What Changes do Illy's Want? [Archive] - EQ2 Forum Archive @ EQ2Wire

snowli

08-16-2010, 10:43 AM

If for example illy was planned to be the next class for an overhaul of it's issues, what would you want changed?? What would people be in favour of to give illy's a boost back in the right direction?? Periodically I'll try and edit this OP with coloured text for suggestions coming from the thread, if I'm not too busyI'm 1 of the only 2 regular shammys in our raidforce, and recruiting to replace our last illy for raiding is so hard I made an illy raid-alt inspite of that, so I only have a part-time newcomers perspective on playing this class, but these are some of my thoughts:Illy's are 12 times worse at helping a raid keep mana, they only help their group keep power up. For mana management to stack up against the whole cross raid group manaflow of a coercer: <ol><li>The same groupwide manaflows?</li><li>or Illy myth proc raidwide? (possibly too powerful for a proc not active ability)</li><li>or Manatap and Manacloak made raidwide? (probably not as powerful or as a clutch ability as groupwide manaflow, but a steady trickle raidwide) {3 triggers of manacloak for each raid member, most will be unused of course)</li><li>or Savant goes raidwide? (giving it good clutch utility when it's up)</li></ol>I think option 3 is best personally, it keeps coercer 12x better manaflow unique but lets illy's help cross-group i.e. raid mana despite the 12x worse manaflow ability. It would give us reason to cast manacloak and manatap far more, which will lower our dps further of course. Far too many Temp Buffs:<ol><li>fold destructive mind into peace of mind, so taking the aa just adds the bonus affect to the pom spell - they're on same recast anyways</li><li>fold illuminate into flash of brilliance, so getting the illuminate aa just adds the 50% less resistance buff into flash of brilliance - they're on same recast anyways</li></ol>you can't keep adding a new temp buff every expac, eventually what time is left?Buffs, making them more worthwhile:<ol><li>Adding some crit bonus, potency, accuracy, flurry, +all primary stats, or a damage proc in order to remain meaningful as buffs percentage to all melee buffs so they are useful for names not just trash, and make redundant stats less redundant? This includes Arms of Imagination (aoe melee useless on most meaningful non-trash fights), Rapidity, Illusory Arms</li><li>Making Arms of Imagination and Illusory Arms into 'until cancelled' group buffs that persist thru death - the amount of single target buffing is just crazy on this class.</li><li>make time compression self also, it's nuts when for an example the warlock has UT and you want TC but can't and have to put it on a melee healer or troub or scouts. Trouby and dirge buffs can go on themselves - whatever old argument that might have used to exist for non-self TC is invalid.</li><li>Allow TC to go overcap for cast speed, recovery and reuse - restoring it to it's former desireability.</li><li>Make single target buffs persist after deaths/zones/pet zones would make life a lot less annoying?</li><li>Combining both the red adorns for synergism into 1 adorn.</li><li>giving the prism adorn 3 extra triggers like coercers adorn, not 2 as currently.</li><li>Timewarp... needs a redesign. I raid next to my gf who is number 1 dps in our raid with her mage. even with the rarest opportunity that gives us that most don't have, to perfectly synchronise timewarp by request, lining it up with her best spike abilities - it still adds a pitiful amount of dps (and part of that dps originates from non TW spell double attacks), which is worse considering the amount of hassle it takes. What TWarp adds to any other caster is truly pathetic. I'm not sure that managing timewarp, taking illy time off dps, and encouraging mages to hold back spike abilities incase of TW's they are probably still immune for (but no1 can see because of bad log parsing too many buffs, no maintained icon etc) doesn't lower dps overall frankly. TIMEWARP either needs a) groupwide 10sec duration, 2min base reuse, or b) groupwide 5sec duration, 1min base reuse.</li><li>channeled focus needs a boost.</li><li>Doppelganger providing a Xhits stoneskin to make it relevant. Let the doppelganger be cast on the hostile target, and have it absorb the next X (3?) actions of the hostile target.</li><li>Fix spellshield, make it raidmate targetable, make it a persistant buff, give it a X% chance to stoneskin a non-physical damage.</li></ol> Illy Personal DPS: <ol><li>A blue aoe!</li><li>All 'on termination' damage AA abilities should be burnt at the stake for starters, convert them to potency boosts, dot duration reductions, and/or on first tick spikes - no more, on termination.</li><li>Duration for prismatic chaos could be upped to 40secs, just to make it running out on slow pulls less annoying. Prismatic chaos should be castable on either the mob or a player, on a player, all hits trigger it, on a mob any incoming hits from any player trigger it. Timewarping needs to double up adorned extra triggers of prism aswell. Possibly, prismatic chaos could be converted to be triggered by any ability/spell/hit from the group of the person it's casted on (unless there's tech problems to adding this better solution) - so it's still different to coercer but not quite so badly handicapped in comparison.</li><li>Give the personae reflection better mit and crit mit and hp's (perhaps duplicating it's owners), and a lot more hp. it dies constantly in raids, often it's not even worth casting. Even better, make Personae damage immune.. the personae pet should be unable to take any damage, but also unable to gain any hate - this could be an effect applied to the mythical/enervated, so personae doesn't insta-gib on every aoe/frontal/taillash/add arrival/mob turn/positon change etc etc.</li><li>UV beam aa's need to up it's potency and crit bonus, effects that are relevant to SF gear, not the effects they have.</li><li>All aa's for casting speed need to have potency substituted instead.</li><li>Give Illy's a genuine spike damage ability, something a smart player can usefully combine with timewarp and/or dispatches and so on, e.g. a 5k per tick, 5 times, over 5 seconds dot. Nice suggestion for illusory allies to be a activated storage ability that records what the illy & his groupmates do in heals and damage for X seconds and then a percentage of those heals damage are output by the illy on illusory allies termination.</li></ol>CC - At least a third of our spells are worthless, or actively harmful to group and raid play e.g. memwipes teleports etc. All the aa's for these skills are therefore worthless too.<ol><li>There are a lot of CC opinions, some think it's too broken to fix, others see it as being central to chanter play in an ideal implementation which requires a whole new approach to encounter design, some would like debuffs for those epic immune type spells, others want to dps not be a debuffer etc.</li><li>whatever way it goes, masses of our spells are redundant</li><li>and masses of our aa's too, with the strong likelihood that CC will remain broken for at least another 5 expansions whatever the 'ideal world future intentions' might be - it's worth actually giving illys decent changes in other areas to compensate until that probably never day when most group/raid encounters have meaningful CC that is still fun for everyone...</li></ol>

vexrm

08-16-2010, 12:17 PM

The first thing that needs to be done is defining what the class is any more. Over half our spells aren't used end game. A few of our spells are out right detrimental to cast. Many of our spells do absolutely nothing and while that's better than, say, Illusionary Allies, it's still not good.So, what is an illusionist?If we are to be crowd control we need more crowd control that does something. Enchanters are the only classes in the game who are supposed to be able to crowd control epics. Only it's flat out worthless. So if this is to be part of our power it needs boosted.If we are utility our utility needs boosted. We hit too many things that get capped. Timewarp is a joke. You spend half your time rebuffing folks.If we are mana regen... there will be mass rioting in the streets. Though if that's the case, we need more mana control and regen abilities. We need ways to take people from 0 to full. We need to be able to tell the wizard to mana burn because they will still have power at the end.The class is not a DPS class. I think every one recognizes that. There's a huge argument over where our DPS should be. I will say this, for what we add now, our DPS is horribly lacking.Right now, I resent spamming the buttons and adding very little. I'm spazzing out trying to keep everything queued up and going, but doing so much less than any one else. I wouldn't mind spamming buttons if it counted for something. This is the big thing I want change. A sense of accomplishment.However, till the Devs state what their vision for this class is, it's going to be a broken class. We are split too many ways with too many ineffective abilties being Class Defining (tm) for us to matter.

desinence

08-16-2010, 04:24 PM

<cite>vexrm wrote:</cite><blockquote>If we are to be crowd control we need more crowd control that does something. Enchanters are the only classes in the game who are supposed to be able to crowd control epics. Only it's flat out worthless. So if this is to be part of our power it needs boosted.crowd control epics?!?!? are you out of your mind? If your talking about amnesia or illusory allies that is used for ending a raid encounter, that is far from "crowd" control. If you applying it to anything else, none of our crowd control was ever intended to work on epics, ie. the description of the fricken spells, try reading them.</blockquote>Really Vex, did you not learn on the flames that your were not an authority and should perhaps just leave you comments to /support as far as the class development goes? Please, please, please go learn something before pretending you know something.

