701 - In addition to the blood shield, this spell needs some sort of damage bump as you gain levels to keep it viable imo.
705 - Add % chance to cause instant death via demonology similar to 1106 where the entire target is disintegrated. Even 302 has an instant death chance.
709 - Add % chance via necromancy to summon a zombie
710 - Add % chance via demonology to summon an imp
718 - Add % chance to cause instant death via demonology

As I gaze over the horizon, the wind tugs at my cloak and whispers, "Adventure" in my ear.

A squeaky halfling nearby asks, "Why you playing with orcs heads and troll rearends?!"

730 Chaos Aura would be ideal. A randomized offensive aura that follows the caster. It can lash out at 1 or more targets in the room with various affects of our DoT spells. Power enhanced by all sorcery, elemental, spiritual lores. Targets enhanced by SA and MOC.

>>Another idea. Update phase (704) or a new spell to provide a chance to go non corp on a stun. It's currently a voln ability on command and has a balance there. It could follow a seed like mage armor (earth) gets additional crit padding on stuns. It would certainly fit the the description of phase and the current defensive benefit has been compared to about 4 smr bonus which leaves room for improvement. also it could look really cool if you take a hit and suddenly go poof, I'm dracula

Would be nice. Though it seems with blood shield and 740 escape, they'd rather we flee when the stuff hits the fan. Which will probably become a necessity when we dilly-dally with our DoT and concentration spells.

> 709 i really like this spell, i don't know how it could be better other then i wish it was player friendly to people who walk in and get dragged down. the bonus i could... miss their eye rolls i honestly feel bad

Good news! End-of-the-year changes made 709 -- along with a buncha other spells -- player friendly by default.

Player-hostile versions now require using the EVOKE option; see https://gswiki.play.net/Area_of_effect/saved_posts for the full list. It also includes 710 and 720...

I think it was LORD-STIGS who said:
> Having a pet as the pinnacle of sorcery seems at odds with a profession that is focused on accumulating personal agency and knowledge.

I just thought this was very well-said. I tend to agree.

Much love
from Soliere :)
loving all the various sorcerer input

In a couple of cases (if I read correctly), I've seen people arguing against a point, where the original point was basically the SAME point being counter-argued. That underscores how difficult it is to follow what's being said.

Arguing against like-minded people can't stop a razor-edged pendulum from swinging into the heart of Elanthian sorcery. The pendulum continues to swing. Time is limited and precious.

So I got a few begs and pleads for y'all:

-Be clear. If players don't get your point, GM's may not either. Sorcery is then in big trouble.

-Limit your use of sarcasm. If it flies over the heads of other people, it often hurts your point instead of supporting what you say.

-Explain more, Argue less. Don't muddle your main points by being argumentative. YOUR preferences (not your distaste for someone else's preferences) are really what you want to communicate. The minute you come across as hot-headed, some people will begin to write you off. And your opinion is valuable. Yes, you too. And especially you. You know who you are. :) :)

I also love conciseness/brevity, but I struggle with it myself too much, so I can't preach about it. 0:)

Much sorcie love
from Soliere's player :)
just trying to make sense of the jumble

>Yes, everyone knows that forum grumps are the purest expression of the player base.

I base my views on seeing dev nerf things unnecessarily for decades while reducing overall character power and general fun in favor of homogenization and dumbing things down.

>Just want to comment, what got us the loot cap is directly related to the issue that Unicorn3 have pointed out earlier in this thread:

At the end of the day, it was really one person and their massive MA army supposedly pulling in over a billion silvers a month. Which was way way way higher than what anyone else was pulling in, whether they were scripting all day or not.

>The botting combined with the ability to do it with a big multi-account team of however number of characters one would want, is what got us here today with the loot cap. In an ideal world where multi-accounting is limited (even to something generous like 3 concurrent logins per IP address to still allow for smaller MA groups) and fully automated script hunting is banned, there'd be no need for a loot cap.

I don't necessarily disagree. But their "fix" went way overboard. Imo, a better "middle ground" solution would be something like a 100m cap, but that cap is shared between all linked accounts. Instead of the current 35m cap that's per account and ignores linked accounts.

>Several of the other professions and spell lists have been updated over the last few years. If "please stop" is what you wanted, you might have spoken up then.

I've been saying "Please stop" since 2015 when Estild first posted all the nerfs that wizard received in 2016. I'm way ahead of you on that.

>I'm not sure what Simu thinks about this. Consider it just me speaking for myself.

Maybe the mantra changed at some point, but for years Simu's whole deal was "Our focus is on attracting new players."

