Hi.

Today the rules for freezing changed as it no longer stacks.
With this change, a complete freeze of the enemy is no longer possible, since freezing only slow them down by 55% and it last two rounds. There is no longer any point of hitting the same target within the two round period.

By changing this you made the wizards useless again. Any high level tier fights will no longer have any needs for wizards, because 1. Less health 2. Less damage done 3. No other advantages that can compare with the damage another warrior or ranger can do instead of a wizard.

I will say that the wizards was a little overpowered before the last change, but what else advantage do we have. No AOE spells that can do a lot of damage, or other spells that can compare with ranger/warrior class.
I think the devs. need to allow stacking of freeze and make hits after the first one do less freezing, but more than nothing. Also a counter that shows the freeze turns would be nice.
If not we need something new or changed, to allow us to be effective in battle. We need to have something to bring into the team other than a lost slot for another class.

As long as this is in effect, wizards are now useless compared with other classes.

Tharexia

In terms of scores wizards are screwed I agree. but for usefulness in missions you are just as useful as the other classes. I find it amazing that you can disregard the power of phase. It gives you enough mana to use your most powerful damage spell (other classes need 2 aim/furious to use impale/pierce), this alone makes your 2 turn damage from 0 energy equal or greater than rangers/warriors. It gives you a hefty armour/MR buff that really improves your tankyness. Finally it gives you a high chance to go completely invulnerable! It is possibly the strongest skill in the game!.

And in terms of rangers and warriors being able to complete higher tiers because we can oneshot the harder foes. Bull it takes me 2-3 shots to kill most of them, more for the strongest ones, and that includes an aim! I use rr because we can't regenerate energy quickly enough to sustain the use of pierce in a battle lasting more than 4 turns, which as there are often 4-5 foes that take 2-3 shots to kill is every battle.

Simply wizards are just as strong as other classes for completing higher tiers because of your sustainability in fights. If rangers can't out damage the opponents (which by higher tiers is unlikely) we die quickly. Wizards at least can get some phase procs and survive long enough to win!.

Also phase is still a strong skill! rr gives 55% speed for 1 turn. compared to freeze with a stun chance and 55% slow for 2 turns there is no contest! let alone the extra energy you have left over from phase! I would love to have an ability that debuffed the opposition. and pincushion doesn't count cause the damage from the procs is negligible!

remember how OP rr was when it stacked? how angry you all were back then? thats what the freeze was like.

So to conclude something needs to be done to help your scores, or the way they are evaluated. But you are not as hard off as you claim. I would trade aim for phase in an instant if I could.

I do and don't agree with the general sentiment coming from other wizards here. On one hand, wizards aren't "dead", but they certainly aren't all that useful. We weren't useful for our damage-- We were used to slow or even stop a boss so that the real power hitters could take it out without being killed in high tier missions. No one said "I need wizards for damage". They said "I need a wizard", would get one, then would say "okay we need two heavy hitters, warriors preferred" or something of that nature. That speaks pretty well to the overall issue at hand.

I said it last night in chat after my normal sarcastic type quip about the "hatred" of wizards being back in a new form. Aly said something in response, which was fair enough since I was being dramatic, but I did elaborate there a bit, and will here.

The problem was not that freeze stacked with itself. The problem was that there was no floor for enemy speed. Or, to reword it, there was no cap on how much speed reduction could stack. This apparently led to us either driving a unit to 0% speed or a value infinitely approaching 0 but otherwise an unobservable difference. This is where I believe CNE dropped the ball. Like Aly said to me, you would have thought that after the RR bug with speed persisting they would have expected something like freeze stacking and/or persisting, but to be fair, stun was also a factor since most wizards running freeze were running 5+.

I proposed that we get a cap on the amount of a stat we can reduce from enemies. Since freeze tops out at 80% speed reduction at level 15, I figure it would be fair to allow it to stack to that point. After all, when Jungle hits we'll be able to do that anyway, with a 20% stun chance.

As it stands now, Andaho has a point. We just can't compare damage wise, no matter how we do it. I currently run a 9 fireball, 1 freeze build (will be changing when my respec cools down), and I can sorta compete with damage scores in MP because of my high consistent damage while everyone else charges up. However, once a comparatively powerful player unleashes a furious impale, or an aimed rapid reload, I'm down notably on the score list. It's not just a stat differential, because I have one of the higher damage ratings I've seen among players, even ones who outscore/out-damage me at ratios of 2:1 or 3:1. It's a matter of the power of the skills or combinations thereof.

