This is my last post. Consolidated feedback after 120 hours of gameplay.
I'm the highest level wizard across all servers. My team hasn't had a single wipe, and I haven't died a single time. Our names are on the recent live stream in the "Top Poopsockers by Level" that the devs showed off. I have min maxed the gameplay for the wizard as hard as it can go. I have 128 intelligence unbuffed and have tested numerous times with varying levels of intelligence to get a sense of scaling.
This is going to be comprehensive feedback for the wizard from level 1-50. 50+ doesn't change anything so I don't think I'll have anything else to say. This is also based on a group setting fighting only yellows and reds. If you're fighting blues and whites in your group, nothing really matters because there is basically no risk. You can use whatever you want and do just fine. But if you're looking at min-max efficiency in long group sessions, below is my feedback on it.
In Short
My overall rating in group: A-tier. Good utility and great damage. Nice to have in your group.
My overall rating solo: C-tier
I like the class a lot and it's very fun. Reverting to the old volley/reclaim loop more than doubled the damage of the wizard over long sessions and added some fun to the class since beta. Fun class overall.
The downside is that this class is complete garbage until 28, having very short lived damage spikes at 4, 8, and 16. Devs really need to look at wizard post 28 and work on smoothing out the base damage and mana efficiency before then. After 28, I think it's one of the top DPS in the game without being in the S-tier giga strong class. Solid damage and situational utility plus ports saving hours of time. We're number one on our server because of ports honestly.
Quad kiting is dead. Soloing is possible, but slow because you can't spam volley and reclaim effectively.
Damage Lines
You have a few spell lines for your damage:
Surges
- Mid-sized single-target nuke, 2.5 s cast
- The best damage per mana of all lines
Blasts
- Big single-target nuke, 4–4.5 s cast
- Huge hits; front-loads a fight
- Best damage per second of casting when mana is plentiful
Flashes
- Small, fast nuke, about 1.5 s cast
- Cheap and quick for finishing a mob or interrupting, with a side effect (ice slows)
Volleys
- Cheap spell that lands as many small hits
- Low mana per cast, can proc a power surge, and I found it slightly better per mana than surges
Bursts
- Damage on your target and everything near it
- Real damage on tight pulls
Novas
- Point-blank damage around you
- Strong when mobs are already on top of you
-Verdict-
Unfortunately, most of them are borderline worthless. Volley is obviously your bread and butter. Always use the highest level one you have no matter what. Element doesn't matter. Every 4 levels you'll alternate between Surges and Blasts because they are the most mana efficient. The ONLY thing that matters when grouping is your mana efficiency because you will be chain pulling. This is objectively true. The elemental effects aren't good enough to change this and AOE is basically dead.
You should almost never sit to med. Volley into Reclaim is usually better than sitting in. Volley/Reclaim is more regen than medding until probably 200+ INT.
Don't even buy flashes, bursts, or novas. They're never the right choice.
Elements
I think this entire system needs a rework because the elements aren't super meaningful. Situationally they can be ok, but not a single one factors into my decision of what nuke to take. Always prioritize mana efficiency above all. I suggest something to incentivize using different elements. For example, fire adds a debuff to increase the next cold spell, cold buffs lightning, lightning buffs arcane. This also solves my problem with the glyph system below
- Arcane - probably the strongest. +25% cast time debuff is quite strong on some of the casters.
- Ice - snare but doesn't last long enough. Usually doesn't even last for the length of your spell cast.
- Lightning - interrupts are situationally really helpful. However, you should let 90% of spells go through because spells almost always do less DPS than their melees and it's actually better for your tank to take a 2-3s cast of some trash spell.
- Fire - No effect and doesn't do any more damage than the other elements. Not sure why it exists.
Utility
The utility kit is broader than I expected, and most of it is glyph-castable.
- Spellshield - surprisingly powerful The MR alone is super helpful
- Mana recovery - regen buff and arcane recovery actually add up to a lot of extra mana over time. However, Arcane Recovery does not scale well. It needs to do base + 0.5*INT or just flat 10% per tick. With 130 INT it's barely doing 1/4 of my mana when it used to do almost 60%.