>I get the happy advantage of knowing how many lich download / installs there have been over a period of time. I'll make a simple observation. 6K+ downloads. If 10% of the downloads for the last two years were new players - that's six hundred new. If another 10% are returning players who have inactive accounts, and they're looking to get back to something they fondly remember, that's another six hundred almost new.

>And that last number is probably way too overly conservative. What I'm saying is I think we cycled 1200 new / returning players minimum through. Did they stick? Are they still with us? How many are F2P versus pay? I can't say. But for me, keeping the lifeblood flowing is a core part of what I do. Anything targeted to attract more new players truly does carry the pressure of the Challenger Deep.

People often set up on multiple devices, get new PCs etc. If anything, Lich downloads, or the population in general, are probably up because of Covid and people still being/working at home most of the time, etc. Once the world is normal again, how many of them will leave? Unfortunately, probably most of them, regardless of any in-game changes.

>I agree with some of your sentiments about the many changes to GS in the last 5 years, but this notion that the devs are systematically nerfing everyone is so divorced from reality that I had to point it out. Never in the history of Gemstone has gear been less necessary in regard to playing the game effectively. Never before in the history of the game have the players been this overpowered. All the dev that I've seen since I took 6 years off has been a massive net increase in power. The notion that there is some sort of conspiracy to make the game gear dependent has no rational foundation, and to assume that they are going to somehow turn this entire paradigm on its head with Ascension is just a gross assumption with no support.

Oh believe me, this is the thing I hope I'm wrong about the most. However, shady happenings like what happened with 1206 don't make the optics look good. I'll never believe that the 515 nerf had nothing to do with DR either, despite Simu's old claim that balance changes aren't done with DR in mind. But wizard nerfs are old news.



I would argue that players have "never been this overpowered" because...well just look at the gear that's been coming out over the past few years. Remove that from the equation, and I'm just not seeing what's making you believe people are more OP now than ever.

It could be argued that players have never been this overpowered because players have never thrown this much cash directly at Simu before. Rift boots?

>Regarding systematic nerfing: they have nerfed some things, replaced them with others. Survivability is up for many classes. Some of the net power increases are indeed gear-related. When it comes to wizards, even with core tap, the power ceiling will always be lower than old-style Immolation with 0 RT. The memory of past nerfs casts a long shadow. They have also seemingly (reports vary, and I don't play a ranger) nerfed Spike Thorn, and are widely rumored to be on the verge of a significant bard nerf. At the risk of speaking out of turn, I believe these are in part where Methais is coming from. For my part, when I saw they were proposing to reduce 720's kill chance (and possibly 709's success chance and 706's duration, hopefully a GM can weigh in and clarify) my anti-nerf reflex also went into high gear.

Pretty much this. Dev also wants to homogenize time to kill (TTK), which I don't really have a problem with at face value, and unless something changed over the past couple years, they want to slow down combat overall, which I do have a pretty big problem with.

But what I'm expecting is that TTK homogenization will come in the form of everyone killing as slowly as squares, instead of speeding up TTK for squares to match pures. And this DoT based sorcerer review seems to indicate this being the case so far.

Most people want to chop off heads and blow things to bits in this game, not attrition things to death via plinking and DoTs.

>This idea of a single sorcerer being a master of destruction doesn't exist in history.

Sorcerers, masters of cobbling.

>When I read the update doc the first time, I got the impression that they had already laid out what they were going to do and the feedback doc was just a formality. I had the same impression about a couple other feedback requests made recently as well.

This is for the most part how the ELR review went too when wizards got hammered.



TLDR: I hope I'm wrong about pretty much everything, but my expectations are low, and it's based on decades of watching dev to dev things, whether it's the current crew of GMs or a previous crew.

~ Methais

>I base my views on seeing dev nerf things unnecessarily for decades while reducing overall character power and general fun in favor of homogenization and dumbing things down.

Are we playing the same game? Aside from a few outliers, player power is massively higher now than even 10 years ago. Gear has never been less necessary. The reviews have largely been significant buffs. Are you just talking about the 702/719 ye' old nerfs?

>Are we playing the same game? Aside from a few outliers, player power is massively higher now than even 10 years ago. Gear has never been less necessary. The reviews have largely been significant buffs. Are you just talking about the 702/719 ye' old nerfs?

Nah, but those old GP2 nerfs in the Warden days were pretty garbage too. Just watching GS3 Dark Catalyst in action would make you want to roll a sorcerer. But no, I just mean in an overall sense, most of which is centered around wizards. Though I won't argue at all that empaths are a lot stronger these days, for example, so some professions did indeed come out ahead.

>Let me get this straight - and please correct me if I'm wrong. You're upset that a wizard nerf may have rendered wizard's problematically less powerful than they should be?

