Well, I may have found a spec that lets me still compete, sort of.  Maybe I won’t be shelving my magus after all!  The problem is that our damage has been so incredibly reduced that I am literally only good for support dps (and this is laughable, I’m not increasing the TTK in any way near significantly enough).  I think that some magi *cough norgoth cough* are overeacting – we’re down but by no means out, and I’m encouraged by the posts at least one of the oracles for our class have made regarding mythic’s changes to our class.  It sounds like good things are in the works, but the question is, will they get here soon enough?  “soon enough” being the three weeks I’m going to give my class before I shelve it and go do something more worthwile with my time, like levelling that sorc I have in T2.  At least he still has damage.

Add 3 abilities to this class.  You start with one, get the second at rank 4, and the third at rank 7.

The Blessing of Havoc
No cost
Instant cast
No cooldown
Concentrating mightily, you channel power into your disc, causing it to take a new form.  While the Blessing is active, your intelligence and initiative is increased by 80, and you gain 10% range to all abilities.  You also gain the ability to auto-attack from range while this blessing is active.

The Blessing of Change
No cost
Instant cast
No cooldown
Concentrating mightily, you channel power into your disc, inspiring it to change.  While the Blessing is active, your toughness is increased by 140 and your chance to crit and chance to disrupt are increased by 5%.

The Blessing of Daemonology
No cost
Instant cast
No cooldown.
Concentrating mightily, you channel power into your disc, forcing it to bend to your will.  While the Blessing is active, your armor is increased by 100%, and you deal 15% more damage when within 30 feet of your enemies, and 10% less when more than 65 feet away.  Does not effect armor buffs or potions.

Remove close quarters from the game.  Do what you want with our pets.  You may only have one Blessing active at a time.

Balance all other abilities as necessary.

Are you finally trying to communicate with your player base? Schweet!

It may not have a billion subscribers or whatever, like woW, but the PVP in Warhammer Online is absolutely a blast (even in T4, when things aren’t getting in the way of it), and there is at its core an amazingly fun, well-planned game that unfortunately is marred in its execution.  When I told him I was subscribing to WAR instead of WoW, my friend invited me to “enjoy the year-long paid beta.”  I knew he wasn’t really joking; and yes, Warhammer is buggy at times, can suffer from lag, and performs appallingly on my computer considering my decent-enough hardware.  But when you can get past that, this game is so fun – and the lore it’s building off is by turns brilliant and laughable.  WoW ruined its orcs; WAR made them what they should be.

It needs a little love.  But that’s okay; I’m willing to wait.  Despite increasingly dire noises made by a handful on the official forums, I think EA is happy with where this game is right now, and I know I am.  Honestly; any more people on Gorfang and I’d be down to single digit FPS all the time.  The game currently has about as many subscribers as (I believe) most other moderately sucessful MMOs, about 350 thousand.  That’s enough for me.

And once they get the balance and bugs tweaked, I bet it’ll start to grow.

It is not for you.

Destruction Characters:

Order Characters:

The first step towards solving your problems is admitting you have a problem.

I wanted to talk about the Magus.  And so I am.

We’ve been told that we should expect our class to perform as a “medium RDPS class with a significant amount of utility.”  People have complained that we don’t have significant utility!  After all, what do we have?

• AoE spirit debuff
• 5 second AoE knockdown at the cost of our pet.
• 2 second AoE knockdown on a 1 second cast.
• Chaotic Rift
• AoE interrupt on 1 Second cast
• AoE Root
• Single target snare (does this even work?  I have never successfully snared someone with it) on a melee ability.
• Single target 7 sec stun morale
• Some useless AP drain morale that I’ve never seen someone slot.

In my opinion this is actually a pretty long list.  Most of our utility is also AoE, rather than single target.  I would happily trade our interrupt for a 3-5 second silence or disarm, and I wish we had something like Ruin and Destruction.  But other than that I’d like to see minor tweaks to our utility; I’d like to see our interrupt an instant cast on a slightly longer cooldown.  How about buffing perils of the warp so that it affects healing as well as offensive magic, and not only deals damage but also (or instead) reduces outgoing heals by ~15-20%?

On paper, we are probably more survivable than BW.  Much of our gear has willpower on it, so we have a higher chance of disrupting than otherwise (heh).  We have an armor buff that increases our armor to the lower(-ish) bounds of medium armor, which lasts for 20 physical hits.  We can self-buff our corporeal resistance. If we spec for it we can get a 20 second wounds buff + damage dealt to attackers every time we are hit, and a 160 toughness bonus to .

In my opinion, the problem is that two of our trees are short range trees.  This would not be a problem except that even with all the wonderful in theory survivability buffs we have, we simply can’t survive in close range; if I am dotting a group of order, I had better hope the single target nukers (or AoE BW!) don’t see me rushing them, because if they do I am dead before I get in range, or have a chance to drop all my dots.  If I have support – like a choppa – along with a healer, I am a CQ machine.  Debuff everyone’s spirit resistance, dot them up, drop mist in their line of retreat, and chase them while spamming Daemonic Lash.  I may not be getting the KB but I’m doing something – I can drop a group of targets down to 1/2-1/3 health incredibly fast, and if my support is doing its job they’re all about to die from a spate of furious chopping immediately afterwards.  The problem is finding people who want to run with me, or even healers who will keep me up in melee range.  This is nigh impossible in a PUG, of course.

