One of the biggest differences between casters and melee is that melee use damage abilities while constantly autoattacking for free damage, while casters only cast spells and don't have an auto-attack for free damage.
This can cause a lot of disparities and issues in burst vs sustained damage, and is the root cause of the stand nuke, sit med, stand nuke, sit med gameplay that plagues many casters.
To remedy this, why not allow casters to perform a simple magical ranged auto-attack using certain weapons: 1H Blunt Wand, 2H Blunt Staff.
This would allow an option for priests and mages to auto-attack at ranged while weilding the necessary weapon type.
To further enhance this, these 1H Wands and 2H Staffs could have a damage type associated with them that would affect the auto-attack.
It will take more convincing for me to agree that an auto-attack equivalent is necessary for casters. Casters have numerous advantages that melee do not, and I feel they should have a differing playstyle. That still leaves wide-open your concern for a nuke/med mechanic, but I've never been bothered by it personally.
Gandalf didn't seem to have a problem swinging a sword :-)
I don't think there is anything in the game that stops a caster from getting up close and personal with an enemy and swinging away with their weapon. So if your mana management is doing fine and you don't need to meditate, I'm guessing you could auto-attack all you want.
Clerics even have a passive called Favor of the Order that gives them lifesteal (self heal) for part of the damage they do with Melee attacks. May not be used all the time, but it's possible that a Cleric could keep himself topped up during a fight with AoE just by pounding away with his mace or scepter or whatever he uses :-) One less person he needs to heal.
Like goofy said, nothing is stopping casters from getting into the fray (aside from sacrificing Mana Regen by not sitting). With that said, wizards will be allowed to use 1hs (swords - similar to the WoW mage) and I would imagine that a technique for the wiz will be to wait to engage with spells until the target is below a certain % health, so adding a little extra dmg with swing between nukes may be very viable. All of the other dps casters will have pets to perform sustained dps. Edit: I will be both surprised and disappointed if the necro doesn’t have pet options.
Caster DPS will likely dominate melee DPS if this is like we expect. The trade off to melee DPS is 0 rest time / sustainment.
in my opinion, this is a non issue and can only be proven by parses. If a DPS, both mellee and caster, both fight 1 same mob for the same long duration, their DPS over prolonged periods of time at equal gear level and played at master skill should be roughly the same, regardless of the way you play (meaning with sit/med or whacking a mob).
And this is really where the truth comes in, there are too many variables. And i do not know of any single person (bots don't count as a person) that can play a character to perfection all the time.
Also there is something about group make up, if in a group situation a melleee dps joins while the group is optimized for casters, you will find a difference. Same thing the other way around.
So all in all, i'm not worried or bothered by the mechanic as it is somewhat traditional and has worked just fine in many games in the past. It all comes down to preference of playstyle.
Darch said:Caster DPS will likely dominate melee DPS if this is like we expect. The trade off to melee DPS is 0 rest time / sustainment.
Unless Casters face the same issues in EQ1 where the higher the level of the NPC compared to the Caster the greater the reduction in damage output by the Caster. NPC scaling has never been kind to Casters while melee suffer a much lower reduction.
Then there is the issue of lower overall DPS from melee if the weapon wielder is a caster. Typically the skill caps are far lower, weapons have lower damage stats, strength of the class is usually quite low as well. All of this means melee DPS from a caster is negligble at best. Nothing that really needs auto-attack.
Adding a caster version of Auto Attack makes since to me, but woulnd't say it's *needed*. Auto attack has never really been used for any real damage, it just seem to be a way to chip away and be "doing something" between your actually skills where you do your real damage.
Melee folks get to hit the mobs with low damage swings, while waiting for their big hits.
Archers fire off random arrows for minimal damage, while waiting to activate their cool high damage shots.
Why not let casters use their wands and staves to auto fire weak no cost "cantrips" that do minimal damage while they wait for their big spells? (if balance is an issue, maybe the big spells get toned down a bit (a thought I know casters won't be too happy about))
Ezrael said:One of the biggest differences between casters and melee is that melee use damage abilities while constantly autoattacking for free damage, while casters only cast spells and don't have an auto-attack for free damage.
This can cause a lot of disparities and issues in burst vs sustained damage, and is the root cause of the stand nuke, sit med, stand nuke, sit med gameplay that plagues many casters.
To remedy this, why not allow casters to perform a simple magical ranged auto-attack using certain weapons: 1H Blunt Wand, 2H Blunt Staff.
This would allow an option for priests and mages to auto-attack at ranged while weilding the necessary weapon type.
To further enhance this, these 1H Wands and 2H Staffs could have a damage type associated with them that would affect the auto-attack.
I don't think this is that type of game. That is, a game where trying to inch out every bit of DPS from every class is the focus, where all classes desparately try to focus on DPS.
Fact is, the entire argument of DPS is in my opinon a failure of this game to even consider (yes, I know this is in direct objection to their DPS Role design). If DPS is a focus, everyone wil focus on it and this is contrary to what I think the original concepts of EQ was about. DPS wasn't even a role, it was a manufactured role by the community in a need to catagorize classes.
This is the natural result of where we end up with such roles.