Illusionist Prestige

[Sever]

Illy (Right Tree): 

Chromatic Illusion (With all but the power aa's put in)

Inflicts damage surrouding the primary target of the spell. For every target the spell hits, the illy gets an increment of Mystic Illusion, which deals additional damage with the next attack and restores some power to the group. Hits up to 6 targets aoe

Target: SELF

Radius: 7.5 meters

Max AOE Targets: 6

*Inflicts 3814-6069 mental damage on targets in area affect (Chromatic Illusion)

*Applies Mystic Illusion. Lasts for 30 seconds.

*On spell or combat hit, will cast Mystic Illusion on the target of attack.

*Inflicts 632-1174 dmg

*Inflicts 316-587 dmg

*Inflicts 316-587 dmg

 *Inflicts 316-587 dmg

*Increases power of group members (AE) by 124-152.

Might need some clarification on this one. It has a 7.5 meter radius around myself? So I have be literally on top of the encounter to actually do anything to it. Our version of the coercer's (pretty amazing) Ether Balance is a situational spell that we have to be in melee range to use. Ours seems to be the worst of all the mages on a comparison just because it's a self targeted blue aoe proc trigger thing. Am I totally missing something here or are Illusionists getting the short end of the stick this xpac?

Does anyone have any parses (at 95) on how much this actually does in a group/raid setting and how does it stack up against coercers?

[Eggwardo]

Yeah this means we have to be right on top of the target, inside our own melee range, to get this spell off.  The power looks like its going to be semi decent maxed out but only if you are able to get a siginicant amount of triggers built up on it. 

For any hardmode mob this seems like its going to be a load of crap.

The recent change to the otherside of the tree REMOVEING THE ONLY GOOD POWER REGEN I'VE SEEN THEM GIVE US is a huge mistake and the group block is nice but how about a heal on it or a stoneskin instead.  OR my favorite idea is make it a group aoe avoid, now that could get usefull.  As this is it doesnt help the group survive if you dont have enough hp and mit to live though an aoe in the first place.

Lowering the recast on PoM... really this effectively lowers it from 1min to 48seconds, 12sec off a recast? That then screws up my TW rotation because of how lovely TW,DR,PoM all line up.

[PeterJohn]

Guys, no! Chromatic Illusion has a range of 35 meters. It says that it affects mobs in an aoe around the primary target of the spell. So any other mobs within the 7.5 meters of the primary mob will also be affected by the spell. Each mob affected then gives you the increments of Mystic Illusion.

[Seiffil]

PeterJohn wrote:

Guys, no! Chromatic Illusion has a range of 35 meters. It says that it affects mobs in an aoe around the primary target of the spell. So any other mobs within the 7.5 meters of the primary mob will also be affected by the spell. Each mob affected then gives you the increments of Mystic Illusion.

What the previous two posters were talking about is how the spell was working, it wasn't working properly and was centering around the illusionist instead of their target.  The patch that went in on Friday was supposed to update Chromatic Illusion to center on enemy rather than on the illusionist. Prior to that point, this ability worked just the way they stated.

[PeterJohn]

Ah thanks! I was wondering cuz it seems like an awesome new spell. Glad you all caught and fixed that then

[Eggwardo]

Yeah it used to be a point blank aoe.  They changed it any now I'm happy with it.  The proc/incremented spell off of it, mystic illusion i think, seems to be easier for mobs to resist than might be intended.

Still dislike the shorter recast on pom, 24 seconds off the base equates to 12 seconds faster for those of us half geared chanters.  I already feel like I spend too much time casting buffs.  I'd like to vote for a increased pom duration or increased pom damage for the same spot. 

On the left side illusionist need an ACTIVE power regen for the group.  We have enough passive preventative spells that adding yet another seems like a bit of an overkill.  Illusionary Platemail should either be buffed or removed.  Maybe add either +stats/heal/stoneskin/+duration or at least like it affect the healer as well.

