The progression servers being at the point they are now offers an interesting opportunity to directly compare real data on luclin and current hp/mana pools against the numbers for paragon and aura of spirit.
Since EQplayers provides limited data, for the purposes of this comparison, i'm defining the "median" max level player as the player of max level (60 or 75) closest to the 55th place in the top 100. This should be roughly representative of the stats of an average max level since most of the max levels are listed in the top 100, with a slight weight to compensate for those who arent and the fact that hp values arent uniformly distributed (theyre more concentrated at the low end).
For the median comparision i selected wizards for mana and warriors for hp and to use data from Xegony (which i randomly selected from the set of 21 standard servers) compared to the Combine (which has cleared VT and therefore has more representative max luclin numbers).
From EQplayers:
The Combine (limited to luclin):
Max overall hp: 5,773 (Chriton, warrior)
Max overall mana: 4,175 (Mehr, cleric) tied with (Vinto, shaman)
Median warrior hp: 3,409 (Inego)
Median wizard mana: 3,050 (Temporal)
Current:
Serverwide:
Max overall hp: 20,029 (Goodurden, warrior)
Max overall mana:15,952 (Nandari, wizard)
Xegany:
Median warrior hp: 14,309 (Dreach)
Median wizard mana: 10,316 (Durja)
*note that these are intended to be representative for those of the MAX LEVEL only and all are unbuffed.
________________________________________________________________________
Paragon hp: 200
Paragon mana: 80
Aura rank 3 hp: 400
Aura rank 3 mana: 140
*its irrelavent whether you look at per-tick, total gains, or total gains over time since the duration and recast have remained static.
These values are per-tick.
________________________________________________________________________
Conclusions:
(all percentages are percent of the previous value. e.g. 100 -> 300 = 300%)
Median hp and mana pools increased to 419.7% and 338.2% of their previous values
Max hp and mana pools increased to 346.9% and 382.1% respectively
These gains can be directly compared to the gains in the paragon line: 200% and 175% respectively.
On the average, hp pools have increased well over twice as fast (210%) as upgrades to the paragon line, while the highest end has seen increases of just shy of double (198%) the rate of paragon upgrades.
Similar results can be seen in the mana values, where the median player has over 1.5 times (169%) relative to the paragon upgrades and high end mana pools have increased more than double as fast (218%).
Clearly, the paragon line's upgrades have not kept pace with the increasing size of health and mana pools. The *most generous* comparison indicates that paragon is lagging by a factor of 170%.
You didnt factor in the relative diminishing return on AA invested :) i.e. each increase is costing more and giving less.
Well, that is the case for almost all AA abilities. Luclin defensive was 5 times as powerful as pop defensive which was 5 times more powerful than omens defensive, all for the same price or more. Rolling thunder is exactly half the gain per aa as plain roar.
In any case, i think the primary argument should be to make the line more powerful. Because i doubt very many of us would be satisfied if they just halved the aa cost of perfection and aura, leaving the pitiful gains were currently getting.
aye would have to agree here.. the cost of AAs is more or less irrelevant.
this is a very nice chance to look at how its value decimatet through the years from actualy being a usable AE heal to only a more or less ignorable mana boost.
would love to see this get uptodate
Buzak Ubertroll & fluffy ubergater
Could it be any clearer?
What can i say? i was bored :p
(http://rkellyspage.com/images/paragon.jpg)
/cheer for hakaaba
very nice chart and info on this hopefuly they will see this and maybe do something to ajust it to be more useful.
Aura rank 3 hp: 400
Aura rank 3 mana: 140
This would make you happy then? :)
Aura rank 3 hp: 900~
Aura rank 3 mana: 300~
And at most we might.....might get this...
Aura rank 3 hp: 550
Aura rank 3 mana: 185
Someone posted elsewhere, I cant remember that compared to clarity and regen lines, that para was being upgraded correctly, its just HP and mana have boomed so much over the years.
And I think if you are talking about percents... if you say to, its 400%, but if you say by, its 300%
3500hp then 14000hp
Thats a 300% increase
It's 400% of the original, or it increased to 400%, but its a 300% increase.
100% of 3500 is 3500
100% increase from 3500 is 7000
erm shrug maybe its a play on words.
I did that comparison, too. And even compared to strictly the clarity line, aura needed to be upgraded a little. But that comparison doesn't even take into account that overall regen has scaled alot faster than the clarity line, too.
