Nurf Chain Lightning Part: 3

But you want CL not to stun lock, even though it is NOT stun locking anything, its not broken. You are right about ice arrow however, I will give you that, but you wrong about air being able to stun lock things.

 

Ok then it is fine and Ill just go on with it ^^

 

Lol, nurf melee? Have you ever noticed that magic (such as my stone fist) hits 100% of the time and melee wiffs half the time? Come on... Nurf chain lightning. The only people who have any kind of stand for not nurfing it are the people that obviously use it because its so OP.

Come on.. its ridiculous that I can stand in the crowd with 500 HP in virtue league and while chain healing myslef be killed by the guys down in the arena 20+ feet away while I am standing on top of castle walls.

Nurf CL



this a call out to everyone else who plays different class's. Come PvP in the virtue League so that we can get some more variety to fight with other then mages chain casting CL.

 

It's clear the air is the best tree. It's what 90% of the PvPers use. I tried using other types of magic before persistence and it always came back to air being MUCH better. I gave in and went full air and things got a lot easier. Again, I think everything needs to be looked at as a whole and adjusted accordingly. You can argue all you want that air is fine, but it's by far the best magic tree out there.

No one has told me of any other spells that can do all the things lightning/chain lightning can do. Fairly quick cast, high damage, stun and range. The only argument is "I use it and it's fine!!1!!1!1!!!!!!. GET SOME RESIST!!!!" I've had the resists and I'm getting them again, but then once everyone has resists for everything we're right back to air being the top dog again. I love fire, but there's so damn freakin resists for it that it makes it damn near worthless. Fire resist innate, douse, ice shield...I think it adds up to like 80% fire resist, which is messed up.

I just really hope Port takes some time to actually test out the skills and make some sort of attempt and bringing things closer together, right now it's not close. Hopefully they can bring some things up rather than nerfing things constantly like they have been. Even adding stuns to other trees would help, because there's no other magic tree that has them (aside from earthquake) and stun is a VERY important ability. Ice field was useful when it made it so people couldn't move, but could still cast. If they had left that as it was, but made the duration 4 seconds it would have been much more in line with what the air tree does.

 

Nurf CL = no

 

Combat balancing is tricky. They have actually been applying small "nerfs" to air magic for the past 2 releases and just havent gotten there yet. Theres more on the way, so we'll keep an eye out wont we

 

Fire is the highest damage potential of any tree, and its main drawback is that it is easily resisted. But there is a counter to it in the form of a 30% fire resist debuff called "evaporate". Its harder to use than the resists, but effectively nullifies a big portion of anyones fire resistance.

 

I'm aware of it, but that still gives 50% fire resist and douse, which just removes the fire DoTs. Fire may be the highest damage, but it's also the easiest to counter. I need to do some testing, but I don't think you even need douse high level to remove the fire DoTs.

 

If i recall, douse only removes 1 douse, and with 50% resistance most high level fire dots are still going to be ticking for 2 to 15 damage a tick and can be applied repeatedly and rapidly.
Fireball haveing a base aoe damage around 50 (before crit) and applying a strong dot for 12 seconds allows you to deliver high dmg and pile dots on simultaneously. I think folks should try evaporate in pvp before unintentionally calling for fire to be overpowered.

 

Fire is already overpovered in PvE, we really need NPCs to cast douse/purify.

 

You can counter air as well. 3 skills will make you unstunnable, and raise your air attunement, use well grounded, and you will counter the damage. The people who are complaining about it dont seem to realize how to counter things. If you have no fire attunemeent and dont run douse, fire will rip you apart as well, same goes for sun, and earth, and ice, and all the schools that have damage spells. Ever see what 13 stacks of fire arrow do to someone? They cannot even cast as the dots are just ripping off of them. Ever see the damage of searing ray? Its the highest damage skill in the game. All you air whiners will just whine about what kills you next as you do not build up any skills to counter anything, you just keep pouring your exp into the skills you use, and then want nerfs of what you do not use, because you do not level up the skills that counter what kills you.

 

Ever notice how how melee can still do stuff without focus? Ever notice how melee takes no regs? Ever notice how melee has no fizzle? Its a trade off. And if you are missing that often, try raising you dex stat. I have seen melees that hardly ever miss. As well, if you are fighting red mobs, you will miss alot. Same goes for spells do hardly any damage to them as well. Stop whining.

 

Of course you must be an air mage who takes advantage of the dominance of this tree, I understand that.

 

Im not sure how many people here have experience in pass groups like SS. Our guild runs 4 groups at one time.

there is nothing better then having an air mage casting chain lightning in a SS group. What happens is that even though they may be 30+ game feet away on their SS mob spawn, their CL is dropping and stunning the mobs I am responsible for in my spawn point. There is nothing like watching CL hit mobs in front of me, see them literally stunned for a huge amount of time and getting dropped like nothing (again, from 30 feet away).

So even though I benefit from CL, it still needs the nurf bat.

yes nurf CL.

Im a big enough man to really not care what air mages say here... such things as "whinners"... Im sure this request will anger there people and they will lash out, it still does not change the fact that the spell is ridiculous and needs to be nurfed.

