The Wizard Bug / Issue List: Sentinel's Fate Edition [Archive]

Mythal_EQ2

04-07-2010, 01:47 PM

Since the previous thread listing our class's bugs, problems and general issues has not been updated in quite some time, here's a fresh list, compiled to include everything from Sentinel's Fate launch onwards.As before, I'll try to keep this updated, if people want to add anything that I might have missed.Updated: April 8th 2010To begin then:ISSUES / BUGS WITH SPELLS<ol><li><div>Spell: Storming Tempest : This damage over time spell is missing its last tick. Unmodified, this spell has a duration of 48 seconds, and the damage is on an 8 second timer. When cast, this spell does its initial damage, then begins with the damage over time portion as expected (which is supposed to tick 6 times), for a total of 7 hits (initial hit + 6 ticks). After 40 seconds, and the 5th tick of the spell, it continues counting down the last 8 seconds, as expected, but when the timer reaches zero, and the final tick is expected to go off, nothing happens and the spell simply finishes. The reason this is considered a bug as oppose to working as intended, other than every other DoT in the game working the way we collectively believe this spell should, is that if you cancel the spell after 40 seconds, but before the spell expires at 48 seconds, you get the mysterious 6th tick of damage, which would have been missing if you did not manually cancel it. This issue has been around for at least 3 years.</div><ul><li><div>Following is a copy of my logs for Storming Tempest and Ice Spears. With AAs, Storming Tempest for me lasts for 23.4 seconds and is supposed to tick every 3.8 seconds (a total of 6 ticks plus the initial hit). Ice Spears lasts for 24 seconds and is supposed to tick every 4 seconds (a total of 6 ticks plus the initial hit).(1270654998)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:18 2010] A storm of lightning begins to form around you.(1270654998)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:18 2010] YOUR Storming Tempest critically hits training dummy for 8328 magic damage. (Initial Hit)(1270654998)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:18 2010] A storm of lightning surges towards Training dummy!(1270655002)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:22 2010] YOUR Storming Tempest critically hits training dummy for 6706 magic damage. (Tick 1)(1270655006)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:26 2010] YOUR Storming Tempest critically hits training dummy for 6739 magic damage. (Tick 2)(1270655010)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:30 2010] YOUR Storming Tempest critically hits training dummy for 6355 magic damage. (Tick 3)(1270655014)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:34 2010] YOUR Storming Tempest critically hits training dummy for 6969 magic damage. (Tick 4)(1270655018)[Wed Apr 07 18:43:38 2010] YOUR Storming Tempest critically hits training dummy for 7070 magic damage. (Tick 5)(1270655080)[Wed Apr 07 18:44:40 2010] You utter an arcane spell of freezing.(1270655080)[Wed Apr 07 18:44:40 2010] YOUR Ice Spears critically hits training dummy for 3232 cold damage. (Initial Hit)(1270655080)[Wed Apr 07 18:44:40 2010] Training dummy is wrapped in Icy Spears!(1270655084)[Wed Apr 07 18:44:44 2010] YOUR Ice Spears critically hits training dummy for 817 cold damage. (Tick 1)(1270655088)[Wed Apr 07 18:44:48 2010] YOUR Ice Spears critically hits training dummy for 1031 cold damage. (Tick 2)(1270655092)[Wed Apr 07 18:44:52 2010] YOUR Ice Spears critically hits training dummy for 1585 cold damage. (Tick 3)(1270655096)[Wed Apr 07 18:44:56 2010] YOUR Ice Spears critically hits training dummy for 1849 cold damage. (Tick 4)(1270655100)[Wed Apr 07 18:45:00 2010] YOUR Ice Spears critically hits training dummy for 1406 cold damage. (Tick 5)(1270655104)[Wed Apr 07 18:45:04 2010] YOUR Ice Spears critically hits training dummy for 1865 cold damage. (Tick 6)(1270655104)[Wed Apr 07 18:45:04 2010] Training dummy's Icy Spears melt away.</div></li></ul></li><li><div>Spell: Iceshield: Stacking issues exist with this spell. If more than one wizard cast this on the same person, only the last one casting will receive credit for the damage. Spell quality seems to be irrelevant, as in the above issue, and a lower quality spell will overwrite a higher quality spell if cast after it. </div></li><li><div>Spell: Furnace of Ro: This spell can be rather unwieldy to use in some (most) combat situations. A simple suggestion for this spell, to make it a little easier to use but without removing the flavor of it being a stationary pet, is to have it appear under the target mob or the target group/raid member instead of under ourselves.</div></li><li><div>Spell: Converge: This spell, which is a minor hate transfer on the MT, as well as a power proc for the MT and caster, does not stack with other versions of this spell, or the warlock variant. This was presumably due to there being no hate transfer cap when the hate transfer portion of this spell was added. As there is now (and has been for over three years) a hate transfer cap, making this spell stack either with multiple instances of itself or at a minimum with the warlock version, would give sorcerers a greater means of power regeneration, without having the ability to overload the tank with hate transfers. Given the severe changes to power replenishment abilities and items, this would be a very welcome change.</div></li><li><div>Spell: Ro's Blade: This spell's effect should be brought up to par with the Warlock version (which currently does more damage). Also would be nice if it could be changed to proc off of any attack (spells and ranged as well), rather than just on melee attacks.</div></li><li><div>Spell: Protoflame: As with all dumbfire pet spells, the issue here is lack of usefulness due to survivability. At the Fan Faire we were told that dumbfire pets would be changed to be simply visible DoT's. This has not happened, and with the plethora of AEs that exist in Sentinel's Fate (as well as previous expansions), these spells have become a joke.