I will note the last Q&A:
“What sort of further balance or talent fixes can we expect in the future?”
While we just did a DPS balance pass, that was mainly only a numbers adjustment. We are planning on looking at the healing and tanking classes next, and also looking at and fixing the broken mechanics some classes still experience. If you would like to read more about the DPS balance pass you can find that here.
Basically, are mages going to get a useful level 30 talent? 2nd level 20 talent? Runic Strength fix? I guess nobody is really complaining about selfish/shared streak but they are also kind of bland. Can lend a hand be made into an optional setting? Can we get two better level 5 talents? Need ideas? The community has a ton.
People miss casting different spells. We don’t want affliction/fireball to be pooped on, we just want to once again raise the skill ceiling and/or add reason to have diverse mage builds within a group.
For example, can True affliction just not have a massive, massive, invisible-text MASSIVE damage loss? It would actually be decent, as-is, if it didn’t completely ruin your DPS. Definitely wouldn’t be as much DPS as affinity because of current fireball speeds, but we would see many rotation mages go into true affliction for the utility/variety. Probably some noob mages too who can’t cast quickly, the DoTs might be favorable. But the base damage is sooooo poor its unbearable lol.
Contamination is poo, would be nicer if it made DoTs tick quicker, tick harder, instantly consume X seconds off of DoT timers as damage, or something useful. Though spreading dots is usually about killing trash, so the more immediate the effect, probably better. The exception would be high level shards where trash doesn’t die immediately.
Can we expect to see any major changes to the classes? The talent system itself? I thought when the talents came out, it was a barebone implementation because it was beta. Aside from receiving level 30 talents (except when that was taken away from mages), we’ve seen very little positive changes to talents, especially useless ones (which other classes have). While useless talents should not really exist, the problem may be less about the talents themselves and possibly more how you are limited in your choices. Like rather than “pick left or right” we could have some kind of point-allocation system with certain talents having more cost, and more talent options. Like snaring enemies with frost spells etc. Again… if you need ideas… lol
- Affliction damage now fills your gauge (the 15 spells thing). You can cast res+affliction 2 to consume the gauge(at whatever level its at), which begins to drain it. Every spell you cast is now imbued with dark magic, doing bonus damage against afflicted targets and removing 1 second of affliction off the target. Idk something like that. Some math will definitely need to be involved. Something useless like triplicity is not attractive even if it’s cool. Certainly more involved than fireball go pew pew extra damage, frost go pew pew extra ticks, affliction go pew pew debuff extra damage. Just one rough idea there are probably better ones. But hey even if triplicity was fixed, thats one new spell to add to my rotation.
Affinity is a damage increase to things we already do, just like selfish streak. True affliction changed how we played, which was cool. I think it’s a good idea to have a “baseline” talent like affinity that doesn’t change up the playstyle much, for players who don’t want to level up and be forced into a different playstyle, but where are the options to include variety? Turn muh fireballs pink/purple, make them trigger arcane runes instead of fire, and have like a 25% chance for them to do smaller, weaker, arcane explosions. Idk stuff like that people will eat that stuff up. Honestly this would be a way cooler wand than a talent (gear variety, particularly unique effect gear, is also a subject for me…) and would synergize with something like an arcane rune tileset or true affliction (if it didn’t suck).
Can we expect to see any major changes to gear? Such as unique weapon/armor effects as mentioned before? Like a wand that instead of just being +6 and doing more damage with 2 affixes, it’s a +6 with either just one interesting unique affix that gives your non-fire spells a frost 1 effect, or like a frost dot on your frost spells(frostburn), or a guaranteed iceheart + this unique wand effect? Frost spells could do increased damage (not to overtake fireball), particularly icelance, or even give icelance a wider cone effect rather than a narrow line? Maybe if you hold the “a” button the cone of icelane narrows, doing increased damage. Frost 3 now AoE’s (to synergize with this new wide icelance effect). Now you got a kickass ice wand and reason to cast frost spells. Maybe not all of these effects go on just the wand, but some of the effects are talents or armor uniques and the players will need to mix them up. Do you get what I am saying here?
I mean you could make talents which give us reasons to cast things like pushback, icelance, pushback 2, fireball 3, frost 3, even arcane ray every so often or even consistently as part of a rotation. Essentially by reworking some of the abilities, and giving us talents that trigger every X seconds for a spell or under certain conditions (or both). Or not let triplicity/contamination hog up our entire blue-bar for special abilities. A talent could even completely modify a spell. Frostfire, electric spells, 2-step rituals similar to triplicity/contamination (like why not make that one talent where every or many spells gets a worthwhile ritual?). Mass Polymorph, Cone of Cold (Ice lance) and so on. You could give us completely new runes with certain talents (I realize the implication of this on existing shortcuts) and so on. Frost can now be a stackable effect. Each tier of frost applies 1 stack, Frost 3 Aoe applies only 1 stack to targets hit by the AoE. At 7 stacks the target is briefly snared until hit, the next hit direct hit dealing increased damage to the target. Pushback might do massive damage to frozen targets. Pushback might be converted into an electric spell. Pushback 2 might summon an AoE lightning storm on CD every 30 seconds. A burning wand or talent might have a similar effect, applying a stacking fire DoT. Fireball 3 might do increased damage, and boost your fire spell damage by X % for the next S seconds, and AoE too why not lol. Even putting that AoE or buff on a cooldown, like 8 or 10s. You could put effects on our wand (like a little flamey orb) similar to musketeers to let us know when these abilities are ready.
Honestly, an entire subtype of mage would be amazing. Give us a mage with mana & cooldowns who can heal, I would actually want to heal. The runes can be the same and mean different things, or you can use totally different runes. Make them separate as to not effect normal magery. asdasdawd