Things that need to change for the better

[Mortikhan]

Well I went through again last night and as I feared it was mostly about shifting and positioning correctly. In all fairness though it is not ALL about that. We failed again with the 45 raid but we had a decent run of it and were far more consistant with it this time around. We were getting to the first boss fairly easily but we could not keep things going because we just did not have the uber power shooting of Archers (only 1 Archer) or the huge healing of Conj (1 Conj 1 Thaum). Sacrifice is just a "don't" in that fight (unless you happen to be the tank ). So I, as the Thaum, was forced to use less effective healing Cures. It was all good though we still did nicely but given the amount of close range people we had in party we will probably have to go with Disabling pots and hope we can bang away on him till he drops from a distance. I only have 8 levels for my Conj to be 48 and a factor as a healer with more MP to boot. So I think we will have this thing licked soon enough.

My overall impressions though are that this initial boss fight in the 45 raid is too heavily favored toward ranged attackers. Sure it can be done with front line DD but requires far more healers to do it due to AoE spamming of close range heavy damage abilities. I am not looking for a change to the fight as it would negate the work we have done so far in figuring out how we are going to do it. I am however a little disappointed that given the huge anti-Archer sentiment that was floating around before the patch along with the anti-Thaumaturge sentiment that they would have made the front line DD more effective...not introduce a raid that makes them a liability. I think they did a good job "fleshing out" the mage classes more but they really still need to work with the front line classes a bit to make them a better fit so an "optimum" party situation is less frequent and the DD classes are far more interchangable. Sure all of the DD classes should bring something different to the table but you should not dread having one and cheer about having another.

Something else I want to touch on is the inflexible nature of the people playing mages. I do not want to blast mages but the ones worried about MP and hate are sticking too firmly to the idea that only the mage classes have what they are looking for. Look around in the DoW stuff too. You might find something worthwhile. I am still play testing it (so far with pretty good success) but "Out of Sight" (reduce enmity by 10 for actions) as an Archer passive ability was a nice fit last night and it crosses over to any class. My point being, stop thinking that only YOUR class has what you need. The tanks are looking around for more ways to hold hate so you should be looking around for ways to alleviate hate.