Celtic Heroes

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Re: Why mages are mad.

#101
This is not a parallel universe.

Once again the person I am in total disagreement with is . . . BLRD. LOL.

Coming from a guy who's top char is a Rogue. The top class in the game.

Yea we'll continue "whining" . No problem there. :-)
Max Sacrifice, Max energy boost
I'LL SAY IT AGAIN IN BOLD. OK IF I MAX THOSE OUT WHAT THE FRAKKING HELL DO I USE TO ATTACK WITH???? I HAVE NO POINTS TO PUT ANYWHERE ELSE TO BE EFFECTIVE. MY WEAPONS SUCK. Then you have other people on here going why don't you be a support mage. THEN YOU CAN'T EVEN DO THAT. How many frakking skill points do you think we have???

I wonder, there's a lot of chit chat, but have some of you actually played a mage. Playing a mage at low level is great and easy. At the higher levels, boss fighting and OW, mage is useless.

I basically leveled my alt rogue to 70 in one day. Actually it took two days, but if you take away sleep, family, eating, going out, etc. So playing low is easy.

Re: Why mages are mad.

#102
rogues are in no way the top class.

rangers are by far, then hybrid warriors, then rogues, then druids and mages

druids at least accept support rolls
pigman, with the fury of the pigs and the mind of a man
level 210+ rogue
Morrigan
Avalon
put your pants on, we're going out

Re: Why mages are mad.

#103
An example I posted in another thread.

This video from Dragon Age Origins is one of the best made.

Its called "Sacred Ashes". You can watch it on Youtube.

Watch the dynamics. Team work. Just fantastic.

BAM BAM BAM BAM. I did say if I heard support one more time I would go postal.

So you want me to run around just casting lures. NO ONE HAS COUNTERED THIS YET. If all I do is cast lures, I have nothing left to attack with. And the usual response to problems on this board is GO LEVEL UP. Well how can I earn xp and kill mobs if all I can do is cast some crappy lures. THEN THAT MAKES YOU 100% DEPENDENT ON OTHER PLAYERS TO HELP YOU LEVEL. So everytime I log on to gain XP, i should shout anybody want to level. And then when I do group, all the other characters do the heavy lifting while I just sit there and look stupid. Great.

A lot of melee class players have got it stuck in their heads that Mages are support. It shouldn't be. WHY ARE YOU GUYS SO AFRAID OF MAGES BEING ABLE TO DPS WITH YOU???

The current quest in OW is to kill 6 of those mini tree buggers. How can I do that if I'm a support mage??? Hey XXX you wanna help me kill the mini tree? No bugger off. Hey YYY,. you wanna help me kill the mini tree. F-Off. I'm not going begging for help everytime I want to kill something. That's what you have to do. Support mage. No way in frakking hell!

Re: Why mages are mad.

#104
uhm get a clan to help you? once you hit 130 (if you havent already) no class but rangers can solo level, maybe druids also albeit slowly

granted yes maybe throwing mages into support isnt popular but support mages are freaking awesome, a good one can half a boss fight time, everyone needed to adjust after the update, mages moreso than others, but overall a mage is easier to play now than pre update
pigman, with the fury of the pigs and the mind of a man
level 210+ rogue
Morrigan
Avalon
put your pants on, we're going out

Re: Why mages are mad.

#105
uhm get a clan to help you? once you hit 130 (if you havent already) no class but rangers can solo level, maybe druids also albeit slowly
Thats where pots and elix's come in. But that's another topic.

So everytime I want to gain xp , i have to call for help. Nice. You know how weak that makes you look. And trust me after a while it gets really annoying not just for you but your clannies.

Can we group, can we group, can we group, hi can we group, you bz can we group, shouting anybody want to group.

Usually when people shout out on red and ask for group, no one responds.

Re: Why mages are mad.

#106
I have three themes throughout my post: implementation, gear inequality, and energy.

First the proper in game infrastructure does not exist for a few skills, items, and abilities. Into this category falls a lot of cool things that have been implemented, but there is no satisfactory infrastructure to support these ideas. For example, the spear ability is a very cool idea. I like it that three classes share a single weapon type. Warriors have the choice between two damage types: slash and pierce. Rangers already do piercing damage; spear doesn't give them more choices but in actuality narrows the skills they can use. Rogues also do pierce; spear narrows the skills that they can use as well. So the spear ability and items are very cool ideas, but the in game mechanics don't support spear characters yet.

I used spear as a main example under this category. There are other things that fall into this category as well, like skills: (play dead; conceal; smoke bomb; calm; howling wind; certain wards) and items: (old mega-consumables; mage frozen armor; druid frozen armor/totem; mage frozen wand; wolf hats; red boss resistance charms) and abilities: (spear, axe, blunt). All of these ideas are/were very cool, but lack proper implementation. I, myself, am sad when cool ideas are added to the game only to be shot down by the community due to poor implementation. The mega-consumables are a stellar example. Mega-consmables were an awesome idea, and I was sad to see them go(The blizzard scroll was awesome! please bring it back :)). The reason they left had nothing to do with the idea, but how they were implemented. The reason the community complained was because they spent an hour killing a boss only to get eight 10 second flame resistance potions. Similarly, all those things listed above are great ideas, but just were not put in the game correctly.

