They should have had progressive meditation sessions. 20 mana/sec first minute, 24 the next minute, etc. to max of 40, assuming continuous medding. Less downtime, but doesn't give them any in-fight advantage.

That would have been a cool idea.

Or give them the Mana version of Monk's Mend.

Make harvest restore a % of total mana!

Bandaid applied!

Hindsight is always 20/20. I think Wizards were balanced this way because back on live melee classes weren't as overpowered. This is because most players had crap gear. It's the same reason why people thought pet classes were flat out overpowered on live, because in general pets did better than poorly geared players.

On P99 Wizards suck simply because every melee class has access to gear that is higher power than what was expected for the level of the mobs being killed. This means Wizards just can't keep up. If you have a group of players in Leather armor + combine weapons, you have a LOT more downtime where the Wizard has time to recover mana. That is what the developers were expecting people to have.

P99 players are also less likely to steal camps. Back on live having a Wizard for high burst damage was a nice way to prevent other people from kill stealing.

Remember that Everquest was balanced around what the developers were expecting the average player to have gear-wise, and they were building expansions for the future. The average power of people's gear on live was much lower per expansion. So in essence P99 breaks a lot of class balance simply by raising the average gear power of players. The developers had to balance the classes around the average gear level AND the power of the class during live.

I am sure the developers would balance the game differently if they planned on stopping at Velious, because they would know that item inflation would occur.

25% of mana, reduce cooldown to 5 minutes.

Also, make Concussion spell a 30 second duration Hate reducer, where the mob doesn't switch targets. So a Hate reducer for the entire group, except for the current person the mob is attacking when the debuff is applied.

Thats a sick wizard model btw. Is it an oldschool citadel sculpt?

I learnt in this thread wizards should be able to equip long swords and BFG.

Wizards (and Rangers) for that matter were shockingly good on TLP because they've been given a lot of balance changes over the years. Would honestly take a Wizard over a Magician in most situations. Thought Rangers were the best EXP tanks in the game because they easily hold aggro, deal a ton of damage, have a ton of utility and track to contest rare spawns.

If warriors are the pure version of melee and get critical hits then wizards should have, as the pure version of a caster, received spell crits. That change by itself would have made a big difference for wizards.