Anyway that's my 2cp. Important parts bold... for her pleasure.

[Keuark23]

Here is my take on everything I have seen so far on the right-side of the Illy tree and this is from the perspective as a raid-geared Illusionist and from a raid perspective.

(Note that all of this math was done with face-value of the ability and 1 point into it rather then 3 points into everything, haven't gotten that far into my beta testing yet. If it can crit and the mana feeds are way more then I would say its good, I just don't want to have to rely on a coercer to keep my group on a regular feed rotation)

Chromatic Illusion has potential to be a great spell and I really like the design incooperated for it. 35m Range and its an aoe based on 15m of the mob. Great potential for combanation with Chromatic Shower and time warp(have tested it and I do believe that the spell as well as the triggers all double cast but that bring sme to the question of if I cap out on triggers on 1 double cast, how beneficial would it be for these to stay around before trying to get it casted a 2nd time within timewarp or refresh.) Another issue I see within Chromatic Illusion is going to be just how much damage are we takling here, right now the base numbers see fairly low but if its not going to be viable for single target encounters then I feel as if its a waste of points considering it would only be useful during swarm-adds or 3+ encounter mobs (basically it would just be another Chromatic Storm at that point). I like the enhancements that it gives (+More damage to make it a viable choice if the numbers are correct and the ability it kept more towards our more high-dpsing abilites otherwise it would then again become a bad choice of points spent, needs to be able to outdamage a consistant crit bonus buff on the other side of the lines) but the increase in power isn't really a great thing in my opinion because it seems low. Even if you were to spec 100% increased power from the buff we still are trying to compensate for something like coercer's mana flow and we just won't be able to even come close to those numbers, even in a dire emergency were not talking a lot of power (6 increments, 170 (100% increase would come to 340(if this is incorrect its because im a math derp) x 6 triggers for the group is about 2k mana every 15 seconds or so.  Thats an ok sort of way to feed power but 2k mana when it comes to power drains such as Eriak or Glokus is just enough to scoot you by until your able to get a coercer mana feed, if the intent is to put us in a situation where we can somewhat self sustain our groups power in a raid situation then this is far far from point. Truth is that coercers will always be the king of mana feeding and I have come to terms with that, but I am confused as to what intent the group power proc was put in on this ability because despite it being a little bit of loving, we are still very very far behind that of coercers and simply enough with more really power intensive fights coming along it seems that this aspect of the ability is just to provide our group with a tiny bit of mana until a real power-feeder can come along and save us. I do like the ability, but I do think the numbers need to be upped a bit on it because it does seem to have a great concept within it.

Endline. I personally myself absolutely 1000% think we got gipped here. Many other classes get really cool abilites, paladins for instance get a 200% damage reflect 100% damage absorb for 3 seconds, sounds kinda silly but its a cool new end-line. I am not sure about the coercer's endline and if they had been changed or what not or if they had a reuse reduction on something but I know personally as an illusionist taking an ability that is lowering the cooldown on one of our already longer casting temp buffs and making us cast it more often is a smack in the face in comparison to all the other cool prestiges that have came out with this and feels like we were just passed by in terms of abilites and the thought process of "what can we do to help this class". Peace of mind in my opinion is absolutely 1000% fine as it is. It's reuse and up time are very compareable to that of destructive rampage and I will usually always cast both of them at the same time (Time-Warp, Destructive Rampage, PoM, Illuminate, dps). But instead of chaining it with destructive rampage all the time (which I prefer due to the damage increase rampage gives) I will not be forced to use it at different intervals and not have all of those chains going togeather. We have about 7 different temp buffs as illusionist, that is way more than enough of my time I spend chaining all these togeather when their up and throughout mob duration to have to use more of my time to do my job/role in a raid as DPS/Mana Feeding to hamper me and by lowering the reuse speed on one of these is only going to make me lose more potential in that role. I don't want another temp buff or change to any temp buffs as that end-line unless it was something such as a Raid-Wide Time Warp modifier or something (We could only dream =P) but instead give us something cool, new, unique and something that can make us be like "Oh snap. Illusionist is still the coolest class to be", not something that makes us fall asleep in our cast rotation by having to use it more often and ruin the rest of our spell rotation in order to keep it sustained more often. Maybe a new prismatic chaos or theorms, maybe make synergism a group buff where it can apply to ever member of the selected group in order to allow us to keep multiple-groups happy (because more and more raids are starting to lean towards 3-1 coercer/illusionist ratio), possibly something like a sustained buff (such as synergism) that when the person it is

