What's wrong with Wizards?

[Messianic]

Originally Posted by stormlord [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I haven't played a mage or wizard on p1999, but when Iwas doing old man mckenzie missions I played mages and wizards several times. What I noticed was that mages greatly helped the group with their pets and damage spells whereas the wizards had only slightly better damage spells (more types though) and no pet. The wizard might have had a few other plusses, but overall, in my groups we never did it without a mage and wizards were kind of like rangers in their usefulness. I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but this is how it worked.

I don't know. It seemed like wizards didn't really have a niche in the missions. Yes, they have more spell types but this wasn't really a concern most of the time. Their spells aren't significantly better and don't make up for not having a strong pet like the magician did. I could count fingers on one hand the number of times I might have been thankful we had a wizard, but that was mostly because we had a gimped group. Mages were always a big help. The missions were limited in scope, so maybe this isn't a fair assessment of the wizard class.

Old Man Mckenzie missions are level 50 content that's supposed to be similar to how it was back in the day. It's an instance you enter from POK. They're in nagafens lair, undead guk, live guk (no undead).

I think a lot of it has to do with what your group is doing. I know that hybrids tend to be a lot more useful when you're in a new place and dangers surprise you. But once you got everything figured out and you're into a pattern, I think the value of hybrids drops like a rock. They're really, i think, meant for dynamic situations that're borderline chaotic and tend towards isolating group members from one another. In situations where they're packed together and organized it's better to have specialized members that excel in certain areas. I mean, what good is a cleric heal if the cleric isn't nearby to heal you? What good is a enchanter if they're too far away to mez or slow? What good is a rogue if they can't get behind the mob? What good is a melee that can't invis if there's no one there to invis them? Etc. There were lots of examples in the old man mckenzie missions where I couold see the benefit of having hybrids, but once i figured things out and knew what to do I just couldn't justify having hybrids in hte group. Call it powergaming, but it's just a tactical reality in gaming.

I'm not saying wizards are hybrids. I'm saying that maybe the range of challenges in hte missions I did were not appropriate for the wizard to truly shine. This though would be just like a hybrid. If a group is challenged in certain ways you will see certain classes doing well and others not. It depends on what you're doing.

From playing a wizard through 56 on live and having a friend who was a 60 mage through the velious era, this is basically true.

Mages have more reliable, sustained dps and only slightly worse nukes. Not that wizards suck, but they aren't part of the "perfect" group (if having a perfect group is necessary).