No, I wouldn't say it's that simple or just because of wizard nerfs, even though that had a hugely negative effect on how much fun this game is for me, and probably most capped wizards, post-nerf. But it's more the overall direction they appear to be looking to take the game...slowing down combat, homogenizing professions, trying to be WoW, etc., and I genuinely hope that I turn out to be spectacularly wrong about most of my predictions, which my primary one is that by the time all of these "reviews" are done, most if not all professions will be noticeably weaker, take longer to kill, and overall less fun to play, but more tedious.

I'd be thrilled to end up being wrong, but we'll just have to wait and see. Hopefully I am, because if I'm right, then it's too late.



Unrelated - Old Dark Catalyst was pretty great:

Kryblue gestures at a csetairi.
CS: +666 - TD: +489 + CvA: +25 + d100: +74 == +276
Warding failed!
A csetairi is suddenly engulfed in flames of pure essence!
... and hits for 132 points of damage!
... 55 points of damage!
Right arm shattered by an extremely well placed hit!
The csetairi is stunned!
... 55 points of damage!
Icy blast freezes the csetairi's right hand!
... 45 points of damage!
Heavy shock to chest illuminates ribcage. Cool!
... 45 points of damage!
Visible wisps of electricity shoot up left arm. Youch!
... 55 points of damage!
Left arm fractured by an icy blast!
... 50 points of damage!
... 50 points of damage!
Nasty burns to right arm. Gonna need lots of butter.
The csetairi shrieks as she falls to the ground and cradles her mangled right arm!
... 50 points of damage!
... 55 points of damage!
Flames burn hole in chest exposing ribs!
... 45 points of damage!
Burst of flames char chest a crispy black.
... 45 points of damage!
Burst of flames to left eye incinerates eyelid. Gruesome.
... 55 points of damage!
Electric blast goes right to the heart! Fibrillation can be fun.
The csetairi writhes in agony and dies.




~ Methais

>>What wow factor do you plan to give to sorcerers?


Not sure we're going to have any wow factor.
No one is going to have the patience to hunt with us unless you're a MAer.
We have to rely on Pets to be effective. I'm sure the justice system will punish us for them.
We still have even more complicated hunting tactics even if 714 will be simplified.
-We get to keep track of soul fragments and more cooldowns.
-We have to know when we last cast our DoTs to have 730 be useful.
-30m cooldown on our highest level spell. Great for invasions, right?!
-No better SMR defense so we're still forced to train Dodge to not die daily let alone all the lores we need.

WHO in Dev hates sorcerers so much that we're forced to become dark Druids? I never saw sorcerers are single-target controllers either.

Would be nice if someday I'd want to use more than 1-3 of my spells on a hunt because they were interesting, effective, and uncomplicated for group pacing.

With this proposal, I'd love to see what a typical hunting setup/strategy is in capped areas.

>WHO in Dev hates sorcerers so much that we're forced to become dark Druids? I never saw sorcerers are single-target controllers either.

This. I still get the impression that sorcerer Dev is cynical, always have. It's pretty bizarre. There are counter-examples to any argument the Devs could provide to things like "make 719 effective against everything." Our 'theme' as a class has now changed 4 or 5 times in the years that I've played the class. We went from masters of warding, to masters of destruction (that one was rich because we were anything but), to what...masters of disabling, and now masters of pets? Like, the ideas in the document are cool and I like many of them, but what are sorcerers? What makes the class special? What spells are satisfying to cast? It looks like we're scary pet masters now? Is that intentional? I just don't see any talk of first-principles from the devs and so we're all just filling them in.

>Sorcerers are an offensive, destructive profession

That might be what the lore on sorcs is, but the reality is far, far, far different, and pretty disappointing.

My feedback on this is very much in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" category. Some of these are pretty frustrating changes, IMO. I'll take anything involving necro lore, for example. We can't go max in either lore, so we have to decide what's more useful at the moment. Kinda sucky, because most of us threw a lot of points into necro lore for the ensorcell benefits as well as the max HP removal. Since they've been removed, there is very little reason to have necro lore to begin with now. After the 30 ranks to avoid a spirit loss, what else do I need it for? It would just be a nice change to make it so someone could just go 202 ranks in their primary lore to begin with. Secondaries, let us choose how we want. Primary, what else are we gonna use those TP's for once capped?

Major Summoning would be cool if those spawns were able to grab disarmed items automatically. Also, the salts and this and that for them really just makes it more complicated than worth having. I don't even bother using minor summoning now, it provides so little benefit for a whole lot of unnecessary work.

