AM mechanic changes, results and a few thoughts.

[kweedko]

If I had a penny for every time people strawman on these forums...

Just take it from the jar of swears.

[Ormix]

In this thread: We ignore the constraints of the limiter mechanic and act like AM has the ability to perform both roles to maximum efficiency at once.

If I had a penny for every time people strawman on these forums...

Ignore them, you are doing an amazing job! Before your patches we were stuck with melee-train-defensive-meta where BW wasnt even able to scratch a healer or a marauder It was so broken and far from being fun...And the funnienst part that people were OK with a pure dps-only class who couldn't properly DAMAGE a healer (actually that made me quit both my dps AM and BW)... Now 4 of my friends are back JUST because of the course you have chosen! Keep the good work going man!

And to all the whiners = look at the ALL of the other MMOs where healers can be pure dps with some healing abilities! Everything is just fine.

[Telen]

Its nice to play a class that gets 8 tactic slots 50 mastery points 150 renown points and can wear both heal and dps gear at the same time. Apparently.

[live4treasure]

It seems there's a need to clarify something about the current AM for those of you who say it's overpowered. I wanted to put this off a little bit longer, but I think my assesment is essentially correct at this point.

DISCLAIMER: I will be speaking purely from a smallscale pvp perspective. I need more time with the Radiant Burst tactic to form a proper opinion on it. I also really wanted to avoid pseudo-mathematics in this post, but I found that I just could not get the point across clearly without them. You'll have to forgive me for this
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1) Damage potential.

a) Burst Damage.

The burst damage a dps class can do to a target, if we pretend everything crits, which it can, because that's what burst DPS classes are geared towards more often than not, is in the 8000 ballpark over a period of about 2-3 seconds on an unguarded squishy target, which often times means the tanks can't always react to it happening. This is definitely the case for something like BW who can easily sit at about 60+ crit chance with some investment and pretty close to the old white lion who could sit at around 40-45ish crit with buffs from lion. That said, this is a very approximate number.

The burst damage a DPS AM can do assuming everything crits, which it won't because AM can have 30% crit at best without gimping its intellect levels to extremely low values (around 750 before pot), is around 6000 on the same squishy target, however in addition to having lower crit chance, you need to prepare this burst for 4.4 seconds, then cast a 2s spell, then cast a 1s spell. So in actuality, the preparation required to apply these potential 6k bursts, which will more likely end up at around 4.5k depending on target rr, ends up being a massive 7.5 seconds and requires you to stand at a punishing 65 feet. You have more than enough time to have both tanks switch to the target you're going to burst and make that 5k turn into 2.2k~ burst damage on average and this is assuming the target has 0 toughness and resistances, which it won't of course, so the real number you will see even with resist debuff would be something more like 1.4~k. So the point is that it is unreliable. Usually you actually only have time to really apply 2 dots before it's too late to do any damage because the target has been guarded.

b) Sustained Damage.

This is where the DPS AM is supposed to shine, however. Let us assume a slayer's sustained dps on a single target is in the 2k ballpark, at least that's the approximate number I got by asking around earlier. So a slayer would do 2k sustained dps before mitigation. It's actually probably closer to 3k than it is to 2k, considering how two slayers can easily cause unguarded dps tanks, who usually have about 4k armor and 7.5k hp and 500ish toughness, to explode in a few seconds.

Alright, well, after an AM spends 7.5 seconds of prep time, or at least 6.4 if done at 100 feet (which lowers the burst), the bis AM can have around 1.8-2.1~k dps on an unguarded, unmitigated target... for 3 seconds. More than 60% of this short bit of sustained damage comes from Scorching Touch, while the DPS AM dots contribute maybe at best 640 dps, while scorching touch easily does double that amount. In short, what I'm saying is, even in that short 3 second window, the sustained damage a DPS AM brings is lower than the damage a slayer can reliably keep pumping out every single second.

Actually, the fact of the matter is that in a 6 man you often don't have time to apply Transfer Force and Law of Conductivity, because it takes too long and just gives the enemy more time to guard or the other dps in your group will have already started going through their rotation and dealing actual pressure, so you can throw about 320ish dps out the window there. Meaning, that's about 1.5-1.7~k dps on an unguarded, unmitigated target.

I'm actually using the example of an AM that invested full points into Asuryan tree to squeeze out every bit of damage he could, which doesn't allow him to take, for example, Magical Infusion.