Andu

08-16-2010, 04:27 PM

As vexrm says the first thing to do is state what an Illusionist is. They certainly are NOT what is described at character creation.Mana management is about the only thing ok about the class atm. Making it raidwide won't improve the class much if at all. Agree on all the buff stuff.All good ideas for DPS too. I'd say the pet should just be straight immune to non-direct AoE's. Its an illusion after all and hardly powerful.

vexrm

08-16-2010, 04:28 PM

It's right there in our spell description. It effects epic targets. I'm not saying it's doable in todays day and age. I said "supposed to be able to". I believe coercers are the only other class to get that.

desinence

08-16-2010, 04:40 PM

<cite>vexrm wrote:</cite><blockquote>It's right there in our spell description. It effects epic targets. I'm not saying it's doable in todays day and age. I said "supposed to be able to". I believe coercers are the only other class to get that.</blockquote>It will work once and briefly is a paraphrase of the descriptions, then the raid mob gains immunity. this is still how it works, and yes, .00002 seconds is still briefly working apparently by soe standards. If you ever thought that implied they were supposed to have viable uses on epics, then i am sorry, you are as i initially stated, out of your mind.

vexrm

08-16-2010, 04:45 PM

<cite>desinence wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>vexrm wrote:</cite><blockquote>It's right there in our spell description. It effects epic targets. I'm not saying it's doable in todays day and age. I said "supposed to be able to". I believe coercers are the only other class to get that.</blockquote>It will work once and briefly is a paraphrase of the descriptions, then the raid mob gains immunity. this is still how it works, and yes, .00002 seconds is still briefly working apparently by soe standards. If you ever thought that implied they were supposed to have viable uses on epics, then i am sorry, you are as i initially stated, out of your mind.</blockquote>No, but I can believe that SOE factors this into our "power" as Chanters are the only ones to get this I'm sure it's sitting on some ones class balance sheet. As I said, if we are to be mezzers it needs a boost.

snowli

08-16-2010, 08:34 PM

Regarding the raidwide versus group mana management, I've been in several raids this summer with 1 coercer as the only chanter, and I've also been the lone illy as the only chanter in a raid - there's a very big difference between the 2, coercer can support multiple groups while keeping his group in power, illys simply cannot match that at all.If you haven't seen raids with no chanters you might not have experienced the difference firsthand, but it is there, and one important element of the chanter balance and illy package I feel.group mana from illy is okay as it is from coercer, raid mana is abysmal in comparison to coercer.

Giara

08-16-2010, 10:05 PM

What changes does this illy want? 3.5 levels and 60ish AAs so I can retire this toon and switch to mystic and forget this toon ever existed. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/385970365b8ed7503b4294502a458efa.gif" border="0" />

Zephanor

08-16-2010, 11:50 PM

<cite>snowline wrote:</cite><blockquote>If for example illy was planned to be the next class for an overhaul of it's issues, what would you want changed?? What would people be in favour of to give illy's a boost back in the right direction??I'm 1 of the only 2 regular shammys in our raidforce, and recruiting to replace our last illy for raiding is so hard I made an illy raid-alt inspite of that, so I only have a part-time newcomers perspective on playing this class, but these are some of my thoughts:For mana management to stack up against the across raid whole group manaflow of a coercer: <ol><li>The same groupwide manaflows?</li><li>or Illy myth proc raidwide? (possibly too powerful for a proc not active ability)</li><li>or Manatap and Manacloak made raidwide? (probably not as powerful or as a clutch ability as groupwide manaflow, but a steady trickle raidwide)</li><li>or Savant goes raidwide? (giving it good clutch utility when it's up)</li></ol> I think the only vialble option would be to make mana flow group just like coercers. In order for us to maintain power we have to start early and keep it up (manatap, savante, mana cloak) but I don't see them making them raid wide as it would perhaps be overpowered. They reduced the effectiveness of our myth proc which made up for the difference in manaflow that coercers have, I don't see that coming back but would be nice.Buffs, making them worthwhile: <ol><li>Making melee buffs raidtargetable not just group? Not many need these really except for a few troubs I generally don't get asked. Plus keeping it group only would relegate raids to just one illy (which some may prefer, I don't, lol!)</li><li>Adding some flurry percentage to all melee buffs so they are useful for names not just trash, and make redundant DA less redundant?</li><li>make time compression self also, it's nuts when for an example the warlock has UT and you want TC but can't and have to put it on a melee healer or troub or scouts. Trouby and dirge buffs can go on themselves - whatever old argument that might have used to exist for non-self TC is invalid. Strongly agree. Though I would prefer UT as well but almost never get it so being able to TC myself would be great and I don't understand why we can't. </li><li>Make single target buffs persist after deaths/zones/pet zones would make life a lot less annoying? Meh, more important things to me that needs to be address that I can live with this (and macro if too annoying but things aren't as bad as they used to be so...)</li><li>Combining both the red adorns for synergism into 1 adorn? Agree and agree.</li><li>Timewarp... needs a redesign. I raid next to my gf who is number 1 dps in our raid with her mage. even with the rarest opportunity that gives us that most don't have, to perfectly synchronise timewarp by request, lining it up with her best spike abilities - it still adds a pitiful amount of dps (and part of that dps originates from non TW spell double attacks), which is worse considering the amount of hassle it takes. What TWarp adds to any other caster is truly pathetic. I'm not sure that managing timewarp, taking illy time off dps, and encouraging mages to hold back spike abilities incase of TW's they are probably still immune for (but no1 can see because of bad log parsing too many buffs, no maintained icon etc) doesn't lower dps overall frankly. TIMEWARP should go RAIDWIDE, with no immunity and a longer recast. TW annoys the crap out of my but the homies like it. I currently have four macros to manage this and don't even ask about what I do for conjys! Though honestly I like it when I can time it on myself (cast sever hate on yourself to help, heheh.) However I would prefer this be group only and honestly I don't see it ever being a RW buff. Still, wouldn't hurt but I would like to make sure it's worth having more than one illy around, heheh. </li><li>channeled focus needs a boost.</li></ol> Illy Personal DPS: <ol><li>All 'on termination' damage AA abilities should be burnt at the stake for starters, convert them to potency boosts, dot duration reductions, and/or on first tick spikes - no more, on termination. I remember reading at one time that we would see a change that would frontload the damage component so we wouldn't have to wait until termination. This would be nice. Maybe it was for some other class, I dunno.</li><li>Duration for prismatic chaos could be upped to 40secs, just to make it running out on slow pulls less annoying.</li><li>Give the personae reflection better mit and crit mit and hp's (perhaps duplicating it's owners), and a lot more hp. it dies constantly in raids, often it's not even worth casting. This is debatable but the consensus is to forget about it. It's great for soloing, okay for groups and a temporary dot in raids. I still use it because if I have two good group healers my pet can survive some of the easy mode mobs but other than that it doesn't really add much to my overall DPS. Any change in the positive would certainly be appreciated but I would rather see my personal DPS upped to T2 mage DPS so I'm not getting stomped by some healers, ouch!</li><li>UV beam aa's need to up it's potency and crit bonus, effects that are relevant to SF gear, not the effects they have. </li><li>All aa's for casting speed need to have potency substituted instead.</li></ol></blockquote>

Tehom

08-17-2010, 02:49 AM

I agree about Time Warp needing a redesign. It is easily the most irritating part of playing the illusionist class. Casting an ability on demand/request by other players is a reactive nuisance that no one enjoys. It's a far cry from the design of victorious concerto, which is an example of how to have a meaningful utility ability that is both proactive and enjoyable for a player to use. The raidwide suggestion isn't bad, though there's a few different ways to go there - just so long as it doesn't turn into a less fun version of Jester's Cap, basically.IA and Rapidity both need either crit bonus, potency, accuracy, flurry, +all primary stats, or a damage proc in order to remain meaningful as buffs. DA and Haste are trivial to cap - although players can have tradeoffs that mean some high end players can still use them, it's very much on a case by case basis and high end itemization strongly suggests unless players maintain a separate gear set to make the most out of an illusionist when they have one that the buffs will become increasingly irrelevant. They need to have properties in the buffs that won't hit existing caps.Our personal dps isn't so much weak as both annoying, tedious, and unrewarding. Prismatic Chaos is the only primary dps ability of a class that usually depends on other players, and frankly should probably be changed at this point. I realize that changing it to have identical trigger conditions to hostage would further blur the lines between us and coercers, but I really no longer care.Our red adorns do need work, since we don't really get comparable upgrades from them to other classes. The synergism ones should be combined, others should be upgraded in effect.As one note about personae - it's funny, but one of the reasons that coercers typically outperform us on trash dps clears is that their possess essence pet is better for VC than a personae is and handily outdamages it on straight-up burn fights. I don't really consider that a big deal since on major fights both are more difficult to keep alive than their work, but if high end fights were to somehow become geared to be RoK-style dps race fights in which their survivability isn't a consideration, it'll become yet another balance concern.