 

I notice how convenient it is that you ignored a lot of the topic when it comes to the fact that one of my main spells is stone fist which connects 100% of the time, has no fizzle and costs no regs. I also note that it is also convenient that you dont mention that as an earth caster,my areas spell is earth quake which isn't nearly as strong and powerful as chain lightning like it technically should be at the same given requirements,cast time and tree level.

If Chain lightning is fine, then why does it dominate so over earth quake?

In truth, Earthquake is a pure example of a spell that is pretty well balanced.

 

Is there a video up yet of the latest virtue league tournament? I'd like to see what you're talking about.

I know in R31 Chain Lighting and Lightning were both OP. That's a fact, and that's one of the reasons they were worked on for R32 (like a day before we went live on R32). But I have no experience with them in R32, I only know that it's HIGHLY likely that not enough was done to even out the spell.

@Chris
I had a laundry list of things that were wrong and a suggestions to fix it. I don't know what changed, the only thing I heard about was that it cost more focus to cast. I would be interested to know if a cool down was added or not. There are other spells that have crazy cool downs in comparison, CL barely had any in R31. There are other spells that do far less damage that have crazy casting times, CL in R31 hardly had any. I get interrupted all the time using Death Ray, with CL in R31 I barely ever got interrupted and when I did I would just kill everything in sight (and out of sight for that matter) on the next few casts of it.

The range for CL was 2 in R31, but as I explained in my observation list because it "chains" it has an effective range of infinity. I was killing things that I couldn't even see on my wide screen monitor.

So the odds are that CL is most definitely stupidly still OP and that very little has changed since R31. I understand that it's designed to be a big hitting damage spell but there's no counter to it. Fire has Douse, what does Air have? The idea that everyone is supposed to have excellent strength, train up in air resistance and air attunement, to lower the impact of CL and Lightning is a horribly imbalanced design. There should be some kind of spell that will effectively make Lightning and Chain Lightning "blocked" much like Douse does with the Fire spells. I have commented before that I believe the best spell for this would be a reflect spell that only works on Energy Attacks from the air school and returns SOME of the damage back to sender, thus making the spamming of this spell more than a poor strategy.

No other spell in existence does the following, Stuns, Chain Stuns, Does Massive Damage, is not counterable, has massive effective range, and costs very little focus to cast. Again, based on my play testing in R31 (on the R32 QA server).

Please balance out this spell with other high damage spells.

• Reduce the effective range.
• Create a spell counter (probably in the Earth School of Magic). You could actually make Shield of Crystal reflect a portion of the damage back on the caster of the air spells. That seems fair. If they also have Shield of Crystal up maybe it does equal damage to both players.
• Increase casting time. It's a huge damage spell, it should take much MUCH longer to cast this spell making it open to more interrupts. (both Lightning and CL)
• Require it to cost more focus. Again, huge damage. Want less focus cost, train around it or stack your glyphs to reduce it.

I'm not interested in nerfing this spell, I'm interested in balancing it. Oh yeah, and please if you make large changes (which you most definitely should based on what I tested on the QA server) then for god's sake don't reward people that took the OP spell of the week and min/maxed the heck out of it by giving them an easy way out to train in something else that is OP. They made their bed and now they can sleep in it. If something isn't balanced it should be changed appropriately. That goes for everything I'm using too.

 

Make the cast time longer so we can counter it with our own stuns. One of the problems is in virtue league that they can walk 1/4 the way into the arena, stop and just start spamming it on a melee person far before Im close enough to even start charging them. This is actually another issue that I have in that charges like body slams are broken and not hitting/stunning. I posted proof of this in video form in another thread to Attwood.

If they fix body slam, I have a lot better chance of countering chain lightning with my blunt stuns.

These videos are posted in the R32 bug area, I have 2 videos showing that my body slam has an 80% chance to stun but hits 0% of the time on moving targets since R32. As seen in the video of 2 fights where I charge 4 times in one and 3 times in another and the mechanism to connect them to the target is broken if they are moving (which casters/archers are doing in pvp).

 

This is not just about melee people it's about over all balance for mages and archers too.

In play testing on the QA server I could use Chain Lightning to kill anything that moved. I didn't have to use any other spell I just kept pressing the same button. There's very little anyone can do against it, very little any MOB can do against it. There was nothing more effective at killing than CL. The second best thing was Lightning.

It may be that Chris simply didn't have time to make more robust changes at that time. He's kind of a busy guy.

 

totally agree, its "easy mode", the first week of virtue league in R32, we are all lower level people. I go up on a CL mage. I have 400 hp, he has 350 ish. We are both probably lvl 55ish. I have gm bludge. He hit me for 250 hp with a CL crit...

yar.. fer sure... thats such a balanced spell.

 

Well I don't mind if he hits you for 250 damage on one hit. I have no problem with that. But if he's going to do that, he should have a long casting time, a long cool down, it should take quite a bit of focus, he should not be casting it on the run, he should be hitting you at a range of 2, not 6 or whatever the hell it does when it starts "chaining". These are the details that make a spell balanced or not balanced. The Damage is just a byproduct of the rest of the system. It's supposed to be a heavy damage spell and if you don't have air attunement or air resistance then it makes sense that it's doing a lot of damage. But the context of how that happens is very important. It would be my feeling that he probably could just hit that button again and have the same results over and over again because there are no other real factors involved. That's the problem in my mind, but I haven't seen it live yet. That's why I'd really like to see the videos.