Necro/Mage rebalancing going in the next patch (hopefully 11/6)

Grip already triple dips on magic damage on your gear so that's not exactly the whole story there, it's potentially a lot better than it looks damage wise. I guess archaic also double dips now with the DD on it so it also has more of an advantage.

I also kind of disagree on making it a lifetap, these buffs have already been pretty strong and adding a DD lifetap to duration taps would make necros even more disgusting in lower tiers. Not to mention it's pretty unnecessary, if your healer can't keep up with damage to the point where you need to lifetap constantly either you're under tiered for your area or your healer is. Or barring being in certain t14 areas you need to feign death more.

Caress I'm more eh on but it also has the shortest cast time and lowest duration so if you want to slam out dots quickly or don't want them ticking forever for mechanics reasons it's still fine. I think it missing any sort of buffs is probably more tied to shaman sharing it than anything but with all the other buffs recently I'm content to have it lower priority.
 
Bonk84 said:
Since the initial plan was to help make Necro's more efficient with sustained DPS, could I suggest we lessen the gap between the efficiency of DoT spells Necro's get? After running some numbers I've come up with the following list based on my damage per mana point:

Scitterpox - 325 mana - 5590 damage - 17.2
Claws of the Chill - 480 mana - 7750 damage - 16.15
Marlow's Cremation - 465 mana - 6126 damage - 13.17
Grip of Kaezul - 920 mana - 10618 damage - 11.54
Hand of Kaezul - 470 mana - 4120 damage - 8.77
Funeral Pyre of Malath - 450 mana - 3882 damage - 8.63
Caress of Sivyana - 505 mana - 3491 damage - 6.91

So topping the list now is Scitterpox (Being 10 ticks should make this the most efficient DoT) and at the bottom we have Caress of Sivyana (Being 4 ticks with a DD component makes sense at being the lowest). I would like to propose the following changes:

Replace the initial DD on Caress of Sivyana with the same damage as Torbin's Venom Blast and increase DoT damage as the same value as "Toxin" from Cryotoxin.
Caress of Sivyana - 505 mana - 5152 damage - 10.2

Give Hand/Spirit of Kaezul DoT's an initial DD lifetap that's half the current DD from R2, and remove the DD from Grip of Kaezul as it will gain the DD's from casting the two spells. Lower the mana to make it more efficient to cast the single spells over Grip.
Hand/Spirit of Kaezul - 440 mana - 5309 damage - 12.07

Lower mana cost on Funeral Pyre of Malath to make it slightly more efficient than the suggested Caress of Sivyana.
Funeral Pyre of Malath - 360 mana - 3882 damage - 10.78

Lower mana on Marlow's Cremation to bridge the gap between Archaic and Funeral Pyre of Malath
Marlow's Cremation - 440 - 6426 damage - 14.60

Scitterpox - 325 mana - 5590 damage - 17.2
Claws of the Chill - 480 mana - 7750 damage - 16.15
Marlow's Cremation - 440 mana - 6126 damage - 14.60
Grip of Kaezul - 920 mana - 10618 damage - 11.54
Hand of Kaezul - 440 mana - 5309 damage - 12.07
Funeral Pyre of Malath - 360 mana - 3882 damage - 10.78
Caress of Sivyana - 505 mana - 5152 damage - 10.20
Click to expand...

Something seems off about your math... I updated the DoT section of the wiki and have WAY different results on based dmg/mana
http://wiki.shardsofdalaya.com/index.php/Dot
Also, I agree with Masuriya, the DD component in Grip is fine without Hand/Spirit having lifetap components and replacing the DD. Besides, it has an -800 MR resist adjust.
 
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I'm very much looking forward to trying the runic pet updates. I always enjoyed it but thought it's mana regen was crippling. I hope this removes the "need" for it to meditate really. the meditation mechanic is really what screwed it the most. damn thing would never sit down when you wanted it to. or thought it was in combat. the note about it scaling some how with your mana pool and mana regen sounds amazing.
 
Anytime someone looks at 1 aspect of a spell's usefulness, (for example damage/mana) it's a little bit shortsighted to assume that it's the only metric of a spell's usefulness (as others have noted). You also need to consider off the top of my head:
  • cast time
  • dot duration
  • resist adjusts, resist diversity
  • damage / cast time
  • utility (healing from a duration tap, snare etc)
  • elemental damage scaling
  • scaling options available from gear
  • spell slots
I hadn't ran a specific analysis on the efficiency of dots (dmg/mana) but assuming the posted numbers are correct, I think those numbers seem about right to me.