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2) General overview.

The point is, the damage is still much lower than that of a pure dps class. If you're experiencing problems with AM then the reason for that is because you are either poorly geared, have low rr (aka low defensive stats as a result) or don't have a healer or guard on you. All these things are usually symptoms of a pug SC, where the DPS AM most certainly shines. It's very good at stomping pugs after it gets some gear and it always was quite good at that, but afaik from testing so far, it still doesn't seem to fit into a dps slot of anything serious.

DPS AM provides a good bit of extra healing in a tight spot for a group that decided to take it, but the damage on all fronts seems to, amazingly, STILL be a bit lacking. What a DPS AM can kill in 10 seconds, a BW can kill in 3, what a DPS AM can whittle down in 15 seconds, a slayer can whittle down in 7~ish.

DPS AM, however, certainly has good burst healing for his group. Sadly, because of the low damage it still isn't quite viable for a dps slot.

PROs

- Tankier than a sorc/bw, has aoe detaunt for 5s.
- Has quite decent healing for his group, can save the party from a wipe in some situations.
- Healdebuff with 90% uptime, downside of this is that it's disrupt, so not completely reliable against healers.
- Can remove blessings, but the proc chance makes it somewhat unreliable.

CONs

- Very long ramp up to get damage going, about twice that of other single target dps classes
- Low damage, about 30ish~% less than other dps classes
- Damage is concentrated in a 3 second window, which means it is too spread out to be considered burst and too short to be considered sustained
- Still pretty darn squishy and has no escape mechanic
- Dots can easily be dispelled so at times have to waste even more time setting up covers for them
(Seems to be strong because of the fluff damage dots do in scenario scoreboards)

What the Scorching Touch tactic means for us:
First of all, to take this tactic you have to sacrifice Dispell Magic. Obviously, you can't do that. So that means you actually sacrifice the racial 10% strikethrough tactic. As good as it was, our limited tactic slots simply have no open space for the extra strikethrough. You will have to brute force your way through disrupt values with gear-based strikethrough values, which means the bis setup has changed for us slightly. In your circlet slot you would usually have Mercenary because it offered you 20ish more intellect, but now because Discerning Offense is marginalized the optimal piece of gear in that slot is Dominator for the 2% strikethrough, while the crucial 2 piece mercenary set bonus should be achieved through the robe. We lose some intellect, but we gain some wounds for our trouble. In optimal gear you should be looking at about 7% disrupt. Of course, sometimes you can allow yourself to run Discerning Offense or Centuries of Training instead of Dispell Magic, mainly depending on the enemy comp.

Your rotation stays the same, albeit you have much more incentive to stick to the end of Searing Touch instead of just using one tick for burst damage. It's almost always worthwhile to do so outside of a situation where the target got double guarded or has detaunted you.

Conclusion:
This is much better, but it still doesn't quite fit into the dps slot and also doesn't fit into the healer slot. My initial thoughts were that Dispell Magic will be able to carry us the rest of the way, but it doesn't seem to be quite significant enough. I would say that it still needs a push to be viable and we are DEFINITELY getting closer to the dream. My current understanding is that increasing the damage of DPS AM any further without nerfing its healing would actually start going into overpowered territory. So the two suggestions I have will be made with this in mind.

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3) Suggestions:

a) I believe if Scorching Touch did not decrease the duration of Searing Touch to 3 seconds, it would be a start, because that means the dps of a DPS AM would upgrade from roughly a 25% uptime with less than 35% of the dps available for the remaining 75% of the time to a 55ish% uptime. Remember, our burst is low and scorching touch can't really be considered actual burst damage because it is spread out. Obviously you don't want to make it do all of its damage in the span of a second, so the other natural solution I see is to increase the duration of the channel without increasing the interval between the ticks to push it closer towards being actual sustained damage. I believe this change will not cause any radical shifts in the AMs powerlevel because the amount of damage per second dealt remains the same, but it will certainly make it somewhat better. It is also my belief that going forward, if trying to push the DPS AM towards being a real class in 6v6 and smallscale still remains on the agenda, changes should be done slowly and step by step, because I feel that that from this point on this class balances on a rather narrow road, where stepping too far to one side or the other could send it into being overpowered. On one side, you have healing. On the other, damage. Going forward, assuming this change would be implemented, any damage buffs should be countered with healing capacity nerfs. However it is important not to nerf the AMs self-healing capability because what constitutes for the Archmage's survivability mechanic is easily countered by a heal debuff, cutting it down to about 50% of its efficiency. If this is nerfed it will quickly bring us to below or at least only slightly higher levels of survivability to a sorcerer/bw, because their dominator proc is an automatic detaunt and they can stack defensive stats over intelligence due to naturally high values, while having a fraction of the damage.

