Wizards! Do you regret it?

[Azazel]

As far as grouping goes, wizards are terrible, far worse than rangers. Great to have on raids tho.

[Hithrohir]

The problem is that the content isn't designed to cater to what a wizard offers. If huge burst damage was widely useful, it'd be different. There's very rarely a need to burn a mob down in a hurry, especially as mob hp grows to the point where you pretty much can't. Towards the end of Kunark, and certainly in Velious, it gets to the point where the mobs simply die faster if you apply the sustained DPS of a melee class throughout the entire fight. If it had been so that wizards, despite having a lower general DPS, were frequently needed to burn down mobs during hypothetical dangerous phases or whatever, they might serve a purpose. It just isn't really there, and for the vast majority of the game's content, a wizard is resigned to sitting around nuking each mob once and doing horrible DPS with no situations coming up where the ability to burn shit down becomes valuable.

The math has already been done in this thread. While rudimentary, it's pretty straight-forward - consider the damage to mana ratio, the time it takes to get that amount of mana back, and you have a general DPS figure. Then consider that a wizard contributes absolutely nothing else during combat and you have proof that the class is simply weak. Their ports are a tertiary convenience, their evacs are only needed if things don't go right (which they usually do with this playerbase, most everyone being hardcore EQ veterans who know their shit) and the ability to interrupt casters is neither rare nor particularly critical in a group setting. Plus it costs DPS for the wizard, unlike other classes.

I think the simple fact that magician nukes are only 10% worse than a wizard's while their pet approaches the DPS of an additional melee class is enough to discount wizard as a viable DPS role. And even magicians are considered sub-par. Lures are hugely mana-inefficient and are used only on the occasional raid target that can't be nuked with normal spells, and while wizards do become a bit less futile on raids, they're still far from necessary and often enough out-performed by melee anyway.

Most of this boils down to that lapse in class design vs. content design, and of course the inexcusably bad caster itemization of early Everquest. A naked wizard does the same DPS as a raid-geared one, and while the latter can do it for longer, the mana pool dilemma comes into effect on anything but boss mobs where you always start at FM. Uptime was discussed in a previous post, and anyone who knows their shit knows that a large mana pool is worthless when you never get to reach FM, and is equally worthless if the content is so easy that you frequently do. It only matters in those situations where you get to fill that huge mana pool up before using it and can then use the whole thing. Without a way of doing this on demand like you can in modern games, it becomes almost entirely worthless, and thus caster itemization is broken.

[WizardEQ]

Bring back Classic "BETA" Everquest. Then you got your pre-nerf wizards back (and lots of other stuff)!

[stormlord]

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

The problem is that the content isn't designed to cater to what a wizard offers. If huge burst damage was widely useful, it'd be different. There's very rarely a need to burn a mob down in a hurry, especially as mob hp grows to the point where you pretty much can't. Towards the end of Kunark, and certainly in Velious, it gets to the point where the mobs simply die faster if you apply the sustained DPS of a melee class throughout the entire fight. If it had been so that wizards, despite having a lower general DPS, were frequently needed to burn down mobs during hypothetical dangerous phases or whatever, they might serve a purpose. It just isn't really there, and for the vast majority of the game's content, a wizard is resigned to sitting around nuking each mob once and doing horrible DPS with no situations coming up where the ability to burn shit down becomes valuable.

The math has already been done in this thread. While rudimentary, it's pretty straight-forward - consider the damage to mana ratio, the time it takes to get that amount of mana back, and you have a general DPS figure. Then consider that a wizard contributes absolutely nothing else during combat and you have proof that the class is simply weak. Their ports are a tertiary convenience, their evacs are only needed if things don't go right (which they usually do with this playerbase, most everyone being hardcore EQ veterans who know their shit) and the ability to interrupt casters is neither rare nor particularly critical in a group setting. Plus it costs DPS for the wizard, unlike other classes.

I think the simple fact that magician nukes are only 10% worse than a wizard's while their pet approaches the DPS of an additional melee class is enough to discount wizard as a viable DPS role. And even magicians are considered sub-par. Lures are hugely mana-inefficient and are used only on the occasional raid target that can't be nuked with normal spells, and while wizards do become a bit less futile on raids, they're still far from necessary and often enough out-performed by melee anyway.