Suggestoins for replacement.

Strong Minded

Single Target Sustained Buff

When target that the buff is placed on cast a hostile spell, if the caster of the buff casts another hostile spell within 3 econds both caster and target receive 1% potency, allow this to keep stacking and stacking upwards to maybe say 15-20% potency for both caster and target until the chain is broken (whether it be death or stiffle/stun or long-cast spells such as fusion) and allow it to reset down to 0%. Obviously there would need to be a lot of testing and what not within this spell but it would have the potential to be really interesting and a great way to keep illusionist a favorite in the mage-group and maintaining the damage counterpart to the more power dominate coercer. 

Enchance Synergism (Name would be obvious to change)

Allow synergism to be group applied on the target and allow us to cast it on more than 1 group at a time, possibly a max or 2-3. This isn't necessairly a suggestion in order to make us over powered by more or less to show you that we need some loving. Many many more raids are running 3 coercers and 1 illusionist in their raids and not even mage/scout (with the change to synergism allowing to proc off melee attacks)it would allow the coercers/troubs/scouts to get that extra damage proc while allowing illys to withhold better concentration slots for their group buffs (such as the intelligence buff that is never used in almost any situation). 

Enchaned Timewarp (Same thing as the last name)

Enchance timewarp to be raid wide possibly? This would obviously be border-line OP but being that the buff is only 5 seconds long in duration it might still not be that over powered, or possible add another 5 seconds to the duration of it. Just food for thought.

Obviously there are more suggestions available and a ton of different things you could do with it but to me personally filling the gap between my normal time-warp rotation (which includes peace of mind) with another spell for 1 second could be more of a burden at times than a buff (but also vice versa). Possibly even change it to a longer-duration buff for Peace of mind? I know this was a long post but me personally as an illusionist I don't like that option for the line being that 99% of illys are going to spec right-side regardless for the time warp refreshment.

[Ratman12345]

Just going to point out that coercers get 12 seconds off Peace of Mind making it a 48 second recast at 100% reuse, which is a smack in the face for an endline.

[Eggwardo]

Yeah illys get the same exact endline.

[capricorn23]

Keuark23- You have mentioned several things i am in agreement with, mainly the  reuse timmer on Peace of Mind.

 I belive that is new AA is  one of the poorest ever,  On average  in a 10-12 minute fight we will be able to cast it a whole one more time !

 Thats completely pathetic, and  adding a reuse reduction timmer on a skill thats been around forever shows COMPLETE lack of motivation to create something new for this class or the players that play it.

A longer Timewarp or raidwide cross group wide Timewarp would be alot nicer , i agree.. anything but a skill thats going to throw off my temp buff casting order, or at least lower the reuse of destructive rampage and timewarp aswell so that all 3 temps can work toegther one after the other.

[capricorn23]

That pisses me off so much, its almost like flash of brilliance, with 100% reuse it can be up NONESTOP, but instead of them making it a perma buff, we are forced to throw it in our casting rotation and chain cast it. the buff itself lacks so much lately, with a low INT buff on it, but lately it has had AGI and STR and WIS added to it, and you gain more AGI and STR on that buff than actualy INT which the buff was orininally  designed to have for the mage group. figure that one out... 

Not sure who is designing these Illusionist abilities, but id really take a look at their qualifications and  perhaps get someone with a fresh  interest on the class in here before people lose interest in this game alltogether.

