Epic Mage Armor nerf........

[Daltian]

there's nothing wrong with high ac casters.

A caster that cant be hit is wrong.

[Alkapwn]

It seems to not understand where the players are coming from. Both in pvp/pve the +12ac made hybrids and casters alike were finally playable. I have high ac toons and they still get crunched down by without any problems in the high end epic planes. Now they're 30% more likely to be hit from an already 40% chance. Have you never been to the Abyss???!?!?
Even still with the nerf I can make a toon that will hit 100ac if i did that would you nerf it and make everyone else suffer for it?
Epic Mage armor wasn't broken, Why would you mess with it? No one was crazy overpowered running around invincible like some of Dragon builds around (which we well know are totally unbalanced).
Anyhow this nerf is BS and i'm seriously begining to question why I waste my time on this server..........

[mgrjebbo]

Seriously folks, think about this. A mage is suppose to hide behind the tanks not tank himself. A mage ac should be in the 30's tops, and if it was my server they would be in the 20's. Now go run in circles and cast spells like you should and stop complaining about this great change.

[Alkapwn]

there's nothing wrong with high ac casters.

A caster that cant be hit is wrong.

Everything can be hit. Its just a matter of knowing how too.

[Korr]

TD tournament had between the two times 4 people participate. . . 1/2 of them were PMs. 1/2 sounds drastic till you realize that meant there were 2 PMs

[Chernobyl_Glow]

TD tournament had between the two times 4 people participate. . . 1/2 of them were PMs. 1/2 sounds drastic till you realize that meant there were 2 PMs

exactly. i know there would have been at least twice as much participation but fighting bolg would have been a slower trip than just going to the devil angel on your own.

linux:
my ac was 70 and now is 64. self buffed w/o bard song. i know mloki has similar builds. i have zero offense spell capability other than mords. saves aren't exceptional. easily dispelable (since i took monk levels). low ab since i took sorc levels. the only thing i had going for me was ac and it was not notable, just passable. with this one change i went from having a barely viable build (which i enjoyed) to having something just a smidge better than an embarrassment. now it's purely a novelty build. ppl will say, "oh. how cute. a melee mage." and then smack me to the floor.

primarch has a few points higher ac but he has 0 melee presence in constrast. his sacrifice of melee made their spell casting possible. he also has three books on the build. he has possibly one spell focus. only 1 extra epic feat. SR is a real problem. like other mages if they do get a hit on him it'll probably knock him down and its church from there.

i wish we didn't have expose our weaknesses so that you can see that we aren't overpowered. being candid like above basically just makes the builds more useless. you're not going go change back and now everyone knows a little more how to beat me.

neither of these builds were uber. we never solo'd the Negative boss or took them to Posi plane or DWP to harvest gear. PM's and CoTs and SD's do that. We certainly didn't frequent Celestia or the Abyss. They were pretty effective PvP but strictly because their AC made them durable. That lost and they're lost.

again if the point was to knock down high AC builds, why did we jump right past PMs? based on the decisions made, it seems like the point was to bust the hybrid caster builds that AO is building.

waaaaaaaaahhhhhh. can you hear us whining? you scrapped approximately 20 builds in pwnd/hns with this change.

- glow -


ps, jebbo, love ya man but your opinion can't be taken seriously since its so far off from the reality of the server. i agree with you in theory but the fact is they aren't building this server that way. so the point is irrelevant. ironically, though you're right. my pure caster has like 35 ac and runs like crazy as soon as someone looks towards him.

[Daltian]

neither of these builds were uber. we never solo'd the Negative boss or took them to Posi plane or DWP to harvest gear. PM's and CoTs and SD's do that. We certainly didn't frequent Celestia or the Abyss. They were pretty effective PvP but strictly because their AC made them durable. That lost and they're lost.

For me balance is if you aren't overpowered in PvP. I really dont care if some build can even solo Celestia or Abyss, but if you have great advantage in PvP its not right. That's just my point of view. Also, as I see it a character that can cast 2x IGMS or 2x bigsby in round must not be durable.

[Chernobyl_Glow]

daltain i agree. the objective is to balance pvp. pvm isn't an exact indication of how well a build will do in pvp. but its a pretty good indicator. if ARE soloing high level planes then you will probably do quite well in pvp. you might even just dominate. my point was that these builds are NOT doing that. others are. why is this combo being targetted as overpowered when others are clearly more powerful.

if you want a good indication of what's over powered refer to the thunderdome event. i don't think it could be clearer.

- glow -

[burrahobbit]

I built Bolg so this would get nerfed, i am shocked it took this long. I understand the frustration, i enjoyed bolg being melee immune. I wouldnt go so far as to say its the PM lvls that were the problem, not the EMA. You can make a RDD bard with similar AC to bolg, Should we nerf RDD ac too? Of course not. Bring a bard, your right back to where you were, or at least close to it.