Most of this boils down to that lapse in class design vs. content design, and of course the inexcusably bad caster itemization of early Everquest. A naked wizard does the same DPS as a raid-geared one, and while the latter can do it for longer, the mana pool dilemma comes into effect on anything but boss mobs where you always start at FM. Uptime was discussed in a previous post, and anyone who knows their shit knows that a large mana pool is worthless when you never get to reach FM, and is equally worthless if the content is so easy that you frequently do. It only matters in those situations where you get to fill that huge mana pool up before using it and can then use the whole thing. Without a way of doing this on demand like you can in modern games, it becomes almost entirely worthless, and thus caster itemization is broken.

I LOVE your comments here because they highlight something that I've said before and has fallen on deaf ears.

The interplay between class design vs content design. I played a ranger a lot on live. One thing that bothered me is that content seemed to get increasingly stale over time. Rather than rooting or snaring or tracking or invising or kiting or doing some of the other things my ranger could do, I ended up being reduced to a simple dealer of DPS. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I leveled up. The early levels involve a lot of rooting/snaring/kiting/etc and those things make the gameplay more interesting, but as you get higher you start to group a lot and most of the gameplay for rangers is simply DPS-oriented and, of course, monsters would summon and become hard to tank. This was not a fault so much of the class as it was the fault of the content. The content was just not there. There were too many creatures that could summon, the fights/deaths were too quick, the creatures hit too hard, everything seemed more predictable, and so on.

I think the game would have been better if there was no summoning and players had more hp or the creatures didn't hit as hard. There should be zones that have more chaos so groups need more hybrids/utility and then some zones that're more predictable and you don't need hybrids/utility as much. But it just seems that with time everything was chiseled away until combat encounters were just hack/slash; heal/tank/dps.

It might be that the game just ran out of money and they were unable to make diverse gameplay. So this is what led to the simplistic triangle-based content; heal/tank/dps. Rather than rogues disabling traps and sneaking past monsters to loot chests, they just stood behind and stabbed in the back. There was very little thought into developing content for classes. All in all, it seems that the developers decided it was cheaper to produce content for heal/tank/dps than it was to produce content for all the different classes. What happened is they reduced all the archetypes to just these 3, mostly. In the process, a lot was lost.

You can reduce all the classes to simplistic archetypes, but that's a slippery slope. They do it to save money and if the players eat it up then they continue to make it. It shouldn't be acceptable.

Why shouldn't it be acceptable? Because rangers aren't DPS, they're MUCH more than that. They're explorers. They're hunters. As explorers, they can respond with more abundance to the unexpected. DPS is a far cry to the expanse of the wilderness and the dark hollows of caves. Put most men in those places and they're go mad. Rangers are at home. Rogues are more than DPS too. They disable traps, they sneak and hide, they poison weapons, they stab people in the dark, they lock pick treasure boxes, they emanate charm to their unwary victims, they're as much about stealing and tricking as they're about killing. A lot of this detail is lost when you simplify it to a cut and dry system. That's what happened to everquest content over time.

That's how it felt to me, wrong or right. My ranger felt gutted.

Basically, classes are stupidly boring when content is mostly made for just heal/tank/dps. You see, in a wizard's case, it's not just the dps, it's the BURST-dps. The simplistic content wasn't prepared.

I remember reading something similar about Morrowind, an old Elder Scrolls SRPG. It had something to do with classes wanting unique content but it not being there or something. I can't recall the details. I know a lot of games are guilty of relying too much on heal/tank/dps. There needs to be content that's more diverse. A way to solve it with just casters or just melee or just hybrids or something similar. For example, a man of the sword will slay his enemy to get his jewels, whereas, a rogue will sneak into his home and steal his jewels without touching him. A wise man might simply con him into giving away his jewels without a fight. A criminal man might extort him. There needs to be more paths that lead to success, not just one or two or three.

I think camping also partly ruined it. Players would settle into a single camp and stay there for days and weeks, grinding it to dust. Everything was a science. Rogues didn't need to lock-pick. Rangers didn't need to track. Chanters didn't need to mez. Druids didn't need to succor. Nobody needed to root. Etc. Players themselves, with the support of developers, paved the road to a game that became much more boring.

I think they should have put locked treasure boxes in the dungeons for player and trapped some of them. In all my time in EQ, I only ever saw rogues lock pick in LDON, if ever. I think maybe once. Then there was ONE other time that I shrouded to a goblin rogue so I could unlock a door in a kunark zone. There was no excuse for that. It was plain laziness. It also seemed that there were not enough dungeons and zones with 3d twists and turns. It just seemed to be one flat area with simplistic pathing and etc. Very boring.

