The trouble with epics?
by Josh Owens 
Dec 28th 2005 at 7:00AM
I
must say, in all my forum travels, this is one of the more educated
posts I have read in a long time. It is a well thought out piece of writing that goes over epics and their high
damage output.The post goes in to detail as to why tier-2 epics are overpowered from a damage output perspective and not enough damage absorption. The crazy part is when he compares a blue equipped mage versus a blue equipped hunter, or the same pair wearing MC epics - the mage can crit for 38% and 42% of the hunter's life, respectively. A BWL equipped mage can score a 71% crit on the hunter's hp. That is insane!
The poster also goes on to mention various ideas to bring things back into balance, which I applaud him for! Nothing will get a problem solved faster than having a solution attached to the complaint. While I think this isn't something we will see fixed quickly, hopefully Blizzard will take notice before they release the expansion (one of the solutions).
I also liked the idea of changing spell resistance to be more of a partial blockage of the damage (similar to AC and melee damage) rather than an all or nothing deal.
Kudos to Arash for such a fine post.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
drypulse Dec 28th 2005 12:10PM
we have a couple mages in our gear who have crit with their frostbolts in the 3700-3900 dmg range... and thats with using arcane power and the zandalarian hero charm from zg.. we've only killed razorgore once and couldn't kill vael yet so we're not bwl equipped.... yet
drypulse Dec 28th 2005 12:18PM
here's actuially some screens of what you can do with arcane power/zandalarian hero charm/talisman of ephemeral power combo's
http://pacifistguild.org/media/index.cgi?id=609
http://pacifistguild.org/media/index.cgi?id=599
http://pacifistguild.org/media/index.cgi?id=552
Faience Dec 28th 2005 1:13PM
This post does bring up some interesting points, but its data is not comprehensive enough to draw conclusions from.
First off, this post throws around a lot of numbers without any note of where they've come from, indicating only that a blue equipped mage can do X damage, whereas a MC equipped mage can do Y, and a BWL equipped mage is capable of Z. There's a lot of caster gear in these instances, and these statements are vague blankets that I don't trust without seeing exactly where the numbers came from.
Some numbers of my own...
A max rank frostbolt (level 56 skill) hits for 429 to 463 damage. Using the arcane power talent (31 point talent, arcane tree) increases damage by 35%, making damage 579 to 625. With the ice shards talent (10 point talent, frost tree) doubling crit damage, this makes a crit land between 1158 and 1250.
What gear adds to this depends very heavily on the gear...
The mage's blue set, Magister's Regalia, has no +spell damage and no +spell crit (though it does have some +spell damage set bonuses - +7 to frost). That means that a mage geared thusly does no more damage than one that just hit level 60 and has no blue gear at all.
Up into epics, Arcanist (MC set) has +36 frost damage and +46 spell damage (all spells), for a total of a +82 bonus to spell damage. (This isn't a flat increase - the +82 is applied based on the casting time of the spell, and any spell with less than a 3.5s cast does not recieve the full bonus. Frostbolt is a 3s cast, so it only receives a percentage bonus.) And Netherwind, the BWL set, only has +148 spell damage.
None of these numbers come anywhere close to accounting for the damage a BWL mage should apparently get! A 3400 damage crit means a 1700 damage frostbolt with arcane power, or about a 1300 base frostbolt. To get a 429 to 463 damage spell to hit for 1300 damage, base, you're adding more than +1000 spell damage. And 1000 spell damage is a lot. A whole lot. I'm not sure that's possible even if you did manage to aquire the best +spell damage pieces in the game. And even if it were possible, getting that sort of spell damage involves a sacrifice of other statistics - int and stamina will both suffer for it.
(Note: The damage scenario discussed in the post is less unlikely if it assumes that the caster has both the Talisman of Ephemeral Power and the Zandalarian Hero Charm, which, stacked, would provide a temporary +455 spell damage bonus, on a cooldown. But even then, a large amount of +spell damage gear would be required to reach the amount of damage implied in the original post.)
Also, the post discusses mage DPS vs. hunter HP... but what about mage HP as compared to the hunter? If the hunter gets the first shot at the mage, does the mage have an equal chance at surviving? Physical damage scales up disporoprtionally to magical damage in this game, because for hunters, rogues, warriors, paladins, and shaman, they can aquire a single piece of gear with a higher DPS to increase their damage output signifigantly. Caster itemization is much different - to achieve DPS boosts, a caster must have little bits of +spell damage on every possible piece of gear - and when they take +spell damage gear, it is always at the sacrifice of stats. Though the original poster mentions that the epics problem effects all classes, by presenting the data in the way that he has, the impression left is skewed unfairly in one direction. It's worth viewing these problems from all sides.
Also, BWL Wrymguards oughtn't be considered when talking about damage. They're highly vulnerable to a single (random) school of magic and take ridiculous amounts of damage from anything in that school.