[Keuark23]

Ok so I had typed up a huge long list of more reasons things should be changed to the endline before actually logging in to see the new endline but I must say I am much more satisfied with this change but yet still a bit emo about it. Will edit with questions/thoughts

Ok so after looking at the new endline, I believe it is at least worth the 1 point into it, but it seems to be weak/out of balance for other things. At 300 Potency self buffed (without EV on myself) completely raid-geared Illusionist (not fully end-gamed geared but fairly well off) by my math (lets hope its right) it comes out to 15 Potency. Granted that is better than a reduction in cooldown for Peace of Mind by far but still for an endline in a new-content expansion, it seems weak. EV itself is double that amount of potency for a until cancelled buff for a wizard in my group and is rivaled by Psychic Trauma. Destructive Rampage is 15 Potency to the group for 40 seconds (with 20 seconds of gap time between it) which barely rivals a consistant raid buff by conjuror for 10 potency (I believe, correct me if im incorrect of course). Yes, it's worth the point now, but it still is on the weak side of things. Another question that comes into play is what exactly is considered base potency? The way it is worded can be confusing alone, is it based on the entire groups base potency (a combined pool of everyones potency, I'd imagine not but the wording could confuse someone) or the Illusionst's/Casters potency.  Is base potency going to be just our equipment + base stats, ignoring all until cancelled buffs etc as well as temporary buffs (obviously temporary would instantly disqualify it as base in my opinion). Maybe beef up the number to 10% or look into possibly giving it a base value of 25% potency increase or something because being that gear varies form every illusionst to every illusionst you are looking between 100-300 Potency (5-15 potency to the buff) and there is a lot more that could factor into it. 5-15 Potency, while at face value is ok, seems to be weak for consideration of an endline, especially when every other class such as Wizards Warlocks Necros and Conjy's are all getting what seems to be (I haven't played on any of em yet) a pretty devastating and big damage nuke. I know were not any of those classes, we are supports and our job is to make these guys do more damage while sustaining a respectable amount of damage ourselves, but mage for mage and looking at it for supporting DPS classes, as I said earlier, it is on the weaker side of things. 

Another alternative could be to completely redesign into a new ability such as suggested previously but I don't think that would be necessairy considering this was a great change already and has potential with proper testing/tuning.

End all be all, I think the change was a good move and the right move toward Illusionist, but it needs to be buffed up a bit to really make it worth that end-line point to a tree we are pretty much stuck to anyway in terms of group DPS supporting.

Last Edit for this post: If any illusionist that are 95 on beta (Yea, I've been slacking.) could test the potency numbers for me, post your "base" potency as well as your potency with EV on yourself and with 1 other perosn in your group and the value's that DR gives to your potency it could help.

[Dooh]

Keuark23 wrote:

Last Edit for this post: If any illusionist that are 95 on beta (Yea, I've been slacking.) could test the potency numbers for me, post your "base" potency as well as your potency with EV on yourself and with 1 other perosn in your group and the value's that DR gives to your potency it could help.

OK at 300 potency and no EV it gave 15 potency

Forget what I was with EV but it gave me 16 potency

With EV and Illusionary Vigor maxed at 372 potency, it gave 18

This was solo and with someone else in the group.

The other in group was undergeared and at 253 potency it gave 12

[Keuark23]

Dooh@Crushbone wrote:

OK at 300 potency and no EV it gave 15 potency

Forget what I was with EV but it gave me 16 potency

With EV and Illusionary Vigor maxed at 372 potency, it gave 18

This was solo and with someone else in the group.

The other in group was undergeared and at 253 potency it gave 12

Ok so the other person in the group received less potency from it, so it is based not on the casters potency but whoever receives the buffs potency? Like if im at 300 and wizard is at 350 I'd get 15 pot and they'd get like 17 or whatever it may be? Does that seem accurate?