b) This coincides with the prevous suggestion, however it is my belief that if any further changes are to be done and my suggestions are taken to heart, that the first suggestion be implimented first and then the result be monitored. It is possible that AM might squeeze its way through to some less popular group compositions and find a spot as a support dps in something like a 3 tank 1 dps 1 dps am 1 healer group, where the healing capacity along will be enough to have good survivability through triple guard and the sustained damage bolstered by a dps tank or two will be enough to have good kill potential. Anyway, the suggestion itself would be to tie in a 10% damage increase and 10-15-20% healing done to others reduction with one of the already popular tactics. The optimal target for this would be Master of Force. It would mirror the tactic that provides crit and parry to WP in a very roundabout way, and I only mention this because there is a comparison I wish to make here. You might think 10% damage is way better than 10% parry, which is true, but then the healing decrease of said tactic doesn't effect lifetap healing, which is exactly what a dps or melee healer warrior priest would be using for self and group healing, so the downside is more of a shoehorning into using specific healing tools rather than an overall decrease. In the case of the AM such a downside would be real and definitely not imagined, because the DPS AM will often be sitting at force stacks and simply unable to make use of his lifetaps, aside from Transfer Force which we have already established is actually rarely worth the global cooldown investment, and so this tactic would decrease the actual group healing potential of the AM while giving it much needed damage. Of course, if Master of Force isn't the right tactic to attach this bonus and downside to, it could be added to Scorching Touch, although it is my belief that giving the aoe AM a bit more damage likely won't really break anything at all as it is still very far behind the damage of a BW without even counting morale bombs. A 10-15-20% healing-on-others decrease would definitely be a noticable and fair trade off, but likely not fatal to its healing potential.
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Comment: The reasons I do not suggest a buff to dispell magic is because; 1) it may have uncontrollable effects for the AOE AM, 2) it may become too punishing for blessing-based healers, 3) spellbreaker exists, so the utility of a blessing removal in a tactic slot is questionable, not useless, but with a 2h slayer in the group, questionable 4) the main reason is it puts too much weight on a gimmick rather than giving the class a solid foundation to stand on.

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This concludes my thoughts on the recent DPS AM in smallscale pvp. Honestly, I thought this was the patch. The patch that will make the DPS AM dream come true, but it turns out we're still not quite there yet. Once again, thank you for your attention.

P.S. Had my lolmath wrong for dps AM damage, I used 200% critical damage instead of 150%. Fixed

[live4treasure]

Had math wrong in DPS AM damage stuff. Fixed.

[live4treasure]

Ready to give my thoughts on the class once again. After playing it more extensively and in a variety of environments, I guess I was right to initially hesitate in making my earlier post. I did get some things wrong, but some things I did get right. I'll speak about certain cornerstones of the DPS AM that I feel are worth discussing, as well as attempt to give you a general overview of the class.

Another important thing I will be discussing is the changes to Drain Magic from the DPS AM perspective. I'm not quite ready to talk about the change of the healer and DPS AM's focus onto the Vaul tree together with MotM's shift.

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1) Damage Dealing: Trials and Tribulations

So first of all, DPS AM is a dps class, obviously. Hybrid or not, the main thing it does is do damage, and everything else is a secondary benefit it brings to the party. As soon as it does enough damage, those secondary aspects it brings start to factor in to the equation. So the obvious question is, does it do enough damage?

Uuuuh... kind of? To be honest, the opinions on this with people I've done 6v6 with are split. Many think it's just good enough, many think it isn't good enough. You don't see DPS AMs in the topend 6v6 gameplay right now, as the favored comp is still that of a double melee with slayer/wl for dps slots. It's difficult to tell whether it does enough or not, but the damage it deals is still a frequent point of contention when whether it should be brought in to a 6v6 group or not is being discussed. I suppose if you were to ask me, I'd say it has other far more important issues built into it that are seriously holding it back, where without adressing them first no matter how much damage they deal, it won't matter. Before I get to that, though, let me give you a general overview of the classes performance in smallscale pvp.

