Hello, I usually try to avoid making suggestions to altering combat because it isn't my place as a player. I try to stick with talks about the current feel of classes and what changed, however I do want to offer two ideas for improving magicka combat. (Note, I am primarily a PvE'r, but I don't think my changes will effect PvP greatly or at all. If I am missing something, please let me know and I will try to amend the post to help)

The first idea is to have all light attacks scale from Max Resource, instead of the weapon specific resource as it is now. Now why do I suggest this? Well it all stems from a forum post about somebody making a DW/Staff Magblade. Me being me, I wanted to try to prove how viable it is in PvE and did some Iron Atro parses with a setup I would use. I parsed 65k with a DW/vMA Inferno staff setup after about a week of practice and messing with CPs. This is the maximum I have been able to reach, I am sure that someone with more skill can reach more than me as I am not the best player in the world. Hitting 65k in a parse proves that it is viable for most endgame PvE content. I took it into vSS with no problems until I had to do the portal group on the last boss. For that fight, I had to switch to two inferno staves to make sure we cleared faster than the group could hit the next add phase. With two inferno staves, I can hit 70k+ on a trial Atronach, and I've seen parses of people hitting 80k+.

Now, where is difference between DW/Inferno and Inferno/Inferno coming from? Well as you may have guessed from above, Light Attacks. You suffer a major damage penalty as a magicka player, if you try to weave with weapons that use stamina abilities. Now don't get me wrong, I am not stupid and obviously it makes sense to why this is the case. I am suggesting this change to give magicka players at least some options for comparable damage, other than two staffs. I think this change is small enough that it wouldn't effect gameplay too much, but it would give magicka players much needed weapon variety.

My second topic is an attempt to help bridge the gap between stamina and magicka dps. To be clear, I do not believe that magicka should be on par with stamina, but I do believe that the gap should not be as far apart as it is now. As of when this discussion is posted, the highest Stamina Parse in Esologs is held by Revelx, sitting at 101k with a stamina necromance. The highest magicka parse is held by Olupajmibanan with 85k on a magicka necromancer. Now are these the all time highest parses? No, I am sure there are higher floating around on peoples discord, but I work with the information that is publicly available to everyone. What is a major factor contributing to the increase of stamina dps compared to magicka? Major Slayer.

The suggestion I am making to fix this is to increase the time of Major Slayer that War Machine and Master Architect give from 10 seconds to 16 seconds, and in a tradeoff, reduce the number of other people it effects to 1, two people in total instead of three. There will be a 7% increase in effective Major slayer uptime between the old version and the one I am suggesting. However, it may have an impact on Magicka players that have a low cost ultimate, i.e. Nightblades, Wardens, and Templars. As of right now, it takes approximately 19-20 seconds for a nightblade dps to build 75 ultimate without any form of heroism applied. So, effectively it will be a ~85% uptime on major slayer for a single person, which may not be the 100% that lokke provides, but is still pretty good. Will this completely and radically change the meta? No, probably not, you'll still see eight necromancers in rele/lokke scoring some of the best trial scores. However, it may help to somewhat close the gap between magicka and stamina dps (not completely, but partially) and create a buddy system for magicka players that one provides major slayer and the other run selfish and a higher cost ultimate, i.e. Sorcerors, Dragonknights, and Necromancers. I know that Major Slayer isn't the only thing causing the different between the two, Relequen being Relequen has a huge impact on its own, however this is a change that can be made without having to introduce an entire new set.

Anyways, I try to avoid pure suggestion post like these as it isn't my place to tell the developers what to change. However, I did want to get it out there in an attempt to start making Magicka a little more versatile in terms of weapon choices.

Cheers,
Shadow