Planar shift being limited seems like an odd change, I don't understand how it's being abused enough to warrant that kind of nerf? Is it forgotten that it's on average 30k to move all over the place? Is this to kinda force us to use (buy) chronomage orbs instead? Normally, we're not going all across Elanthia anyway with any regularity, so I'm not sure what this is really doing other than just kinda nerfing for the sake of doing it :/

I know these changes are being done with the intent of improving quality of life, but it kinda seems like some of these are just being done to kinda piss us off a bit? Like yes, you want us to choose red pill vs blue pill with regards to our training, but at what point does it just seem like it's cruel and unusual punishment? We hit cap, there's not a whole lot of stuff to do. Based on the current hunting grounds and post cap hunting choices, I picked up 1x in CM and dodging. The fact I deemed that more important than finishing things like harness power or my lore ability says more about how absurd the maneuvers are and what's a better use of thousands of training points. Why should a game that we all play because we enjoy it become more frustrating as time goes on?

>> My understanding of the document was that there would be no change in the current uses of 740. <<

This is correct. Nothing is changing with any of the existing functionality, only an addition of a new mode to the spell for emergency purpose.

Zissu - Combat and Magic Systems Dev Lackey

<Except for cross-realms, the spell is made obsolete by ;go2. :go2 doesn’t cost 40 mana. I can get into OTF with :go2 not 740. For dragging corpses 735 is better. I don’t have to take about a book etc in a swarming OTF zone.>

Not everyone uses lich for a variety of reasons.

Taking things out of the game or failing to improve aspects of the game cause a 3rd party already does something would be a serious mistake. If anything, they should be looking how to incorporate/improve things people currently do via 3rd parties into the game/site/etc to make people less reliant on 3rd parties.

They've done an excellent job of this with spell active, ESP, travel, LOOT, etc... now it's time for them to tackle playershops, sloot, narost, etc.

Starchitin, the OG

A severed gnomish hand crawls in on its fingertips and makes a rude gesture before quickly decaying and rotting into dust. A gust of wind quickly scatters the dust.

>Zissu — Yesterday at 11:54 PM
>There might be some implimentation nuance in that to say how it will work fully, but if a DoT would last for 20s, it doesn't finish twice as fast (10s) with 706 active, the duration is still 20s.

>Zissu — Today at 11:56 PM
>Intent is duration doesn't change, we just fire damage twice as much.

Copying this over as it is a question I had as well as a few others. It is the answer I was hoping for in regards to how 706 will function with DoTs.

As I gaze over the horizon, the wind tugs at my cloak and whispers, "Adventure" in my ear.

A squeaky halfling nearby asks, "Why you playing with orcs heads and troll rearends?!"

I like the chance to spread pestilence, but it would be great if this spell gained an actual AOE cast option. You can AOE cast it for twice the mana cost or AOE cast it with a reduced duration.

As I gaze over the horizon, the wind tugs at my cloak and whispers, "Adventure" in my ear.

A squeaky halfling nearby asks, "Why you playing with orcs heads and troll rearends?!"

719 isn't on the list and it's a good spell as it is, but it has one drawback that isn't world-ending, but seems like it could be adjusted, so I'm throwing it out here.

The elemental cycling makes it unusable in many capped hunting rooms like parts of otf north, nelemar, and the entire confluence, among those I immediately know. Possibilities of igniting gas in the bowels, shocking one's self in nelemar or otf, and healing elementals in the confluence as opposed to hurting them are some of the issues.

The ONLY change I am suggesting is the ability to static the cycle by choice when the character attunes to their element (to whatever their element is). It offers a modest level of control. You could be more elaborate and liberal than that, but that is ALL I am suggesting/requesting. There's a huge (and probably understandably founded) concern that any spell touched will be nerfed. There is no need to change anything else about it. If it wasn't solid it would be on the list, but I do think this would make it even better.

- Arshwikk: for my sorc(s)

<< 725 - Major Summoning
<< Combine Animate Dead and Demonic summoning into a single spell. Spell will either animate a dead creature or player, summon a minor demon, or otherwise consume a shadow essence to summon a new undead or demon combat pet. Only one pet can be present at any time. >>


Does this mean that if I have a minor demon and I happen upon a body that would need to be animated to be rescued, I would have to dismiss my minor demon first? Or does "pet" refer only to "undead or demon combat pet"?

I really hate the idea of making sorcerers into a DoT class. This isn't a game in which I can kite creatures around. We need to be able to kill them before they kill us. The fact that demonology seems to be a much better path instead of necromancy is also poorly done. Its going to force players into demonology instead of allowing us to pick our flavor.
I understand and respect that changes to our class are needed. But this is a poorly design change which will force a lot of players either a way from the class or the game.