Hellball and Caster epic strikes
- Thread starter Teh_Troll
- Start date
Gloomspear (Epic Strike): Single-target SLA, 1d8+8 Negative Damage per caster level and applies 3 stacks of Shattermantle. Cooldown 6 seconds, cost 5 SP
Necrotic Ray: Blast a living enemy with 1d6+12 negative energy damage per caster level up to 25d6+300 at caster level 25. A successful Fortitude save reduces the damage by half. The ray also suppresses the life force of any living creature it strikes, granting it 1 negative level.
Is my math wrong or is Necrotic Ray better than the friggin epic strike? It benefits from cooldown reducers, and in my experience hits harder consistently.
Necrotic Ray: Blast a living enemy with 1d6+12 negative energy damage per caster level up to 25d6+300 at caster level 25. A successful Fortitude save reduces the damage by half. The ray also suppresses the life force of any living creature it strikes, granting it 1 negative level.
Is my math wrong or is Necrotic Ray better than the friggin epic strike? It benefits from cooldown reducers, and in my experience hits harder consistently.
Gloomspear goes up to d12+16 against targets with zero spell resistance in t5.
It's significantly stronger than it was before update 66 (used to just be d6+6, which is equal to a third level spell for a single target spell.), but nobody cared because dragon breath was drastically too strong in comparison to everything else so no other spell epic strikes were even worth considering.
Xgya
Well-known member
I see a few obvious differences:
The SLA is an SLA - it gets all the metas for free.
The spell has a saving throw.
Someone that can only cast level 3 spells can still get access to caster strikes at full caster level.
By design, the devs chose to make SLAs, even the Epic ones, weaker than what the best available spell is.
Now, I don't fully agree with that decision, but I can understand the reasoning behind it.
I have a pale EK melee wizard. He is T5 in Magus but also pretty deep in Draconic. I use the dragon breath for close-in and gloomspear for when I need to do spell DPS at range. And Gloomspear is bad. I rotate spear and nectrotic ray and the ray almost always deals more damage.
And yet they all still share cooldowns. That's the real rub.
I can see an evil sort of reasoning in SSG killing of casters for a while to earn money from people retooling.
But that mission has been accomplished now. The tiny handful og caster left wont swap nonatter.
So SSG, you milked that cow fully, you can allow caster to be viable again earning money from those retooling back to casters in the process.
Not holding my breath though. Looking elsewhere than DDO to spend my leisure money instead
But that mission has been accomplished now. The tiny handful og caster left wont swap nonatter.
So SSG, you milked that cow fully, you can allow caster to be viable again earning money from those retooling back to casters in the process.
Not holding my breath though. Looking elsewhere than DDO to spend my leisure money instead
the way epic strikes were before it was an issue between casters that basically everyone went into draconic for the breath (what, you want to play sonic or light focused? Reroll and pick a better class idiot.) and the only real difference between casters was whether you have a bypass or not and dragon breath was the singular spell epic strike whether you were aiming for single target or AoE, overall things are in a healthier spot in terms of representation and balance between the trees now.
I don't feel like epic strikes and epic destinies should be so strong that they completely overshadow your class choices - especially when certain caster archetypes still lack proper support in the epic destiny system and that the issues with the overall weaknesses of casters right now are a an issue of the overall systems, not the epic destiny SLAs themselves.
Hellball, Spirit Blades and Arcane Pulse have always been bad and since the level cap is going to keep going up will fall further behind due to the fact they have no caster level scaling. Ruin and Greater Ruin are so absurdly propped up by draconic, they have their base damage doubled.
Epic Strikes overall are better than they were, dragon breath and carrion swarm get nerfed and the rest get buffed and suddenly they all got gutted?
I don't feel like epic strikes and epic destinies should be so strong that they completely overshadow your class choices - especially when certain caster archetypes still lack proper support in the epic destiny system and that the issues with the overall weaknesses of casters right now are a an issue of the overall systems, not the epic destiny SLAs themselves.
Hellball, Spirit Blades and Arcane Pulse have always been bad and since the level cap is going to keep going up will fall further behind due to the fact they have no caster level scaling. Ruin and Greater Ruin are so absurdly propped up by draconic, they have their base damage doubled.
Epic Strikes overall are better than they were, dragon breath and carrion swarm get nerfed and the rest get buffed and suddenly they all got gutted?
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Teh_Troll
Master of Baiting
Gloomspear is literally Iceberg, a 9th level spell. That also should hit harder.
Probably the goal is to milk it by creating some new class/archetype that is "the best thing ever" and everyone has to swap over to it immediately.
Looking at how much chaosmancer and dragon disciple sucked... I have little faith they can beat this.
Anurakh
Little Nixie
Yeah. The best nuker is a monk. Yes, devs, the highest-damaging spell in the game is the damn ki bolt.
On the topic of the iconic dhampir, Tilomere begging about not nerfing his melee power SLAs because melee power-modified SLAs are the ones that do the most damage, thanks to a stupid design flaw.
No, no need to say more. A melee class is the best nuker. So, devs, it's up to you what you want to do.
SpartanKiller13
Why do I have 522 ddo build files
Moonlance also has no save and has a (currently) no-fail freeze effect, which is conveniently left out of a lot of these discussions when comparing vs pure damage spells. ~All epic strikes have upgrade effects, although many aren't great XD
It's pretty great with the T5, at least IMO. Strike a Chord is also ok. Many/most of the caster strikes don't feel worth using though, which is pretty awkward.
There's someplace between pre-nerf dragonbreath and current dragonbreath that I think epic caster strikes should land at. Worth using, but not invalidating the rest of your kit. Giving them non-damage effects helps make them more useful, but it's hard to balance those as well (like Nightmare Lance for -5 PRR/MRR is excellent for raid bosses, but useless for most questing and the duration is long enough you want to bring a DPS strike as well). Short-term buffs/debuffs seem best maybe? Stuff like Thrive from PA (if it was 100% proc rate) would make even weaker epic strikes more useful as part of combos.
It's pretty great with the T5, at least IMO. Strike a Chord is also ok. Many/most of the caster strikes don't feel worth using though, which is pretty awkward.
There's someplace between pre-nerf dragonbreath and current dragonbreath that I think epic caster strikes should land at. Worth using, but not invalidating the rest of your kit. Giving them non-damage effects helps make them more useful, but it's hard to balance those as well (like Nightmare Lance for -5 PRR/MRR is excellent for raid bosses, but useless for most questing and the duration is long enough you want to bring a DPS strike as well). Short-term buffs/debuffs seem best maybe? Stuff like Thrive from PA (if it was 100% proc rate) would make even weaker epic strikes more useful as part of combos.