[Dooh]

right

[Keuark23]

Well. Im satisfied with the new rethought endline, good job on that devs (Still think a static number on the high end around 20 or 17.5 or so would be good but then again we can't determine that until we see what the level 95 gear is going to be for group and raid players) now we just need a bit of loving on Chromatic Illusion's numbers and we'd be pretty set and balanced for the expansion, right now the inital damage is a bit weak and the trigger damage seems weak as well (the mana portion doesn't sound to bad though), will edit post with more information/thoughts etc.

[Sever]

I still think the damage on chromatic/mystic illusion needs to be reviewed. Last time I did a group zone, on a good aoe fight, it was topping out at around 30k combined dps. I was looking the parses the coercers were posting on the updated Ether Balance and it's back to being amazing, while ours remains bad. Yea, its a blue aoe, which our class needed, but the damage is still very low. Other than that, main point is you have to cast it every 5 seconds to maintain the 10-30k or whatever dps while the coercer can cast theirs once a minute and pull upwards of 70k dps out of it (coercer parse shows EB doing 40k-70k post fix). I would expect ours to do something similar at least in a multi-mob fight. Also, like Keuark was saying, if its not worth casting in a single target rotation, then is it really even worth it? For being our prestige line, thats pretty bad imo.

Thoughts?

[crazy8ss]

I agree, it really doesn’t sound well thought out, to have to cast something every 5s to do half the dps of a spell that coercers cast once a minute just doesn't seem right, the recent ACTs for EB in coercer forum look very healthy indeed. 

Not sure the DR prestige is that great either, while an improvement on a reduced reuse to PoM, it’s not particularly inspiring to see a temp buff for 15-20 pot as endline prestige, how does this compare with the troub pot buff (36 pot)?

[Keuark23]

Saden@Blackburrow wrote:

I still think the damage on chromatic/mystic illusion needs to be reviewed. Last time I did a group zone, on a good aoe fight, it was topping out at around 30k combined dps. I was looking the parses the coercers were posting on the updated Ether Balance and it's back to being amazing, while ours remains bad. Yea, its a blue aoe, which our class needed, but the damage is still very low. Other than that, main point is you have to cast it every 5 seconds to maintain the 10-30k or whatever dps while the coercer can cast theirs once a minute and pull upwards of 70k dps out of it (coercer parse shows EB doing 40k-70k post fix). I would expect ours to do something similar at least in a multi-mob fight. Also, like Keuark was saying, if its not worth casting in a single target rotation, then is it really even worth it? For being our prestige line, thats pretty bad imo.

Thoughts?

I think you've made great points here but I'd like to see some numbers as well if anyone can throw some parses in this thread, damage parses as well as mana parses, give a bit of feel for just how detrimental it is to our casting rotation and how it feels with everything else, you have to remember that firstly its a fast cast low cooldown, so things like PoM, ET etc are going to help us with this spell being that its such a quick cast and quick reuse, it could potentially fit in well nice with those but overall I don't think that is going to be the direction to go with an ability such as this and that it would better fit into a mid-cooldown type of area, think like Theorms, Chromatic Shower, Prismatic etc. Something added into that area of cooldowns and being one of our bigger dps abilities with the added benefit of it being aoe would be nice it would be a nice little peice to our collection of big hitters considering we'd have one On-target (Prismatic), One single target (Theorms), One Encounter AE (Chromatic) and 1 Blue AOE (New ability). Its a great concept for the ability but as everyone is pointing out, it needs reworked within the numbers. Possibly a 30second base cooldown? 40? Something along those lines would be great so that it falls in line with our other 3.

[Keuark23]

crazy8ss wrote:

I agree, it really doesn’t sound well thought out, to have to cast something every 5s to do half the dps of a spell that coercers cast once a minute just doesn't seem right, the recent ACTs for EB in coercer forum look very healthy indeed. 