Zephanor

08-17-2010, 03:32 AM

There is or was a post that suggested making Prismatic Chaos a mob cast so that any hit would count, that would be nice. Another suggested making it work on any hostile attack so we could cast it on mages but I think I prefer it simply being a mob cast to help ease some of our tedium.

Amphimedon

08-17-2010, 09:11 AM

Most of the stuff is already mentioned in the Illy issue post on top of this forum, but ok … this is want I want … First of all, we need to be on par with our evil counterpart, because as for now, we are bypassed on all fronts by coercers. Dps-wise: - increase the triggers on Prismatic Chaos (and like above player mentioned, let it be cast on mob instead of player) - get rid of the ‘on termination’ mechanics – in 50% of all cases we don’t get the full (biggest) return of the spell due to mob dying or spell overwriting. The only way we get full return now is to wait until spells run out, which is only frustrating for the illy. Since the ‘on termination’ mechanics gives us no full return, the spent AA points are just a waste. - Give our pet some survivability. As for now, I don’t care to cast my pet because it dies as soon as the mob farts. Make it do some damage or at least give it some kind of functionality. - Increase base damage of illy spells. Mashing buttons just to be outdps’d by a healer isn’t that motivating :S Utility-wise - Remove the 25% DA from Illusionary Arms, replace it by crit bonus and/or potency so it is useful to every class - Allow TC to be cast on self, in line with troub/dirge buffs - Rapidity has become useless due to all melees being capped at haste. Maybe replace it by a crit bonus, potency or ability modifier? - Redesign Timewarp. In its current form it adds nothing to a player/group/raid. At the moment just a waste of AA in my opinion. - Doppleganger is pretty useless in its current form. It dies with the first AE, adds no dps and is currently not worth casting. Let Doppleganger absorb some hits/damage from the mob ( 3 trigger-ish ?) - Redesign Illusory Allies and Phase. They just take up space in the spellbook now. I wouldn’t even care if they got removed. Casting these spells is kind of … suicidal - Redesign Spell Shield so it works also on non-profession spells or change it to another kind of protection(stoneskin) - Make buffs persist through death. It drives me crazy to give out a zillion buffs each time I die, most of them not even able to cast while running Powerregen-wise - Give something to deal with big power drains. The nerf of the myth proc and the fact Mana Flow only can be cast on one group member at a time, makes us have difficulties to bring back power to the group in emergency situations. It has been stated that we are utility, (heck, we aren’t dps for sure). And honestly I don’t have any problem with that. But being a utility class without any utility irritates the hell out of me. We need a fix and we need it fast before the illy population goes down further ….

snowli

08-17-2010, 09:56 AM

Seems all the raiding guilds on our server are having a hard time recruiting illies, our previous illy left so he could raid a different character.Typically our illies do between a quarter to half the dps of coercers in our raid, when the illies have the good troub/fury buffage and coercers have bad, no troub, melee/tank buffage.

Carthr

08-17-2010, 10:07 AM

<cite>snowline wrote:</cite><blockquote>Typically our illies do between a quarter to half the dps of coercers in our raid, when the illies have troub/fury buffage and coercers have no troub melee/tank buffage.</blockquote>That's an issue with your Illy then.. I will say that Illy's need a bump in DPS, but I don't think it should be 2-4x their current DPS like that would suggest. Our best geared Illy would sometimes outparse me, but usually was within 75% of my coercers DPS.

Amphimedon

08-17-2010, 10:48 AM

<cite>Carthrax wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>snowline wrote:</cite><blockquote>Typically our illies do between a quarter to half the dps of coercers in our raid, when the illies have troub/fury buffage and coercers have no troub melee/tank buffage.</blockquote>That's an issue with your Illy then.. I will say that Illy's need a bump in DPS, but I don't think it should be 2-4x their current DPS like that would suggest. Our best geared Illy would sometimes outparse me, but usually was within 75% of my coercers DPS.</blockquote>I guess it all depends on playing style and group setup, but in my experience, Illies end up between 50-75% of the coercer's dps.

snowli

08-17-2010, 12:14 PM

I admit it could partly be motivation/enjoyment that contribute to the 3 illys I've seen raid's low dps.1 of those illy's is my alt in that statement, and certainly:<ol><li> inexperience (and healer instincts still somewhat watching the raid for detrimentals curses hp positioning etc as opposed to totally focusing on dps rotation) </li><li>and of course gear (although pvp gear isn't that bad for dps just bad for strain on healers) </li></ol>contribute to my lower dps with illy, but with great buffs I'm seeing typically 5-9k dps so far while our coercers consistantly churn out 20-25k dps with bad buffs.Whilst the 3 coercers have better gear, familiarity and better aa's than my alt illy that's not as true of the other illy mains I've seen raiding and there's still a big gap, especially considering the 2 different buffing environments of their groups.

Andu

08-17-2010, 04:25 PM

You realise now this is stickied noone will read it <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" />Better than locking I suppose.

Daeloq

08-17-2010, 04:26 PM

<cite>Anduri wrote:</cite><blockquote>You realise now this is stickied noone will read it <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" />Better than locking I suppose.</blockquote>And a rehash of a thread already stickied...

RobF

08-17-2010, 08:23 PM

Anduri wrote:<div><blockquote>Stop making mobs immune to most of our spells.Remove linking on mobs so that mobs act according to their own AI. Get rid of the stupid utterly illogical encounter thing where the brown deer on the left will kick the snot out of you whereas the deer on the right is actually a wimp but for some reason there are four of them. Even though they have the same name and look identical. Make them seperate and actually make it so crowd control is fun and in some cases necessary. In case you had missed it - other classes have mezzes too. Its not like we would be the only solution. There would be no holy trinity here (other than the one we have right now).Stop dreaming up idiocy like making our group mez highly resistable because it is "overpowered to mez whole groups" where in fact that whole group is the equivalent of the solitary mob next to it that can be single target mezzed easily. Or is it that the encounter mechanic is just ridiculous, see above.(My priority highlights - RobF)Stop giving us buffs that noone wants.Stop giving us buffs that people want but disappear when they die forcing you to constantly be recasting them or suffer whinging from your teammates for having the temerity of wanting to play the game and not keep rebuffing them.Stop nerfing our dps so we do less than some healers who are managing to heal the group and outdamage you. Or less dps than the bards who are equipped with far superior utility.Stop giving us idiotic buffs that have immunities but no sensible tool for casting them on a variety of people that doesn't involve spamming the server till it melts with macros. That have stupid warm up periods that are not logged logically so noone is sure you have it. That we have no way of knowing when people are immune, or them being aware that they have the buff until its too late. In short, why have such ridiculous buff mechanics other than to drive people to distraction.</blockquote></div>QFT

biig

08-17-2010, 09:21 PM

Make Time Compression go past the cap of cast recast recovery etc so wen people are capped they still get bennifit

jimmyquinella

08-17-2010, 10:18 PM

For the love of god BLUE AE!!!!!!

jollie

08-18-2010, 04:43 PM

The suggestions above make sense and are mostly in the mode of let's tinker a tiny bit with spells, ability, equipment. Along those lines my only suggestion deviating from what has already been said would be to remove the memory wipe component of illusory allies which would make it usable.Rather than tinkering around the edges, the question of the fundamental purpose and role of the illusionist made me think of some things which might not be the right thing out of the box, but might lead to a more fun end game than at present.My main idea along this line would be to envision a more melee oriented mage. Lots of the aa lines increase melee skills but to what purpose? An illusionist is still a very squishy character. However, I can imagine class armor with greateer mitigation and hp buffs, epic/class weapons with higher damage output, a choice of 2 personae reflections: an offensive one and a defensive one which might intercept damage.The other notion that occured to me, based on my recollection of the enchanter I played in EQ1 was mob debuffing. If top mobs are to be unmezzable, perhaps additional lines of debuffs they cannot resist, weaker than mez but still useful: base stat debuffs to go along with dismay/nullifying staff. Improving the penalty to the mob of chronosiphoning would also fit in with this.On power management, what if there were - aa based or standard spell - a version of manatap which stole much more mana from the mob and distributed it to the whole group but gave a considerable amount of hate and/or an extract mana which required a great deal of health, but distributed a large shot of mana to each group member?Submitted for your consideration with the advance knowledge that all my ideas are bad. =P