RE Huge cyclops man being not quit as huge, yea that's probably pretty reasonable.
 
My apologies, I messed up some multipliers (put 6 ticks on marlows cremation instead of 8, 5 ticks on Grip/Hand instead of 6) and didn't add in some DD changes on my spreadsheet, so after killing a few alligators in remnants and getting all the correct numbers my necro is getting, here is the new list.

SULTNKA.jpg


Also appears the skele's in remnant's undead city are pretty resistant to poison which would explain why it appeared earlier to me that Caress of Sivyana was a bit low, that or client bugged and wasn't registering my poison mod.

Moving forward, why is funeral pyre only 6 ticks and not 8 like the rest of the line?
Also I was trying to justify some changes to the Hand/Spirit relics to be better than casting Grip, since Grip is pretty much an instant DPS increase (casting 2 DoTs which allows you to add another in the line before they fade) and saves a spell slot. The only way I saw to do this was either drastically lower the mana for Hand/Spirit, add in some sort of DD to them, or both in order to make casting the single spells better on mana.

As far as some of the other considerations Remy mentioned,

Cast time - For me it's about efficiency here, as once I get DoTs rolling, I cast them all in the same order to maximize damage/duration. For full burn, casting 1 DoT a tick is the goal as to stagger out the durations, which for me amounts to less than a 4 sec cast time. Scitterpox is fine here because the next DoT I would cast is Marlow's for an 8 tick duration, so Scitterpox finishing 1 tick or same as Marlow's is fine.

DoT Duration - All the top 5 DoT's I would cast all have different durations, which dictates my cast order when I'm full burn. In XP groups however I normally only cast 1-2 DoTs before the mob is dead, so I stick to Claws and Grip. If the mob calls for more, I will toss in a Scitterpox or Marlow's depending on the amount of time I feel I have.

Damage / Cast Time - I feel this isn't that important for Necro's as you are still waiting on DoT's to finish. Overwriting DoT's before they finish just hurts your DPS/Mana. You are racing your first DoT cast.

Utility - Healing DoT's/Lifetaps are great. It allows me to tank a lot more stuff than without it, especially when they crit. Snare utility isn't as useful as the tiers climb, as I would rather DPS and tank than snare and run, as I feel it's faster XP. I also box with a druid, so tanking and DPS'ing is a better way to go unless I simply just can't tank it, but in most of those situations Snare wouldn't help me either.

Elemental Damage Scaling - I feel this is poor for Necro's if talking about elemental damage addition on gear. After some testing with my DoT's, +24-35 elemental damage (cold, poison, and magic were all tried) only resulted in around 1 DPS increase in damage over DoT ticks (+35 Magic got me 6 damage per tick on Hand, +25 Poison got me 4 for Caress, and +24 Cold got me 4 for Archaic). Also take into account we cast all elemental types, so focusing on just one is fruitless.

Scaling Options Avaliable from Gear - Our main focus, Affliction, is in small supply at the top end. Currently for my tier and what we've killed, the only two items I have are Mist-Touched Wardstone at tier 8 (which I can't verify anymore as we haven't killed Soul of the Keep since he changed from 18 to 6-man) and the newly added Hrugtah Hide Bracer at tier 10. The next option for necro's at my tier is the shoulders from Saitha. So from Tier 8? to tier 11ish, I have two to three options for Affliction 8 compared to six for Damage Inc 8 in the tier 10-11 range. Now to help maximize damage and increase scaling, I also need all five elemental foci on top of a decent damage increment, on top of conjuration and alteration mods, which becomes quite the gear juggle.

Spell Slots - I always have at least 5 DoTs up, Claws, Marlow's, Caress, Scitter, and Grip. Prior to just getting Grip a few weeks ago, I would keep up both Hand and Spirit in spots 5 and 6. Now that I have a spare slot, this is usually my floating utility (mez/pbaoe/another dot). Slot 7 is utility and in my case, target FD, and slot 8 is Ancient Lifetap. I don't feel this is any different than Mages/Wizards however as they have their own juggling of preferred spells.
 
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Can't figur out how to post this as a picture, but this is how I analyze dot's.

https://imgur.com/saSKn7v


I should probably also add some data on how much for example 100 Magic, changes the dots.
Usually I just make a seperate conclusion about how much they benefit the dots.