Great job putting together the numbers Hak. Think we all agree Paragon has declined over the years. Before the OOC regen, I'd say this was a big issue for us, but now...not so much really. I wouldnt even make it top 10. Mana regen in group situations is really diluted now, often I don't bother asking for oak and/or c7 anymore! On raids, even a fat boost to paragon would make a small impact on small number of raids. I used to primarily use Paragon to hasten wipe downtime. Now thats completely mute.
The point im making is I dont see paragon having the potential for being much of a utility. We crave utility and I think our efforts would be better spent pushing something that would have a significant impact in raids and/or grouping, rather than bolster a rather useless ability. There's been suggestions made, I'd like to see us pick one and all get behind it, making it our #1 priority and push push push.
I wouldn't say AoS is worthless, just not what it could be or what paragon or perfection use to be.
It still has some power and viability. *shrug*
Those who also say mana regen is worthless since OOC as well now and days are so far short I have no idea how you can assume such. The whole theories of part of groups just sitting out and unloading when they FM and switching around are bull. Any form of mana regen still has quite a bit of power in it.
Less need for downtime is still greater then what happens during downtime. Those with higher mana regens will always push farther in content then those with little to no mana regen.
Latest runs on Daosheen are still running over 20 mins from engage to kill.
With all the extra healing required on this, there is 0 opportunity for OOC regen. This is an example of a situation where the para line would be great. It don't help that, while skilled, our gap b/w our top 2 or 3 clerics and most of the other is tremendous in mana pool & equipment. So para seems to actually have some impact upon them.
Esp on raids, while the OOC regen can be nice, its still of main usage after wipe recovery, when everyone is going to be sitting around for 5 mins anyways, going to restroom, fixing a snack/drink etc. In groups, it can be effective for someone to effectively sit out a mob or two to med back up to full, but it can't work on raids ("oops, I'm oom. AFK from the healing rotation for 6 mins"... yeah, right). So there is some need for all mana regen still, especially on fights that last more than 4 or 5 mins (I believe that's where wizards have pinned down their limit of effective sustained dps.)
PoS/AoS is a form of mana regen. Every other Mana Regen ability in EQ has gone up proportionally by the same amount. Chanter crack, Direwild,SE, Bard song. Even Necro MW/MF has increased because SoE widened its scope by allowing it on all mobs, though its power remains the same. It sure looks to me as if the Mana Regen/Mana pool decrease is deliberate across the board. In fact, I am surprised that our PoS AA line has increased as much as it has :). If you went back to your graph and add in other classes data - you would get this:
(http://home.mindspring.com/~iamweaver/data/ManaRegen.jpg)
As long as Paragon is a group ability, I think we will be tied to the Mana Regen curve, so we would have to suggest something different
That graph is misleading by a lot, you take a one per fifteen minute ability against a constant regen. You have to compare it on even footing and recalculate PoS regen to regen over 15 minutes. If you do you will notice that your PoS graph will start out at 0.4 and grow to to 0.933. If you want to compare it with mgbable buffs you have to take it at once per 72 minutes which is even worse (0.11 to 0.194).
Fact is that PoS is not a manaregen buff, it is more a mana (and health) HoT and probably should be more compared with the total amount of HoT available at its release and now.
I made that comparison already in another thread, but you're ignoring alot of facts such as theres alot of new sources of mana regen that werent there in luclin. Not to mention, scaling of a burst mana ability is arguably unrelated to scaling of constant mana regen abilities.
Denti, I was referring to the slope of the line alone, not its height. Notice my comments were directed to changes in value, not values themselves. Whether you adjust PoS to be mana/tick or not, the slope remains the same. What's worse, your math is horrid. 140 mana/tick * 7 ticks with spell extension AAs = 6.1 MR (and in fact, giving us quadruple AoS makes us the 2nd-best Mana-regen class in the game besides Necros, with no detrimental side effects). Your other argument is invalid. All HoTs have scaled the same since luclin as well, with the exception of cleric HoTs, which have increased a bit faster, and our HoT has a MoT componant where devs historically told us that mana regen is "a concern".
Hakaaba, I have two questions: I can only think of 2 new sources of mana regen: "Mobile KEI" potions, and OOC regen; what other ones have I forgotten? Also, what is your argument that burst mana is different from constant mana regen? Certainly, burst mana regen is potentially more powerful, but surely that makes it less likely to be improved, not more? If you just use it in tactically poor situations, the worst you can do (assuming you don't deliberately cast it when you are FM :)) is give you mana at an average rate of 6.1 mana/tick between casts, so the least that the devs will compare our regen to is that standard, which is MR+6. Its current level of usefulness is, IMO, basically stackable group Maelin's Methodical Mind, with minor tactical utility for healing/mana-boosting your group.