Kuchan

08-20-2010, 08:41 PM

I play illy in Onyx and i have to ask one question of all the other illys around, WHAT DO WE HAVE A PET FOR? All an illy pet does is die in raids. I don't even cast it anymore for raids or pvp. As for the PVP side of the the pet it is worthless. Everyone in the game can debuff our pet off. So i would love to see something done with the pet dps and survivability as our counterpart can get a pet and it does way more for them.Another thing I think needs to be addressed is the illy myth. The buff it gives now is a waste of space (1 proc ). I does very little to add power. Also as a class the used to be used to provide mana the way it stands now you can barely keep the group in power so i would like to see a change there.I don't know what everyone else thinks but i remember not all that long ago an illy could parse very well in both raids and PVP. The problem with that is that was when you could crit on procs. I think illys need to get a dps boost as i am still parsing the same in the new x-pac as i was in the last one and all other classes had their dps boosted.My last thing is TIME WARP. I hate this spell with all my heart. It is such a pain in the butt when all you get all raid long is "Time warp me now plz". I really would like to see this dumb duff changed or removed all the way and something better put in.OK this is my last thing i promise. I just wanna talk a second about Illys and PVP. The Nerf to all casters dps killed the illys. We should not get thrown in a lump group with Wizzys and Warlocks. Their dps is way more than ours and now we hit for nothing in pvp and we cant crowd control at all because SONY chose to give everyone the ability to have immunity to all CC so i don't know what we are good for since we cant dps or crowd control so there is no reason for us to be there.I hope SONY takes this serious or all illys will be done with the game or class.

Dojac

09-01-2010, 12:12 AM

One thing I would love to see is some attention paid to our utility in PvP. As it stands in real pvp with a group we're basically an annoyance that isnt worth a heck of alot of notice. Solo in real PvP we're tissue paper and scout fodder. What I would love to see and what I think would make us viable again in PvP is the return of our power drains. Just over two years ago we had a power drain attached to most of our damage spells. While this is pretty useless in PvE it was killer in PvP and the main reason I even made an illy to begin with. I would love to see our power drains come back to augment our crap status in PvP.

vexrm

09-01-2010, 10:57 AM

<cite>Dojac@Vox wrote:</cite><blockquote>One thing I would love to see is some attention paid to our utility in PvP. As it stands in real pvp with a group we're basically an annoyance that isnt worth a heck of alot of notice. Solo in real PvP we're tissue paper and scout fodder. What I would love to see and what I think would make us viable again in PvP is the return of our power drains. Just over two years ago we had a power drain attached to most of our damage spells. While this is pretty useless in PvE it was killer in PvP and the main reason I even made an illy to begin with. I would love to see our power drains come back to augment our crap status in PvP.</blockquote>Disclaimer: I'm not a PvPer.With all the power proccing gear (which I thought you were fading out SOE that's why you nerfed our mythical) would this really have that great an impact?Edit: Spelling fail.

snowli

09-02-2010, 06:34 AM

I think the power drains would be far more useful in some maps than others, even with 5 pieces of power procing gear my mystic regularly runs out on gears maps for example, but far less often in the dens matches becaue of more downtime, running around to get to the next fight, or guarding center etc.Overall I can see more power drains on a pvp basis being a good illy (chanter) distinction, but only in addition to illy damage being looked at, illy damage is so bad, so is illy survivability, and CC is easily circumvented, and matches often are way too 'fluid' for buffing to be anything but annoying in pvp - no time to play because someone constantly needs a rebuff.It's a shame draining a mob of power isn't really practical (takes far too long you can kill it far easier) and doesn't seem to do anything in pve/raid settings.

vexrm

09-02-2010, 05:23 PM

<cite>snowline wrote:</cite><blockquote> shame draining a mob of power isn't really practical (takes far too long you can kill it far easier) and doesn't seem to do anything in pve/raid settings.</blockquote>You can drain a raid mobs power completely. It's very easy to do infact. The kicker? It does nothing. The script continues on just as planned and abilities still fire off.

snowli

09-04-2010, 05:36 PM

that's exactly what I mean - a) draining it does nothing to reduce a mob's output and use of abilities/aoes b) it can take a really long time to drain a raid mob so even if it did do something it it's still unlikely to be worth it.I'm not sure if it's worth adding some encounters where removing mob mana could be important, but it could be interesting to try. It could make a range of abilities and gear have more meaning outside of pvp.

Zivgar

09-09-2010, 03:09 PM

I don't see a problem with the extra damage on termination spells. I have it on the 2 green spells (chromatic shower and storm) The duration on that is 10 and 9 sec not that long to wait, especially on epic fights. With that in mind I wouldn't complain if they just took that termination damage and add it through out the DoT. I think this is such a minor issue.Rapidity for the most part is fine, though you could fix it by lowering the haste value by 20 ish and add some thing else to like recovery speed, reuse speed, casting speed, flurry. Something that fits with increasing speed. With that our myth needs to change from 10% DA to crit bonus or potency. Some stat that isn't capped.Which brings us to IA, change it to 8-10% Flurry chance then scouts would drool over IA again. As of now nobody really cares if they get IA or not.From the TSO tree on the Illusionist line Manaflow needs to be changed here. Make it lower its reuse time by 3 sec per rank and at the 5th rank make it groupwide. Right now its sorta useless.I like the idea to make illusory allies not memwipe. That would make the spell useful.A coercer should never ever ever ever do more DPS than an equally geared Illusionist, just as an Illusionist should never out DPS a coercer (unless they got a Troubie)Well those are a couple ideas.

andreas2901

09-10-2010, 12:58 AM

Solution for our Prismatic Adornment problem(wasted charges):Make unused charges end up in direct damage.

RobF

09-10-2010, 04:52 PM

I know snowline is the OP, and they wrote this repy, but just to keep the thread on track this last reply sums it up nicelyBig issues are,<ul><li>A third of the illy's spellbook is pointless (crowd control) or even actively harmful to game play dynamics e.g. memwipes teleports etc.</li></ul><ul><li>If your raid is low on chanters, coercer manaflow is 12 times better than illusionist. precisely 12 times better. manaflow is the tool to address power problems raidwide.</li></ul><ul><li>There are so many single target buffs that with people regularly dying in harder encounters, there is a huge drain on your time to play your character, you're constantly rebuffing other peoples characters.</li></ul><ul><li>Many buffs are wasted due to caps. Lots of time co-ordinating who even needs what buff.</li></ul><ul><li>Timewarp is suposed to be the class defining ability for SF. It totally sucks in everyway. It is another single target buff that has to be co-ordinated and applied every 30+ seconds, the dps it adds is pathetic for the amount of hassle in using it with immunities, and a useful 5 second window that is so small that server lag and encounter scripts etc waste most of them. I suspect timewarp probably lowers dps, due to abilities being held back for these tiny 5second windows that are mostly wasted/stunned/stifled/kb'ed/spike abilities missed/server lagged/ported/too busy to use/not noticed. Even using it on my own illy in the rotation, for best timing control, I'm lucky get 2 spells into the window with illy cast times (not that Illy's have good spike abilities and prism chaos our best dps ability doesn't get double triggers properly), it's just [Removed for Content].</li></ul><ul><li>Illy personal dps is much worse than coercer, and their utility especially in power is much worse also, especially considering illy's traditionally have troubs and coercers don't.</li></ul><ul><li>The gearflation means that the chanter balance advantage of fast cast speeds are meaningless now, coupled with proc's becoming less useful it really hurt the personal contribution.</li></ul> Honestly - what more do u need to know?

snowli

09-11-2010, 04:33 AM

I'd really like to see our personae reflection pet given aoe/aoe melee immunity - any type of built in warding as an alternative that would keep it alive in hard modes would be unbalanced for solo. Having the personae gives an illy a nice class distinction, yet it dies constantly on any harder content.Perhaps, the personae should be unable to take damage, but also unable to gain hate? I cannot imagine anyone even at low levels soloing, using it to tank something they couldn't 'tank' themselves better, but if that was the case, the 'no incoming damage no hate possible' personae effect could be added to the mythical/enervated.