Not sure the DR prestige is that great either, while an improvement on a reduced reuse to PoM, it’s not particularly inspiring to see a temp buff for 15-20 pot as endline prestige, how does this compare with the troub pot buff (36 pot)?

Oh the Troub pot buff, can you give the stats/info behind it? Is it on about the same duration? Etc etc. It might put it in a bit more perspective. 

[Misia]

Personae Wall even at rank 3 isn't going to do much to help Illys who feel that their pets are weaker than tissue paper.

One AE from any raid mob, especially HM, and the pet goes poof. Blocking 30% of the damage just means, well... nothing.

[Keuark23]

Misia wrote:

Personae Wall even at rank 3 isn't going to do much to help Illys who feel that their pets are weaker than tissue paper.

One AE from any raid mob, especially HM, and the pet goes poof. Blocking 30% of the damage just means, well... nothing.

Dev's please look at this =( I am thinking, and if im wrong correct me, the 30% damage was put in just to make our pet more surviveable through AOE's and not get 1 shot by aoe's and if it still is getting 1 shot by aoes then it essentially makes this mastery useless. Possibly buff it up to 50% damage reduction on the pet or buff our pets hp/etc so that they can survive an AOE? 

Also as far as the Chromatic Illusion AA line, I am going to get on tonight and play with it a bit to see where the damage numbers fall and what not because from what I heard from everyone else is that almost every other classes "stacking/incremental" damage ability endline/midlines are doing insane numbers, ours is still falling way short in comparison to classes such as tanks etc and extremely short of mage damage overall.

[Dooh]

Just hit a dummy for like 2 mins to try it out. It did 6% of total damage this time on the initial hit. And 2% from the other triggers. Just wanted to try it before i logged for the night.

Also was hoping with the instant cast I cold just macro it to all my spells and it would just cast when it was up. But that didn't work and it just messed up the spell cues sadly.

[Dooh]

Tried it again a few more times today. On avarge its doing 4% and 1%. The power proc is ok though I reckon. 67% to soothing mind at 33%. That was on solo dummy though. Just messing around doing quests and on groups it did much better.

They also changed Illusionary Vigor to just 1 potency per rank. BS imo.

[Keuark23]

Dooh@Crushbone wrote:

Tried it again a few more times today. On avarge its doing 4% and 1%. The power proc is ok though I reckon. 67% to soothing mind at 33%. That was on solo dummy though. Just messing around doing quests and on groups it did much better.

They also changed Illusionary Vigor to just 1 potency per rank. BS imo.

Honestly, the Vigor change doesn't really bother me that much considering were getting a decent potency proc on our DR and it's likely that Vigor isn't going to be up as often as everyone is predicting anyway (mostly group's i'd say, im not sure if I would spec it for raids but thats going to be something to look at when everything hits live. I like Vigor and the functionality of it right now and honestly the nerf to 1 potency per rank was justified because every other support class got theirs knocked down as well. 

As far as the damage/changes done to Chromatic Illusion, I think dev's went the wrong way but buffing up the damage enhance on it and making it instant cast rather then making it a longer-reuse/higher damage nuking ability but 6% with triggers doing 1% of our damage is still really weak for an endline, the base numbers need to be brought up in my opinion to where its somewhere around the 9%/2% range, making it compareable to our current big-hitters that we cast every time their up (cause honestly, im not sure if i'd still use it outside of AE/Encounter fights rather than just using it as a filler in my casting order or something quick to use for another hit on PoM/ET/VC). My suggestion would be to give all the base numbers a 5-10% or so increase and that should put it just under the DPS of Theorms/Prismatic Shock and right above Beam, as well as on encounters making it compareable to Shower. So another buff to Chromatic might be in order to just get it to that sweet spot of damage that it needs to be. (I liked the damage increase on the enhancement but as stated above, the base numbers are still just a bit to low)

