Quick shaman SoD writeup

[Retron]

With beta pretty much at an end - I have to say it's been the most ill-tempered one I've yet been in. Frustration at certain aspects of the development provess was evident and there was more inter-class bickering than usual. Yes, some of it was directed at shamans and yes, some of our spells were nerfed (although it's hard to say for sure whether the class-envy posts tipped the devs in the nerf direction!)

Phew. That said, here's a look at what's on the cards, starting with spells:

* The big one is the combining of our stamina, avoidance, damage mod and focus buffs into a single spell, Unity of Spirits. The avoidance mod has a new name but was changed to be the same value as our existing line - apparently there are problems with getting a spell that autocats another spell to autocast a third spell. The other parts of the buff are the usual percentage based increase.
Downside: a heck of a long cast time and because Unity isn't a buff Quick Buff doesn't work. Focus has had its duration nerfed too.

* Our one-and-only direct heal now heals for the same as druids. This caused a big argument and the mana penalty compared to druids was changed from 10% to 34%. Our group HoT had the heal amount boosted somewhat at the same time. FWIW Druids picked up further healing increases, including a much-boosted group heal and a Promise clone.

* Wild Growth appeared and was immediately shot down by everyone, druid and shaman alike. The duration was belatedly changed from 5 ticks to 25 ticks but it's still not popular amongst those on Beta. Yes, 5.2K HPs will come in handy but it's another lost spell gem.

* No changes (other than damage) to our cold nuke and old poison nuke lines, despite plenty of suggestions being offered. Feralisis received an upgrade, it's now pretty much a reverse Champion for blunt weapons only.

* Our pet hits for 154 (rank 2), but we're now bottom of the pet-casting classes DPS wise (except druids). Wizzy swords, cleric hammers easily outDPS our wolf and our once-equal secondary pet classes have now gone way ahead. Indeed, SK pets do DPS more on a par with raiding beastlords!

* Regen spells were boosted a fair bit, rank 2 now heals 147 a tick (compared to 98 for the current version).

* Ward is still broken, if you're casting the HoT still won't fire.

* New overcap DPS spell, a chance of proccing swarm pets when a nuke / DoT is cast on a mob. Drains 300 mana a tick, meaning it's for use solely on burns (handy in the group game - think squires - but less so for raiders).

AAs saw a boost too.

* The main selling point of SoD is the "spire" system. You have to buy ranks of Fundement of Wisdom, which gives 10 HPs and one overcap STA each rank for us. After buying a few ranks, you can buy the first spire (3 ranks worth), then the next few ranks of Fundement, the second spire and so on. Spires are 90 second buffs with a 10 minute reuse. They're mutually exclusive, ie you can only use one every 10 minutes.
The first spire is a DoT critrate booster (less than necros for some reason).
The second spire adds 1500 points to every blast heal cast.
The final spire is a group buff that boosts procrate and accuracy, as well as giving significant overcap stats. It's currently blocked by Focus, however.

* New ranks of all our main activated AAs, VP, wolfpack, canni, rabid bear (miniscule upgrade - don't bother), aid / union.

* AA Malaise-line spell: neg 200 check, takes 66 away from all resists except disease.

* AA AE slow, a clone of Tigir's Insects.

* Pet crit and flurry AAs, at long last - we were to get those during Gates, but they got yanked. Swarm pet extender AAs (1 second per rank), new ranks of fortified companion and a new innate pet HP boost AA. There's also a reuse time decrease line for Spirit Call, taking it down to 9 mins 30. Talking of which, Spirit Call pets now hit for 216 at the top rank, still not as much as a normal SK pet though!

* A new runspeed / fixed invis / lev combo buff. I won't say too much in fear of a nerf, but it's very fast indeed.

* A couple of activated AAs that reduce resist rate for spells landing on mobs.

* AAs which extend the research cap (from 200 to 300 - yes, all classes can now do limited research).

* New ranks of avoidance and mitigation AAs, natural durability, the AA which gives 100 HP a rank, regen / mana regen cap boosts. There's also a new AA which directly boosts your AC each rank.

A quick note on items: new tradeskilled weapons are on the menu, with sub-Crystallos ratios (group, that is). They have stats on a par with Crystallos weapons, ie around 480 HPs - and the theme of being close to existing tiers is reflected in all the items I've seen so far, bar the 700HP stuff from Discord. The group items continue to have lacklustre mod2s and the shotgun approach of a lot of little mods remains - as does the focus effect system.
No word on armour progression or raid gear at all, as it wasn't available to view this time around.

