Quote from darlissa
No, he called them low IQ because they don't realize that the problem is with their gear, build or play style, not with the WD class.
To whoever whines about mana, if u go for a mana draining build (high mana cost skills or simply stacking attack speed), weapon can give 14 mana regen, offhand can give 11 mana regen, head can give 11 mana regen, and depeneding on the dps skills u use, there may be reduced mana cost on certain items for it. Base mana regen is just 20, so from gear alone u can double-to-tripple your mana regen, NOT taking Vision Quest into account.
I'm able to clear pretty much every kind of elite pack in this game, I'm a full time engineer working 8-10 hours a day (so the time I spend in this game is a couple of hours every day and during weekend time), and I've spent 0 euros on RMAH, all I bought were items from gold AH with gold i made on my own, because that's how the game works.
Besides the (expected) bugs every now and then, the game is not bad. Wake up and use your brains before the zombies come to eat it.
If you get enough gear you can do almost anything in this game. I remember the "outrage" over the WD who killed the Butcher in 9 seconds. I remember the WD who one-shotted the Butcher with Pile On.
But, please, tell me how that matters? Are people actually using Pile On for everyday use? Probably not.
Is it possible to use Zombie Bears as your primary source of DPS without Vision Quest regardless of whether or not you have perfect mana regen on all your slots? Probably not.
Every class can do some amazing things when they outgear content. That's not really up for debate as it's prettymuch common knowledge. The real question is - when we're not outgearing stuff, what exactly does a WD do better than everyone else? Control spells? OK. But control, in and of itself, doesn't kill things.
The fact of the matter is that this is a game where every class has to have some skill in every facet of the game. We need to be much more well-rounded than we currently are, simply put.
What bothers me about mana is subtle, but here goes.
If you're a Wiz/DH/Monk you look to get the max out of your arcane power/hatred/spirit abilities. You also gain more use from those abilities by using a "primary" ability to regenerate your resource. I'd lump Barbs in here too, but most of them are ignoring fury right now, even though it does fit in the arcane power/hatred/spirit paradigm, I don't want an argument based on technicalities.
Our system works such that our "primary" abilities still penalize our resource generation. Using Poison Darts while waiting for mana to regen so we can use, say, Zombie Bears, actually keeps us from using as many Zombie Bears as just standing there doing nothing.
Whereas every other class (Barbs, in theory) would be using their FREE primary ability to do less damage, but still do damage, to attain max regeneration, for a WD to attain max regeneration their damage, quite literally, has to go to 0. It's really a stupid way to go about things and it should be fixed.
But that brings about another issue: PtV & VQ. Almost every build I see has one or the other - PtV for low cost spells, VQ for high-cost spells. What this tells me is that the cost of abilities (both primary and non-primary) are simply out-of-whack. But, these exist because of our mana issues. Either we want to outright ignore mana as a resource and use PtV + darts, or we need to have huge amounts of it to sustain bears or bats. We are not using our resource anywhere near the same way as all the other resources were designed to be used.
My proposition:
Our primary abilities need to cost 0 mana. Use of a primary ability grants you 25% (value negotiable) of your mana/sec value as instant mana (if you have 20 mana/sec, using a primary ability grants you 5 mana).
The size of our mana pools (before +max mana), or the costs of our non-primary spells, needs to be tweaked such that we can cast roughly 10-12 non-primary offensive spells before we need to regen mana. Zombie Bears, as an example, costs 140 mana per cast, so either we need around 1600 base mana, or their cost needs to come down to around 75 mana.
Defensive spells should be mana neutral, meaning they should cost exactly what our base regen gives. This means that casting a defensive spell doesn't actually prevent you from casting more offensive spells (except for the casting animation), but it also means that, save for mana regen on gear, you're also not gaining mana by casting defensive spells. What is important here is that +max mana and +mana regen on gear should be treated as a BONUS and not as a necessity - I would say that for all classes for the record, it's fairly ridiculous that +max discipline gear is so necessary for DHs, that indicates an overall problem with that particular resource. What should happen is that +max mana should increase our burst potential and +mana regen should enable us to cast more of our "better" spells in lieu of some of our primary spells.
Our spells should not necessarily have equal damage/mana ratios, but should have different enticing functionalities. Different range, different area of effect, stuff like the ooze rune for Poison Cloud. But the damage/mana ratio should be close. There shouldn't be a clear winner and clear loser based on damage and mana, is what I'm ultimately saying here.
At the end of the day our primary spells should not be our biggest source of damage (I'm looking at you, PtV + Darts builds), but they should still support our resource system. We should be about more than just taking a bunch of CDs to make VQ work (and virtually ignoring a primary ability) or taking a bunch of CC and juicing up a primary with PtV. We should be selecting our skills to do what is best for us in combat, not to jury rig our resource system such that it's "good enough" to get the job done within some pretty tight parameters.
But, I could be wrong!
2