Okay. I’m not going to say what I feel about this in an effort to avoid having the thread locked and, once again, cause the devs to just ignore class balancing because of interpersonal friction.
If we go the route of discussing likelihood to quit, have you considered the other classes who feel that their effort input is being capped and is not being rewarded with equivalently (or even approximately close) damage? That they might want to quit because no matter what they do, they cannot hope to do end game content as it’s scaled to require ubermages?
This part of it, I don’t mind. I agree with you that if I didn’t enjoy a game, I wouldn’t play. My issue is solely with the statement that the only item you enjoy is class imbalance and balancing it would ruin the game for you.
if a class had no hard cap and all of sudden the class gets one, and its the only reason you play the game would you not consider quitting? The problem in itself was that there was no cap in the first place so we got invested in it. Just like the weeklies there was no cap of 10 weeklies so people stacked them up. If people knew there was going to be a cap they wouldnt have stacked them. Now there is going to be a cap some people are planning to stop doing weeklies all together. Simple concept
Let’s repeat that: nobody here wants to hardcap mages
This whole time, I’ve been arguing to increase mage base damage and add a depreciation to the damage beyond some point so that skill still has effects, just not as monstrously pronounced.
Capping these like this was a poor decision, I agree. I also provided my two cents on what they could have done instead to make it better.
As soon as you compared mage to “a top level player on a different class” I began talking about rangers. The example doesn’t contain rangers; only actual logs do.
Affliction never does 100% of dps, but even up to the max cast speed it still makes up a significant portion that simulates diminishing returns.
I thought I made it clear that balancing expert content for expert players should be done after the other classes are given dps returns to skill to catch up to mages.
No, it would not be better. Should “pretty good” players be able to clear the hardest content? If all of the classes get balanced with caps and log returns to skill, then nothing except understanding of mechanics differentiates anyone significantly. The difference in damage between medium and high skill mages is a very good thing.
I’ve put a huge amount of effort into being as good as my class as possible and seeing actual returns in my effort by doing a lot of dps. If I do 5 or 10% more damage than someone who is half as good as I am, I feel pretty capped. This goes both ways: if someone shows up who does 30% more damage than me, I get incentivized to continue improving myself until I might catch up. If their 50% skill improvement only gives them 5% more dps than me, I’m hardly motivated to reach their level in order to kill bosses 5 seconds faster because I’m essentially already capped. I understand that other classes are already like this: this doesn’t mean mage needs to be changed, but other classes do. Why are you advocating for removing the best mechanic from mages instead of giving all the other classes that mechanic?
The way I see it, the Devs have a few options.
1.fix 3 classes to be more inline with mages, which will take a lot of work and likely cause a bunch of bugs/problems since it would be a complete redesign of those classes. This would also require non-mages to relearn their preferred dps class.
2.fix mages to be more inline with the other dps classes, this will piss off 3-5 people but make tuning content much easier and would not change the core mechanics of the mage
3. leave it the way it is, keep the 3-5 people happy but piss off all the people that don’t like playing a mage.
I know what option I would pick but I’m not a Dev for this game.
I told you before that arcane miscle spam is best dps in game if you do it fast enough on 4+ mobs (except for affliction spamming those mobs, but at 6+ mobs you overcome affliction spamming too xD). Shaman can not go faster and surprise surprise has diminishing damage on hitting multiple targets. e.g. shaman lightning does less damage per target if it hits more mobs. And again the cooldown problem that mages don’t have
And thats without true affliction and contamination already xD
(Edit: Okay to be fair in theory best multi target to the extreme is pally, but you need a way for him to survive aka healer which means you actually are more then 1 person when doing the dps. So ya dps per person is less xD.)
Okay! Ran some numbers on my lunch break. I included triplicity and selfish streak in this, but left out the runic diversity because I wanted to keep this on just Affliction and Fire as examples to simplify things. With those added, a 0.5/s mage pops out 1.1 dps, a 1/s mage gets 2.15 dps, a 2/s mage gets 4.40 dps:
Note that ‘yellow’ means one affliction ends, ‘orange’ means 2 end, ‘red’ means all 3 end, and ‘green’ means that the dots were refreshed instead of ending.
Note that this is still the ‘first mage’ case where this is the only mage casting affliction, so there’s no DPS interference with other mages.
Each of the extra spells from triplicity doesn’t do full damage. Overall it’s about a 1.6x damage multiplier (each extra fireball does about 0.3).
You also need to compare an equal reset point based on rotation, not time. You end the 0.5 rotation on 3 afflictions, which basically don’t get a chance to tick and do no damage. You need to test a scenario where each rotation ends after the same number of triplicities, triplicity charge times, and in the same position away from the afflictions (so not one speed skewed down by applying aff).
Affliction also doesn’t get tripled by triplicity; you have to cast it outside of trip or you lose damage.
Not really possible to do because each rotation ends up being so different. I’d have to extend by like another minute on the 0.5/s case. Instead, I’ll take pseudo dps values at each second and then average those to get the overall average dps for each case.
I don’t think any of this will make as big a difference as you think it will
Can’t be just pot a few damage logs to show the extream difference?
@Sift if content is added for mages only I will be quitting the game.
The complaints I have is that other dps classes, scoundrel Ranger Sharman, no matter the work we put it, ar considered less good, avoidable, or even obsolete.
Then just end each rotation at the same point relative to triplicity, before reapplying afflictions, at different times each. As long as the total time is a few minutes long then the lack of dots for the last couple seconds wont make as big of a difference.
I just did some calculations based on Sift’s cast speed of affliction and fireball and frost. And it seems like triplicity fireball, frost would do less damage then adding affliction in between it xD but because triplicity only takes 8 seconds it gets more complicated because you can have almost whole duration of triplicity have affliction ticks on the enemy. So conclusion no clue if affliction should be cast while in triplicity mode but fun fact at-least
Edit: Thinking about it more (without numbers) you should probably just cast frost affl fire*times and repeat and ignore triplicity timing. just the sec you get triplicity you start casting it and continue you frost affl fire rotation while in triplicity.
So, in my experience, devs rarely test content manually, and without parsing programs (which to my knowledge nobody here uses on this game), they kinda just have to guess at boss health that ‘looks’ right. This is even the case for AAA developer games like WoW, where if you look up C’thun, he spent (iirc) a full month without being beaten by even the top raiding guilds because they just kinda guessed. Players even went out of their way to pull up charts (not unlike atro here) to show that even under ideal conditions, without doing mechanics, always dealing max DPS, you still couldn’t kill him. After that month, they lowered the health and he became beatable, but the fact of the matter still remains. So I don’t think they scale shard dungeons and the like to people like sift and cam, more likely they look at the previous dungeons and modify to what they think is reasonable, hence why they didn’t increase the health for the latest set of added shard dungeons.
Hence the whole, “the game was not scaled to us” that I mentioned previously.