Boldac

09-11-2010, 09:46 AM

Something I've always wondered, since the illusionist is more or less the true enchanter, shouldn't we be able to "enchant" a multitude of things?Since early eq2, mez'ing mobs has been obsolete. Obsolete to the point where not many folks keep it on their toolbar and even fewer actually like it when you mez. Example: I ran cella the other night with a group (Guardian, Illy, Coercer, Assassin (me), Trouby, Mystic or Templar (forget which)) The tank actually laughed at the two enchanters in voice chat when they mez'd the adds on the last fight (and explicitly told them not to do it again) because it took longer for us to kill them.I don't think there is a way to make mez'ing useful with end game content and raiding without trivializing said content. And rather seeing developer time wasted on it, I think it would benefit everyone if that time was spent fixing things and helping the classes (like Illy) that need it. Now how would you do that.....Doppleganger: It could be similar to the Mystic's ancestral sentry where it soaks X damage or creates a clone of the target (not a ghost) that distracts the mob. In other words, it would become the top of the hate list, absorbing a pre-defined amount of damage before it dies allowing you, in a sense, to rescue someone from death. When the doppleganger dies the mob reverts to the closest fighter.Personae Reflection: Replace one of the useless aa's in the illusionist set with a buff to the pet that, again like the shaman, grants the pet non-direct ae immunity. I also like the idea someone else suggested about making the pet ae-immune and generating zero aggro. This way, it is still very useful in solo/group/raid situations, but not able to "tank" like the pets of summoners.Now, on to use being enchanters...with the way SF changed blue stats, some of the illy buffs need changed. We should be able to "enchant" our groups weapons, armor, pets, even their minds, to aid them in combat. And our buffs need to be for the stats that, in order to be useful, have no cap. On top of that, to help the pvp crowd, the majority of our buffs need to be group wide with a small handful of single-target, cross-raid castable, buffs. Everything from raw potency and crit bonus on the offensive side to mitigation and crit mit on the defensive side. I'd love to see a single target, can only be placed on one person, CA double attack buff that gives the target something like 5 or 10% chance with each CA to have that CA double attack.Replace the mez's in the spellbook with more utility and damage too. Give us one single target, long duration mez and one blue, short duration mez. Replace the other two with a blue damage spell and one of the buffs mentioned above.Combine blink and phase into one spell that teleports the caster back X meters, the mob off in a random direction away from the caster x meters, lowers hate of the caster by X and has a % chance to wipe the hate list based on level and quality of the spell. Epics targets are immune to the mem-wipe and teleport. Call it Blink.With that newly opened slot, create a new dps spell or group/raid buff. I'm sure I'll come up with more crazy ideas, but that's it for now.

Sykosys

09-11-2010, 04:46 PM

Can we just plz scrap TW all together, I hated it with a passion first time I read about it, Hated it in beta and it is a jokeon live. The propsed changes to TW will only increase wizzy dps even further. How does increasing wizzy dps help illies?By making it less of a PITA for us maybe ? Well I can just decide not to cast it at all, thats less of a PITA! But hey thereare certain people or guilds that require/demand it. I was a die hard TW protester as an illy and refused to spend theaa on it. Of course I have and use it now because of peer/server pressures. I also agree that TW in its current formprobably decreases DPS in most circumstances heh.SCRAP TIMEWARP PLEASE !

Supav

09-11-2010, 07:27 PM

<cite>Sykosys@Crushbone wrote:</cite><blockquote>Can we just plz scrap TW all together, I hated it with a passion first time I read about it, Hated it in beta and it is a jokeon live. The propsed changes to TW will only increase wizzy dps even further. How does increasing wizzy dps help illies?By making it less of a PITA for us maybe ? Well I can just decide not to cast it at all, thats less of a PITA! But hey thereare certain people or guilds that require/demand it. I was a die hard TW protester as an illy and refused to spend theaa on it. Of course I have and use it now because of peer/server pressures. I also agree that TW in its current formprobably decreases DPS in most circumstances heh.SCRAP TIMEWARP PLEASE !</blockquote>Illie's are also a SUPPORT class... soo... that'd prolly be why its there.... >.>

snowli

09-13-2010, 06:58 AM

Stampede for mystics for example or RO / VC for bards etc are examples of SF definining support class abilities that increase raid/group dps in a meaningful fashion.Timewarp is an example of a SF ability that completely fails to properly support anyone. Timewarp probably lowers raid dps, due to the time taken from illy, the abilities held back by potential recipients with all the immunity mess, the tiny miniscule 5 second window which often gets wasted, and the general headaches of cordinating it.

andreas2901

09-21-2010, 08:45 PM

For next expansion give us the option to increase the duration of self-timewarp up to 10 seconds, keep the duration for the 2nd target on 5 seconds.

LivelyHound

09-22-2010, 04:29 PM

<cite>snowline wrote:</cite><blockquote>For mana management to stack up against the across raid whole group manaflow of a coercer:<ol><li>The same groupwide manaflows?No, that kinda of coercer territory, being a mythical effect. They should alter our mana regen differently imho.</li><li>or Illy myth proc raidwide? (possibly too powerful for a proc not active ability)They should just change it back to 3 triggers, or put it up one to two. SOE just went overboard on this nerf and need to undo it, especially as it requires active participation to get any use from it. If your healer is healing constantly against some big bad mob that they arnt attacking at all they get no benefit, unlike the coercer mythy effects, which require non. 1 trigger of ~400 pwr is far worse than 20% pwr reduction for 10secs, especially the more and more that cast times are reduced thanks to gearflation.</li><li>or Manatap and Manacloak made raidwide? (probably not as powerful or as a clutch ability as groupwide manaflow, but a steady trickle raidwide)Don't make manacloak raidwide, it will only ever proc on the MT or random on an aoe. The trouble is not that you end up feeding random people it's that you use up all 3 triggers in under a few secs. This make Mental Awareness useless, well more so than it is already. They could uncouple the effect and make manacloak last the full 30secs whether there are triggers remaining or not to counter that. I like the raidwide manatap idea.</li><li>or Savant goes raidwide? (giving it good clutch utility when it's up)Now that I think would be OPd, so I'm all for it. With 2 illusionists in concert it would be up permanently. Mine is a 55sec duration , with a 2min recast.</li></ol>In essence I think the easiest fix for our mana issues is to reinstate our mythical effect back to 2 or 3 triggers. Personally I feel as power pools have grown, and spell power costs have increased since the myth effect was made it should go back to 3 triggers. That way it will last through the next lvl cap raise and will address current mana issues, especially as it requires ACTIVE PARTICIPATION unlike the coercer myth effect, which being % based is going to scale forever.Buffs, making them worthwhile:<ol><li>Adding some crit bonus, potency, accuracy, flurry, +all primary stats, or a damage proc in order to remain meaningful as buffs percentage to all melee buffs so they are useful for names not just trash, and make redundant stats less redundant? This includes Arms of Imagination (aoe melee useless on most meaningful non-trash fights), Rapidity, Illusory ArmsThe change coming on test at the mo uncapping da and making it multi attack makes IA useful again. So far that indirect change is the biggest love this class has seen since SF, how sad is that. However, should they change +haste so that overcap led to +flurry, which is an option that we can now reasonably consider that would make rapidity extremely coveted again. If they are going to go along the route of overcap leading to other stats that the recent change seems to propose tha aoe attack should lead to say +accuracy on your primary target if you are against a single target, slightly less +accuracy against 2 targets, less against 3 a non against 4. However coding that would be a git as it would need to check how many targets you are under attack by every swing.Personally I have always considered that stat a trash / heroic stat and thus AoI is not really a useful radi buff. They could look into changing it, but what to I dont know. </li><li>Making melee buffs raidtargetable not just group?This would help but also create headaches for rebuffing. Yay for more complex rebuffing. This problem would go away if they could make single target buffs persist.</li><li>make time compression self also, it's nuts when for an example the warlock has UT and you want TC but can't and have to put it on a melee healer or troub or scouts. Trouby and dirge buffs can go on themselves - whatever old argument that might have used to exist for non-self TC is invalid.</li><li>Allow TC to go overcap for cast speed, recovery and reuse - restoring it to it's former desireability.I am hoping that the uncapping od DA is just teh begginging thus making all our buffs useful again. I would be great to get a dev comment on this.</li><li>Make single target buffs persist after deaths/zones/pet zones would make life a lot less annoying?YES PLEASE</li><li>Combining both the red adorns for synergism into 1 adorn?</li><li>Timewarp... needs a redesign. I raid next to my gf who is number 1 dps in our raid with her mage. even with the rarest opportunity that gives us that most don't have, to perfectly synchronise timewarp by request, lining it up with her best spike abilities - it still adds a pitiful amount of dps (and part of that dps originates from non TW spell double attacks), which is worse considering the amount of hassle it takes. What TWarp adds to any other caster is truly pathetic. I'm not sure that managing timewarp, taking illy time off dps, and encouraging mages to hold back spike abilities incase of TW's they are probably still immune for (but no1 can see because of bad log parsing too many buffs, no maintained icon etc) doesn't lower dps overall frankly. TIMEWARP should go RAIDWIDE, with no immunity and a longer recast.Timewarp is just horrible. It needs to be grp or raid wide, it needs to be without immunity, and it needs to last a lot longer than current. Even then its a pretty aweful spell.</li><li>channeled focus needs a boost.Its a nice buff except for the recast. That is what they should change.</li><li>Doppelganger providing a Xhits stoneskin to make it relevant.I don't think that they would. How many are you asking for? The current duration is 30 secs, so what 3 stoneskins in that time. It then becomes a basic mimic of Tower of Stone, just more powerful as you can cast it on someone else, albeit on a longer recast. I'm not really sure what to do with doppelganger consdiering its our lvl 80 special. I hated it on release because having a special spell, lvl 50, 55 ... 80 and so on being unuseable in solo play sucks. Having specials you cant use in all forms of the game is really imho BAD.</li></ol>I think making our buffs useful again may be on the cards, simply due to mechanics changes, at least that is my hope. A clear dev post on the uncapping of DA -> Multi Attack, and whether that is a one off stat or if they are going to do it to others would be most helpful here.Illy Personal DPS:<ol><li>All aa's for casting speed need to have potency substituted instead.I would say have an endline aa ability that takes 10% of casting spd greater than 100% and make it spell double attack as casting speed has always been the illy flavour. I would make timewarp into something like that. Change Timewarp to a passive illy buff that takes does: +Spell Dbl AttK = (Cast Haste - 100) / 10. This gives illies incentives on gearing and it gives us incentives to utilise the AGI line to the max.</li><li>Give Illy's a genuine spike damage ability, something a smart player can usefully combine with timewarp and/or dispatches and so on, e.g. a 5k per tick, 5 times, over 5 seconds dotFor me I would change illusory allies into that spike ability, as it is currently useless outside of the BG's. Make it a grp dmg / heal accumulator for 10secs, then upon termination <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" /> , the illusionist lets loose a nuke for x% of the dmg and a grp heal for x% of the heals. I.e. you create enchanted versions of your allies that mimic their actions to a lesser power and the illusionist then siphons that power. Similar to the bard Rhythmic Overture , Victorious Concherto chain, just inverted.</li></ol></blockquote>My 2c