Quadrupling its effectiveness in all respects suddenly makes it considerably more powerful (and of shorter duration) than cleric AA HoTs (1600*7 vs 550*12), so that is unlikely to happen on the HP side, as well.
Unless AoS becomes more limited (to make it different from, but NOT greater than, normal party mana regen), or comes with some kind of detrimental side-effect on the caster, I think that we are stuck with it as it is :(.
Actually iamweaver, the best way to graph the upgrades to mana regen would be to make it percentage based. How much better is XX expansion mana regen over original mana regen at say ... Luclin when we first were introduced and received our mana regen and Paragon lines. If you do that you will see a graph that looks like this one below showing the increased mana regen lines at each lvl increase expansion.
(http://www.freewebs.com/urim_ms/PoS%2Dlarge.jpg)
The beastlord and enchanter lines are the same line as our mana regen effectiveness has increased by the same percentages. The only reason the Paragon line has a steeper slope is due to not receiving an upgrade to it with PoP so the next 2 upgrades had to make up. In all actuality the paragon line has increased in effectiveness in proportion to our regular mana regen buff.
And that is what the major problem is with this AA line. It is scaling in relation to the wrong stat. Instead of scaling in a similar fashion to regular mana regen buffs it has needed to scale with the increases in average hp/mana levels so that it would maintain the same relative effectiveness. In luclin and even in PoP it was an extremely powerful ability that set us apart from the other classes. It wasn't uncommon for the use of a MGB Paragon to decide a win or loss. Nowadays with the poor decision to scale it with mana regen buffs instead of mana amount it has fallen off to being a joke of an ability. All the while it is coming with increasing costs.
I honestly don't know of a way to make it back into the powerful tool that it was and i wouldn't be surprised to find out this weakening of the ability was actually implemented with the sole intent of making it less useful. However, now that the ability that used to be 'class defining' by many is a joke i think it would be nice if we were given something that increased our utility and make us wanted like we were in PoP.
It's sad when i am telling a recruit beastlord that his role on the raid is to SE 3 groups and then DPS without getting himself killed.
You are correct; properly inserting the beginning point of that line at the right expansion shows the higher curve slope starts at a dfferent spot in the graph (and in fact ends up being steeper) - but that was not my decision to place PoS there; that was Hakaabe's, and I forgot to move it properly. Regardless of where the appearance of PoS occurs, I see no reason why new mana regen lines are required to "catch up" to the other lines. The clear implication there is that the Devs inserted the ability in as an underpowered one designed to handle mana/health pools for the wrong era, then had to "beef us up" to make us catch up with the other classes. I see no evidence of that; when it came out it seemed to be quite viable. In addition, the other half of PoS, the health regen, has the exact same slope as other class HoT, or HoT+bonus ability gains since their introduction, except for the cleric line, which appeared earlier, and continues to this day to increase at a slightly faster rate. By your logic, this is the opposite of what should be occurring. The cleric line should have a lesser slope to reflect its age, and the newer lines should be "catching up".
But there is a bigger issue here than that. Percentage-based statistics are not applicable here because the baseline against which they are being measured is an external factor, namely mana pool sizes. Use of statistics for those not familiar with stats can be misleading (as Mark Twain said, "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics"). Be very careful when using them - graphs showing comparisons must in almost every case use a common baseline of some sort.
**edited to fix stupid spelling errors ***
Apologies to Denti. I realized that you were right in one respect - the slope of the PoS/AoS line is, of course, altered when you "rescale" the function to ticks. Silly of me. As a Mana Regen ability, PoS is clearly in line with the other MR lines. Notice that in this better scale, the slope of the two "primary" mana regen classes is greater than the "secondary" lines, though not to an enormous extent. Just enough for us to whine about, not enough for the Devs to care! :)
(http://home.mindspring.com/~iamweaver/data/ManaRegen2.jpg)
I am glad I wasn't testing myself, I would have lost 20 points, and been forced to explain why I was wrong :).
QuoteHakaaba, I have two questions: I can only think of 2 new sources of mana regen: "Mobile KEI" potions, and OOC regen; what other ones have I forgotten?
Mana potions are irrelavent since they don't stack. OOC regen is a huge one, but theres also various clickies, as well as all the many boosts to base mana regen from AAs, jesters, etc.