Overall - we did pretty well out of it and there's a chance - just a chance - that we'll be able to main-heal in endgame grouping content at least. Although I'm really not sure how well our 5K heal will hold out against trash that quads for 5K! Druids will still be a better healing choice, however and it remains to be seen whether groups will trust a cleric merc to do the job.

[Yesak]

what is the argument in giving SKs much stronger pets? I dont get that one at ALL. For all our complaining about dogdog, it looks like he gets shafted again. We'll see how things shake out with SoD going live. I enjoy our healing upgrades but I wish we didnt have to give up dogdog. I'm excited about new movement spell but otherwise I'm not very excited about these changes.

[Retron]

[Jorelora]

This is all very disappointing. Especially about our pet. We should be able to do the same dps as a cleric hammer

[Jorelora]

Also "The final spire is a group buff that boosts procrate and accuracy, as well as giving significant overcap stats. It's currently blocked by Focus, however."

Do they give any indication that they plan to fix that?

[zantocon]

This makes me a sad puppy

[Macnair]

[Hecude Poison`Blood]

[Keltsete]

Well things could be better could be worse for a shaman this time around. Compared to a few classes I'd say we got shafted but then if you look at a couple of other classes (monks come to mind) things could be a hell of a lot worse.

The heal is a nice addition however.

[Retron]

[Funi]

Wasn't there an AA levi as well? Perfected levitation? Isn't it gone now?

[Unmei]

I don't really see how you can -possibly- complain about the mana cost of the new heal, considering the fact that it's an serious EFFICIENCY upgrade on Gemmi's.

Gemmi's2: 3319 HPs, 868 mana=3.82 HPs/mana.
Dannal's2: 5199 hps, 1144 mana=4.54 HPs/mana.

That's a nearly 20% upgrade. Compare say, the upgrade from Ahnkaul's Mending:

Ahnkaul's2: 2887 HPs, 768 mana=3.75 HPs/mana.

You folks got a huge boost in raw power AND efficiency. Gift horse. Mouth. Do not look in.

[Bigcat Daddy-o]

[Unmei]

I honestly couldn't say about clerics, but it doesn't look like they got anything real new and exciting. Which is sad, because giving Shamans and Druids real, solid healing tools is only half the battle of priest class balance. =/

Though as long as all three classes are preferred over mercenaries, I guess things are okay for now.

[Retron]

[Unmei]

I was in beta, and I watched the whole thing. That's not the point. It's not a question of who begrudges whom what. That's just class infighting. The point is that you got a really big upgrade, both in terms of power and efficiency, and now you seem to be saying that it's not big enough? Druid healing enhancements have nothing to do with this any more than the improvement to shaman group HoTs does. Shouldn't you be -pleased- with a 55% power upgrade and a 20% efficiency upgrade instead of bemoaning some balance issue about bitter druids?

Hell, if -my- class got a 50% improvement in -any- of our core abilities, I'd be pretty damn pleased.

It's beta. Things get changed. If they left you a crippled spell, that'd be one thing, but the end result is still massively better than anything you've had before.

[Jorelora]

Not sure why you guys are going back and forth on the heal. Its annoying that it was reduced, but not surprising.
What I'm curious about, in no particular order:
Why can't they fix our Ward spell instead of just introducing a new rank of a broken spell?
Why do we have a zillion pet aa's and the worst pet in game?
Is there a decent resist check on our new AA AE slow?
Exactly how much did they shorten the duration of focus?
And why can't Unity of Spirits have an AA to reduce the cast time?

[Tugela]

[Tugela]

[Kumudil]

Q: Is there a decent resist check on our new AA AE slow?
A: As it is implementet it casts Tigris, so 0 resicheck.

[Unmei]

[Funi]

[Funi]

Is there really no edit button or is it just hidden from my view? Make the above yes with a capital "Y". Thanks

[Tharkis]

You do realize that your options are "have the pet aa" or "have no pet aa" they're in ADDITION to what you're normally getting, there' no 'quota' that they cant go over or anything.

Would you rather Nodyin remove all the pet aa from you entierly, you wont get any compensation, they're just a bonus / perk. I'm sure he would do it if enough druids or shaman were pissed about getting pet aas, it wouldnt be any skin off his back.