Earlier I stated that it was in a weird spot where it doesn't do enough pressure to be at least close to a true pressure class like the slayer and doesn't do enough burst to be equal to a burst class like the white lion. This sort of remains true after a closer inspection, but while I initially thought that the Archmage style of damage dealing is a problem, I have made the mistake of thinking that Dissipating Energies, the ability that many likely both love and hate, isn't a worthwhile ability to use outside of aoe situations. To my surprise, the truth was the opposite. Dissipating Energies is literally the difference between what could have been a potential kill and failure. After you have your dots up, cast Radiant Lance into Dissipating Energies on a nearby mdps or tank and go into Searing Touch immediately.

In pug SCs or RVR roaming this is actually a very difficult task because a number of things can go wrong which are not under your control, for example any sort of CC can easily allow an enemy to exit out of range. On the other hand in 6v6 this ability becomes much more reliable, because it's highly likely that your target is always in range of your tanks or melee and it's not as easy to, say, punt the DE target away. However, if you do manage to get Dissipating Energies and as such complete your rotation, your next 5 seconds will be that of glory and satisfaction. It is simply the most important spell in our "burst" rotation.

I guess the AM rotation is characterized as a strange in-between of pressure and burst. It's burst damage that is spread out over 5 seconds with about 8.5 seconds of prep time. This can be reduced to a minimum of 6.5 seconds if you have an SM to debuff spirit for you, saving you the need to cast Storm of Cronos and if you choose not to use Transfer Essence, which is arguably still much to weak in terms of damage output compared to your other dots. Not to say you shouldn't ever use it, but you won't always have the time to do so.

And here-in actually lies the aforementioned main problem of the current DPS Archmage. Those 6.5 seconds of preptime are requried every single time you switch to a new target to do any meaningful damage to them. You often have to switch from target to target because of guards, defensive abilities, detaunts etc. Often enough by the time you set up your 3 dots, dissipating energies and searing touch, it's too late to do any damage to a given target.

So, in short, we're in a much much better position that before! If you set up everything, you start feeling like a real dps class, and as far as I'm concerned, that is a huge win in terms of game design for RoR. A great time to be playing DPS AM, especially if you can find your way into a stable 6 man.
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2) Drain Magic

So what changed? I think the patch notes were clear enough on this. Basically you can now remove 1 blessing from the target every 10 seconds and regain a good bit of AP, as well as apply a weakish ap drain to the target. On its own, the drain effect on your target won't do that much. It is important to say that AM has a lost a powerful CC tool with the current iteration of Drain Magic, which is a problem, because it was a big contender in DPS AM viability in 6v6 as you could, for example, throw it onto a choppa and he's going to be doing a lot less dps going forward if you manage to keep it up on him. It won't be quite as impactful now, of course.

So are there any good things? Well for a start, it's been made more reliable for healing AMs. This change alone will likely free up a tactic slot like Restorative Burst, which is a noticable improvement. It also provides the AM class as a whole with a reliable blessing removal, whereas before this utility was constrained to a RNG based tactic in the DPS tree.

It's not the end of the world, however, as it still has its uses. Zealots and DoKs are a very popular choice for destro 6 man groups, so anywhere outside of solo-roaming you will almost always have a target to use it on. The actual utility of this is that you can decrease enemy initiative by draining off the zealot buff, or significantly reduce enemy resistances by draining off their resistance buff. It's not impossible to reduce enemy resistances to very low values with this combined with our resistance debuff.

Another thing here that is worth considering is the fact that this ended up being a huge hit to DPS AMs in pve situations. Losing our source of AP regain has somewhat crippled our damage dealing capabilities in prolonged pve fights. It's my hope that this wasn't intended, of course.

A small benefit to this change is that DPS AM has actually become more balanced for solo roaming. No one really cares about this, but I suspect the devs aren't completely blind to the solo scene and administer small changes as long as they don't interfere with the balance of the classes in more important content like 6v6 and largescale. In that sense I've found the change to be positive as I now actually have a chance to lose to some classes which I never would have lost to before.

