Malthrus

You do have the same fair chance as everyone else? The keyword here is chance, as in you don't always succeed.

How does a better player have any advantage, because they are better at playing the game...? Please tell me you are trolling, because I don't think any game developer would take your opinion seriously with that outlook on game design.

Sorry but if you can't faceroll your way through every boss you might actually have to use both halves of your brain to figure out what you did wrong and how you could do better next time. This is a video game not a movie. You don't just sit there and watch it play itself, you have to actually overcome your adversary.

There should be bosses/content in the game that are difficult. If every player can kill every boss, then what is there to separate a good player from an average one? MMORPG's are built on community and competition.

If you are just an average player, then like Mongo said you have a challenge to tackle and keep you busy for awhile, which means you don't run out of things to do as quickly. The satisfaction of killing a boss that killed you many times is tenfold compared to a new boss that you killed first try because it was too easy. I state that from personal experience of killing extremely difficult bosses from older games vs killing the watered down loot pinata's of instant gratification from more recent games.

You don't HAVE to kill every boss without wipes, this is what I think most people didn't understand when we were trying to figure out zork first couple times, people cared more about their repairs than trying to overcome a challenge. Guess why people used to play old MMORPG's for years yet basically all MMO's made in the last 4 years are beaten and discarded within the first couple of months? Because they were more difficult, the content kept you busier for longer.

However I don't think all world bosses should be difficult, but 1 or 2 of them should require a skilled group or co-ordination though and drop better stuff to compensate for increased challenge. If your stance on the game is that everyone should be able to beat every piece of content (communism gaming), then you are likely in for a disappointment when lvl 50 & ascended dungeons are released.

I made the same thread 2 days ago, they're working on it

Yeah but that would be even cooler! Uses a random monster model, maybe you'd get a giant squirrel boss

It seems a few people would rather world bosses just being loot pinata's instead of having to put any effort into killing them.

Limiting them to 10 players with the current templar/prophet count would cause a negative impact, but my idea of the bosses scaling in power should absolutely be implemented. It is blatantly obvious to everyone who has killed them before that bringing more than 10 people as of current is breaking the encounters. This is end game group content, not hello kitty free loot adventure.

A better solution in my opinion would be to make them scale in power depending on how many players are present, I totally agree though and said since the first time we killed them. Bringing 30 people completely trivializes the fights, I don't think people realize how much more difficult some of these bosses are with 10 people.

If you want your content to last longer, one of the best ways of doing so is to make it harder.

Yes warrior seems fairly weak to mages atm, but it's a game of rock paper scissors, because prophets and assassins rape mages currently (mainly due to bugged DoT damage in pvp though). Warrior should beat prophets though and have a fair shot vs assassin & rangers.

Mages don't get more points to distribute, sorcery is 1 stat not 2. You can't cast 2 things at once so you're not twice as effective for having a stat that raises 2 different types of spells. Like I said the imbalance is within cauterize, try playing a mage and healing through someone elses damage with revitalize. The only thing that makes prophet healing good are the prophet specific healing talents: Dogma, Crimson Chain, Redemption HoT & Dark Prayer.

Also you mentioned there is no dodge talent for spell & ranged, i'll correct you there that the 15% dodge talent in assassin for dual wielding effects all 3 damage types. There are also 3 different types of gems you can put in your armour to build defense against your desired damage type, so you can build full spell defense if you're having trouble against mages/prophets.

What would fix this situation is if hybrid gear existed, where you could have melee & sorcery on the same item for example, at 70%~ of the value of a pure piece of equipment, which someone above already suggested and has been suggested many times.

Basically no. Everything else in the game currently (from reaching max level in anything to obtaining the best gear) EXCEPT for max-tier gems are already way too easy to obtain, and you want to make the only cosmetic set that has any sense of accomplishment attached to it easy to get for 1 months casual work?

There SHOULD be things in the game that take a long time to obtain, so people who have finished the game have a long term goal to work towards something cool and unique. If you suddenly saw a bunch of other people wearing the same set as you it suddenly isn't as cool or feel as rewarding anymore. 

It's not like you really need to buy the gloves or boots as their visual difference is very little, could reduce the cost of those 2 pieces.

You can fill the whole game with zero effort instant gratification equipment with stats on it all you like, but leave a cosmetic set or two for the more dedicated/hardcore player, so when you see somebody wearing that set you know they worked hard for it. It is called "Prestige" after all.

Crit shouldn't be forced into every build, I feel as if you should be able to choose which secondary stat you would like to focus on (or none at all). With Mage for example, you should be able to build a pure attack power mage, a haste mage and a crit mage. Each one would work better with different abilities, for example crit does nothing for damage over time effects but attack power is great.

Looking at prophet you should be able to choose whether you want to focus on direct healing, heal over time spells, absorb shields or damage/healer hybrid (purification talent). We need stats that allow you to choose which path you want to take, which would mean splitting haste, crit and attack power into 3 different stats.