Since this post is about mages, I'm going to zero in specifically on poor ways mage and mage items are implemented. First, sacrifice doesn't have enough in-game mechanics to make it worthwhile. There are not enough situations that need mages to sacrifice other members of the group. There is no way to tell which group members need energy or not. Mages don't have enough skill points to invest in sacrifice. So these problems combine together to make a problem that I think is sufficient to be on my list of poorly implemented skills.

Second, the mage wand is a problem. Mages gain almost all their energy regen from sigils. I am going to get into this point a little later, but I'll provide it here as well.

Cloak at 49 costs 367 energy. cast every 2 min.
Firebolt at 48 costs 347 energy. You cast firebolt every 6 seconds.
Lure at 35 costs 172 energy. cast every minute.
Regen from items in combat is 75 energy every 5 seconds (25 from offhand, 15 from crown, 20 from neck, 10 from braclet, 5 from ring).

Imagine that I cast one firebolt at 367 energy. How much time does it take to make that back? Well at 75 energy in-combat every 5 seconds, It will take 30 seconds to regenerate the energy that I used to cast one firebolt. Imagine I cast 10 firebolts because I'm in a boss battle. It will take a little over one minute to cast 10 firebolts. That means in minute I have spent a total of 3470 energy. After the minute has passed, I have regenerated 900 energy. So I have a net loss of 2570 energy. If I sat out of the battle, it would take 3 more minutes to regenerate that much energy. At this point a mage thinks, "ummmm, yea?" 3 minutes is a lot of time to sit and do nothing. Plus you are going to run out of mana 1 minute after you wait 3 minutes. So in every 4 minute interval a mage is only getting 1 minute of playtime. Also consider the fact that the mage is only casting one spell, firebolt. What if i wanted to cast firebolt and iceshard?

Long story short, mages buy large amounts of sigils to fix this problem. I personally have over 500 sigils. That means I can regenerate 500 energy in a 5 second period if i am out of combat. So instead of 3 minutes of downtime, I only have 10-15seconds (you normally get out of combat regen as you wait for firebolt to cooldown.) Sigils allow me to keep my current damage skills and not have to get sacrifice or e boost.

So because I use sigils, that means I cannot use auto-attack. If i auto-attack with wand, then I lose my out of combat regen. So while it would be very cool to use the frozen wand and get the bane of crom proc, it is not a good idea. Consequently, I don't even carry a frozen wand in my backpack anymore.

This situation leads my into my next theme, gear inequality. Every class has the potential to get the same energy regeneration from their items. The max is 75 in-combat energy regeneration per 5 seconds from items. 75 energy is more than enough for warriors, rangers, rogues, and sort of for druids. But as I showed before, 75 energy is nothing for a mage. So mages are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to luxury items.

Regeneration isn't really one of the biggest problems in gear inequality. The biggest gear inequalities comes from the resistance formula, mitigation of incoming damage due to resistances, and (not a gear inequality but poor implementation) lack of variety in monsters. Physical resistances are closely tied to armor. For every point in armor you get 1 physical resistance. This inequality has been increasing since warden armor was introduced. It got progressively worse when meteoric and frozen arrived. I suspect it will continue when dragon gets here. The problem is that a mage's physical resistances are equal to the physical resistances of a warrior in ancient plate. The physical damage on Stonevale bosses is measured up against a warrior in ancient plate. The damage is scaled to be moderately difficult to a group whose tank is in ancient. Warden, Meteoric, and frozen armor gave tanks huge armor bonuses and thus physical resistances. The frozen warrior physical resistances is nearly 2.5 times greater than mage. This means that physical damage monsters are scaled to still be moderately difficult for a warrior with high physical resistances. But what happens when monsters are still difficult to high physical resistance classes? It makes it much more difficult for low physical resistance classes.

The idea used to be mages were good at taking less magical damage (ex. mage frozen armor has high bonuses to mitigate spell damage). That still is the idea, but it has poor implementation. Mages have(used to have) the highest magical resistances. So they would take the least amount of magical damage. The problem is there are no monsters that mages can fight to take advantage of their magic resistances. All monsters leveling up do physical damage. Occassionally they do skill shots, but very often the skill shots do physical damage as well. So while mages has all these great evasion resistances and magical resistances, they are unable to use them because the proper situations have not been implemented yet to give these numbers any meaning.

I orginally planned to add a paragraph or two about mage damage skills, but decided against it. I think that the some of biggest issues are slow casting times and skill points. Spending skill points in lures is a problem because of a lack of transparency. Since there is no way to find out the resistances of the monsters you are fighting, people just dump points into lure skills and hope it helps. For example, I keep pierce lure at 30. But one time I went to 42 pierce lure. If I didn't pay attention, I would never have realized that for most monsters the pierce resistance hits 0 with 30 pierce lure. So I had essentially tied up 12 points in pierce lure that could have gone somewhere else. So my story should illustrate how difficult it is to "shoot in the dark." You put points in lure to help with damage, but don't know when you should stop.

Also consider the skill point trade off to solve energy issues. Every point you spend in sacrifice and energy boost translates into less points in other skills. So between lure skills, energy skills, and energy shield(mages need this because of the lack of physcial resistances) mages are very tight on skill points. Again I think these ideas are very cool, but they are just poorly implemented in the game.

So I would now like to sum everything up as best I can. The idea that mages can function as a support role is cool. It just has bad implementation. So many things are hidden that it means players have to guess or spend many hours figuring the system out. Mages can give other characters energy, but the way to find out is if someone says so, which is a bad way to do it. Mages can increase the damage of other characters by lowering resistances, but they have no idea what the resistances of the target are. Another issue is caused by gear. The gap between phyical resistances creates a situation where low resistance classes receive extremely high amounts of damage. The regen items benefit low energy cost classes the most, and do very little for high energy cost classes. Finally, a lack of skill credits hurts mages.

1.I think that I have come up with some creative solutions to this. What if there was a advanced user interface that you would turn on from the settings menu. You could then identify the monster the same way you identify player. But the menu would give resistances, health, and energy of the monster. OTM claims that if they released information like this then you lose an element of mystery from the game. But I claim that you all are keep this so hidden that people think your ideas are crap and want refunds because they don't know what is going on. I will cite an example where lack of transparency actually fuels desire to play. WoW had an add on that everyone used that gave you your average dps. Anyways, I think you can make a compromise on this issue. Make the stats of small monsters open to everyone and hide the stats of larger monsters.
2.I think mages need more skill points.
3.I think there need to be mage specific monsters that have high magic damage and low physical damage while mages have high magical resistances.
4.I think it is still way too tough to solo monsters in the otherworld for all classes, especially mages though.
5.Most importantly, I think that the ideas above that are cool but poorly implemented should be given higher priority than they are now. It is cool to add new stuff and invent new things, but there are so many half-way implemented ideas in the game that you could seriously increase the quality of the game by spending a little time fixing them.
Last edited by Marshill on Tue Oct 23, 2012 2:11 pm, edited 5 times in total.

Re: Why mages are mad.

#107
Ok, a little math for those that obviously don't play mage (or not regularly enough) :
If I max only lures (not even counting giants and possibly magic) :
100 to 125 points at level 120. Which i get to cast 4 spells in total, and i don't even have enough points left to put points in energy boost/sacrifice/cloak of fire. Without even speaking of attack spells.
At level 140+, I can't even max all of them. Which would be useless anyway outside boss fights (and even there, i don't think bosses have that much resistance). So I can make a cross on leveling, since I'm not needed, nor helpful, for most mobs.

Now, one could argue that since I'm not using shards/firebolts/cloak of fire, i don't need ice and fire lures. But then you have melee toons with ice/fire/magic offhand, summer armor, and such. Which means I'd most probably get flamed because i don't max their effectiveness.


I'd be ready to make that sacrifice IF it'd add to MY total damage for kill, or if wand dealt any significant damage. But it doesn't.
So basically, you're telling us to shut up and cast our 4/5 spells and then watch you as you slash/pierce/other your way to the kill. Sorry but no. It's a what i signed up for when I started a mage. It's not a game, it's just tapping a few buttons then sitting there looking useless. Which would most likely get me some nice comments about taking a spot for nothing, stealing loot and getting xp without work.

Of course there are mages who enjoy to play like that. Ok, if that's their choice, then fine. But if i don't want to sit my way towards leveling, I should be able to deal AT LEAST as much damage as a RANGER (without even speaking of a rogue), with or without lures depending on the mob.
No other mmo does that. Every single one of them allow spellcasters do deal enormous damage, using nuke spells instead of speedy attacks. This one seems like the only use for casters is support, and even then, one of the two classes sucks because they're forced to respec half-way through leveling. No other class has to do that. And beside rogues, all classes can choose between two roles.

We need another game engine at some point that will allow casters to be what they are meant to be (hint : NOT melee, like the only somewhat-functional mage build now). Heck, even druids got it better because they can get away with some choice, even though they suffer from the same game mechanics gap in energy regen.

Re: Why mages are mad.

#108
gonna second arcana on that, but on top of lure im gonna say she should max cloak. I can solo a wyv in slightly under 1 min. When i cast cloak on my lvl 80 warr, he can kill a wyv in about 1 min 30 seconds. Cloak does a lot of damage vrs monsters with fast attack speeds.

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