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3) Radiant Burst: AOE DPS AM

I simply love the fact that this exists now Love the name and especially the animations with lasers flying everywhere

Sadly tho, you can't say much more than that at present. Your damage output on an aoe is pretty low, the aoe itself doesn't actually seem that big in practice and the utility of Radiant Gaze boils down to -5% chance to critical hit, which isn't really meaningful considering how much critical chance the aoe classes tend to have, while the more meaningful -5% damage done is overshadowed by things like challenge or even the SM's -15% thing.

I suppose the actual aoe dps of an AM can be called aoe contribution rather than dps. If you manage to line up DE with RG, RL and the cast speed M2 you can get something decent going on, but it's definitely not worth a dps slot even with the supposed utility of Dispell Magic. The 100 ft. range is very interesting and fun, though. All in all, it's very fun, but not especially functional.

The tactic is actually quite nice to have for PVE though. Just a bit of extra versatility for a greater variety of situations.

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4) Suggestions

The current design space for AM, it seems to me, is the following:

a) Dispell Magic the tactic has lost a lot of its luster with its utility now being worked into Drain Magic. I think this tactic has become new design space for both Shaman and AM in order to fix some of their underlying problems.

b) Arcing Power, the tactic is too weak to slot for any situation. Even in solo roaming, after extensive testing, it doesn't seem to be doing much at all. As far as Radiant Burst + Arcing Power goes, even that is usually very weak. Not even worthwhile for farming mobs, it seems. Therefore, it is also design space for the AM, alternatively, making the healing from this apply to the whole party would likely make it viable in a sort of hybrid heal aoe dps AM with Radiant Burst for largescale.

c) Golden Aura, the benefit of it is way too hard to use. It's also very easy to counter. Shatters, damage... etc, just a lot of ways to get past the shield. I think it's no surprise, since it basically hasn't seen play ever outside of testing it and then dropping it for something more substantial. As such, it is also design space for more ideas and whatnot. Although buffing this one to viability is pretty easy if the immunity it grants sticks for a certain duration and is not tied to the shield itself.

The best suggestion I can give, one I've talked over with several other players, is that perhaps instead of Dispell Magic, which is now somewhat obsolete with the blessing removal of Drain Magic, we would have a tactic that would allow Drain Magic to "consume" all of the 4 dots an AM has as if they were a blessing and then in some fashion reapply them to a new target, perhaps just by using any form of offensive spell upon said new target.

I think the actual drain effect is nerfed enough that even if you slot this hypothetical tactic for solo roaming in order to drain your targets, it won't be as destructive in a 1v1 fights as it used to be, especially for something that requires a tactic to work in a certain manner. This allows DPS AM to switch its dots to a new target once every 10 seconds, which solves one of the key issues the class has. It also has the benefit of alleviating the huge hit it took for PVE, although still at the cost of a tactic, obviously.

In some sense I would have loved such an ability to be something core, because abilities like this seem to be a staple for any dot-heavy class in any mmo and for good reason, but if this suggestion ends up having some influence on future decisions, a tactic is good enough for me as this will patch up the last remaining hole in the DPS AM's design.

[Brizio]

Ready to give my thoughts on the class once again. After playing it more extensively and in a variety of environments, I guess I was right to initially hesitate in making my earlier post. I did get some things wrong, but some things I did get right. I'll speak about certain cornerstones of the DPS AM that I feel are worth discussing, as well as attempt to give you a general overview of the class.

Another important thing I will be discussing is the changes to Drain Magic from the DPS AM perspective. I'm not quite ready to talk about the change of the healer and DPS AM's focus onto the Vaul tree together with MotM's shift.

__________________________________________________________________

1) Damage Dealing: Trials and Tribulations

So first of all, DPS AM is a dps class, obviously. Hybrid or not, the main thing it does is do damage, and everything else is a secondary benefit it brings to the party. As soon as it does enough damage, those secondary aspects it brings start to factor in to the equation. So the obvious question is, does it do enough damage?

Uuuuh... kind of? To be honest, the opinions on this with people I've done 6v6 with are split. Many think it's just good enough, many think it isn't good enough. You don't see DPS AMs in the topend 6v6 gameplay right now, as the favored comp is still that of a double melee with slayer/wl for dps slots. It's difficult to tell whether it does enough or not, but the damage it deals is still a frequent point of contention when whether it should be brought in to a 6v6 group or not is being discussed. I suppose if you were to ask me, I'd say it has other far more important issues built into it that are seriously holding it back, where without adressing them first no matter how much damage they deal, it won't matter. Before I get to that, though, let me give you a general overview of the classes performance in smallscale pvp.