When a melee char stands next to a mage and wiffs away getting blasted by igms and never scores a hit, we have a problem. Its a good change.

Bolg won the TD event because of counter spelling, not his ac.

[LinuxPup]

Alkapwn... stop whining and post stats... I'm a dev and all I care about right now are numbers. What's your AC before, after? I'm trying to get things sorted right now between this, WoF, and some other updates coming (not nerfs).

[Amoenotep]

bolg won because no one on this server knows how to play a mage or against a mage..its all i have an uber tank and i can break stuff...

[Chernobyl_Glow]

Tep you are currently nerfing mages because we evidently learned how to play them too well. If we still haven't learned to build effective ones why are you correcting them? Plus, Burra is right. He'd counterspell most of the arsenal and you'd eventually get clipped by that nasty forearm slam from big ugly.

Its human nature and really no surprise that the NC faithful find this to be a great change. All casters feel the opposite. This change doesn't really hurt bolg or any other pm to any notable degree. You'd probably win a TD rematch.

"When a melee char stands next to a PM and wiffs away getting blasted by Big Ugly Summons and never scores a hit, we have a problem." <-- only changed a couple of words.

A great number of builds also whiff next to fessick and bolg and menelandro and painfynder. The list goes on. Having high ac is not a crime. EMA doesn not on its own create the high AC. Its the creativity of the builds that has done so. The sacrifice of caster levels is enormous. requires a number of feats that a caster wouldn't normally take plus pump stats that I normally wouldn't.

I'm beginning to think that there simply are no good changes. Every change simply results in builds that are now less effective. Sometimes yours, sometimes mine. Sometimes they are less effective because something you counted on is less worthwhile. Other times, the build you just completed would have been enhanced if you known about something new which would have made it better. How many players didn't take Blind Fight and wish they had? How many PM's wish they would just equip a shield instead of invest in EMA? Gee how I wish I had Divination on some prev clerics. No matter if the change is perceived as "Very Good" it disrupts things. That's why there are almost always complaints from someone. The more changes the more disappointment.

- Glow -

[Rogue2x]

bolg won because no one on this server knows how to play a mage or against a mage..its all i have an uber tank and i can break stuff...

I take offense to that. I was one of the other 2 people in the tournament, and I used a 37 caster, because I knew going up against Bolg was suicide. That I managed to get the other PM down to Near Death before the summons finally broke the lag and caught up to us, KD'd me, and killed me before I could use my first of three pots. The fight lasted a minute. And his AC WITH epic mage armor was 66, and the PM summons still has a +81ab. With this change, the PM is still unhittable, and my mages die in what, seconds?

I also have to argue with Jebbo and Korr, mages in the background? yeah? what's stopping the tank from running straight at the mages? There IS no "background", combat is chaotic, everyone attacking everyone. Now that we can't help optimize our mage's ac, it's back to spamming bigby on everything, and we have every mage built and played exactly the same way....hooray for diversity and creativity.....

My hybrid caster had a fully buffed AC of 77, and was, by NO means invincible. And as cool and butt-kicking as he is, I have NEVER gotten a complaint about it, and we all know much people like to shout, so that says something. He was designed for ac, and had to make HUGE sacrifices in the casting-department to get that AC. It was a give-and-take, and there was a lot of give, for benefits that none of the other players ever complained was 'broken'.

I just don't understand, if a vast majority of the players like it the way it was, why did it need to be changed?

I'll tell you where the future of this change is headed. The only way mages survive now is Bigbies, so a month down the line, when we all HAVE to roll up new casters now, we all have the only mage build that works, a bigbier, and THAT will get nerfed. Things are looking healthy for the server already.....

[Cluster]

What's your AC now? That's what's interesting... you said it was in the upper 70s? So is it low 70s now? What about with Bard Song?

And how dispellable are they? And how effective are the spells? Spells/day? Spell DCs?

That AC isn't free.

The reason AC mages are preferred to pure mages is because pure mages don't offer much for incentive. You have to give up large ranks in primary skills. A large number of spells that do work well are generally unusable because they make you hostile to your faction and hurt your party members. The spells that you are left with that are effective in most situations are just as useful in a hybrid build. So again, the pure caster offers only slight advantages with some major drawbacks, and therefore is less effective.

At least if your going to pout the pure mage's survivability into the toilet, then let them have better control of their spells. Pure caster is required for a friendly hellball, why not make some of the other spells it has friendly also. This would give more advantage to the pure caster, as the hybrid will still have unfriendly ice storms/evards/thunderclaps and so on.

Lokey, you said it yourself that you would like to see casters that put points towards their spells, then make it so if we do so we have something that works. I could specialize and pump the DC to make an awesome thunderclap, too bad that clap is going to hurt as many of my allies as my enemies.

[LinuxPup]

We'll be in talks to find out a good solution for this... what kind of AC are we talking with a monk/mage with EMA vs. a non-monk build?