Why do mage classes feel so gimped compared to close combat classes atm

General Discussion General Discussion
#42

VG is a mage weapon as long as you dont use it as main where void blade is your main source or dmg. VG can cast you know.

So yea issue is int weapons like VG, IG, FS do not work if you want to use them way mage would use them - as a caster on some range. In this game, very short range.

It wasnt that a big deal when you had tools to counterplay mele jumping on you. But now, when you are still forced to sit 10m range in light armor and you dont have tools to deal with 1 mele jumping you with LMB spam - we have a serious issue. Build is unplayable.

#43

With the idiotic changes and the fact the new fresh start servers have already been mega companied and are on track to be as bad as legacy servers, I think NW is going to soon encounter its next big player drop. Everyone thats been around sees it happening again, and new players will lose interest. They nerfed a big portion of the population with Mage and Healers by saying here were going to give the strongest build in the game the ability to just run you down and lock you in place

#44

Well the problem is not solvable, because:

  • either you can outrun melee as a range player
  • or you can not

So it is always very bad for one of the two. No solution.

#45

It is 8 months now. Mage Dps Fire Staff Ice Gauntlet was very hard class to play but actually solid. They nerfed it 8 months ago then periodically, it is the worst class to play rn in most activities. They hate mages. Mage dps is off meta in wars for the last 8 months. The so called stat padd 0 utility.

Nerfs:

Entomb: Dmg - Dmg Resistance - Cooldown start after exit. Cooldown
Spike: damage, crit , hitbox
Ice Storm: cannot stack, removed weakening and 10% dmg, dmg, slow
Ultimate Chill: dmg, duration, weakening,removed effect on weapon swap, allies do not benefit
Ice Shower: duration effect, cooldown, root, cooldown of heavy freeze and root.
Heavy Freeze: no more chainable, 1sec then 5sec.
HEAVY ATTACK: time to land an auto, hitbox still bugged.
Windchill: no rework.
Pylon: huge nerf but still viable.

Firestaff: nerfs to Fireball (reverted crit), Incinerate, Flamethrower mana, pilllar and meteor showerā€¦

Bad mechanics:

Cluncky, self slow ( every attack you receive a 1.75 slow stronger than ice shower, yes like self - showering and forced to dodge. You are ez target everytime u want to do something. Burnout getting stuck into gravity and multiple instances.
No damage to kill an oppo. EVEN Worse in PVE
No utility in wars.

How to fix: Like void gauntlet, abilities effect based on specific attribute. In that case Focus.

Revert some nerfs: Make IG FS effects based on 300 INT only so mages will be mages and weapons not abused by other weapons such as ga ig in past or bb IG.
Make Musket and BB not int based but another attribute or keep double stats based.

Bad things:

No support from Ags, no comments by devs, no dev update about it.
No drops in game like other classes
Hardest to play
Hardest to equip
Most expensive to equip and sustain ( potions food on light armour).

I EXPECT DEV. UPDATE OF NOVEMBER HAVING SOME ANSWERS. OR REALLY I WILL QUIT.

#46

This is the general problem.

However, prior to the recent patch, melee COULD chase down range. It required a Great axe, blood lust, charge and reap/gravity, and a second weapon with a good gap closer like the sword and shield. Once the bruiser was in bloodlust range, you could never escape even with a rapier because the GA was faster than the light rapier user. With that said, you had enough distance to fight back, but the GA would always be pretty close. In my mind, it was fair. The GA had a reasonable chance to kill you and you had a reasonable chance to fight back. Most melee, for whatever reason, didnā€™t run this build, and they struggled to kill range players.

Now, with the recent changes to dodge, once these melee players, or anyone with a S&S, gets in range you are dead. You cannot fight back as you could before. You get permanently snared and die. It doesnā€™t feel like much of a game playing against these types of players. You basically have to run away and avoid getting hit just once, which is nearly impossible because you do not have enough dodges to avoid reap/charge/gravity well/leap/bash or rush.

Range should be able to fight back in close quarters, but struggle to fully disengage. Once range gets hit with a melee attack they should be vulnerable to a second attack, but they should be able to make enough space after that point to fight back some.

I think the solution would be either to change the dodge penalty to either 10 or 15% instead of 20% and/or only apply to the penalty to the first melee attack and give the defender a 3 second immunity to further slows. Additionally, they may need to look at certain melee weapons and adjust some abilities directly, like the S&Sā€™s Achilles heel should apply a slow when the target is below 30% health, not all the time.

Melee on the other hand shouldnā€™t get totally melted before they can get close. Therefore, they should change mortal empowerment and probably reduce the max range on the bow/musket to 50 to 75m. If bows are still a problem, they could change the scaling on dex with the bow that only low con builds do decent damage.

I personally only have an issue with the s&s (Achilles heel can lead to a permanent snare) and small issues with the greatsword (tracking on the final hit of skyward is too much) and GA (you cannot see reap coming, you will always be hit by it, it needs a longer animation). I think the other melee weapons are fine.

1 Like
#47

Combat is ever-evolving and we appreciate and are keeping an eye on feedback around Mages! :saluting_face:

As a :fire: :snowflake: main myself, I thoroughly appreciate everyoneā€™s thoughts and suggestions!