Earlier I stated that it was in a weird spot where it doesn't do enough pressure to be at least close to a true pressure class like the slayer and doesn't do enough burst to be equal to a burst class like the white lion. This sort of remains true after a closer inspection, but while I initially thought that the Archmage style of damage dealing is a problem, I have made the mistake of thinking that Dissipating Energies, the ability that many likely both love and hate, isn't a worthwhile ability to use outside of aoe situations. To my surprise, the truth was the opposite. Dissipating Energies is literally the difference between what could have been a potential kill and failure. After you have your dots up, cast Radiant Lance into Dissipating Energies on a nearby mdps or tank and go into Searing Touch immediately.

In pug SCs or RVR roaming this is actually a very difficult task because a number of things can go wrong which are not under your control, for example any sort of CC can easily allow an enemy to exit out of range. On the other hand in 6v6 this ability becomes much more reliable, because it's highly likely that your target is always in range of your tanks or melee and it's not as easy to, say, punt the DE target away. However, if you do manage to get Dissipating Energies and as such complete your rotation, your next 5 seconds will be that of glory and satisfaction. It is simply the most important spell in our "burst" rotation.

I guess the AM rotation is characterized as a strange in-between of pressure and burst. It's burst damage that is spread out over 5 seconds with about 8.5 seconds of prep time. This can be reduced to a minimum of 6.5 seconds if you have an SM to debuff spirit for you, saving you the need to cast Storm of Cronos and if you choose not to use Transfer Essence, which is arguably still much to weak in terms of damage output compared to your other dots. Not to say you shouldn't ever use it, but you won't always have the time to do so.

And here-in actually lies the aforementioned main problem of the current DPS Archmage. Those 6.5 seconds of preptime are requried every single time you switch to a new target to do any meaningful damage to them. You often have to switch from target to target because of guards, defensive abilities, detaunts etc. Often enough by the time you set up your 3 dots, dissipating energies and searing touch, it's too late to do any damage to a given target.

So, in short, we're in a much much better position that before! If you set up everything, you start feeling like a real dps class, and as far as I'm concerned, that is a huge win in terms of game design for RoR. A great time to be playing DPS AM, especially if you can find your way into a stable 6 man.
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2) Drain Magic

So what changed? I think the patch notes were clear enough on this. Basically you can now remove 1 blessing from the target every 10 seconds and regain a good bit of AP, as well as apply a weakish ap drain to the target. On its own, the drain effect on your target won't do that much. It is important to say that AM has a lost a powerful CC tool with the current iteration of Drain Magic, which is a problem, because it was a big contender in DPS AM viability in 6v6 as you could, for example, throw it onto a choppa and he's going to be doing a lot less dps going forward if you manage to keep it up on him. It won't be quite as impactful now, of course.

So are there any good things? Well for a start, it's been made more reliable for healing AMs. This change alone will likely free up a tactic slot like Restorative Burst, which is a noticable improvement. It also provides the AM class as a whole with a reliable blessing removal, whereas before this utility was constrained to a RNG based tactic in the DPS tree.

It's not the end of the world, however, as it still has its uses. Zealots and DoKs are a very popular choice for destro 6 man groups, so anywhere outside of solo-roaming you will almost always have a target to use it on. The actual utility of this is that you can decrease enemy initiative by draining off the zealot buff, or significantly reduce enemy resistances by draining off their resistance buff. It's not impossible to reduce enemy resistances to very low values with this combined with our resistance debuff.

Another thing here that is worth considering is the fact that this ended up being a huge hit to DPS AMs in pve situations. Losing our source of AP regain has somewhat crippled our damage dealing capabilities in prolonged pve fights. It's my hope that this wasn't intended, of course.

A small benefit to this change is that DPS AM has actually become more balanced for solo roaming. No one really cares about this, but I suspect the devs aren't completely blind to the solo scene and administer small changes as long as they don't interfere with the balance of the classes in more important content like 6v6 and largescale. In that sense I've found the change to be positive as I now actually have a chance to lose to some classes which I never would have lost to before.

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3) Radiant Burst: AOE DPS AM

I simply love the fact that this exists now Love the name and especially the animations with lasers flying everywhere

Sadly tho, you can't say much more than that at present. Your damage output on an aoe is pretty low, the aoe itself doesn't actually seem that big in practice and the utility of Radiant Gaze boils down to -5% chance to critical hit, which isn't really meaningful considering how much critical chance the aoe classes tend to have, while the more meaningful -5% damage done is overshadowed by things like challenge or even the SM's -15% thing.