[Funi]

Not to be argumentative but like many other Shaman I don't cast the pet anyway and there for would find it irrelevant weather the AA's where removed or not. Pet AA's are the VERY last AA's I get each expansion. I remembered a time when SK's NEVER cast pets. Do you think most of them would have cared if they had pet AA's back then? Now their pets are not too shabby and I'm actually starting to see more and more of them. What's the DPS the Shaman pet adds? 83 DPS for one maybe two mobs then he's dead? I know you can spend a lot of time buffing him up to do more but he's still dead after a few mobs and you have to cast and rebuffing him over and over. So for many it's just not worth it.

I personally wouldn't ask for the AA's to be removed because I know many do use him but on a personal level I wouldn't care no more so than I'd care about Feralisis being removed.

[Brohg]

There's no reason for doggie to die besides the lack of your attention in managing his activity.

[Retron]

[Fenier]

[Bigcat Daddy-o]

Interesting, and likely all true, but EQ's demise has been predicted before... Actually the first time I recall it being predicted was Velious.


It isn't the game it used to be, but it's still the game.

Just one man's thought. Sadly, it looks like you might be over EQ, or at least on a break. That is sad for the game Fenier, because ever since you have come on to the scene you have added a lot. If it is over for you, I wish you well, and it's just a break, see you when you get back.


Peace and love to you and Sabby.

[Unmei]

No offense Fen, but your comments just seem... kinda out of touch.

Blizzard develops 15-25 man raids...because that's what they've been doing the whole time. EQ has pitched a number of raids of that size in its career, and with a very small number of exceptions, they've ended up unused.

With regard to specialized roles... I don't know that I've seen roles be this unspecialized in a while, what with the very large boosts recieved by knights in certain specific tanking aspects, and by non-cleric priests in healing.

It seems very odd that you should be evaluating an expansion you haven't seen based on the number of posts and views on a board that you yourself admit is pretty much dead.

I don't really see anything about this expansion that makes it any more likely to be the last than any of the last several.

[Fenier]

[Kiru]

As of Friday the 17th, both Unity spells have a 6 sec. "duration" for the sole purpose of allowing Quick Buff to affect the cast time. With QB3, Unity of Spirits has a 10 second cast and Talisman of Unity of has a 12.5 second cast time.

Wild Growth only increases the tank's HP pool (by 5200 HP) and requires a heal to make use of the increased pool. Apparently the results are not pretty for the tank if the buff wears off when the tank is under 5200 HP and is in active combat. This buff is now located under HP Buffs | Temporary.

The Perfected Levitation AA levitates you permanently (unless you visit a no levitation zone, of course).

Spirit Walk is the name of the "new runspeed / fixed invis / lev combo buff" AA. It has two parts: Spirit Walk is the combo run speed / levitation buff part. Invisibility of Spirit Walk is the invisibility part. They split the buff into two parts so that we won't fall to our deaths when the invis breaks.

Some of our spells had weak names or names that were inconsistent with older spells in the same line. Friday's beta patch included updated names for a good number of the new spells.

[Retron]

[knumhotep]

[Funi]

[Lathdrinor]

MMOs are such that the masses will always follow fads. Today, this might be WoW and WAR; tomorrow, it might be something else - the Bioware Star Wars MMO, perhaps, or maybe one of the dozen others in production. However, if there is one thing I know about games, it's that people always return to the quality ones. So, in that context, what's wrong with EQ?

I think the biggest problems with EQ are accessibility and tradition. The Devs fear player power too much. I suppose it's natural that they do - EQ was supposed to be the "hard game" on SoE's lineup, made for "hardcore" players willing to grind for hours. WoW, by comparison, is all about accessibility - you are not likely to go through a WoW expansion without experiencing a majority of the content. By contrast, in EQ you could purchase an expansion for $40 and not see half of the zones. It's not just a player choice, either - sometimes there's simply too much catching up to do. Take group tanks, for example - the amount of hp and ac they need to tank in tier 3+ SoF is such that many casual tanks never even see those zones. You don't have this problem in WoW - appropriate gear for high-end instances is handed out to you via solo quests, and there is no AA hurdle to overcome.

Next, tradition - frankly, there is too much of it. People fear change to the extent that they'll rally against it. In some respects, it's good that SoD did not attract as much attention. Perhaps people were too busy playing with Mercs to notice that SoE got through some major healer changes. If EQ had been as active a game as it was years ago I don't think this would've happened. How long have we noticed the over dependence on clerics? How long have people been pointing it out? Yet, only now have the devs really responded. And even now, how insulting is it to receive an exp res for 90% in an expansion where 96% resses are available to just about everybody via Mercenaries? Is 6% really that unbalancing? Do clerics really need that edge? If so, why introduce Mercenaries that anybody can pop out for a 96% res? It's a practical slap in the face but, if I were to go by Ummei's logic, I shouldn't complain because "it's better than anything you've had before."