Theres a very important fact related to OOC regen. It was introduced, the devs said, to make up for the fact that regen was not scaling nearly as fast as hp/mana and especially endurance pools.
Its pretty obvious that they are scaling PoS as a regen ability and therefore its not surprising that it does not scale with pools. A fact you have not contested and that is pretty obvious from the data i collected.
But, PoS isn't a regen. And the plain fact is that measured in terms of the amount of benefit recieved, Aura of spirit is
dramatically worse than Paragon. Upgrades of abilities should not be worse than the original after adjusting for "mudflation". Ideally, they should be the same, although in some cases upgrades are better. But clearly, aura is worse. And thats the problem. You can say they scaled it exactly like a regen, and you can even be right, but that doesnt make regen scaling enough.
QuoteQuadrupling its effectiveness in all respects suddenly makes it considerably more powerful (and of shorter duration) than cleric AA HoTs (1600*7 vs 550*12), so that is unlikely to happen on the HP side, as well.
Cleric HoTs can be MGB'd, so they have the same limitations as current perfection. The fact that it would be flagged non-MGB is what allows it to be 4x as powerful.
Quotebut that was not my decision to place PoS there; that was Hakaabe's, and I forgot to move it properly.
Who says Paragon is a PoP ability? Most importantly, it is listed under Class AAs (Luclin) and i believe it was introduced one patch before PoP was released.
Quote from: hakaaba on November 22, 2006, 01:53:16 AM
QuoteHakaaba, I have two questions: I can only think of 2 new sources of mana regen: "Mobile KEI" potions, and OOC regen; what other ones have I forgotten?
Mana potions are irrelavent since they don't stack. OOC regen is a huge one, but theres also various clickies, as well as all the many boosts to base mana regen from AAs, jesters, etc.
Both lines of MR Clickies already existed in VT. Innate MR caps were already there in Luclin, and were merely scaled up just as the other forms of MR were. BUt it's true that we have the Vet AAs now, and they can be powerful if used cleverly. I hadn't thought of those.
QuoteTheres a very important fact related to OOC regen. It was introduced, the devs said, to make up for the fact that regen was not scaling nearly as fast as hp/mana and especially endurance pools.
Its pretty obvious that they are scaling PoS as a regen ability and therefore its not surprising that it does not scale with pools. A fact you have not contested and that is pretty obvious from the data i collected.
But, PoS isn't a regen. And the plain fact is that measured in terms of the amount of benefit recieved, Aura of spirit is dramatically worse than Paragon. Upgrades of abilities should not be worse than the original after adjusting for "mudflation". Ideally, they should be the same, although in some cases upgrades are better. But clearly, aura is worse. And thats the problem. You can say they scaled it exactly like a regen, and you can even be right, but that doesnt make regen scaling enough.
True, but OOC regen bypasses all other forms of mana regen, so I am not sure that its planned to be in addition to the other forms, but in place of them. All AA HoTs though, suffer from the same loss of power due to mudflation (Cleric CR line has gone from 250 HP/tick at the start of Luclin to 550 HP/tick now). Since the change is across the board I assume it's deliberate. Clerics FINALLY got upgrades to the castable group HoT spell in PoR and TSS (the last was Kunark-era!), so the devs do *know* about the issue, but seem to want to ignore it on the AA side.
My main concern is class balance: that we will see a hue and cry from the chanter community that our new Paragon-plus(TM) usurps their role as mana regen kings (though necro's already can do that, of course. Shhhh...). MR *was* always such a touchy subject prior to OOC - but with its release, things might have loosened up a bit at SoE. we can hope. If not, then we might be looking at some odd spell line instead, along the lines of Demand for Blood (http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=10482&source=Live) :(
Quote
QuoteQuadrupling its effectiveness in all respects suddenly makes it considerably more powerful (and of shorter duration) than cleric AA HoTs (1600*7 vs 550*12), so that is unlikely to happen on the HP side, as well.
Cleric HoTs can be MGB'd, so they have the same limitations as current perfection. The fact that it would be flagged non-MGB is what allows it to be 4x as powerful.
Righto.
Quote
Quotebut that was not my decision to place PoS there; that was Hakaabe's, and I forgot to move it properly.
Who says Paragon is a PoP ability? Most importantly, it is listed under Class AAs (Luclin) and i believe it was introduced one patch before PoP was released.
True, but when released, it was done so with PoP content already known and rolling out of Beta.