Like, R2. 100 Magic = 100 x 3 / 6 = 50
Poison, 100 Poison = 100 x 2 / 4 = 50
Archaic, 100 Cold = 100 x 2 / 5 = 40 (was 20 before the dot changes)
Relic Fire, 100 Fire = 100 / 8 = 12,5
Scitterpox, 100 disease = 100 x 2 / 10 = 20

Mana effeciency is ignored here...


As Rymy said, there is also stuff like R2 heals, Archaic is Cold (few immune mobs), Relic is fire (many immune mobs), poison and disease have low resist mods, ect ect.
 
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Snake said:
Can't figur out how to post this as a picture, but this is how I analyze dot's.

https://imgur.com/saSKn7v


I should probably also add some data on how much for example 100 Magic, changes the dots.
Usually I just make a seperate conclusion about how much they benefit the dots.

Like, R2. 100 Magic = 100 x 3 / 6 = 50
Poison, 100 Poison = 100 x 2 / 4 = 50
Archaic, 100 Cold = 100 x 2 / 5 = 40 (was 20 before the dot changes)
Relic Fire, 100 Fire = 100 / 8 = 12,5
Scitterpox, 100 disease = 100 x 2 / 10 = 20

Mana effeciency is ignored here...


As Rymy said, there is also stuff like R2 heals, Archaic is Cold (few immune mobs), Relic is fire (many immune mobs), poison and disease have low resist mods, ect ect.
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I’m not saying it’s not useful, however it’s not great compared to mages and wizards simply due to the DoT mechanic. Mages/Wizards can “rapidly” chain the spells affected by elemental damage and focus on less elemental types, greatly improving the DPS gained by the gear. Necros don’t really scale well due to having to wait for the DoT to complete to cast again and the lack of quality same type spells to take advantage.

As stated above, we don’t have a breadth of different elemental type spells with the same near quality to take advantage of say spiking specific elemental damage, with magic being our best since we can run four magic based dots (hand/spirit, snare, and splurt), in which two are hardly used at the top end, at least from my spell bar. Fire has two, poison “can” have two, but disease and cold only have one.
 
As others have mentioned in various formats, I still believe necro's would benefit from an AA that allows all dots to "complete" upon use, dealing all dot duration damage at once to a single target, while removing all dots, maybe with some 10 - 30% damage penalty to limit use. Give it a cooldown of 20 - 30 mins so its simply a "burn" mechanic, while it still doesn't compare to a wizard because of set up time, CD and dmg penalty.

IMO, every caster should get some marginal form of burn ability. Granted lifeburn / manaburn, but those are extraordinarily situational.

-Pazms
 
That's not a bad idea, maybe casters should get some form of burn ability. Maybe on a cooldown of about 15 minutes or so, not too long like say an hour. It'd also make it sync up with enchanter curses really well.

The AA of an ability would probably be annoying to make for all casters so it should probably be an item. Not something out of reach of everyone but maybe some long chain of quests with some other rewards to keep you going toward the final big reward.
 
Melodico said:
As others have mentioned in various formats, I still believe necro's would benefit from an AA that allows all dots to "complete" upon use, dealing all dot duration damage at once to a single target, while removing all dots, maybe with some 10 - 30% damage penalty to limit use. Give it a cooldown of 20 - 30 mins so its simply a "burn" mechanic, while it still doesn't compare to a wizard because of set up time, CD and dmg penalty.

IMO, every caster should get some marginal form of burn ability. Granted lifeburn / manaburn, but those are extraordinarily situational.

-Pazms
Click to expand...

There's another game I've played that has a DoT mechanic called "Rupture" that was implemented to bridge the gap between burst and DoT classes.

Basically it gives up to a 15% chance to apply all of the remaining damage of a single type off any DoT.

Example: Cast a poison DoT, it "ruptures" all of the remaining damage on any existing poison dots, and reapplies a fresh one.

You could make this 4 part tome that has 3/6/9/12% chance. Would be sweet.
 
So, I'm not sure on how I feel about the monster summon change. It'll all depends on the parses overall.

The stacking of pets as far as I know only really effects two fights, Old Overgrowth and Taesh, mainly. So the preventing of the stacking kind is overall a wash, whereas the poofing is mainly a negative. It prevents the mage from summoning aux's for a main tank, but this day and age we have Moraelin as a main tank so not like I need that ability. But, coming up in tiers, that was actually useful, albeit a lost technique now.

The two minute pet poofing and 5 minute cooldown. That seems overall like a negative that wasn't needed.