snowli

09-22-2010, 08:59 PM

Added the illusory allies as a group dps/heal storage then burst via illy on termination, neat idea.I don't see problems with my group too much for mana when playing illy, so triple myth triggers wouldn't help that much, what I see is I am 12, yes precisely 12, times less effective at using manaflow to deal with cross raid power problems via manaflow than a coercer. Manaflow is THE tool to help power issues raidwide - we have nothing to compare to coercers in that dept.manatap/manacloak raidwide as a potential suggestion I envisioned as 3 triggers of manacloak per raidmember, yes a lot of manacloak triggers would be wasted without regular aoe's, but it would be something at least if we don't get the coercer type manaflow.

LivelyHound

09-24-2010, 09:41 AM

<cite>snowline wrote:</cite><blockquote>Manaflow is THE tool to help power issues raidwide - we have nothing to compare to coercers in that dept.manatap/manacloak raidwide as a potential suggestion I envisioned as 3 triggers of manacloak per raidmember, yes a lot of manacloak triggers would be wasted without regular aoe's, but it would be something at least if we don't get the coercer type manaflow.</blockquote>Ah I see where you were coming from now. I know that enchanters share channeled focus but that is where we are supposed to get our raid wide power return from, hence the tag Other Group. This would be fine if the spell recast wasnt so stupid, but doesnt address the coercer mythy effect imbalance. Changing our manaflow to do the same kinda breaks the uniqueness that myths were supposed to have, thus I don't see them giving us group mana flow, although its the easiest solution.I have a feeling that 3 triggers per raid member on Mana Cloak would be considered overpowered especially as then chances are the enhancement would finally last the 30 secs duration and give 15% raidwide power reduction in that case. It would not be the base power return that would OP it, just the enhancement. However if they made it Other Group like channeled focus I could see that as a fair compromise that might make it in.The best option is still making manatap raidwide. Trouble is I don't think on its own that would be enough and I don't think they will change more than one option to give us a way to return power to a raid, because on a spell by spell basis that would make our power regen far superior to coercers. The only thing that breaks the balance is group mana flow, which only comes into play after lvl 80. Thus changing our spells would up to that point make the two classes unbalanced.The only other option I see then is to change someting in the 80+ lvl range into a raidwide mana effect and the best target imho for that change is Timewarp. Why? Because everybody hates timewarp and its current effect is marginal.Possibly change it into an effect that makes mana consumption go down because the other group is out of the normal timestream where magic happens. Something along the lines of your target group is pushed out of phase with normal time so that half the time the dont exist in the norrathian universe. The effect being a 20sec 50% mana reducer, 2min recast, tagged other group.Or alternatively you place a group of norrathians into a state of being that accelerates their metabolisms. The effect being 20 secs of 200% mana regen and heath regen, tagged Other Group, 2min recast. This effect would have to be able to go over normal regen caps, and effects any regens that are running on them, like sigil of heroism for paladin hate. Thus stacking bard mana songs and this effect would be beneficial for example. Something that keeps the idea of a timewarping effect but becomes useful.Thus the option I see are:1. Change mana flow to be grp wide as its base, and give coercers a new effect for their myth.2. Raidwide manatap.3. Other Group Mana Cloak.4. Change Timewarp to a mana regen effect.I'll continue to think about it <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />

Zivgar

09-24-2010, 04:06 PM

Well our myth effect to give rapidity groupwide was given to coercers via AA, so i don't see a big deal giving us manaflow groupwide also. I said change the AA in TSO line for manaflow where at the 5th rank makes it groupwide. That is the same as giving coercers groupwide velocity AA, which was unique to our myth.Now I also like the idea to make mana cloak castable on another group in the raid instead of giving Illusionists groupwide manaflow. The bottomline its kinda unfair when the nerf our Myth while giving Coercers groupwide manaflow and giving them groupwide velocity, which was on our myth. Manaflow is the stample enchanter ability, the first thing an enchanter gets via AA. I think our should be about the same.

biig

09-24-2010, 08:28 PM

end str line give us ranged auto attacka AA to allow gear procs to critMake immune interupt buff be permanantPet needs to be a real illusion of ourself keep our statsextract mana grpwide and more power regen on itrandom op ideas

Raveen

09-27-2010, 02:45 AM

An AA to allow gear procs to crit would probibly fix the dps gap we feel all by its self. And if that gap was closed we would probibly be less irratated over all the other faults. In the last 3 Xpacks my focus has been on my Illy. But with the changes in SF and now the nerfing of PR and Torrent procs, I have geard out 3 alts. Why because if this stuff swings into the negative even more I'm probibly gonna swap mains. The changes to Dbl attack and Arms are a step in the right direction as far as making our buffs wanted again. The changes to time warp need more work. As some has said in other posts 5s is horrable in a world of ungodly lag and stun stiffle fest that is the raiding world. Do us all a favor and make Time Warp group wide. Even if you dbl the recast time it would pay off way more. Pulling the immunity on it is just gonna leave out casters. It will become a wizzy/lock temp and push peeps like necro/conj who just got some love this xpack. The sheer amont of button mashing we do to keep dps up should pay off lol. After 3 years raiding on the illy my mouse finger can punch a hole in a cinderblock <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /> I dont mind that healers are doing 20K+ dont nerf them just bring us up to speed. Give us more than just the ability to poke somones eye out <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />-LOL I just saw the Time Warp group wide thing on another post. And if thats were their going with it right on you guys <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> There is some hope yet <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

Faeward

10-06-2010, 11:34 AM

Groupwide manaflow makes sense. Coercers get groupwide DPS buff and groupwide manaflow. Illusionists get groupwide haste but only single target manaflow. Would make up for the lacklustre power regeneration currently provided by an Illusionist.

