TB;DR

Well ice looks good single target DPS wise now if you max CL and don't fail saves. I guess it depends on iceberg's cooldown. It's probably easier to fit the electric spells into your standard spell rotation (on a sorc) but you're still missing polar ray which is pretty nasty post update. New staff is good but it fucks up your gear slots. (~15% more damage with the staff due to MCL going from 33 to 38)

Pre-update with 80% crit chance and 1k spellpower air is the top dps at about 8k dps.
Post-update with the same crit chance and spellpower it looks like cold might hit 20k.
Keep in mind this is running magister with 2 tier 4 twists (+3 MCL and Eburst) with Empyrean magic as your third twist.

It's humorous how SSG keeps fixing the wrong things. 

Spell points / point of damage is the problem they need to be fixing, not actual DPS.  50k DPS Evo caster will still be dead weight in R10s after they blow their spell point pool on the first 10 mobs assuming that the average player does not have an endless supply of potions to chug non-stop.

Melee DPS = autoattack and do X dps against every mob without running out.

Ranged DPS = autoattack and do X dps against every mob without running out.

Evo Warlocks = autoattack and do X dps against every mob without running out (even if X is laughably small in high skull reaper)

Instakiller caster = be smart about your spell point burn rate and able to make it from shrine to shrine without too much trouble

Evo Wiz/Sorc = burn 5k spell points to kill 5-10 mobs then wonder HTF you're going to avoid virtually piking while the rest of your party clears the way to the next shrine.

One of the easiest ways they could fix evo casters in reaper is to add a passive, fairly fast spell point regen effect to them.  Or in other words, just give Evo casters a stance that works in a similar manner to the Epic Defensive stance for melee.  Have it give a steady and relatively endless spell point supply to Evo casters while reducing non-Evo spellpowers and DCs to zero and reduce healing range to touch.

If they did that, at least Evo casters would be able to stay active, casting a steady stream of damage and feel like they're contributing to the group on a consistent basis which is what ranged and melee DPS currently do.

On a related note, so much for SSG not making balance decisions based on Reaper difficulty.  It's entertaining to see them squirm around that ultimatum since, no matter how they spin it, these sort of changes are only needed because Reaper utterly wrecked evo casters.

Digimonk wrote on Nov 13^th, 2018 at 12:38pm:


If they give such a thing, whatever form it takes ( enhancement stance, destiny, feat ) they just kill every plain spellcaster class as everybody in spellcasting will want ot have access to that... so you'll end up with LVL X Wiz/LVL Y Clerics gimps just to get that Mana refill option.

It's just bad, as it's going to kill options instead of make more options viable.

Flav wrote on Nov 13^th, 2018 at 1:46pm:

Disagree.   Show me a healbot player that sacrifices 800+ positive spellpower to run in the Evo stance and I'll show you an idiot that quickly gets blacklisted from good groups.  Nobody's going to want a healbot that can't heal for shit.  A non-evo CC or instakill caster would be even more useless while running in an Evo stance if the stance was designed correctly. 

Current healbot builds and DC casters generally have plenty of spell points to make it from shrine to shrine assuming the gear, build and player are at least semi intelligent.  The spell soul gem things in reaper are more than enough to keep gas in their tank as is.

Evo casters on the other hand are just completely fucked by spell point pool burn rates in reaper and it gets worse as the skulls increase.

An instakill spell kills a mob in one cast and thus a fixed amount of spell points per kill whether it's EN, LE, or 10 skull.  Now consider how many spell points an evo nuker has to burn to kill an EN mob vs an LE vs a 10-skull.   There's the problem and it could be fixed by a stance if done right, which probably rules SSG out but the theory is sound.

I haven't played around with a caster build in YEARS and even then it wasn't that serious. Mage builds never appealed to me. Anyone mind giving a quick lowdown on their state in the meta right now? I'm reading some of the responses in this thread and they're informative, though I don't think I have a very full picture of casters overall right now.

From my standpoint (I mostly just do R1-R3 in heroics or E-R1 in epics, never spending time at endgame; TR hamsterwheel ftw), instakill casters seem more powerful than anything melee offers. Neither strikes me as overall useful as ranged physical DPS though because when compared to melee, ranged DPS sacrifices almost nothing in the way of damage while having vastly safer options than melee--ranged combines the safety of casters with the consistent output of melee, or the best of both worlds in other words.

The opinion here seems to be that casters generally are underpowered. So two main questions:

• Is the difference really that catastrophic in higher level reapers so as to render casters useless?
• Who are the worst and best casters right now (Shiradi, crowd control, nuker, instakill etc.)?

And I guess by extension, how you guys would go about changing things so they were more fair. I'm genuinely just out of the loop, lol.

Pseudonym wrote on Nov 13^th, 2018 at 9:27pm:


And completed.

I feel like my racial lifes will become much more fun with this change.
Clearing rooms with aoe on r 5 r 6 as s orc with 1 2 spells, let the dream come true

Lelouch wrote on Nov 14^th, 2018 at 9:30am:


Heh, yeah.  Helf, Lock Dille, Fire Sorc...

Digimonk wrote on Nov 13^th, 2018 at 12:38pm:


Fixed that for you.

Digimonk wrote on Nov 13^th, 2018 at 12:38pm:


You've got that right, kiddo.

All they have done is to acknowledge the DPS issue with Evo casters while only slightly improving their position in elite content, and hardly at all in anything reaper.

are any of the Arcane changes making DI damage abilities better?

The issue is the devs don't even understand the problem to come up with a viable fix. while Digi's solution was not great at least it tried to address some of the problems.

harharharhar wrote on Nov 15^th, 2018 at 12:44am:


Nay