9 Likes
#48

if u main it, u know that there is almost no good item to farm ingame aswell :frowning:

#49

@Aenwyn combat for fire staff has NOT evolved at all in a year. PERIOD. It has only devolved into a heaping pile of smoldering poo you all wonā€™t comment on anywhere in the theads that have thousands of views from both casters and melee. There are combat breaking bugs that have been constant for several months now only getting worse. Itā€™s been way too long with no official response and people are leaving. OPR is nothing but muskets/bow murdering anyone that steps out from behind a bush or a giant sword that hits 20ft in front of them. If you main mage, you should be as miserable as the rest of us or you arenā€™t playing on live servers. And then the video of the devs saying they havenā€™t played magical is just a big ole smack in the faceā€¦ again and we all knew it.

6 Likes
#50

While the thread is about mages, I think the take away is that you (AGS) needs to improve the amount and quality of communication on these forums and between players and the team.

Two responses and people already think youā€™re lying about playing the build.

The CMs do not post anything meaningful on these forums and, if anything, make things worse when they do by commenting on joke threads and providing extremely limited insight/bottled messages when they do.

These posts have been going on for weeks and people are upset because the communication has been limited. People want more than ā€œconfirming receiptā€ at this point.

4 Likes
#51

if melee is overtuned then dex should just be deleted frankly.

1 Like
#52

Because the only thing this dev team knows how to do is nerf shit. Never an increase in armor, buffs or supplements, just nerfs. The ā€œbalanceā€ bar is so low that itā€™s sitting on the floor.

5 Likes
#53

Thank you for replying, as you can see it is a very hotly talked about subject and hope all of this is passed onto the devs.

Since you play the FS you would know how it does not perform good enough in PvE to be acceptable into most endgame activities where melee is easily chosen over FS users due to damage issues of the staff and also in PvP for its own reasons as well.

So hopefully with this barrage of info and complaints you can approach the devs with possible solutions offered by the players to get the FS turned into something that can be used everywhere as much as melee without upsetting melee users as well as those in PvP.

1 Like
#54

I think most peoples issue is with Firestaff. Some people complain about IG and even VG. I think VG is in a perfectly fine place no matter how you use it. Of course we all know BB is S tier so no issues there. IG would be fine but itā€™s riddled with bugs, so it feels not so fine a lot of the time.

FS is just weak, there is no way around that. It does not compare with any other weapon. I donā€™t think it needs a ton of damage adjustment. But the clunkiness and lack of utility is an issue.

If Firestaff was fine, it wouldnā€™t be completely excluded from Mutations, and extremely limited in war where itā€™s not even doing the work BB is. The only reason you pair FS with BB is because you are already using fire damage increases to boost the BB, and Flamethrower which is pretty much carrying FS atm.

#55

How about making them viable? No oneā€™s leveling any mage weapons that donā€™t heal. Iā€™ve seen once ice gauntlet while leveling three characters in fresh starts and actually 0 fire staff users.

1 Like
#56

Id be happy if there was a non-light fire build that was viable, but since fire is purely damage no utility, it makes absolutely no sense not to use light and you have to just to even have a chance of surviving if you get within a certain distance of someone.

Ice/Void thematically does great (at least in war scenarios), but I would love to see a viable way to use the fire staff in the same manner.

The abilities are already there,
they just need some fine tuning.

#57

ofc you keep an eye, so that yall can nerf it even more and bring 20 IQ content creators in your streams to spew their BS to make it look like they make sense

i cant 1v3 so nerf it, yall are disgrace in terms of class balance, whoever responsible with class balance in the team should be instantly fired and never be allowed even be in the industry ever again

oh but wait, even the director and head of the team have no clue whatsoever about mages anyway, they are all classic melee oonga boonga left click spammers so why we even bother. i mean, after FUCKING 1 YEAR, the head is like uuhhhmm imma play mage in fresh start to see how it feels like, i mean, ISNT IT ALREADY TOO LATE???

2 Likes
#58

@Aenwyn ā€¦ It absolutely blows my mind a gaming developer would literally say so openly he/she/they havenā€™t played all the weapons in their gameā€¦ how can you balance or create content when you have no idea how 3-4 of your 14 total weapons play or function??? That is what is offensive to so many people who bought your product and your company and developers need to know it.
How can you sit here and ask all of us to give you feedback and report bugs when literally we now know they arenā€™t being looked at and havenā€™t for months and months now. Thatā€™s what your statements say to the community. We now know for a fact that you donā€™t test weapons against other weapons. This is why your hit boxes are all terrible. This is why casters walk like they have no coding for their animations. This is why new players turn around and walk away again. Weapon balance and testing should not be a foreign concept, yet your devs act like itā€™s impossible to figure out on weapons they donā€™t want to play. Shame on them. Your next dev video should be an APOLOGY to all the casters who have been shoved under the table and lied to about things being ā€œforwarded alongā€ to Devs who just want to shoot guns.
I TRIPLE DAWG DARE YOUR DEVS TO LIVE STREAM THEIR GAMEPLAY AS A MAGE ON LIVE SERVERSā€¦ OPR queue in and show us your gameplay :dog: :dog: :dog:

3 Likes
#59

Iā€™m curious as to whether you do mutations. Have you ran into the 75% fire resist or 75% ice resist mutations? What do you think of them?

4 Likes
#60

Imagine playing mage since launch like me :clown_face:
I tried GS and BB lately and the damage different is huge. My auto attack with 250 int IG hit like 800-1k depends on resistance. While they hit 2k+ and are aoe damage. :skull:

5 Likes
#61

Same thing here, trying finally anything else and can 100% agree that literally any other weapon is much easier to use and way more rewarding. State of mages is just a joke, cant wait for another nerf because of bunch of clowns can just see big dmg numbers on scoreboard :clown_face:

1 Like