BW & Sorc feedback - October 2025

[Ninjagon]

Hello.

Short:
In my honest opinion the DPS of Bright Wizards & Sorcerers is too low now and needs to be addressed.

Explanation:
- BW and Sorc are the most fragile characters in the game with lowest armor, (almost) no self heal and very limited survival mechanics.
- Their class mechanic (Combustion & Dark Magic) comes with self-injuring price. Yes everybody knows that.
- In Patch Notes 12/09/2025 Knights & Chosens got new abilities which contains group absorb shield (Shield of the Sun and Bane Shield).
These absorb shields combined with the other (many) existing shields which every healer have, act as a direct nerf to the BW & Sorc damage.
That is, because BW & Sorc DPS depends on high crit damage, but when a target has active absorb shield, you cannot receive crit until the shield runs out.

Solution:
a) Adjust the BW & Sorc DPS that they can crit regardless of the absorb shields.
b) or raise the overall BW & Sorc damage to compensate the new state of the game.

I posses no hard data nor other evidence about this topic, just personal player experience. The "a)" solution looks much better to me.

[nocturnalguest]

Very bad wording, somehow since 2017 alot of people word it like "cannot receive crit until the shield runs out" which is not true. Absorb have no effect of your chance to crit or to receive crit. Absorb "eats" initial damage which is then decided if its crit or not, "eating" that base damage means that if hit will crit, the value of such crit will be from lower base. That simple.

So now i advice to think again what exactly do you want to see changed? Sorc&BW ignoring absorbs will not happen, it contradicts combat mechanics.

[wonshot]

If the general issue you are addressing here, is that there are no alternative to going full crit-damage build, regardless of if you are aoe or st spec, then I do agree.

The timestamp singletarget build is a pure nightmare to balance, because if the punch is too weak and not leathal, then it kinda becomes irrelevant with how telegraphed it is and with the multitude of counter messures you can apply to prevent it being leathal.
And on the other hand, if the burst is too strong you have a pug stomping monster or a flee-cuddler build that is very hard to catch who will dictate the whole fight for both friends and foe to keep the caster alive and out of harms way.

Aoe builds are still kinda meta, due to the 2024 proc changes.
Now while my two most played classes on each realm is MSH and BW respectively, I am not sure the damage advantage an immobile cloth melee mage has over a powerhouse of a free armor/wounds/thoughness Squigarmor, with much higher mobility, crowdcontrol and selfsustain aoe melee dps build makes up for what other classes bring.

Say for example a Sorc/BW aoe build is 20% stronger than a MSH. The utility on the Squig makes the class so much more desireable and easily outweighs the damage advantage of the classcanon mages.

The 3 mages Magus, Sorc, Brightwizard are the only classes that needs to stand still to channel closerange. Maybe having a movementspeed selfdebuff while being able to channel on the move at 60% ms could be a small adjustment. And then bringing some Ramping channeling ST build or a Hard-cast singletarget alternative to the Timestamping crit builds.