playingtokrush,Jan 21 2005, 02:38 PM Wrote:You must not be playing the same game as I am.Littledude is level 31 at the time of this posting. His wand skill at the time I made the other post was 132/155. What I do not see from you here or apparently in the thread that you are referring to is any factual data to use to see your real postion on where you are at. While you refer to the thread on the WoW forums as "a wand suggestion/discussion/rant thread"; all I really see there is lots of ranting, a minor suggestion and not much discussion. Very light on anyone stating what their skills are at or what level of mobs they are trying to use them against.
What level is your mage?
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Now I will retract the portion that I said about "about every 1.5 shots on average give me a skill up". From running some data samples out, the rate is showing to be about 1 skill up per about 20 shots in the sampling that I took. The reason for the difference is a part of human nature at when doing a casual observation over actually doing hard records of the events. In my normal course of play at shooting at a 'fleeing' mob to do the finish off I may get from 1-4 shots at them, but it usually would only take me 1 or maybe 2 shots to finish the mob off in over 80% of the cases. Doing the human thing of taking note of things of importance like getting a skill up and tending to not bother to remember the cases where one does not have anything noteworthy in the fight happen is what can lead to the think of only requiring 1 or 2 hits to get a skill up.
Following is some of the data that I collected.
Skill:133/155 target Worgen level 27, 19 shots: 0 resists, 18 hits, 1 critical, +1 skill.
Skill:134/155 target Crocolisk level 31, 47 shots: 21 resists, 26 hits, 0 critical, +4 skill.
Skill:137/155 target Crocolisk level 31, 39 shots: 22 resists, 16 hits, 1 critical, +1 skill.
Skill:138/155 target Ogre level 28, 22 shots: 0 resists, 22 hits, 0 critical, +2 skill.
Skill:140/155 target Ogre level 28, 20 shots: 0 resists, 20 hits, 0 critical, +0 skill.
Skill:140/155 target Ogre level 29, 23 shots: 0 resists, 23 hits, 0 critical, +1 skill.
Skill:141/155 target Ogre level 30, 26 shots: 1 resists, 23 hits, 2 critical, +1 skill.
Skill:142/155 target Tiger level 31, 31 shots: 6 resists, 24 hits, 1 critical, +0 skill.
Do you have any data like your level, wand skill level and level of mobs that you are using the wand against? This is a Game Mechanics forum that goes more off of hard numbers of observation than rant like statements of "...dismiss wands as the garbage that they really are." to make its cases.
Some minor analysis of the above. For mods any appropriate skill of theirs in question usually set a level*5 just as the players max of their skill is usually at the their level. The worst cases for the resist problem was when using the wand skill against a mob that was 4 levels over the effective level of the wand skill (138/5=27 vs. a level 31 mob). Even then the resist rate was only about 50% ( (21+22)/(47+39)=50% ). The resist rate was slightly higher than that though as the first sampling againt a level 31 crocolisk had a number of partial resists where the damage done was well below average for the wand; this was also the case where the fastest skill ups occured at.
Skandranon:
Quote:QUOTE(Ruvanal @ Jan 21 2005, 11:25 AM)
If your wand skill is too much below the mob_level*5 point then you sill usually end up getting lots of resists and no skill ups when using the wand. The game is taking into acount your chance of actually doing damage when awarding the skill ups. It actually works more like the fishing skill in that if the target mob is too high compared to the skill then it will substitute in a failure message (Resists) without telling you that the target is effectively beyond your skill to hurt.
Not quite so sure of that. I've gained a skillup off of a "resist"; in fact, off an entire chain of resists with nary a hit to be seen. Just like other classes can skillup off misses: when my paladin started learning swords, she hit air on her first fifteen or so swings and got a skill point on each one.
You are missing what I am saying here. But first let me point to some of how things were displayed in the closed beta on this matter compared to now. In the early parts of the beta when you were using a wand (and some of the other caster skills prior to their auto-skill up when leveling) you would get messages that said 'Miss' when used against a target that was several levels above your effective skill. Occasionaly you would get a 'Resists' message in there and that was when you would get your skill up on the wand (or the caster skill in question). Due to the skill up proceedures not working as the developers were intending at that time (it took a lot more successes to get a skill up then than it does now) they had to implement the auto-skill up to allow the casters a chance to keep up with their skill compared to the rate that the melee classes could keep up their skills (they could get in x2-x3 the number of swings as most spell caster could get in their attacks and the casters usually had to spread their skill ups across severl catagories like fire, frost and arcane).
Then about 2 to 3 months prior to the end of the closed beta the designers changed how the various failure messages were being delivered to the players. Things like fishing no longer gave you a direct message that your skill was not high enough for the area, it would give you the sequence of fishing as usual, you would just end up getting lots of "fish got away" or "no fish hooked" messages and you had to infer that you got to a point beyond your skills ability. For a skills like the wand or spell casting the 'miss' messages (a blant point that it was exceeding your skill to even go against) started to become 'resists' that left the player near clueless to whither the skill was not good enough to have an effect or if the target was in truth just very high in it resists. So what at in the early closed beta might have shown as
miss-miss-miss-miss-miss-miss-resist-miss-miss-miss-miss
would now show as
resist-resist-resist-resist-resist-resist-resist-resist-resist-resist-resist
Note that only the seventh one in each of the sequece is one that would count as a potentional hit to get the skill up off of. It is just a lot less obvious that was where the skill ups are coming from now compared to how you could see them happening in the earlier closed beta. As the difference in the effective level of the skill to the mobs level get too large these resists that allow skill ups will become very infrequent, but they will more likely give you a skill up when you get one. Hence if you are at a point in effective skill that you are getting lots of hits-that-are-resisted as opposed to misses-that-show-as-resists, you will likely get strings of skill up happening.