Modern MMORPGs, like WoW or EQ2 or DDO (somewhat modern) or etc, they've improved somewhat on some of this. In fact, I've been very impressed at times. Too bad EQ only ever got a passing glance at it. But I'll admit that the maps and radars and (!!) icons and cartoony gfx and too much hand-holding does not appeal to me nearly as much as the other things they've done. In that sense, I still like classic EQ.

Sorry that I wrote so much. A big wall of text can easily ruin what's at the heart of a message. I'll lose a lot of people. Maybe I even lost a bit of myself in all that sh**. But I know that there's something to it. I didn't make this post mindlessly. These issues have crossed my mind for years and years. It's hard to pack all of that into a single post without error and with absolute completeness. Actually, it's impossible.

[Tecmos Deception]

Yeah, yeah, I'm a thread necro. Have been wanting to/thinking about making a wizard to give me a relatively rare class that is relatively desirable in raids but is less group-dependent than a melee, and I found this thread.

The quote below is great:

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

I LOVE your comments here because they highlight something that I've said before and has fallen on deaf ears.

The interplay between class design vs content design. I played a ranger a lot on live. One thing that bothered me is that content seemed to get increasingly stale over time. Rather than rooting or snaring or tracking or invising or kiting or doing some of the other things my ranger could do, I ended up being reduced to a simple dealer of DPS. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I leveled up. The early levels involve a lot of rooting/snaring/kiting/etc and those things make the gameplay more interesting, but as you get higher you start to group a lot and most of the gameplay for rangers is simply DPS-oriented and, of course, monsters would summon and become hard to tank. This was not a fault so much of the class as it was the fault of the content. The content was just not there. There were too many creatures that could summon, the fights/deaths were too quick, the creatures hit too hard, everything seemed more predictable, and so on.

I think the game would have been better if there was no summoning and players had more hp or the creatures didn't hit as hard. There should be zones that have more chaos so groups need more hybrids/utility and then some zones that're more predictable and you don't need hybrids/utility as much. But it just seems that with time everything was chiseled away until combat encounters were just hack/slash; heal/tank/dps.

It might be that the game just ran out of money and they were unable to make diverse gameplay. So this is what led to the simplistic triangle-based content; heal/tank/dps. Rather than rogues disabling traps and sneaking past monsters to loot chests, they just stood behind and stabbed in the back. There was very little thought into developing content for classes. All in all, it seems that the developers decided it was cheaper to produce content for heal/tank/dps than it was to produce content for all the different classes. What happened is they reduced all the archetypes to just these 3, mostly. In the process, a lot was lost.

You can reduce all the classes to simplistic archetypes, but that's a slippery slope. They do it to save money and if the players eat it up then they continue to make it. It shouldn't be acceptable.

Why shouldn't it be acceptable? Because rangers aren't DPS, they're MUCH more than that. They're explorers. They're hunters. As explorers, they can respond with more abundance to the unexpected. DPS is a far cry to the expanse of the wilderness and the dark hollows of caves. Put most men in those places and they're go mad. Rangers are at home. Rogues are more than DPS too. They disable traps, they sneak and hide, they poison weapons, they stab people in the dark, they lock pick treasure boxes, they emanate charm to their unwary victims, they're as much about stealing and tricking as they're about killing. A lot of this detail is lost when you simplify it to a cut and dry system. That's what happened to everquest content over time.

That's how it felt to me, wrong or right. My ranger felt gutted.

Basically, classes are stupidly boring when content is mostly made for just heal/tank/dps. You see, in a wizard's case, it's not just the dps, it's the BURST-dps. The simplistic content wasn't prepared.

I remember reading something similar about Morrowind, an old Elder Scrolls SRPG. It had something to do with classes wanting unique content but it not being there or something. I can't recall the details. I know a lot of games are guilty of relying too much on heal/tank/dps. There needs to be content that's more diverse. A way to solve it with just casters or just melee or just hybrids or something similar. For example, a man of the sword will slay his enemy to get his jewels, whereas, a rogue will sneak into his home and steal his jewels without touching him. A wise man might simply con him into giving away his jewels without a fight. A criminal man might extort him. There needs to be more paths that lead to success, not just one or two or three.

I think camping also partly ruined it. Players would settle into a single camp and stay there for days and weeks, grinding it to dust. Everything was a science. Rogues didn't need to lock-pick. Rangers didn't need to track. Chanters didn't need to mez. Druids didn't need to succor. Nobody needed to root. Etc. Players themselves, with the support of developers, paved the road to a game that became much more boring.