Another aspect of tradition is SoE's copy-and-paste habit. SoE, in the name of class balance, has been selling us the same spells and AAs for *years*. They have a tendency to introduce new abilities only when game mechanics demand it. This leads to serious stagnation. Blizzard, by contrast, introduces many new class features every expansion. Yeah, this is potentially destabilizing - the 3.0 patch for WoW screwed up a lot of classes and some people are furious, but it also keeps the game from getting stale.

As a shaman when was the last time I got something truly exciting? All of SoF was pretty much copy-and-paste. Healing buffs, sure - I'll take them (partly because I need them), but where's the creativity around here? Where's the distinction? Shamans used to be about something and I'm just not sure they're about that anymore. This has to do with the dev fear of player power again. I mean, look at Feralisis - WHAT were they THINKING? "Hmm, I wonder how I can pre-nerf this ability so that people can't abuse it?" SoE is so damn caught up in tradition and balance that they'd rather go the play-it-safe route. No offense, but when I go fifteen levels without a single upgrade to Champion (you know, the spell everybody points out for shamans?), I tend to get a little pissed. I am very tempted to whine, at this point, about BSTs getting Bestial Alignment to add even MORE group utility to their already hefty list, but I thought better of it. All I ask for is some rethinking on the Devs' part on what role the shaman is supposed to play. If it's to be the king of melee buffers, where are our new, shaman-specific buffs? It's to be the king of melee debuffers, where are our new, shaman-specific debuffs? If it's to be just like clerics, where are our new chunk heals?

Moving aside from shamans for a moment (because I could rant on and on and I don't want to), the same lack-of-depth argument applies to gear. SoE standardized gear distribution in SoF. To them, this is the Great Leap Forward - now they can use an automatic stat calculator to whip up each expansion's gear in seconds. I don't begrudge some consistency across gear sets - in fact, I welcome it. But I don't think this should come at the cost of gear diversity. Why can't they have standardized gear sets and individual pieces simultaneously? Because it takes too much time? But they've had a year's worth of time. Hell, it can't be that hard to tune your automatic loot generator to generate some random loot and scatter it around the zones. With the way they do named mobs these days (more hps! more dmg! slow mitigation to 20%! proc 1-2 adds every ten seconds!) they can probably even generate random nameds. It boggles the mind that Diablo II still has a better loot system than just about every MMO in existence.

I play EQ because, in some ways, it's still the best PvE MMO around. WoW has to balance PvE with PvP, and WAR I don't even have to mention. But as a PvE MMO, as one of the few PvE MMOs with solid base mechanics, EQ just frustrates the heck out of me sometimes. It's not that the game isn't good, it's that it could be so much better. There was, and still is, great potential in EQ. But for whatever reason - be it lack of desire or lack of capability - SoE simply squanders that potential more often than not. They come so close, sometimes... I mean, look at SoF - if Crystallos had been more accessible, if group tank ac had been better, if the camps didn't have such mind-bogglingly low spawn rates, it could've been a great step in the right direction. It could've narrowed the gap between raiders and groupers, between power gamers and casual gamers, such that they would've been able to make SoD into an expansion everyone can enjoy. But as it is... I don't know. People were so hopeful and excited at the start of SoF... I don't see the same level of interest for SoD.

[Brohg]

I don't think closing that gap would be a good thing. That lack of distinction is what makes having a great character in other games so non-special.

[Lathdrinor]

There isn't a lack of distinction in games like WoW. The top PvP arena teams, the top raiders, etc. *are* distinguished from their peers and frankly, the idea that there's no distinction of gear in WoW is a myth. That's not the issue, here. The issue is the size of the gap across expansions, and the accessibility of the content. 80% of the content in WoW, each expansion, is widely accessible and will be experienced by the majority of players. They are built for "casual consumption." By contrast, most of SoF wasn't built for casual consumption just by the sheer difficulty of many camps, mobs, etc. This is related to the issue of how each game treats expansions, also. WoW does a gear reset at the start of each expansion - the previous expansion's mid-tier raid gear becomes the new casual gear. This way the new expansion becomes an even playing field, but of course it doesn't stay that way since after 1-2 months the gap starts forming again, thus distinguishing the pros from the casuals, so to speak.

[Maztrak]

[Woodelfous]