Zivgar

10-12-2010, 11:39 AM

<cite>Faeward@Nagafen wrote:</cite><blockquote>Groupwide manaflow makes sense. Coercers get groupwide DPS buff and groupwide manaflow. Illusionists get groupwide haste but only single target manaflow. Would make up for the lacklustre power regeneration currently provided by an Illusionist.</blockquote>Yes all we ask for is the same ability to keep the raid full with power like the coercer. For my group I just don't have power issues, but I would like to help the raid just as the coercer does. Just change the TSO Manaflow AA (since it is pretty much worthless now) to at the 5th rank make manaflow groupwide. Nice and easy fix.

Priam Pendragon

11-30-2010, 06:45 PM

Mana:It's fine, I don't care if the Coercer is better.DPS:This needs work and lots of it. The only way I could ever pull agro is by Time Warping a Miracle and even then not likely.Changes:Scrap all mezzes except for 1 group and 1 solo.The entire enchanter wisdom line with buffs to suggested changes in Illusory Allies, Split Personality and Construct of order.The entire Stamina line with a two-weapon fighting option.Change strength end line from prevents the next professional spell, to prevents the next AoE.Scrap the pet and the mythical pet concentration slot reduction. Change to grants 10% spell multi-attack to group.With no permanent pet, we are free to be illusionists again. Make Illusory Allies a dumb-fire pet for every player in the group.Change split personality to be a mirror of the illusionist. IE it casts what we cast.Change time-warp duration to burns 20% mana per second. This way we can use some of our mana abilities for something other than mana medic.Make Phase target a player eliminating all hate on that player to his implied target.Change channel focus to a toggle ability that stuns/stiffles us, we cast on another player granting 100% spell multi-attack.Change mechanics of casting speed where every % over 100 equals 1% spell multi-attack. So 130% spell casting speed equals 100% spell casting speed and 30% spell multi-attack.

Vaylan77

03-04-2011, 01:28 PM

Sadly this post is mainly about raiding Illys.I am an PVPing Illy on Nagafen and as normal on this server you stop and lock XP of your toons often. So this Illy is now on of the two main PVP ranges. In T4, he is 39. The typical level to try out the class and do PVP and then decide what to do with it. I am not interested in how well the Illy will do in raids. I am interested in what this class can do in PVP and here I can say this class at 39 is hard to master and in comparison to my ranger it really frustrates me very very often. And here people decide if they want to continue a class and others if they want to start this class. And Illys are not very often seen on the PVP server, at least in the lower levels I don't see many... and now I know why.Lot of people here wrote about the lack of DPs. True. But it I want a high DPS mage I go for Wizard. So instead of making all classes even and the same it's ok to have differences. And basically it depends on your playstyle. Maybe I don't do the highest DPS in BG matches with the Illy because I cannot spam AOEs but I can be very effective in some games and having (again I speak for T4) the highest kills in the match.What I miss/dislike:- Immunity in PVP. What is the use of mezzes if you effectively can only one-time mezz an opponent. In a game where you cannot get away he will be on you seconds later and then your biggest strength is gone because the next mezz will result in immunity.- Group mezz cannot be cast while running. In PVP that is vital. When 3 people go for the easy to kill Illy I'd like to emergency mezz them either by 0 seconds casting or mezz them while I run to the rest of my team.- Increase of buff times. The temporay buffs are often not useful in PVP because here you have to decide if you do damage the next second (because DPS is low so time counts in PVP) or buff yourself up and do damage 5 seconds later. But in that 5 seconds you might be dead already or stunned, stifled, interrupted.- Better mana regen. For a class that's said to be able to help with mana I constantly run out of power in PVP because I chain nuke with him due to the low DPS. And even with the mana buffs I run out of power very fast.- Give some better indication who is mezzed. In PVE that is not really vital but in PVP mixed teams people just aren'T use to mezzers. They hit everything I mezzed and the advantage is gone. Why not levitate those who are mezzed 5 meters in the air or cage them with highly visible beams or whatever so people at least see better that someone currently is not being able to do anything. I really hate it when there is a healer and another char and I mezz the healer so my group now is able to burn the other char and people on PVP servers just think "hey, let's kill the healer to remove his healing on the other char".- Invis while fighting and while running. Really I hate it in BGs when I cannot invis away when a ranger fires arrows at me to at least have a chance to get away.- Better mitigation against long range damage. Really my worst enemy is the ranger in PVP because if he picks on me and is out of range I can hardly do anything but go for cover - if I find it. Some kind of mezz proc would be nice here. Rangers have a buff that might clear the oponents target. Wardens have a buff that heal procs. Why can't an Illu not have a mezz proc, an interrupt proc, a stun proc whatever. Or give us an aura. When someone walks too close he will be mezzed for 3 seconds or something similar.Warlocks can enhance Magi's shielding with healing. Illys really are weak when it comes to protection.- Biggest problem I have with the Illy is the interpration of this class. Mainly I feel it somehow manipulates time by removing people from combat, making mana flowing faster or whatever. But it's not really someone that casts many illusions. Why not cast illusionary weapons? Why is my pet identified as pet on the PVP server so only idiots target it instead of me (it clearly says that it is my personae)? Why not cast illusionary mobs? Why not force an enemy to target my pet or any other illusion I have cast? Why not being able to wrap an enemy in the illusion to be one of my team so his own team may target him accidently?Why not set up an illusionary trap?Why not bring some new mechanic that confuses the other player by scrambling his hotbar setup temporarily so he has to search where his combat arts or spells are?Why not being able to make an opponent target his own team because he thinks they are the enemy?Why not being able to manipulate health or power visual indicator for the enemy so he thinks he is almost dead and casts heal spells on him although he is not?...I miss illusionary things. Mind manipulating things. Reality twisting things.Lots of things are just for PVE use sadly... but this game was designed for PVE so they will never add things that mainly change the PVP playstyle but would have no use in a PVE environment.

Faeward

03-29-2011, 11:10 AM

Oh my god! I think I actually love those last 3 suggestions... that would be excellent!On the DPS side of things... personally I am not too fussed about Illy DPS. We have so many abilities that prevent damage, or reduce the effectiveness of hits landing with Silence, Aneurysm, Paranoia, Dismay, Bewilderment, Chromatic Storm, etc. that DPS isn't such an important thing.

Priam Pendragon

04-28-2011, 12:35 PM

<cite>Silbermond@Nagafen wrote:</cite><blockquote>Sadly this post is mainly about raiding Illys.I am not interested in how well the Illy will do in raids.</blockquote>I feel for you, but Illy's in PVP aren't really suffering. You'r talking about stuff that would really be fun additions, and I agree they sound great.That said, alot of us do care about raiding and there is still alot of work that NEED's to be done, not just to make it awesome, but to make it playable, at least where you don't wont to jump off a cliff every AoE.

Zivgar

07-04-2011, 04:18 PM

One change that they really need to make is to make Time Compression castable on the Illusionist.I get tried of being in a group with tank, healer, drige, 2 scout DPS, and Illusionist. I have to put TC on the healer. I would just like to be able to put it on myself when the group doesnt have an obivious choice. I can put it on my pet but not me?You changed it for Bards now do it for the illusionist

Priam Pendragon

07-06-2011, 02:55 PM

bmg

08-28-2011, 06:34 PM

<cite>Zivgar wrote:</cite><blockquote>One change that they really need to make is to make Time Compression castable on the Illusionist.I get tried of being in a group with tank, healer, drige, 2 scout DPS, and Illusionist. I have to put TC on the healer. I would just like to be able to put it on myself when the group doesnt have an obivious choice. I can put it on my pet but not me?You changed it for Bards now do it for the illusionist</blockquote>This really needs to be done asap. It was done for troubs, why not illies? I'm usually in a group with troub, warlock, illy. UT really should go on the warlock and TC on the illy. I raided as a warlock in SF, and UT is pretty huge for warlock...thus I can't bring myself to complain about not getting UT, so TC pretty much goes to waste. If an illy puts TC on themselves when they should be TC'ing a wiz, then that's an issue for the raid or group leader to deal with.

QQ-Fatman

08-29-2011, 01:27 AM

+1Bards can BC / UT themselves when no better choices in group, or when solo. TC self castable is really long overdue!