I suppose the actual aoe dps of an AM can be called aoe contribution rather than dps. If you manage to line up DE with RG, RL and the cast speed M2 you can get something decent going on, but it's definitely not worth a dps slot even with the supposed utility of Dispell Magic. The 100 ft. range is very interesting and fun, though. All in all, it's very fun, but not especially functional.

The tactic is actually quite nice to have for PVE though. Just a bit of extra versatility for a greater variety of situations.

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4) Suggestions

The current design space for AM, it seems to me, is the following:

a) Dispell Magic the tactic has lost a lot of its luster with its utility now being worked into Drain Magic. I think this tactic has become new design space for both Shaman and AM in order to fix some of their underlying problems.

b) Arcing Power, the tactic is too weak to slot for any situation. Even in solo roaming, after extensive testing, it doesn't seem to be doing much at all. As far as Radiant Burst + Arcing Power goes, even that is usually very weak. Not even worthwhile for farming mobs, it seems. Therefore, it is also design space for the AM, alternatively, making the healing from this apply to the whole party would likely make it viable in a sort of hybrid heal aoe dps AM with Radiant Burst for largescale.

c) Golden Aura, the benefit of it is way too hard to use. It's also very easy to counter. Shatters, damage... etc, just a lot of ways to get past the shield. I think it's no surprise, since it basically hasn't seen play ever outside of testing it and then dropping it for something more substantial. As such, it is also design space for more ideas and whatnot. Although buffing this one to viability is pretty easy if the immunity it grants sticks for a certain duration and is not tied to the shield itself.

The best suggestion I can give, one I've talked over with several other players, is that perhaps instead of Dispell Magic, which is now somewhat obsolete with the blessing removal of Drain Magic, we would have a tactic that would allow Drain Magic to "consume" all of the 4 dots an AM has as if they were a blessing and then in some fashion reapply them to a new target, perhaps just by using any form of offensive spell upon said new target.

I think the actual drain effect is nerfed enough that even if you slot this hypothetical tactic for solo roaming in order to drain your targets, it won't be as destructive in a 1v1 fights as it used to be, especially for something that requires a tactic to work in a certain manner. This allows DPS AM to switch its dots to a new target once every 10 seconds, which solves one of the key issues the class has. It also has the benefit of alleviating the huge hit it took for PVE, although still at the cost of a tactic, obviously.

In some sense I would have loved such an ability to be something core, because abilities like this seem to be a staple for any dot-heavy class in any mmo and for good reason, but if this suggestion ends up having some influence on future decisions, a tactic is good enough for me as this will patch up the last remaining hole in the DPS AM's design.

Intersting points. But, don't you think we should start discussing AM healing fist as it is primely a healing class?

The last patch, wich mainly focused dps, got a underperforming healing class to a even worse situation. What i mean is, in a 6v6 there is absolutely no reason to use an AM, unless you are missing one healer.

AM healer does not have a spammable instant heal, or even a quick cast heal. The surviabillity is awfull, worst between all healers, and changes on the trees made it a worse support as we are "obliguated" to 2nd Vaul tree. The sets, omg, the sets dont give us any option as most of them are hybrid and they follow the obsession for the "mechanic". Also, now we have AP peoblem constantly. Some players will say they dont because of life tap, but most of those player dont even play Isha.

So i really want to hear yor opinion about the class thats is described on when you create it, a healing class. Thanks mates.

[kkprfx]

How are you having AP issues lol

[Brizio]

How are you having AP issues lol

Unless i stack 2 ap tatic, or use life tap (wich is crap for healing), its pretty easy.

[live4treasure]

Healing Archmage is all about positioning. You have Healing Energy, Shield of Saphery, Lambent Aura and the cleanse, all of which are mobile healing spells that you can use to gain tranquility stacks and move away from your enemy. After that point, you can use lifetap which has a rather huge strikethrough, to produce heavy heals as needed and constantly reposition yourself so the enemy never has a proper chance to hardfocus you.

Though, honestly I very rarely play healer, and definitely not in 6v6. Just doesn't seem that horrible to me, you just can't rely only on spells from the Isha tree.