My MAIN issue right now though is still the pet. As I was informed of today, at SOE Live there were a few devs that were happy to report that our pet wasn't going to be a "dumbfire" pet anymore essentially, but as many people have said and testing has shown, that 30% damage reduction still is not cutting it because out pet is still being 1 shot by AOE's. Why not add in a benefit that the last rank of the damage reduction adds in a permanant AOE blocker on the pet (unless direct of course) that adds benefit to those 3 points being added while still not making our pet totally overpowered. Damage for Damage, even with a permanant AE blocker, our pet wouldn't even come close to Conjy/Necro pets which is perfectly acceptable considering that conjy/necro pets should do more damage than our pet. Yet another intricate part of that is that Conjy and Necro's rely on their pet as well and have many different saves/heals/ae immunes/etc making it so that not only do they rely on their pet but their pet relys on them as well (Pets give them benefits and vice versa), while our pet is just an added short amount of DPS to our parse and an addition of a soloing ability, our pet isn't worth a recast when it dies to every raid AE because its going to take more from our dps just to die again, we do not have a heal to cast on our pet because it isn't part of our class, we do not have any added benefit except the extra bit of damage that our pet puts out. Heck, the pet honestly wouldn't even suffer from a small boost in its damage output but that would be useless without the survivability factor. Right now the current strategy behind keeping our pets alive is to use Sever Hate's AOE Block portion on it to keep our pet alive from red text/other aoes but this brings 2 problems into itself, firstly not all AOE's are avoidable with blockers and the pet will still die if an AOE is delayed or timers are misread. Secondly it wastes Sever hate's functionality of being able to cast it on a scout when they draw aggro, casting it on a healer when they are about to get hit on an AOE etc, we have the option of keeping a pet alive that will add minimal damage to the mob or to cast the Sever Hate on someone more important in a raid and allow them to continue to function through the AOE.  The only other solution to fixing the pet honestly is to go back through the pet's scaling stats and increase the amount of HP/Avoidence/Defensive Stats/Resist that it has but that would cause more work than needed because you'd have to look at other factors such as just how much they need to withstand a raid mob's AOE and live as well as how they would fair verse normal encounters etc. One last note is that the AOE blocker would have to be one of the better AOE blockers out that there blocks just about everything except for Red Text (It would keep illusionist as a skillful class to ensure that whenever a red-text aoe is about to hit that their pet is backed-off otherwise lose the dps and seconds it would take to recast). 

EDIT on pet subject: I just tested it and the Illusionst Pet, while having TC and Synergism + Group Buffs is only doing 25k DPS on Epic Training Dummy (I've seen conjy/necro pets literally put out 10x that number), so if that might help put things in perspective just how low the dps is, and what we have to go through just to keep that extra dps out there. We could use some pet love in terms of DPS but I'd settle for surviveability first. 

I might sound like a broken record by now, but when I heard that there were some dev's really excited about this at SOE Live and how Illusionists pet weren't going to be useless anymore I got a bit sad considering that even with 30% damage reduction, the pet still dies to any raid-encounter aoe that has a damage component to it. 

EDIT: Also. I would just like to thank you Dev's thus far because you have been really responsive to everyones suggestoins/critism and have done very good with the changes and help balancing things to make us a good counterpart to a Coercer and useful to groups/raids as well as good soloing characters. 

Ok. Firstly sorry if these images are to big, im a scrub when it comes to linking these things. This is a Encounter of normal dummies parse from 100% - 0% for sake of duration, casting normal priority for spells and damage as you can see I only casted my temp buffs combined with Chromatic Illusion (Casted every time possible), Chromatic Storm (Casted once I believe?) and Shower. Shower over doubles the DPS on the encounter based mobs while storm comes in right behind at a very close 3rd place behind Illusion. Honestly had I cast Storm twice rather then once I wouldn't be surprised if it had out DPS'd Chromatic. So on AOE fights, where the spell is suppose to outshine our big hitters, its DPS was still sub-par with Storm.

