Spellcasting - Breaking Concentration and Balance

[petros]

What he said was it is not acceptable for a Caster to do it (prep and killing) in 2.5 hours what would take him 5. So he is indicating it takes them half the time it takes him.

Sometimes it's a bit hard to as a first language english speaker to get exactly what a second or third language english speaker is really trying to say as they sometimes have slight grammatical errors which change context.

Being a second language teacher I am used to seeing this and can pretty easily pick it up. I've been an English as a Second Language teacher so again I'm used to it.

Windemere

Thanks Windemere. If it's indeed a language issue, then that can explain some of the issues. So then he's saying that the caster is clearing the area in 30 minutes and is preparing for 2? I'm really confused. How would one know how long the preparation was?

[Windemere]

He doesn't

What I get from what he is saying is that it takes 2.5 hours for a Spellcaster to clear an area that takes him 5.

What had been said earlier in other posts by other people was that it might take 2 hours of preperation time. I would then imagine he is adding that into his timing.

Obviously I am only drawing information from how I understand the post. I can't take words and put them in Lindros's mouth. But this is how I understand his post and from chatting with him on other occasions.

Windemere

[Maizara]

I know were really not going to get into the discussion of guilds and soloing because ive seen and teamed with a few people who completely shatter any record that are not a certain healing guild. Who basically grabbed a few things off the racks and said "Let's Go!"

[petros]

Ah ok. So he is observing that caster is able to kill an area in 30 minutes that a fighter takes 5 hours? So that's a 10x difference over a long period of time? If that's the case, then I can see why it can seem extremely imbalanced. I haven't seen anything close to this difference though. So if you have logs of how someone is doing this, by all means, send them to me and I'll look into it.

[Rhynox]

Well, I remember when you could not get near Icewall or Mithas because you would get poisoned. They haven't done that in years, truth to be told, or at least I have never found them doing that again after they were warned.

[Ilrahil]

When I was a monk and approximately 200 average or so, well over myth, with a prime set of gear, using skunk berries, full of booze, and with my damage output maximized, it was impossible for me to clear areas like Mithas and Qualinost solo.

To show this in more detail and what I am getting at.

It took me approximately 2 hours to go from Spot A and fully circle through every room back to spot A. I have been an eyewitness to a specific casting guild clearing that in under a half hour. Given other abilities of the casting guild to appropriate herb/potion manufacturing and the idea of younger members keeping experienced members fully stocked, and having played a character as a member of this guild, the preparation time + killing time ratio to what I was capable of doing was about 1:2 meaning it took me twice as long which is interesting, because one of the "balancing" factors of most casting guilds is the preparation needed to perform such feats.

People should have the option to play a caster, however the system is so severely flawed. Going up against a member of the two powerful casting guilds in the game is near suicide without being extremely well prepared. You need methods to heal to outweigh their damage. You need specific items tailored to help resist the full effects of their spells (many of these are extremely rare.) And then on top of going into the battle you have to be able to damage them extremely fast.

You have to damage said spellcaster faster than what they can damage you. And without being able to break a spellcasters concentration it is near impossible to do unless you are packing some crazy healing. Think of it this way. Most combat guilds have specials that miss or do little damage at least 25% of the time (rough estimate.) Breaking a spellcasters concentration requires a ridiculous level of damage not easy to obtain against one titan + sized. And spells have nearly if not always a 100% hit ratio, and are nearly impossible to interrupt.

Maybe that will help a bit.

[petros]

If PvE were the only consideration, we could create mages who have devastating one-shot powers with a fair amount of impunity. The trouble comes in when PvP comes into play. The playerbase, I imagine, would be able to accept the idea of a mage preparing for many hours, gathering a team of tanks to protect them, entering Moria, and killing the Balrog with 5-10 powerful spell attacks. The problem happens when the same mage is able to use these powerful spell attacks against the most powerful melee players in the game, making them feel rather powerless to protect themselves other than by running.

It remains a seemingly unsolvable issue, in terms of making everyone happy.

Seems like the last page of posts just summarize again exactly what Gorboth wrote and have not added much to the conversation about balance for spellcasters. For that I apologize. I'll close this topic for now.