Because the r1 pet has a rain in his spell, a lot of times the r1 pet should only be used on mobs where you can rain. I think the r1 pet has mana, because after a while it just stops casting it looks like. That seemed like a natural limitation, already in place. So overall, you may have removed dps from fights that mages were ok on. I.e., ones where they could rain. By doing the 2 minute poofing. Because the previous changes just increased a mage's damage on fights they couldn't rain on.
When you had to do damage to a single target, you could place the other summoned monsters stacked but they often didn't last long due to lack of hp.
Mask of multiplicity is now a useless clicky for mages. Fun for other classes.

Overall, I think the adding hp to increase survival was cool. The trade off might be too heavy handed (you'll have to look at parses, and collect data), by pet poofing. Especially since r1 should usually be used on mobs that you can rain on as well. Some counter ideas:
1) allow pet stacking, but they all poof after 2 minutes. This still requires 5 spell gems to do.
2) keep the shared cool down, but get rid of the 2 min pet poofing.
3) Undo the shared cooldown and pet poofing, because was this truly a problem to begin with?
4) make the cooldown equal the time when it poofs. You're draining the mage's mana so there is a cost.

Also, if anyone played mages solo anymore this would be super annoying. You can use the summoned pets to act as off tanks. Like, you send you pet on one, you summon the r1, IV, III on other targets. It was a good way to split up multipulls.

R2 pet changes look awesome. Looks like the Water R2 pet is the better duo/solo pet. Can't wait to try it out.

**Edit**

Really kills me on summoning ramp tanks for Mage Pets, because you'd just stack them up and let the mob go through them. But, I think I'm the only mage that will solo at times on the server.
 
Rymy said:
Forgot to put these in the patch notes but changes outlined here are live now.
Click to expand...

Does this mean worn flowing thought only? or also buffs? so clarity / lich / clickies?

I presume the pet will benifit from it's own clarity but not from the caster's lich?

Rymy said:
Part 2e: Necro runic pet. The necro runic pet is unique but in most situations will run out of mana too fast do do anything useful.
Increased mana pool and flowing thought to scale much better from the necro's mana/flowing thought.
Click to expand...
 
Ok, it's been awhile.

I do not like the monster summoning change. It will hurt up and coming mages more than me. I usually am boxing a super sk. It basically hurts the exping aspect of mage. Monster Summon is super useful for eating rampage on certain mobs, it becomes more helpful when I'm doing bounties.

I think either need to reduce the cool down on the spells, to maybe like 3 minutes if you want to keep the poofing

Or, get them off the same cool down if you want to keep a 5 min cool down.

That's just my opinions.
 
speakeroo said:
Ok, it's been awhile.

I do not like the monster summoning change. It will hurt up and coming mages more than me. I usually am boxing a super sk. It basically hurts the exping aspect of mage. Monster Summon is super useful for eating rampage on certain mobs, it becomes more helpful when I'm doing bounties.

I think either need to reduce the cool down on the spells, to maybe like 3 minutes if you want to keep the poofing

Or, get them off the same cool down if you want to keep a 5 min cool down.

That's just my opinions.
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That is an incredibly niche use of monster summoning. There's basically no reason to use it this way unless you're soloing, and even then them having a bunch more hp already serves this function. not sure what you're really after here?
 
Thade said:
That is an incredibly niche use of monster summoning. There's basically no reason to use it this way unless you're soloing, and even then them having a bunch more hp already serves this function. not sure what you're really after here?
Click to expand...


I use to solo a lot in DN. And, if you had multiple bone dragons, it would be MS IV on the first one, MS III on the second, and so forth, and if you ran out of those, host of elementals. As it stands now it's MSIV, and wait....

I've since moved from that zone, but it was a very legitimate use of the spell for mages who were trying to get AAs and charm money. DN is still one of the best solo mage zones, if you ain't got a runic.
 
speakeroo said:
I use to solo a lot in DN. And, if you had multiple bone dragons, it would be MS IV on the first one, MS III on the second, and so forth, and if you ran out of those, host of elementals. As it stands now it's MSIV, and wait....

I've since moved from that zone, but it was a very legitimate use of the spell for mages who were trying to get AAs and charm money. DN is still one of the best solo mage zones, if you ain't got a runic.
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The game isn't and hasn't even been balanced around soloing. Also that's still INCREDIBLY niche. It's not like this is something you're doing all the time. The game shouldn't be balanced around sub 1% use cases, that's asinine.
 
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