A note on the Lesser Magic Wands that Treesh pointed out. They are not soul bound and can be passed onto other players when you get a better wand to replace them with. These wands are instrumental to allowing a player to do as described above in getting off an occasional wand shot when out soloing at lower levels. I was doing this from teh start of the retail for just this reason, not waiting till I had to spam the wand to get it up to a functional level. This is the way to get the skill moving in the early game and does not leave you in situation of having to spam the skill massively later on to just get it started. This is what is turning many mages against the wands since they do not learn to use them early enough.
Even the usage of a wand for 1 or 2 shots at the beging of many instance pulls would allow a steady increase in the skill instead of a mage using things like Fireballs as opening moves that keep pulling aggro off of the tanks before the tanks has a chance to build up the aggro-lock.
Skandranon:
Quote:This is how I work on wands, too, but only infrequently as there are many times when I am soloing in mob-infested areas.Are making sure that you reposistion your self during the fight so that when a social mob that will flee is going to run away from its other social associates? I do this regualarly even in mob infested areas since there is usually an area I just cleared that I can herd them toward. Just safer overall to do it this way in my opinion.
playingtokrush:
Quote:Actually, if you'll note in my wand thread in the Blizzard forums, I made a perfectly balanced suggestion to fix the primary problem of wands for all three caster classes: make the wand skill auto-ranking. It would take a quite the perusing of the thread, but one can see that I have shown that there is no possible way that this change would be unbalancing. No one has been able to prove otherwise (good luck trying; it's impossible).Then to keep balance the missiles skills of warriors and rogues should also get this type of auto-ranking? They too have the damage problem verses to low of a skill when using their missle weapons (not ranged skills). They can tolerate the situation more since they are usually not as concerned with the damage as they are with getting the mobs attention, so you do not hear them grumbling about it as much. Then if you are going to auto-rank the missle weapon skills for warriors and rogues, why not all the missle weapon skills for other classes like the hunters? But wait, that then is the hunters main attack skill and to keep it in line for other classes they would need to auto-rank the other classes main attack skills. At this point why even have any skill up concerns for any weapons? It is this kind of chain arguments that would errupt through the masses of players that is most likely going to keep the situation as is. This is beacuse what you propose would be taken as unbalancing to most others. There were some die hard warrior and rogue players that were not at all pleased in the beta that the spell casters were getting auto-ranking on most of their skills when it was put into effect. I am sure it would be worse if it was changed so that their is nothing that mages needed to skill up on to function in the game. With no skill ups needed for wands, many caster players would not even be concerned with using whatever melee weapons were at their disposal since it would be easier to keep the damage output up with a wand than to bother to skill up the melee weapon. I have noticed no stuttering when using a wand and have never had a wand to be dissarmed in combat, which would make it the ideal weapon to use when in close quarters compared to most other options. The other classes that do not use wands have to either contend with using weapons that can be disarmed or spell skills that can be stuttered in those situations.
MongoJerry:
Quote:Oh, yes, absolutely! It's just like any other weapon skill. You skillup whether you hit or miss.I have to disagree with this based on what my experience was in the early and late closed beta were like. Part of it I stated above in that in the early closed beta you could more easily see the when you had an out right attack you could not connect with and an attack that was considered a potential hit but was instead resisted. During an extended period in the beta the skill ups for wands was broken in that apparently the game was indexing the wrong weapon skill to grant the skill up to (and since most classes did not have that skill there ended up being no skill up granted and no message generated when it should have happened). From what I remember of your posts at that time, Neriad was already at or near level 60 so it would not have affected you much since you were already keeping your wand skill near max all the time anyway. But for some of us that continued to level up during that period, our wand skill was stuck at the lower level as we contiuned to have to go against higher and higher level mobs as we leveled. When they did fix the wand skill so that it would skill up, my mage Tana's skill was about half of what was needed to have an effect on the mobs she was facing (~150 skill or effective against about level 30 mobs and Tana going against level 55-60 mobs). The result for her then was just masses of resists with about 1 in 50 resulting in a skill up. By your statements of how the skill ups should have been occuring, she should have rapidly brought her skill up to within 15% of max. It was no where even close to that rate. To correct the problem, I took her back to an area that had mobs that were about 3 to 6 levels higher than what her effective skill was capable of dealing with. It was there that the skill ups started rolling in at a rate of 1 in 5 to 1 in 8 of using the wand skill. That was more in fitting with the skill needing to have the potential of doing damage than just skilling up off of misses.
edit:fixed a bad quote tag.