</div></li><li><div>Spell: Aurora: Since the game launched, wizards have been asking about the reason why we were ever given this spell. We have yet to receive a reply, and yet with every tier we see yet another upgrade to it. Is it useful? In perhaps 1 out of 10.000 fights (if that) it may be. Please, look into changing this. Removing the self-mez component would make it marginally more useful. Changing the spell entirely would probably be best though.</div></li></ol>ISSUES / BUGS WITH ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENTS<ol><li><div>Elemental Surprise: This alternate advancement is supposed to increase the damage of the wizard's abilities by 10% while the target's health is above 80%. Rangers get a similar ability, whereas warlocks and assassins get one which increases their damage by 10% while the target's health is below 30%. This is a significant difference, and can in no way be classified as "balanced", especially when considering that most raid mobs can heal once dropped below 50%, thus potentially increasing the time during which their health will remain in the 30% range. Either change the wizard and ranger ability to last until the target's health is 70%, give all four classes the increased damage output for 25% health ranges (100% - 75% for wizards and rangers, 25% - 0% for assassins and warlocks), or change everyone to the 30% - 0% range.</div></li><li><div>Iceshape/Fireshape AA choices: Currently these achievements give the wizard two new abilities (Iceshape and Fireshape respectively). I would suggest that instead they are made to affect the spell lines for Frigid Gift / Surge of Ro, giving them the ability to change all spells cast for their duration into cold/fire spells respectively. This would not only save (a little) time, since these abilities currently have a cast time, but would also make it easier since there would be no need to macro them (often ending in spell queues messing up the casting of one or the other). (To clarify, this suggestion would work similar to the current "Enhance: Magi's Shielding" AA).</div></li><li><div>Brainstorm: This AA was changed two expansions ago from 8% increase in potency to a mere 4% increase in potency with 10 points spent. There are two issues with this ability. First of all, 4% increase -- in anything -- for 10 points is really very little and should be re-evaluated. Secondly, there is the issue with the cap in potency itself. For many of our spells, especially our "signature" spells such as Ball of Fire, Ice Comet and Fusion, due to specialized AAs, Focus adornments or other item effects, we easily reach the 100% potency cap, making AAs such as this completely worthless. It should be reworked to provide something like a 5% increase in potency, crit chance and crit bonus for the 10 points spent.</div></li><li><div>Freehand Sorcery: The same issue with the potency cap affects Freehand Sorcery as well. 28% extra potency for the next spell cast "sounds" awesome, but when you consider the fact that, at most, it might increase a spell's potency by 5-10%, its usefulness drops dramatically. It is true that with the Sentinel's Fate endline (Mental Acuity) it can also give an extra 24% crit bonus, but, seriously, that's 18 points spent (10+8) for that increase alone.</div></li></ol>ISSUES / BUGS WITH SKILLS AND CLASS MECHANICS<ol><li><div>Skills not affecting casting ability properly: This refers to our Disruption (mainly) and other casting skills. As raiding wizards we can see our Disruption skill well over 500. That would, if it worked properly, mean that we'd be casting at an effective level of 100 (effectively increasing our spell's resistability by up to 20%). This is most certainly not the case - or, if it is, its effect is so minimal as to not be seen. Certainly, if (for whatever reason) our skill is lowered, we will feel the effect (more outright resists, etc), but higher skill levels do not bring along similar benefits.</div></li><li><div>Potency caps: As mentioned above, with regards to the Alternate Advancements Brainstorm and Freehand Sorcery, the potency cap creates a serious bottleneck for us, especially given the fact that a significant number of AAs are specialized for specific spells, bringing them close, or even to, the potency cap and therefore nullifying the benefits of other more generalized AAs or gear. This would, perhaps, not be such an issue if those AAs were not mandatory for us to get in order to be able to get other -- more usefull -- AAs down the line. The potency cap really needs to be reworked and split up into three categories:</div><ul><li><div>Increase from primary stat</div></li><li><div>Increase from gear</div></li><li><div>Increase from alternate advancements</div></li></ul></li></ol>ISSUES / BUGS WITH ITEMIZATIONThere have been numerous posts about itemization in the expansion so I won't make this section too long. My main comment here is that, for the most part, when it comes to charms and symbols I have yet to see something that wowed me. When it comes to jewelry and weapons, there are, indeed, some very nice items but there is really no variety (with the exception of necklaces).Quite honestly, I've yet to see (and we've killed every instance mob with the exception of hard-mode Roehn'Theer and Xilaxis) a charm that I would use over my T8 charms, a symbol that I would use over my T8 symbols or any wrist-slot item that would replace my T8 ones.I'm not saying they're not out there... but if they are, they're hiding really, really well.And, by the way, completely obliterating every... single... charm and jewelry item's +crit chance... in SF really does not make us want to use them over T8 ones. Crit bonus is nice, but if your crit chance drops from 100% to 50% there's really no benefit to it.