I think they should have put locked treasure boxes in the dungeons for player and trapped some of them. In all my time in EQ, I only ever saw rogues lock pick in LDON, if ever. I think maybe once. Then there was ONE other time that I shrouded to a goblin rogue so I could unlock a door in a kunark zone. There was no excuse for that. It was plain laziness. It also seemed that there were not enough dungeons and zones with 3d twists and turns. It just seemed to be one flat area with simplistic pathing and etc. Very boring.

Modern MMORPGs, like WoW or EQ2 or DDO (somewhat modern) or etc, they've improved somewhat on some of this. In fact, I've been very impressed at times. Too bad EQ only ever got a passing glance at it. But I'll admit that the maps and radars and (!!) icons and cartoony gfx and too much hand-holding does not appeal to me nearly as much as the other things they've done. In that sense, I still like classic EQ.

Sorry that I wrote so much. A big wall of text can easily ruin what's at the heart of a message. I'll lose a lot of people. Maybe I even lost a bit of myself in all that sh**. But I know that there's something to it. I didn't make this post mindlessly. These issues have crossed my mind for years and years. It's hard to pack all of that into a single post without error and with absolute completeness. Actually, it's impossible.

Just too bad that 95% of modern MMOs (or even just plain RPGs) still aren't close to "getting it right."

DDO is the closest I've ever seen to an MMO that made something other than tanking or healing or DPSing important. Well no, I guess CoH put pretty big emphasis on there being a 4th tier to the normal trinity... the buff/debuff/CC role that was also present in EQ. But DDO was the only MMO I've seen that gave rogues something to do that was rogue-y. But even DDO didn't take it far enough, imo. From what I recall, there were still far more missions where killing was the only way to succeed, where stealth was broken by some boss script 100% of the time; and the extra rewards in missions still far favored hacking and slashing and breaking barrels to any other approach.

There's nothing more insulting to someone who grew up playing tabletop RPGs and games like Thief and stuff than to make a class called "rogue" who is actually nothing more than a lightly armored warrior who prefers to attack from behind.

Oh well.

[Atmas]

Well the thing about your tabletop games is they were only limited by your imagination, programmed games have resource constraints. I don't think EQ did a horrid job with Rogues being able to hide and sneak, pick locks, pick pockets, disarm traps, and use oppurtunity attacks (backstab).

[Asher]

I recently got my wizard high enough to start quadding and can really see a huge difference in the amount of resists from live to p99.

The odds of landing snare or an AE DD (Max damage) on all 4 targets is much much lower.

This combined with the enormous hit box that lets mobs attack me with a 50' reach is extremely annoying but I still love my wizard.

Asher

[Messianic]

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

I recently got my wizard high enough to start quadding and can really see a huge difference in the amount of resists from live to p99.

The odds of landing snare or an AE DD (Max damage) on all 4 targets is much much lower.

This combined with the enormous hit box that lets mobs attack me with a 50' reach is extremely annoying but I still love my wizard.

Asher

What are you quadding and what level are you? I got resists maybe 4-5 times a level, even in my 40s and 50s...

[Galelor]

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

I LOVE your comments here because they highlight something that I've said before and has fallen on deaf ears.

The interplay between class design vs content design. I played a ranger a lot on live. One thing that bothered me is that content seemed to get increasingly stale over time. Rather than rooting or snaring or tracking or invising or kiting or doing some of the other things my ranger could do, I ended up being reduced to a simple dealer of DPS. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I leveled up. The early levels involve a lot of rooting/snaring/kiting/etc and those things make the gameplay more interesting, but as you get higher you start to group a lot and most of the gameplay for rangers is simply DPS-oriented and, of course, monsters would summon and become hard to tank. This was not a fault so much of the class as it was the fault of the content. The content was just not there. There were too many creatures that could summon, the fights/deaths were too quick, the creatures hit too hard, everything seemed more predictable, and so on.

I think the game would have been better if there was no summoning and players had more hp or the creatures didn't hit as hard. There should be zones that have more chaos so groups need more hybrids/utility and then some zones that're more predictable and you don't need hybrids/utility as much. But it just seems that with time everything was chiseled away until combat encounters were just hack/slash; heal/tank/dps.

It might be that the game just ran out of money and they were unable to make diverse gameplay. So this is what led to the simplistic triangle-based content; heal/tank/dps. Rather than rogues disabling traps and sneaking past monsters to loot chests, they just stood behind and stabbed in the back. There was very little thought into developing content for classes. All in all, it seems that the developers decided it was cheaper to produce content for heal/tank/dps than it was to produce content for all the different classes. What happened is they reduced all the archetypes to just these 3, mostly. In the process, a lot was lost.