For vitality and energy, I believe a good start would be to reduce the overall effectiveness of all stats, but give us 2-3x as many points per level to distribute. So if you go 100% sorcery you are left with very little life (like 3k instead of the 6k base we get now). Only way to force players to take life is to make them get 1 shot if they ignore it, but there should still be an option for pure glass cannon builds to exist (mage plasma shield for example allows you to absorb a lot of damage if your mana pool is large). If you made the vitality change you would need to severely reduce the CD of plasma shield and increase the mana it burns by 2x more than it currently is for it to be viable/balanced.

For energy you could increase the amount of mana it regenerates in combat by 2-3x of what it is now. There are some classes that are really struggling with mana atm, note this doesn't effect world bosses because of low potion CD but wait until people start doing 5 mans again.

Crit is currently pretty bad for dps, I would suggest to fix crit that you change the currently worthless crit chance gems into crit damage gems. Each tier gives you 5%~ increased critical potency (damage/healing), which makes your crits hit harder. If you stacked 3 of these gems you would then benefit more from putting points into the attribute that gives crit than putting it into melee/ranged/sorcery.

On a side note about prophets: they do NOT need more damage. Perhaps at lower levels but once you have purification (free 3000 attack power) you have more DPS than a mage can ever get vs single target. The drawback is prophet's don't have free your mind to fix mana issues and they can't AoE as well. I think that's an ok compromise for the fact that you have to spend like 20 points in strong healing/defensive talents to get there. You shouldn't be able to deal damage as good as a damage class and have massive healing/defensive CD's, otherwise what's the point of playing a pure damage dealer?

Just look at PvP, the best build atm is a prophet that takes purification, because it does more damage than mage and can't die either due to Righteous Defense + Redemeption + Benedicition damage reduction stack + 140% Spell DPS added to benedicition + soothsaying removing all of the DoT's which the melee classes and rangers basically rely on for damage (because they penetrate 100% of armour). Not to mention the lvl 50 repent talent, which makes you immune to all negative effects with only 45s CD, does that mean 10 second immunity to silence/stun/snare & all DoT's?

Interesting idea about penetration though, you could add it as a stat which causes your abilities to ignore a portion of the targets armour. Doesn't benefit DoT builds, would be a waste for a crit build maybe since you want to stack into crit but would be great to support an attack power based build.

Way too much work and a waste of development time, it's not like these abilities are not overpowered in PvE also. I balance out the ignite nerf with a bloodboil buff. Damage for mage would actually be higher with my changes and aside from a well built assassin build mage is the highest single target dps and the highest aoe dps if you know how to rotate your skills properly.

Mage is also a 10 yd ranged dps class which avoids nearly all attacks from bosses whereas assassin has the threat of the boss 1 shotting them in melee. But rather than nerf mage single target dps I would prefer to see buffs to other classes, such as warrior single target which seems to include maelstrom from what I have seen... *cough sear buff*

Below I will post my thoughts on the mage class abilities, there are some other issues with the game in general that I will highlight that makes my character build (and several others) overpowered, but for now I will focus on the mage skills abilities and skill tree exclusively.

I decided to add some of the prophet skills that we have access to also, since mages can heal decently in this game I feel they are relevent also.

Mage Balance

Ignite - Reduce the damage to 150% instant and add 'deals 25% of the total damage dealt over 5 seconds'. This makes the ability with the mage talent a 200% instant nuke that deals an additional 50% over 5 seconds for a total of 250%. The debuff MUST be stackable on the target from multiple players, as this will suck having more than 1 mage in the group otherwise.

Reason: This ability is overpowered as hell, the single best damaging ability in the game. In Pvp if you follow up a mid-air incinerate with this you can easily 1 shot players on a crit before they even know you are there. My fix keeps it still an extremely powerful ability but cuts the instant burst down by 33%. This ability may need further changes but for now I think what I suggested is fine, keep the cooldown at 15 seconds please, it makes the class more fun to play having a very active ability and also ties in to one of my other changes that i'll talk about another time. *cough haste nerf*

Overload - Increase the range from 10yd to 12yd.

Reason: All our other abilities are 12yd range basically, it is annoying when your character has to run in to cast this because you usually open with incinerate since it has a travel time and does not aggro the mob immediantly so your character runs to the maximum range of incinerate of 12yd. More of a quality of life fix than anything else, the ability is in a good spot and fun to use.

Blazing Embers (Incinerate's DoT) & Static Discharge (Overload crit debuff) - Make these abilities stack with other mages, or make the 8% spell crit for Overload work for players other than just the mage that casted it.

Boiling Blood - Remove the cast time and cooldown.
Boiling Point - Reduce to 10/20% per tick.

