad but it surely isn't uber in anyway, RA's like WA, WP etc. are crusial factors that you will need if you want to have any success with playing a supp rm, imo.

 

[Danya]

The resist debuff nerfs are too much. The resist debuff was originally 30 seconds duration, casted. They made it insta, and cut duration to 15s. That was deemed overpowered for chanters, so they adjusted them back to castable without changing the duration. Further to this, energy resistance reduces the duration. They were still good though - 7-8 seconds of debuff was plenty to kill most people.
The 1.65 changes alter the way they work such that AoM and BAoD are entirely unaffected by debuffs, additionally there's reduced effect vs racial and item bonuses. The effect is you'll typically debuff any target to the 5-10% range. This by itself wouldn't have been too bad. But then they added the duration reduction for some of the debuffs. This basically kills mid and hib assisting as the self-debuff is also the debuff you'd cast to help a spec nuker. When the debuff effect is only lasting 3-4 seconds and only gets your target to 10% resists, it becomes not worth the power. Chanters on VN tested and worked out you get better dps by just nuking than debuff+nuke, even on a high resist target.

Personally I think it's a stupid change - the only way my mentalist was viable was by assisting a chanter. That got nerfed into the ground, *joy*.

As for melee vs caster damage, my merc can hit for 300+ every 1.5 seconds, has over 2300 buffed hp, 753 AF, enhanced evade, parry, and is highly CC resistant. Additionally, once I hit someone they can't run away from me easily as I have prevent flight and can move an hit.
Compare to my mentalist, who does ~300 every 1.7 seconds, has around 1400 buffed hp, 500 AF, no defensive abilities, gets CCed for full duration, and is easily interrupted. Remind me again what's so dangerous about casters?

 

[Ardrias_Mid]

The fairy tales they get told at night have stories of powerful wizards...

 

[master_gimpy]

damage as a caster

In my RVR experiences, i found that the PBAE caster does extremely heavy damage, but to be effective as that type of caster, you pretty much have to zerg, and the zerg isnt everyone's style of play

 

[Flimgoblin]

Originally posted by Danya

As for melee vs caster damage, my merc can hit for 300+ every 1.5 seconds, has over 2300 buffed hp, 753 AF, enhanced evade, parry, and is highly CC resistant. Additionally, once I hit someone they can't run away from me easily as I have prevent flight and can move an hit.
Compare to my mentalist, who does ~300 every 1.7 seconds, has around 1400 buffed hp, 500 AF, no defensive abilities, gets CCed for full duration, and is easily interrupted. Remind me again what's so dangerous about casters?

300+ on cloth only (and even then that's pretty hefty damage) if its every 1.5 - and you're fairly reasonable RR with your merc yeah?

I'm surprised your mentalist is only casting at 1.7 - get some mastery of the art or something - or follow domain about and witness some ~1s pbaoes

Oh and do tell me - how much damage do you do again when you're in a keep?

The problem is not so much casters having low survivability/not enough damage - it's that RvR is stupid at the moment 8vs8 is not the way the game should be - at least not _all the time_.

 

[brite]

Casters have just been raped really. with SCing any everything everyone has maxed out resists, casters get seen casting they have tanks imidiatly on them. In rvr i think ranges need to be changed beacuse almost every group has minstrel bard skald speed and casters need to be able to actualy do somthing or take down a main target in an ememy group before the other group are actualy next to you beacuse thats what being a caster is supposed to be about yeh ?
but adjusting range may mess up pve, but who cares beacuse tanks are the best pve farmers anyway... bla bla summon sms, necros lala.. focus shield is getting nerfed anyway.. and necros are just well... necros

Casters are on equal damage to tanks, but we cant fight when hit, we also have buffs that reduce our damage by 30% ontop of peoples SCed resists and Realm abilitys and our abilitys to counter these are useless

Well hes a bd what does he know about being a caster ?
Well you may not think it but bonedancers are actualy casters when i come into contact group on group i use DD mostly and when i start dealing some damage to there sorc/cleric it doesnt take long for those assists tanks to notice and i dont last long, pets are usualy mezzed and unless its a long fight they will be mezzed all the way though and lifetap will only keep you alive if you have one or two tanks on you if you get some decent crits (also praise heal proc). Oh and did i mention my power hardly lasts 20 seconds with raging power ? im often trying to run off out of combat to get mcl off. So basicly Dark age of Tank-a-Lot



(incidentally high-RR buffbotted casters can get a pretty sick dps - you try doing 600 damage every 0.9 seconds with a melee weapon and that's aoe too...)
600 damage every 0.9 seconds ? yeh sure

 

[Danya]

Originally posted by Flimgoblin
300+ on cloth only (and even then that's pretty hefty damage) if its every 1.5 - and you're fairly reasonable RR with your merc yeah?

I'm surprised your mentalist is only casting at 1.7 - get some mastery of the art or something - or follow domain about and witness some ~1s pbaoes

Oh and do tell me - how much damage do you do again when you're in a keep?

The problem is not so much casters having low survivability/not enough damage - it's that RvR is stupid at the moment 8vs8 is not the way the game should be - at least not _all the time_.

My merc is RR3L7, and that's average on mid chain (I'm thrust).

My mentalist is RR5L9 and has mota1, that casting speed was from before buff increases though, it's probably faster now. As for following Domain, I've probably seen him pbae more time that you've had hot dinners. Don't forget pbae is 2.5s and spec dd is 2.8s though. That said with the current heat debuff I can put out some pretty hefty damage:

*ahem*

In a keep, usually not as much as you'd think - I have to sit in the yard most of the time to avoid stealthers and ae spam.

Casters, expecially pbae, do a lot better if there are 2fg or more. 8vs8 really favours the tanks much more heavily. Also in long fights, the tanks can basically fight for as long a s they are alive. I've had to stop fighting with my mentalist because I had no power at all before, my merc never has that issue.

edit: fix0red link

 

[Shike]

dunno really, just sort interrupts and its fine imo.