[SUGGESTION] Magus Disc - Our 4th Pet

Roo Stercogburn

Resident Freddy
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...or more accurately, our first pet.

The Magus disc is supposed to be Demon of Tcheezeburger, or something like that. Its supposed to be a living diabolical entity, not a frisbee that never lands. Its the defining atribute of what a Magus is and differentiates it from every other class in the game.

It does nothing. Nada. Zip. If you spec Daemonology you get a few fizzly pop effects when you do some pbaoe. And thats it.

The disc should be our 4th pet for when no turret pets are active. It could also be used to address the survivability issue that a Magus has.

Should no pets be active, the Disc should have its own pet bar. Rather than having nuke spells or stuff, it should have purely defensive or reactive abilities. Thus, if a Magus decides to summon a turret he's making a choice to play offensively. Making the Disc a defensive pet means that by default the Magus wanders around and potentially has half a chance when someone with harmful intent appears and decides to act on it.

Ok thats the 'In principle' stuff out of the way. What abilities.

In truth, I'm not sure. This would be very hard to balance. I don't want to introduce more CC to the game. There's not much more the Magus needs.
It would not be fair to negate other classes but currently the Magus has intense survivability problems.


Disc Ability ideas. As ever, these are just off the cuff and may or may not be feasible.

1) Move the baseline AoE root to the disc, make it a pet ability on the pet bar.
This removes the global cooldown from affecting the Magus. Not a massive change but helpful. It also means that if a Magus goes on the offensive with pets he's making a choice not to be a CC monkey.

2) Disc Blast - A percentage of damage taken by the Magus is stored up by the Disc and when it hits a certain amount becomes a 1-shot spell that can be shot at the enemy beating on the Magus. Note this does not reduce the damage taken by the Magus, it only means that the more a Magus gets hit, the faster this ability will build. The exact timings would be difficult to work out, perhaps have the ability do the same damage as Flickering Fire and put it on a 10 sec cooldown. It might not fire off as fast as every 10 secs, but certainly no more often.

3) Demonic Gateway - the Magus sacrifices himself to Tcheezeburger and turns his disc briefly into a gateway to the Warp to make 1 of each type of turret pet appear. When the Magus uses this spell he is unrezzable and must respawn at a rally master or starting point if in a scenario. The Magus would have to learn to be not dopey enough to use this during boss encounters in instances. An alternative to making the Magus unrezzable would be to put this on between a 2 to 5 minute cooldown. But it should not be possible for the Magus to chain suicide creating a demon zerg. This is potentially more of a giggle than really useful. But there should always be room for giggles.

4) Disc-Shield: 2 sec damage absorb or until x amount of damage has been taken. Random chance to proc and on 30 sec cooldown but the chance to proc increases every time the Magus gets hit. Should not absorb a lot of damage, just take the edge off. By making it a random chance, the likes of Witch Hunters still have a good chance to open with their most damaging attacks still being most effective.

:)
 

Nate

FH is my second home
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Lets make Magus more op!!!! :D

You do get a couple of abilities which you control via qbar rather then a pet bar which is your disk doing it's shebang. That tailwhip for instance. However I think if you were to gain another pet for defensive purposes you'd have to loose something in other areas.
 

Roo Stercogburn

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Lets make Magus more op!!!! :D

Play one at R40 for few months then get back to me and lets see if you still want to post that ;)

Aside from one Make-Whine ability on a one-trick pony spec line, there is nothing that the Magus excels at. We can get high scores from tab-dotting in scenarios... and thats about it. Anyone with a decent amount of experience knows that tab-dotting and the associated score isn't really much of an indicator.

Anyway, I'm not talking about increasing overall DPS, just addressing the survivability option and in the same stroke bringing the Magus back in line with its original concept. There are other issues for the Magus class such as silly tactic options

I said in my post that I'm not sure the best way to turn the disc into a pet and keep the class balance, only that it should be treated as a pet. As it stands, the Disc is just something that makes the Magus easy to animate and spot by enemies.

Even if the only pet ability it had was to suddenly make the Magus look big and scary reducing morale of nearby enemies it would be better :)
 

Grotnob

Fledgling Freddie
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You could get off it and wang it at people like some sort of Giant Daemonic Frisbee of Death™. That'd rock.
 

Nate

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Funnily enough, I was the first level 40 Magus in beta :p They were a very different career back then though. Did have quite a bit of fun with it, especially the dancing on the disk/perma green puke abilities. What I'm seeing on Engineers is they are pretty good at AE/cc, with the grenades etc thats obviously why they get high damage in scenarios and yes I realise it doesn't mean they wallop things(well not without some friends). Magus get something similar right? I guess you can't compare ae to the ones BW/Sorc get though as it's pretty insane and they don't need los for it.
 

Roo Stercogburn

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What I'm seeing on Engineers is they are pretty good at AE/cc, with the grenades etc thats obviously why they get high damage in scenarios and yes I realise it doesn't mean they wallop things. Magus get something similar right? I guess you can't compare ae to the ones BW/Sorc get though as it's pretty insane and they don't need los for it.

Not really.

Engineer has more CC abilities and with tactics has much longer range on his AoE and general nastiness as well as having an auto attack. They outperform the Magus in most departments. One of the big gripes for Magus players is our tactics are generally wank.

If comparing to Sorcs & BWs, the only GTAOE spell that the Magus has is high up on one of the mastery trees. It does nice damage but its rather situational. I like it but I'm aware that by going for it I have made a choice to play warband style rather than group. I don't think there's a soloing spec for a Magus but this may be intentional so I'm not going to dwell on it much.

As you say, it was a very different class back in beta. I also played in closed beta.

The goal for me is to see better survivability, not necessarily by joining in a DPS race with other classes. I think the best way is to put defensive abilities on the Disc and increase the 'feel' of the class by using the disc as a proper pet. It was after all advertised as such :)
 

Nate

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There is a Magus that claims to run about soloing sometimes on K8P. His names Oblivion and is on WHA quite often, you could pm him and see what it is he's done with specs/playstyles as afaik he's not given up yet so must be at least a little bit successful Warhammer Forums - View Profile: Ob|ivion
 

Roo Stercogburn

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Daemonology spec with some Havoc thrown in probably, Daemonology has a few damage reduction abilities that other specs of Magus don't get. I've seen him posting.

I'll give you an example of how bad Magus tactics are. Suppose you want to turn the insta nuke into a lifetap. You have to spec fairly high into Havoc. No problem with that, most of Havoc is single target dps - you sort of expect this would be the soloer spec. You then have to buy the mastery tactic that makes it a lifetap. It then costs you 2 tactic slots to make it usable - 1 to reduce from 10 sec to 3 sec cooldown, 1 to change the insta DPS spell into a lifetap.

For that, you get a spell that will return 137 health. You can include it in your spell rotation but it won't increase your survivability, all it does is take up a global cooldown when you would rather be casting something else.

It probably looked good on paper making this kind of thing available. At first when I was looking at the mastery trees I thought "ooooh, I can make something similar to my old Dark SM" ... I was sooooo wrong.

Magus is a ranged class which is weak at range. Most abilities (including the Make Whine ability) are 65'', which is pretty damn close to have to get for a squishy. I don't have an issue directly with this. I have an issue with the fact that once you do this, you are toast. Hence the original post :)
 

`mongoose

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my experience with my magus is that I am most effective when I'm most vulnerable. It's almost like they're a melee caster....

It's an amazing concept and I really like it but I suspect as you get higherup in levels your survivability decreases more and more.

I think there's mileage in Roo's thoughts. I like the idea of adding utility & Survivability rather than dps.

M
 

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