- Dispel and knockback - helpful but the knockback is fiddling and often pushes enemies THROUGH walls and terrain. Good CC when it works, just be careful.
- Resist buffs - one for each element. They matter for some named mobs and caster-heavy camps, but generally they don't actually make you hit more often unless you're fighting high yellows and reds. They are cheap enough to cast so worth taking the one for your nuke.
- Navigation and travel - top tier, but why on earth is group exodus level 55?! Absolute insanity. It should be like 24 max. It is a defining trait of the wizard, and we just use the local ones we get at 32 anyways. Makes no sense.
Spell Crit & Volley Surge
This is a massive bummer over other games. 2% crit chance to do +50% damage is miserable. It's compounded by the fact that over 80% of your casts are individual volley procs so it feels so bad to crit for like 120 when your nukes are hitting for 1800 base. Volley Surge is also only a 2 or 3% chance and it's from 5 to 8. I've never played an MMO where I literally did not care about spell crits on the wizard type class. Biggest disappointment honestly.
Spell crit and volley surge chance needs to scale off INT. 200 INT = 10% spell crit chance and caps there. Damage should be +100% damage. Volley surge chance should equal spell crit chance and if it crits it should crit on EVERY hit, not just one. Or remove volley chance altogether and it's crit chance is it's surge chance.
Glyphs
I've been playing with them a lot. Bottom line is they aren't worth using. I hesitate to say they are bad, but they aren't good either. You can use them if you want, they won't make you terrible, they are just objectively and measurably worse than not using them.
I think the problem is Glyphs are a COST to having access to 36 spells. It's a penalty you pay to have access to 36 of your spells. But it leaves out some of the most important: Eldritch Ward, Blink, Arcane Invocation, Abolish Magic, Wall of Force, and Arcane Shackles.
The biggest reason I think you should never use glyphs is that you don't ever NEED the 36 spells they give you access to. My min-max version of wizard is:
- most mana efficient blasts or surge (mandatory)
- insidious for #1 (mostly optional unless you're fighting high yellow and low reds like us)
- Highest level volley (Mandatory)
- Eldritch Ward (optional, but if you're not pulling agro sometimes you're not dealing enough damage, but optional if you want to slow roll your damage)
- Purge (optional. swap for any utility, this isn't actually worth anything most times especially on whites and blues)
- Blink (great spell in open world, tougher in real dungeons)
- Telekinetic Knockback (also be careful as it's very buggy and sends enemies through terrain sometimes)
- Reclaim Magic (mandatory)
- Exodus (swap this for arcane invocation every 5 minutes, just set a timer. never keep AI on your bar)
- Dispel Magic (optional)
With this loadout, I 100% gaurantee you that I have access to every single tool and I'm out damaging every glyph using wizard with even gear. There isn't a single situation that they could handle that I couldn't and I'll be doing a lot more damage. Someone posted about all the random stuff they do with the glyphs, but none of it matters. Anyone using glyphs is not playing at a high level.
Snare you can swap in for any of the 4 optionals in my list. Interrupts with fast casts are bad because it's minimum 1.6s and most damage spells from enemies will be out by then. You can also just knock them back and stun them instead. Snare on ice spells is a meme.
Fizzling is punished HARD by glyph casting. Fizzles are still common at level 50 with max skill level in every school of magic. Instead of it being a fraction of a section that you can spam until it casts, you're wasting minimum 0.5-1.0s every fizzle. Fizzles are also more likely to occur in multiples over single. So you're actually looking at wasting 1.5-2 seconds.
Glyphs are supposed to subtract from casting time, but it's not working correctly. It also doesn't count the time to press the catalyst.
The changes to spamming volley and reclaim make that even worse because they aren't on the GCD. Also, you can't see the GCD from glyhp casting if you have a bunch of non-gcd spells.
There's a bunch of other small reasons that they fall short. If you like Glyphs for fun, use them. If you want to min-max, don't.