Shinmuriel

09-16-2011, 03:38 AM

I haven't been following test server closely so i only know what ive heard but the changes coming up sound like its going to affect chanter DPS again in a bad way. SOE has failed to acknowledge on multiple occasions that they have made EQ2 reevolve around DPS. Everyone including healers are expected to DPS, wardens and templars aren't even wanted anymore because of the lack of DPS and let me tell you, troubs ain't having much fun either.I would have honestly thought the devs would have learned from the great "chanter strike" of SF that no one wants to have there DPS nerfed, and while "yes" there was no direct nerf there was no increase either during a overly easy expansion that revolved around AOE classes. I came back to EQ2 in June of this year after hearing that SOE had "atoned" for there ignorence and restored chanters to there former glory. I was pleased but my return, I'm affraid, may be short lived. DoV was a very fun expansion but the new blue stats on test are really excessive and not needed in my opinion, I personally don't like having to solve math equations each time i change out a piece of gear. I'm assuming people complained because you need a chain healer in every group because AOE's are so hard hitting that without wards your dead on pull (on trash mobs) so your answer was adding ranged wands for mages and it trivializes the entire melee spec that makes chanters fun to play (the danger of meleeing on mobs that even scouts don't dare approach is fun IMO). Less is more folks.Either way, since i don't get paid to play test and i don't pay to play a beta your out of luck with getting me to formally log over to test so all I know is hearsay but... If you crap on THE hardest working class in this game AGAIN and mess up our DPS I will be the first to drop this game like a bad habit and head out to Old Republic with a clear conscious. Why are we the hardest working? EVERY one of our buffs go down when we die and keeping out pet alive is a sick joke, a doable but sick joke. So my suggestions are...1) Lose the AOE's that kill our pets, its a mean joke. Or make it where our pet can be cast faster so we can keep it up longer in raid. There is no reason to make the hardest working class in the game miserable.2) Fix our buffs do they do not go down when we die. You have nerfed this game so much it is hard to tell the difference between it and WoW so go that extra mile and make it easy on us. We make you look GOOD and its hard as hell to make ourselves look good while we do it but for those of us who love the class, we learn to pull it off and it shows when theres a GOOD chanter on board in raid. Don't let that change. Bards buffs don't go down and there UTILITY to so why should ours? Bards are generally outparsing us now and there UTILITY so why is that? I don't expect to beat Tier 1 DPS on a straight parse but I expect to come darn close if i'm the best at my class. I came in during RoK and raided during RoK/TSO, im a soldier on my chanter and I like stealing the glory from DPS classes who don't know what there doing. Its what makes this class beautiful to me. WE ARE single target DPS and we should shine when it comes to DPS'ing on single target mobs. Keep us within a "respectable" range of tier one at all times or else. Don't over do it though I don't feel like dealing with nerfs mid expansion. Remeber that bards can buff themselves and we cannot, so they moving ahead of us. Maybe you would like to reconsider that or let us do the same?3) i'm relatively ignorent about the spell flurry changes on test, all i know is what ive heard but it sounds like crap for chanters. I don't pay money to play EQ I pay money to play my chanter's (plural) so keep that in mind and remember SF. If your adding spell flurry that is going to do little for chanters then allow cast speed to overflow into spell flurry JUST like haste for melee classes and tweak the ratio so were balenced. A lot of people are currently speccing out of AGI because gear has trivialized it (except for recovery of course)... Bring back the pew pew of the AGI by allowing cast speed to overflow and give us an advantage.4) I remember SWG and there terrible ordeal that took place that day when the "patch" went in. It was YOU SOE that did it. I expect you to do it again with EQ. I have no faith in you anymore. Prove me wrong, I beseech thee.5) Add a purple lightsabre to the marketplace and maybe a Japanese school girl outfit that will match my illy's hair. Thank you, I hope to see you all in Dec!Edit: Ok apparently cast speed rolls over into spell DA buts its a very small %. Why the hell do we need spell DA and spell flurry anyway... Either way I don't care nor do i get paid to figure out why you can't do anything right. Just make sure you don't mess up our DPS and you will be fine, carry on.P.S. Add a "How to play" guide for Rangers, I'm tired of hearing them cry because I crush them beneath me on the parse. =)

QQ-Fatman

09-19-2011, 07:12 AM

1. better power feed:fixing manasoul would be a good start.making channel focus' base reuse 5 mins would help a lot too2. TC self-castable:would help dps a bit when we're in a melee group. I hate to see TC goes to waste.3. better pet survivabilitythe 10% max hp from LU61 hardly makes a difference. we need a pet that does not get one shot every single aoe in hardmode raids, or just make the pet 2sec base cast time so we wont lose huge dps if we recast it.

Shinmuriel

09-19-2011, 08:50 PM

<cite>QQ-Fatman wrote:</cite><blockquote>1. better power feed:fixing manasoul would be a good start.making channel focus' base reuse 5 mins would help a lot too2. TC self-castable:would help dps a bit when we're in a melee group. I hate to see TC goes to waste.3. better pet survivabilitythe 10% max hp from LU61 hardly makes a difference. we need a pet that does not get one shot every single aoe in hardmode raids, or just make the pet 2sec base cast time so we wont lose huge dps if we recast it.</blockquote>/concurMAKE OUR PET CASTABLE WHILE WE MOVE! And reduce the cast time!MAKE OUR PET CASTABLE WHILE WE MOVE! And reduce the cast time!MAKE OUR PET CASTABLE WHILE WE MOVE! And reduce the cast time!Im tired of being left behind by the raid after every pull when my pets dies!And think about the troub changes... there gonna jcap the chanters for group buffs like PoM and DR ALL THE TIME NOW if there smart. Its not fair to scout group chanters. Were gonna get smoked on the parse. THINK ABOUT WHAT YOUR DOING!

Encantador

09-20-2011, 11:39 AM

If you are a raiding Illu then what has JCap got to do with it ? aren't you permanently at 100% re-use ?Also can someone please explain to me why coercer MF is 12 times better than illusionist? It increases power for a max of 6 players on a 30 second reuse (plus the coercer) whereas illu's increase 1 player (plus the illu). Thats assuming that all 6 need power which is pretty rare (not unknown, but even with, for example, Eireen, 1 in the MT group cannot be fed and outside the MT group its rare all 6 get drained).I support illusionists request for more DPS whole heartedly. It is beyond disheartenting to see sorcerors, summoners, predators, and rogues all parsing between 250K and 400K and the poor illu struggling to get to 150K. Dirges can easily out DPS chanters and troubs who are getting a boost are usually ahead. When you consider the buffs that bards bring to a group/raid it is difficult to see why they should out DPS illu's. It is also not unusual to see a couple of healers and fighters doing more DPS.The only non-priest, non-fighter class that DPS's for less than illusionist is of course the coercer.

Priam Pendragon

09-21-2011, 01:55 PM

<cite>Encantador wrote:</cite><blockquote>If you are a raiding Illu then what has JCap got to do with it ? aren't you permanently at 100% re-use ?Also can someone please explain to me why coercer MF is 12 times better than illusionist? It increases power for a max of 6 players on a 30 second reuse (plus the coercer) whereas illu's increase 1 player (plus the illu). Thats assuming that all 6 need power which is pretty rare (not unknown, but even with, for example, Eireen, 1 in the MT group cannot be fed and outside the MT group its rare all 6 get drained).I support illusionists request for more DPS whole heartedly. It is beyond disheartenting to see sorcerors, summoners, predators, and rogues all parsing between 250K and 400K and the poor illu struggling to get to 150K. Dirges can easily out DPS chanters and troubs who are getting a boost are usually ahead. When you consider the buffs that bards bring to a group/raid it is difficult to see why they should out DPS illu's. It is also not unusual to see a couple of healers and fighters doing more DPS.The only non-priest, non-fighter class that DPS's for less than illusionist is of course the coercer.</blockquote>Yes JCap is a joke besides the crit bonus for an illy.Regarding Mana Reg your way off base.It affects two groups instead of two targets making it hit 12 times instead of two (check your log files it's hitting 12 times, not 7). It also costs around 1/2 of what the illusionists does (around 1600 for a coercer and 3600 for an illy), extrapolate that out to the 700% extra mana persistant debuff fights.That alone is insanely better than the illy but it doesn't even stop there, the coercer can also get the mana to all 12 targets in 5 seconds compared to the illy's two targets at best 15 seconds.Feeding the mage group on HM tormax (and many other fights after) a coercer can get well over 3k / second with the mage group illy getting around 800k, that's at least 4 times better, but without the constant feeding that illy isn't getting squat and 12 times better is more than feasable.12 times better is debatable (because most fights don't have the persistant mana burn debuffs) but the fact that illy's are seriosly a joke for mana regenation is not. Hell the troubs are going to parse better on some fights.