I don’t think our mechanic sucks; it’s just irrelevant to how I play.  When I summon my demon it’s to defend a BO & pull WH out of stealth, or to blow it up the next time those MDPS rush me.  I do notice people dying faster when I have a demon out, but I’m not going to take the time to, ahem, whip it out in a brawl, because that’s time I could spend doing something useful, like running away, or dropping mist, or spamming lash, or, I don’t know, anything.

In terms of mechanic there’s so much we could do.  We could have buffs attached to each demon like SH have with their pets; if my pink horror had a +10% range that waffle-er would be out more.  If our flamer increased AoE radius,and our blue horror increased toughness or resists (without a tactic), if any of them gave an intelligence boos, I would have them out more.  If their damage actually scaled I would have them out more.  If the demon did not deal increased damage but actually had lasting power, so I could drop him and he wouldn’t die a minute later, I would have a demon out more.

I know that a lot of people feel our damage is too low, but I would gladly trade damage for staying power, much as the medium MDPS – Marauder and WL – do in theory.   Give me a tactic that increases armor by 100% in the demonology tree, or give us that instead of Daemonic Reach.  I have no problem sitting 65 feet away from my targets if I can actually survive long enough to retreat when I need to.  Give me a tactic that causes daemonic resistance to increase all resistances, but only apply to myself!

I’m fine with being a medium range / damage dps; just give me the tools to do that, please.  If I can’t kill things on my own, I need to survive to aid my allies; if I am going to sit in spitting distance of the slayers, let me weather more than three AoE hits before I’m down and out.

If I am not going to have survivability, there is of course the other option.

You know, the one where I can deal real damage at range.

I think I’ve figured out why so many people are emo.

It’s just so easy.

For example, I am going to have a moderately crummy weekend.  Temperatures in the 90s on a top-floor apartment, no screens on my windows.  I have a choice: death by bugs, or death by heatstroke?  I think I’d rather suffocate on the gnats.  Most of my friends will be gone for the weekend, and those who aren’t gone will still be busy doing the things that the 4th of July requires of them: getting drunk*, and so forth.  It would be easy to slide into hyperbole, and say that this is the worst weekend ever.  I’m all alone, it’s too hot, my hair is too long, nobody loves me.

Wait!  That last one is wrong.  Thank god for that; and even if this weekend is going to be a bummer, the weekend after is going to be great!

To all real life friends:  I’m going to be back in the bay area for a long weekend, July 9-12.  I’m flying in at about 11:00 PM on the 9th, and my flight out is on the 13th at 8 in the morning.  If you are not the significant other, you probably don’t know this, and thus: we must get together, if you too are in the area.  I’m going to be busy Friday night (already!) but beyond that my schedule for Friday, Sat, and Sunday is wide open.  I should probably spend some time with my parents, though.

I plan on spending the fourth of July logged into Warhammer Online on my Magus, sitting in the Inevitable City and setting fireworks off.  Shut up!

________
* I probably could indulge, but gluten-free beer is expensive, and I really don’t enjoy how alcohol makes me feel.  So that’s that.

The coolest part of a Choppa is the savage orc aesthetic they’ve got going in low levels, before they get a lot of armor.  All body paint and stuff.  Why didn’t mythic replace our armor with body paint?  I’d much rather have an orc running around in a loincloth and two swords, bellowing “WAAAGH!” as magical fingerpaints imbue him with protection.  You could have steadily more fancy paints, and maybe have the upper tier armor sets also include more actual armor pieces.  Alas, my Choppa will forever be rank 4, because I don’t want to progress to where I need to wear armor, and I also don’t have the option to toggle all my armor invisible so I look awesome and still get armor bonuses from it..

Maybe one day!

I play Warhammer Online.

My main used to be a Disciple of Khaine, until I realized that Magi were more fun.  After all, Magi are awesome, and while DoKs are also awesome, they are also not particularly fun to operate in the endgame, because of problems that everyone knows about already.  We are a melee healing class, however our strongest tree is in fact the long-range healing & survivability tree, Dark Rites.  the tree that most closely adheres to our states class dynamic, Sacrifice, works only as a support and mediocre DPS tree. The class in general is loads of fun to play in a good group, however it is easier – and more rewarding – as a Disciple of Khaine to play as a ranged healer, not only because this allows you to enhance personal survivability, but because of the current state of game mechanics allowing a Disciple of Khaine to act as a main / group healer better than other classes.  As a Dark Rites disciple I have a 1.5 second cast + 1.5 second cooldown group heal that can crit for upwards of 2800 on a willpower-stacking DoK.

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