Scald - Change to increases the duration by 2/4 seconds, increase duration of the stun to 2 seconds or remove it entirely.

Reason: Nobody uses this ability because the cast time is too long. My change makes the ability worth using and allows multidotting. With all the talents the ability will do 40% spell damage per second for 10 seconds, for a total of 400% over 10 seconds.

Chilling (Blizzard talent) - Remove the stun passive, add slows targets in the area by 30/60%. Slow does not stack with Static Discharge.

Reason: Mainly quality of life change, it's annoying that mini-stun abilities like these are bad in this game because they put other stuns on diminishing returns and since it's a random chance not all the monsters get stunned, which means when you are AoE grinding the monsters unstack themselves. You can chain root with frostbite talent but you need to have the talent to make this work. The slow change is more of a suggestion to replace the stun with more than anything else.

Plasma Shield - Change it to absorb 1.5 damage for every 1 point of mana, 25% of your maximum mana, 20 second cooldown. So for me at lvl 40 with 3.5k mana it would absorb roughly 1300 damage out of my 6.3k life.

Reason: Too weak currently, it barely absorbs a single attack and has a moderate cooldown. There are many other better mage talents taking currently and even in a pure Pvp build this is a waste of a point. In other games the way it's balanced now would be fine, if mana pools were not half of our hp pool. In other games generally your mana is more than your health as a caster. If this were not the case I would suggest it burns 1.5/2 mana per 1 damage, but that would be rediculous with the low mana pools.

Replenishment - Change to 6% of your health over 6 seconds.

Reason: Too weak, waste of a point especially when cauterize instantly heals you to full.

Engulf - Reduce cast time by 1 second.

Reason: Like Boiling Blood, too long cast time and annoying to use. Will be a decent AoE skill with cast time reduction and maybe worth a point in a PvE build.

Void Portal & Call of the Wild (Ranger) - Reduce the cast time to 3 seconds. 8 Seconds is way too long to summon a pet, never used the pet before but I believe you have to resummon it every time you die?

Resurrect - Should no longer be useable in combat.

Reason: When anybody in your party dies, this ability above any other prevents wiping because any dps can simply stop doing damage; having no other responsibility and resurrect the dead player and continue on like nothing ever happened. As stated in my post in the world boss thread, this should be a talent in the prophet tree that allows you to ressurect in combat, so the healer at least has to commit to doing so. Should probably give it a cooldown too, or the mage can just heal the tank and prophet res the dead mid-fight and the issue is left reletively unsolved.

Rejuvenate - Reduce the duration per tick to 1s and reduce the healing by 10% per tick. So now it heals 20% of spell healing every second for 12 seconds, for a total of 240%.

Reason: I think everyone will agree that this heal is very weak compared to the other heals. In its current state, rejuvenate is as weak as a single revitalize over 12 seconds, which makes it incredibly useless. In the state of the game where everything is super burst oriented this ability simply doesn't do enough. With my change the heal may even be used by prophets now, since with the talent it would last an additional 6 seconds, for a total of 360% healing over 18 seconds. Now this may sound overpowered on paper but it really isn't, being a heal over time makes a huge difference and they should always be better than direct healing since you have to wait for it to tick in real time, a HoT should be a damage buffer. Compared to cauterize and dogma this ability is still a joke, but at least this will balance things out a little.

Cauterize - Cut in half the healing done by this ability, 200% spell healing instant. Add in the deep prophet talent 'Healing Touch', increases the healing done by 50/100% spell healing, for a total of 300%.

Reason: Not much to say about this, just way too strong and should have never made it through beta in its current state. 400% instant cast, seriously? The only thing that even comes close to this in pure value is ignite, and guess what the same class (mage) can abuse both of these broken spells.

Prophet side talk

Dogma should be toned down also since its basically another cauterize and outclasses Revitalize by miles, yeah it's a cooldown but if you ever watch a prophet use this skill the tank goes to full instantly. Prophet mana regen needs a nerf somewhere too, it's silly watching the dps and tank mana bars go down and watch the prophets stay at full, increase the cost of some of their heals perhaps. Oh I also suspect benediction is broken also, I have not tested myself but I believe it's doing 210% spell healing per second instead of 210% spell healing over 6 seconds, which is a huge difference. Please clarify if this is intended and just a tooltip error, if so needs to be nerfed because with the talent 'Lasting Supplication' this ability can solo heal TR apparently, lets not mention the rediculous 30% damage reduction in the deeper talent. *cough*

There are 2 places in the city that are marked for forestry, yet you cannot get any of the daily quests from these 2 locations. Other gathering professions are located close to or inside the city, why not forestry when there is a dedicated shop?

First thing I do when I log on/switch server is rearrange my bags so that I can see every slot instead of the bags naturally overlapping like they do by default.

Could we have the game remember how we laid out our inventory?

Also can we have an open all bags keybinding please? thanks!