This was an Epic Training Dummy from 100% HP - 0% (love how you added more HP to the epic dummies as well.) My crushing damage is based off a 1hander hence why it is so low. Casted temps every time they were up, cast priority was Prismatic, Theorms, Shower, Chromatic Illusion (Everytime it was up pretty much), Re-apply dots followed by Beam. As you can see Beam almost outshined it and was lower on the cast priority list, Dynamism and Peace of Mind (both buffs) out-damaged an actual spell which isn't out of the order considering how amazing they both are, but 5% of our damage is low. Granted this is a single target fight but compareable to that of a coercer who's single-target dps from their new line was upwards 15-20% depending on how they mixed it into the fight, it is VERY weak. 

This is the mana-parse, honestly the mana side of things are ok, but not amazing. Through the duration of the 16 minute fight it was barely capable of keeping my mana from reaching 0 (Same conditions apply to the previous parse about cast order etc). Had to put savante in there to keep myself from zeroing out on mana and as soon as I did I pretty much filled back up. It could use a little bit of love mana wise but honestly combined with out other mana tools it is fine, at least from eye value where we are mostly blind about encounter scripts for raids. (If more power drains are added, might need some love in the future to help group.)

For sake of comparison for the 13 minute fight, this is a 3 minute fight (compareable to what you would see on trash fights). Overall DPS stayed rather the same around 220k, this time I prioritized Chromatic over everything except for temp buffs and as you can see Beam did more damage than it this time around, Dynaism less (less casts in a long period are going to render this result for a lot of things though) and Mystic Illusion remains at 1% of our DPS again. Honestly, that extra 1% is not going to be worth the 3 points that could be put into the pet mastery and its a pretty obvious choice to make (as long as the pet mastery is reworked into something worth-while.)

Essentialy, once again compared to our counter part class who's new line is doing a respectful 15% of their dps (and from my knowledge most other classes damage is around that area), our line is doing merely 5%-6%, with 1% from the addtional strikes put into it. Between me and my pet on the parses the Mystic Illusion procs wouldn't wasted because of the casting speeds between us both. I think that the base numbers need to be brought up and the base numbers on Mystic Illusion need to be brought up to fill in that extra damage advantage to make it competitive point wise with our Pet damage reduction or the Potency buff from Illusionary Vigor. I know this was probably an insanely long post to read and respond on but I like to be thorough when it comes to things such as class balancing especially when it comes to the class I play 100% of the time.

[Shotneedle]

Dynamism showed more on that one parse because you posted All Outgoing, not Outgoing Damage.

[Keuark23]

Buffrat@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Dynamism showed more on that one parse because you posted All Outgoing, not Outgoing Damage.

Yea good catch there Buffrat I just noticed after reading this, I'll update it with the correct parse tonight. 

[Dooh]

Dam kid, you sure do like to type :p

While were talking about our pets. Any chance you can fix the whole, 'having to recast pet after zoning' thing?  Thanks.

[Keuark23]

Dooh@Crushbone wrote:

Dam kid, you sure do like to type :p

While were talking about our pets. Any chance you can fix the whole, 'having to recast pet after zoning' thing?  Thanks.

Dam, I hope you like to read :p but yea when it comes to class balancing and making illusionist worth having I want to be precise and make a good case.

I saw the patch notes today, and its a good change for the stacking ability but I really am hoping the pet changes and damage changes come out either late tonight/over the weekend because by that point with Tuesday being the release we wont have time to test it more thoroughly and make sure its in line. 

[Keuark23]

Well I am going to spare everyone the long paragraphs and everything. This a parse after Saturday's update notes, same conditions as the earlier ones regarding cast order and buffs. I still believe Chromatic Illusion should have it's damaged upped by about 50% to where it and shower does compareable damage, combined with Mystic doing about 2% more which would allow it to be balanced with coercers new DPS buff. I still believe our pet needs some love in terms of survivibility, but as we near closer to release, I am just going to let the numbers speak for themselves.