You can reduce all the classes to simplistic archetypes, but that's a slippery slope. They do it to save money and if the players eat it up then they continue to make it. It shouldn't be acceptable.

Why shouldn't it be acceptable? Because rangers aren't DPS, they're MUCH more than that. They're explorers. They're hunters. As explorers, they can respond with more abundance to the unexpected. DPS is a far cry to the expanse of the wilderness and the dark hollows of caves. Put most men in those places and they're go mad. Rangers are at home. Rogues are more than DPS too. They disable traps, they sneak and hide, they poison weapons, they stab people in the dark, they lock pick treasure boxes, they emanate charm to their unwary victims, they're as much about stealing and tricking as they're about killing. A lot of this detail is lost when you simplify it to a cut and dry system. That's what happened to everquest content over time.

That's how it felt to me, wrong or right. My ranger felt gutted.

Basically, classes are stupidly boring when content is mostly made for just heal/tank/dps. You see, in a wizard's case, it's not just the dps, it's the BURST-dps. The simplistic content wasn't prepared.

I remember reading something similar about Morrowind, an old Elder Scrolls SRPG. It had something to do with classes wanting unique content but it not being there or something. I can't recall the details. I know a lot of games are guilty of relying too much on heal/tank/dps. There needs to be content that's more diverse. A way to solve it with just casters or just melee or just hybrids or something similar. For example, a man of the sword will slay his enemy to get his jewels, whereas, a rogue will sneak into his home and steal his jewels without touching him. A wise man might simply con him into giving away his jewels without a fight. A criminal man might extort him. There needs to be more paths that lead to success, not just one or two or three.

I think camping also partly ruined it. Players would settle into a single camp and stay there for days and weeks, grinding it to dust. Everything was a science. Rogues didn't need to lock-pick. Rangers didn't need to track. Chanters didn't need to mez. Druids didn't need to succor. Nobody needed to root. Etc. Players themselves, with the support of developers, paved the road to a game that became much more boring.

I think they should have put locked treasure boxes in the dungeons for player and trapped some of them. In all my time in EQ, I only ever saw rogues lock pick in LDON, if ever. I think maybe once. Then there was ONE other time that I shrouded to a goblin rogue so I could unlock a door in a kunark zone. There was no excuse for that. It was plain laziness. It also seemed that there were not enough dungeons and zones with 3d twists and turns. It just seemed to be one flat area with simplistic pathing and etc. Very boring.

Modern MMORPGs, like WoW or EQ2 or DDO (somewhat modern) or etc, they've improved somewhat on some of this. In fact, I've been very impressed at times. Too bad EQ only ever got a passing glance at it. But I'll admit that the maps and radars and (!!) icons and cartoony gfx and too much hand-holding does not appeal to me nearly as much as the other things they've done. In that sense, I still like classic EQ.

Sorry that I wrote so much. A big wall of text can easily ruin what's at the heart of a message. I'll lose a lot of people. Maybe I even lost a bit of myself in all that sh**. But I know that there's something to it. I didn't make this post mindlessly. These issues have crossed my mind for years and years. It's hard to pack all of that into a single post without error and with absolute completeness. Actually, it's impossible.

A little derail here, but I think you are totally wrong about Rangers. I played EQ for 8-9ish years with some good friends being rangers, and I found rangers to be much more viable as DPS, tanks, kiters, and patch healers after the introduction of AA and into further expansions. GoD was a horrible expansion for all hybrid type classes, but other than that things were not nearly as bad as you write. Clearly in later expansions rangers needed some raid gear to do exceptionally well, but after x amount of expansions so did all classes... (I am not even talking about current expansion raid gear...) With the introduction of augs and GM gear, raid gear was really not a requirement. Honestly, I think you should roll a mid to high level ranger on EQ test and fart around. Your opinion will likely change.

I also disagree that EQ is the same old tank/heal/dps. Some of it was, but clearly you never raided past the early expansions. The early expansions generally required no more than zerg tactics to win (or simple hide from AE.) I would argue that after a the first 4 or 5 expansions, EQ was kept afloat by raiders as the casuals started moving to other games. These raiders stayed due to the diversity of encounter strategies. IMO this type of non-zerg mentality started with Luclin, but was put into much better practice during PoP and the later expansion instanced encounters. (Yes, I know that there were expansions like LDoN that were meant for single group content, but far and away most later expansions were implemented for those of us who raided. Good or bad...)