Bright_Morn

04-07-2010, 07:43 PM

First off Disruption no longer works like that.To quote the Wizard Guide by Daray:As a note here, casting techniques/skills are also based on the diminishing returns curve. Raising your disruption skill from 400 (at level 80) to the hard cap of 520 will make your disruption-based spells an additional 20% harder to resist. Formula for the skills cap is 6.5 * Level.So even with over 500 skill at level 90 it does not decrease the resist rate in the way that you are describing.Secondly I believe there are some other spell and AA issues that were not included.1> Ice Nova - A lower level can be blocked if it lands within the knock down period of a higher level version of the same spell (0.5 seconds). This may seem minor, but the cast time and the damage amount it can be a detriment to DPS.2> Hail Storm - This AA ability does not seem to be stacking properly. Multiple wizards cannot effect the same target with this AA ability. Equal and higher level wizards overwrite other wizards casts of this spell, and lower level wizards cannot land the spell at all durring the 15second durration.

Mythal_EQ2

04-08-2010, 07:58 AM

<cite>Taliesan@Unrest wrote:</cite><blockquote>As a note here, casting techniques/skills are also based on the diminishing returns curve. Raising your disruption skill from 400 (at level 80) to the hard cap of 520 will make your disruption-based spells an additional 20% harder to resist. Formula for the skills cap is 6.5 * Level.So even with over 500 skill at level 90 it does not decrease the resist rate in the way that you are describing.Secondly I believe there are some other spell and AA issues that were not included.1> Ice Nova - A lower level can be blocked if it lands within the knock down period of a higher level version of the same spell (0.5 seconds). This may seem minor, but the cast time and the damage amount it can be a detriment to DPS.2> Hail Storm - This AA ability does not seem to be stacking properly. Multiple wizards cannot effect the same target with this AA ability. Equal and higher level wizards overwrite other wizards casts of this spell, and lower level wizards cannot land the spell at all durring the 15second durration.</blockquote>First of all, in my post I said that Disruption of 500 would equal "an effective level of 100" -- i.e. for opposed resist checks -- so I am in no way contradicting Daray's post about how it would make our spells harder to resist. In any case, whether you take my wording or his, extra Disruption currently does very little, if anything.Secondly, the issues with Ice Comet and Hailstorm were fixed (Hailstorm with yesterday's patch, Ice Comet with the one previous if I am not mistaken), so there was no reason to include them.

Bright_Morn

04-08-2010, 12:51 PM

Great, I missed those updates glad to hear that those stacking issues have been taken care of. However the wording of casting as a level 100 is not the same as gaining 20% resistance bonus. Which is why I pointed it out.

DrkMage

07-12-2010, 03:38 PM

This needs to be altered slightly. Remove the potency cap issues as potency cap has been lifted.Also I would like to add that Furnace of Ro can be aoe auto attacked down (it is aoe immune to regular aoe attacks) But seeing as AOE auto attack ignores aoe immunity Furnace of Ro becomes less useful the more mobs you pull. This is contradictory since it is our aoe debuff. For instance in research halls, you pull half a room and drop furnace and within 2 seconds the furnace dies because of the aoe auto attacks. Please fix this! Furnace was supposed to be more useful than this on large aoe fights.

Azol

08-25-2010, 07:29 PM

It looks like last GU 57 has broken many things at once: I began to experience many stacking issues with spells like Flames of Velious, IC etc - if there are 2+ wizards in group and Wizard #1 has casted one of these spells on target, Wizard 2 will get annoying "Would not take effect" and the spell just won't cast at all. Wizard 2 will be able to cast the spell successfully only after "control" part of the previous spell from Wizard #1 will be over (i.e. slow or knockback portion).That's ridiculous. We just have had the Storming Tempest stacking issues resolved... and voila!