Bright Wizard Class Review

Bright Wizard to Rank 26, RR 10

Bright Wizard is a TON of fun to play, and is definitely overpowered.

As a Bright Wizard I don’t really fear anyone, least of all Melee classes, lowest on the food chain is most definitely Witch Elf’s and Marauders. These guys are a joke, and can basically be ignored to you feel like dealing with them, then utterly destroyed in no time at all.

A witch elf gets at you:

• Shield of Asquishy (or whatever its name is) buys you second to finish your current target.
• Root, walk a few feet.
• Disarm
• Dot
• Dot
• Nova Stun

Fireball
If he is really persistent or you don’t want to fight, detaunt. 3 sets of CC without even trying. And that’s not even the most effective way of killing them, that’s just getting them off you, and still normally enough to kill them.

The only melee that i even ever be slightly concerned about is Chosen, and that’s only if they have dedicated healers. Only because once that chosen (tanked and getting healed) gets on you, you can’t shake him in the 8 seconds it takes to shake anyone else. However generally your own healer will notice and out heal his dps. At which case it just becomes interesting to see how long he will whack you before becoming disinterested and running off to hit the healer.

On a side note, there morale ability really hurts, hitting for 1/4 our health easy, but then, big heals crit at twice that, so I can only imagine how much some of our abilities hurt.

I can kill most targets with Fireball

Fireball Barrage
That’s pretty much it. If there still alive I either DOT DOT or just SEAR. I don’t really see how this fits the TTK at all, and I realize that Fireball Barrage is being looked at.

Since I got FB (fireball barrage) I pretty much just spam
Fireball and FB. They just hit so freaking hard. My
Fireball his for something like (not exact figures) 350 then another 350 over time. That’s 700 a hit without a crit. 2 of these and a
fireball barrage = anyone without a healer. That’s 3 second cast, instant, 3 second cast.

Changing from Barrage to Combustion

I don’t really use Combustion, I don’t really worry about it either. It doesn’t seem that a lot of the important abilities for Bright Wizards have combustion. There is SEAR, but it’s on a timer. Most of the others are AOE effects or skills I don’t use a lot. So it’s just not important at all to me. Not to mention that even without FB at all, I hit so damned hard, and kill so fast. That it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Correct me if I’m wrong, (I’m at work so no in game reference and didn’t play yesterday so memory might be not so good) but the following are the skills I use a lot and whether they have
combustion.

• Fireball – No
• Ignite - No
• Boiling Blood - No
• Fireball Barrage - No
• Sear - Yes
• Nova - No
• Shield of Asquishy - No
• Flame Cage - No
• Disarm (name?) - No

Now I might be wrong about 1-2 of those, but as I stated, I don’t worry about it so much that I never really checked. I ‘think’ some of them might have chances to explode based on your current Combustion, but in truth, that’s never really a worry anyway. Healing is quite heavy now, so going absolutely full power will funnel popping 80 health of you every 1-2 seconds is NOTHING. Let alone the occasional explosion. 1x 3 second heal could fix an explosion and 10 funnels from massive nuking, let alone some dot heal sitting on you.
Combustion might be vital if I didn’t already annihilate people, but at the moment, it doesn’t factor for me at all.

Melee

• I have never lost a 1v1 to a melee.
• I have beaten a few 2v1’s against both melee.
• Just blow the crap out of 1 real quick while CC'ing the other, then finish.

Ranged

The 2 things that I watch for as a Bright Wizard:

• Sorceress'
• Zealots

Sorceress' hurt, and there Shadow Knives and (disastrous cascade ? ) are to be watched carefully. Most of the time I die, its to Sorceress' or Zealots (or just a bucket load of 10x people focus fire). Sorceress' have (from playing against them) a lot of the same issues as Bright Wizards, just in different spells. But having not played 1 this phase (I did last phase) I wouldn’t want to comment further.

Zealots I have only had a few 1v1’s, there the class that’s to be feared the most as a BW. Mostly before you have FB. They have some massive heals, shield spells and they can hurt, not in massive 500+ hits, but definitely hurt. I think its Warp Reality that really stings. Generally they can make the fight last long enough that funnel power combined with their dots really start to take there toll.

Problems

Healing really can throw out a lot of survivability. So you come up with some tricks to deal with it. Smack someone with a fireball. Healer goes to heal him.
Fireball the Healer, Drain AP of healer (morale), dot, