Its like that for Mage and Ranger right now…
No, they need to:
- Increase runemage base damage
- Apply significant diminishing runemage damage returns for casting more than, say, 1 to 1.5s or so per spell, so that damage as a Sift or a Cam is equivalent to what it is now, but damage as a “good” mage is only a couple percent lower and not 1/2 the damage.
- Increase all other class damages to be in line with runemage as well
I’m assuming what you mean by “good” is 1 spell per second. Like I said before, if someone is putting in half the work as I am, and I am 2 times as good at it than they are, then I should be getting 2 times the results, or else it feels unrewarding.
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No it is still rewarding. You still doing for example 1.2x their damage, have a visual cool effect of more spells flying around, lagg everyone around you more so their dps lowers, still have the best utility and dps boost in the game and more… The only moment an end game ranger reaches close to the damage of an end game mage is having a lucky bleed. Thats pure luck bs.
But now I am going to zip too because this is not the topic of this post, make another mage OP post if we want to continue about it 
(the posts have been moved to a seperate topic now)
2 Likes
Ok, last thing Since people seem to not understand, if the y axis is DPS and x axis is skill, mages have linear growth while other classes have parabolic growth in DPS. Simply increasing or decreasing either group’s DPS will just move the lines horizontally, so the disparity still persists, just more so on one side or the other. The only way to bring top 0.1% mages closer to other top dps classes, without crushing dps for the bottom 95% is to force high-skilled magery into parabolic growth. (Since the other classes cannot be switched to linear growth without entirely reworking their core mechanics).
2 Likes
We should fix all the classes, mage and others alike. All end game content at this point is basically requiring upper tier mages (2x damage at least above other classes). Raise damage on everything INCLUDING mages and then apply a depreciative curve. So sift and others at max tier can still do a couple percent more damage with their skill but also so a good tier mage can match a good tier ranger (at present, good ranger > good mage, while great ranger < great mage)
People do understand this but Sift wants to have all other classes also be a linear raise in dps by increase in skill reward system that also does that, right? But that is just too much of an overhaul of all the classes.
If I got a couple extra percent damage over mediocre mages from all my hours of practice, muscle memory building, experimentation, and math, I’d stop playing mage.
Mage doesn’t scale linearly either; I point this out every time people complain about mage. You can’t do more than 3 afflictions at once, which do 3-4 fireballs worth of damage from a single cast, apply weakness, and make up a significant portion of your damage. Afflictions are a bigger boost to slower mages, who have a higher max afflictons to fireballs cast ratio, so we get diminished returns to speed from that.
The only reason I can see for people to want everyone to do the same (within 10% ish) damage as each other is so that everyone can clear the same content, regardless of skill. This isn’t how the game should be and defeats the purpose of improving yourself to beat the hardest enemies.
Make the other classes more rewarding; don’t make mage worse.
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if you made a robot that all it did was draw super quickly and you had 144 hz refresh rate, you could totally draw 10 times per second.
If i make a robot shoot optimally on ranger (hit every target, perfect on every shot timer), i would only do 20-30% more dps.
One is linear, one is logarithmic
runemage is the only class in the game whose cap is physical performance and not some hard coded cap or a cap due to timing.
3 Likes
The alternative way of thinking about this is you cant have difficult and rewarding content/hardest enemies if your dps is significantly higher than the rest of the population. (because they will balance the content around the designed dps rate)
in most MMOs, the top few guilds on each server all have comparable skill level and dps, because every class in those games has an absolute maximum dps. Your objective in those games as a dps is to get as close as possible to that absolute max dps (think TAS).
Now look at this game. Every class has an absolute maximum dps, but the absolute max dps for mages is so ridiculously high in comparison to the other classes that there is basically no cap for humans. Any little bit better you get as a runemage translates directly to an increase in dps, whereas on the other classes, you can only creep towards the maximum cap.
1 Like
I was okay with the mage max dps potential IF it didn’t have:
- best disable stun in the game (polymorph, single target self controlling hard to accidentally break)
- best slowing in the game (frost by default and super frost as option with minor dps loss)
- best damage boost as single mage (10% instead of everyone 5% even support classes…)
- Best utility (power to decurse, multi stun, mob pushing back, only light creator, only fireworks entertainer and meh shield but still an extra most classes don’t have)
So it sounds so unreasonable to be the best potential in everything except for tanking (duh dps) healing (duh not support) and PvP (still very strong insta killer with strong mages though)
Should we on other classes: up the dps boost, make an even better polymorph? Give everyone on demand decurse and up their dps? Or give the mage at-least 1 major weakness like any other class…
Edit: Also it has the best multiple target dps in the game too xD
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I actually want to see one of multiple of these best benefits of a mage be overruled by a better variant by other classes.
You are both sort-of correct. Mages grow near linearly up until they start hitting the maximum, and then they level off, taking better frame rate/better internet connection to achieve a difference at the absolute limit.
At 0.5/s spell, you are nowhere near this limit, so it’s a true statement to say that you can double your output by casting 1/s. After 2/s, yeah, you’re probably reaching a limit and it’ll taper off. Improvements in skill are limited by framerate, hardware, and the sheer capacity for the server to register things (along with human limits on speed). It does not plateau, but ends logarithmically at some theoretical asymptote that nobody could ever hope to calculate.
Other classes, however, plateau. See precision ranger which gets a theoretical (and calculatable) maximum damage for hitting precisely 1/s at a certain distance. Does it scale linearly on the way to the plateau? Not so much, because of the complexity of the way the timing and aiming work. For lower capability, a smaller change in skill will increase your damage tremendously. As you increase in skill, the amount you can increase in damage is reduced. For higher skill, though, you hit that cap. Basically a logarithmic curve at first with a hard cap, rather than an asymptote.
The same is true for musketeers, scoundrels, shaman, etc. There is a huge curve that’s hacked off at the top for an enforced plateau.
What this means is that mages have a theoretical limit higher than everyone else, because it’s not truly capped but asymptotic. More importantly, it also means that unlike other classes where the initial stages of learning to play can raise your effectiveness substantially (logarithmic), you have a linear effect and so crappier mages are not as good as equivalently skilled rangers, scoundrels, etc.
The way to fix this is to make the curve logarithmic. If you give diminishing returns to faster casting, you have achieved this. What you also do, though, is lower the asymptote, which would not be good. So raise the asymptote by increasing base damage.
Then, to make every class balanced, move the other class plateaus to be in line with some % away from a theoretical limit of runemage (remember, can’t calculate the asymptote, but you could probably approximate it).
This methodology has the benefit of maintaining the importance of runemage skill (Cam and Sift and J get to be better than everyone else) whilst also making other people and class combinations viable at end game. Win win.
Edit: obviously do NOT enforce a hard cap on runemages. That would be a terrible way to fix this, and is not what I’m arguing for.
2 Likes
Mages use only 1 arm, rangers use 2, therefore rangers should do twice the damage.
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The way to balance this is to require top level dps to clear top level content. Hopefully shard 15s will do so.
Neither of you seems to have seen my explanation.
For example, a mage casting 1 spell per second might get 1 dps from fireball (not actually 1, just an index essentially). With 3 afflictions ticking, that dps should go up to about 1.7 (assuming 4 dmg per aff over 15 seconds, 3 affs, so .8 per second minus some dps from casting aff instead of 1 fire). If a mage casts 2 spells per second, their fireball component would be 2 but their affliction component would still just add .7 for a total of 2.7. A 100% increase in cast speed granted a 58% increase in dps here. This obviously is just a spitballed number but it demonstrates the concept.
There is also, of course, the max cast speed. This comes from the server buffer to process the spell, framerate limitations (when you draw fast, it looks like a couple points connected by dots instead of smooth lines, so if you draw too fast you skip points), and the limit of hand tracking framerate. I believe that the best mages in the game are very, very close to this limit.
So no, this wouldn’t be possible at all.
However, I absolutely understand that other classes do have damage plateaus around their hard coded maximums. Don’t make mages just as bad; give other classes greater returns to skill. Log returns to skill only make the game boring and make everyone the same.
Polymorph is absolutely fantastic, though shaman has the frog totem and it doesn’t work on stunning bosses. I’d argue that scoundrels have the best stun (bosses and trash) because the charge shot is quick, on demand, travels much faster than polymorph to allow for quick reactions, and is already part of the normal rotation so gets applied automatically.
I think shaman AOE is better; arcane blast is really weak per hit.
Aside from those, I agree that mage has it better than other classes in terms of utility and max damage potential. That’s why I’m saying to improve other classes, either by increasing their damage given from increases in skill and/or adding extra utility.
Though you also have to remember that mage is (aside from shaman, which has its own pros and cons) the least mobile dps class. Our spells travel slowly, we can’t slide, and moving requires us to send a line of spells into the ground/sky/wherever else.
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Mage is way harder to master. Good joke though.
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Id like to see you play ranger at my level then tell me how easy it is.
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Give me 100 hours. Easy clap.
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Ok let me know when you are ready to test.
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Given normal server response time of 100ms, you should be able to max out at roughly 10 spells per second ignoring speed of movement.
Assuming (probably correctly) that the issue you mentioned with it not drawing correctly is due to fps, a doubling of fps would lead do a doubling of spells per second up to the server limit.
A robot would be able to cast at exactly the correct speed to keep up with the fps. There are headsets that get 240 fps
A game should never use fps as a metric for anything. Look at Bethesda and their physics engine for reasons.