To be fair, dasonage has a point. Phase has two notable advantages: The first is that wizards can immediately fire off their power skill with one charge. The counter to that is that other classes are powerful enough that a furious strike or aimed magic arrow is still nearly as strong as a freeze or flame laser, but the point still stands because there's more wait time for the other classes except for the final battle of an MP when everyone is charged up. The second is the potential invincibility. Frankly, I don't know much about this. The only time I used a phase build before was to try to clear the Secret Room in the Valentines event, and something was broken/tweaked there. I literally couldn't get invincibility to proc more than 5% of the time. I actually counted battles between procs and no joke I was getting it to go off once every 20. If it's actually 50%, then we do get a certain advantage from that. I HAVE seen battles won purely because a weaker wizard got a phase proc and we got those extra hits in.

The problem is, this game doesn't have a lot of long battles where survivability is such a priority. It's really a game of dish out the most damage quickly, on both the player end and enemy end. We don't fight protracted battles and have healing skills or stat buff skills for the party, we go all in and hope to kill things fast. Such is demonstrated by enemies with assassinate, or T3 type enemies that are dishing out 17k normal hits and crap. As such, the survivability that phase provides is more negligible than not, because it's dicey proc rate (I don't believe it should be higher, that would be messed up) just adds another variable to the battle. It's not going to help me when the T2 or T3 enemy I'm fighting can crit 40% of the time or more for enough to take me out in one hit. What would help is if I could kill him first, but that's not an option.

I guess the somewhat short of what I'm trying to say is that wizards seem to have been partially built to go for support and sustainability. The problem is that we play a glass cannon game. Any extra durability we have from phase (our armor is largely worthless, and almost every enemy uses AD, not AP) is less than useful because it's still a game of who has the bigger stick. Right now I'm holding a twig while looking at warriors and rangers holding 2x4's. We need something to make us more useful, and I think allowing freeze to stack and persist up to 80% speed reduction would be fair enough.

Well put Gaidin. I agree with your proposal for freeze, let it stack to a certain amount, as Tharexia mentioned in the first post. Also that we need more diversity in builds. More skills would help with this. and at 10 phase the proc chance is 75% i believe. In single players I agree that the proc of phase is not very useful, wizards are definitely lacking there when damage is important. The proc is most useful in MP high tier runs.

I agree with the points that have been made in this post by the previous posters. To the point about wizard types of skills overall, I have stated in the past and will reiterate here, I believe that wizards should be stronger in their AoE attack. The original wall of fire and firestorm levels of strength allowed wizards to do equivalent, albeit different, damage to the type of damage we see rangers and warriors accomplishing with their single target skills. And, if you think about the typical battle scenario in books featuring the three classes represented in this game, wizards were *always* brought in for the mass damage they could achieve, not for their ability to pick off individual targets, for the very reasons cited by Gaidin and others: our glassy shell. If wizards don't have the kind of armor that warriors do because, to quote a dev, "they're wizards" then they need to have the kind of battle skill that represents the fact they are wizards. While I may not be a long-experienced game player, I have read hundreds of books in the fantasy/sci-fi genre, and it seems to me that the game play should follow the same kind of logic of the genre it is built out of. Ergo, restore the previous levels of AoE and Wall of Fire skills--the original across the board nerf on wizards was short-sighted in terms of the long-term impact on the general usefulness of that class. A selective nerf would have achieved a better balancing approach. If these skills were restored to their original levels, or at least increased beyond their present levels, wizards would become highly useful with any group of four or more enemies, and would give players of other classes a reason to bring along a wizard in their party.

Andaho, at my current level of skills, so long as I don't expect to be on a damage leader board, or to be able to do missions at T levels higher than 1 level above my gear T level (the target Aly said the devs are going for in ability), I do fine in single player missions with my single target skills. I find my usefulness as a wizard is *most* curtailed in MP missions, which is the point I am addressing. If it takes me forever to kill a target in a single player mission, well, that's my time. If it takes me forever to kill a target in a multiplayer mission, then that's everyone's time, and the rest of the party will opt to bring a higher damage class such as warrior or ranger along when given a preference. It is only in the diversity of skills that the wizard becomes useful--and I submit that diversity should be in the AoE attack skills.