Wizards...

[Mirak]

Any one looked at Wizard DPS Lately? It seems like it's pretty gimp compared to... any other dps class.

Edit: Or maybe the wizard I was with just wasn't very good... *shrugs*

[Tyler]

No ida where we stand today but Wizards used to be pretty good with their pimped Ether Flame and 2.0 (has a Ether Focus on it).

[moordian]

I played a wizard on live and spend a lot of time parsing wizard vs. melee DPS from the end of Velious until I retired somewhere around OoW launch. The problem with casters is that they don't scale well. They are tied to their spells and a very limited set of focus items and more importantly, to their mana pool. Let's break it down for a 2.0 equipped raid wizard -

Well consider Ether Flame since 2.0 has the nice focus effect on it. For the sake of argument I am going to assume that the wizard had a crit rate of 50% and always lands spells for 100% damage with a 70% damage focus and 40% spell haste. That means that our focused Ether Flame looks something like this -

Mana cost - 1045 mana
Damage - 21675
Total cast time - 7.3 seconds

If you assume a short fight or an unlimited mana pool, this wizard is going to max out somewhere in the range of 2900-3000dps. That sounds impressive until you look at the reality that most spells are not going to land for 100% and only a few people in raid guilds are going to have focus items that good. Not to mention the fact that a similarly geared rogue, monk, or zerker is going to pull similar DPS numbers without the limitation of mana. If a fight goes for 20 minutes they keep hacking away while the wizard sits oom casting as mana comes back or the refresh on gather mana resets.

My warrior parses 1500ish DPS WHILE TANKING all the time. This doesn't include proc damage, which would surely put actual DPS closer to 2000, considerably higher if you count Panther procs.

In order for it to make sense to play a pure caster they need to have a massive increase in DPS relative to other similarly geared melee. Something along the lines of 50-75% higher max potential DPS would make it worth having them on a raid. Otherwise, just make a ranger with a decent bow and a high damage arrow.

[moordian]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the other option that has been brought up before - nerf melee damage significantly. Reducing the damage on weapons across the board would also help with the potential problem of weapons getting too close to the 255 damage hard cap. Cutting damage in half would actually result in less than a 50% DPS nerf since it wouldn't change DPS from procs.

This would only be a temporary fix though, as melee weapons scale back up casters would need new spells and foci to keep pace.

[ChaosSlayer]

yes Weapon scaling is something that was discussed, and was considered to be implemented at same time as tier revamp. But before we look at it in more depth there are a few current projects we want to complete first, before we moved onto that.
So wizards - hang in there for a bit

[Mirak]

I always here the comparisons being for raid geared characters, 2.0's. etc... What about at the lower level though? Like when a character is a fresh level 70 without the help of raid geared friends who can just go and grab him nice gear places... (Like in my position, lol)

It seemed my gimp monk was able to out dps the wizard unless we had multiple mobs 3+, in that case his rains were being pretty damn effective... but 1v1 or 2v1... a monk or rogue (at that level of play) was still seeming to decimate his effectiveness as mobs just die so fast... He doesn't have time to deal damage... Just throwing it out there.. maybe look at giving wizards a super fast casting line of DD's or something all the way up... as a normally played wizard about the fastest casting nuke they can get with spell haste is around 2.2-2.4 seconds or something. And that's a long time if you have a monk/rogue/ranger combo pelting away at exp mobs... he may as well just take a nap. But, maybe if they had a fast nuke.. 1.5sec or faster.. it'd help them be more useful on exp mobs. It doesn't have to be mana efficient... just let it be fast enough that they can actually help kill things instead of just sit around wasting mana.. or ducking off casts because the mob is already dead.

I'll make a wizard of my own to test these things out and report back!

[Kuldiin]

So we fix wizards by nerfing everyone else?

Theres bound to be other ways around this.

[ChaosSlayer]

well its not a nerf- its rescaling
it is not yet definite that this will happen, as it was decided to look at it closely after we done with current projects. But if we are going to rescale, all casters automatically will get extra power without needing any spell changes.

[Mirak]

I agree with the rescaling idea.. I believe it would be in everyone's best interest. The higher end weapons possess quite crazy ratios, that if they continue to increase in that way will be game breaking, or cause some issues without a doubt.

[khaliss]

I agree with Moord, my wiz spams ether flame during raids, and goes OOM before a ToV named is at 50%. He is pretty much just a bonus dpser (and evac) right now, that's why I'm not even gonna gear him (he only takes items that NOBODY wants).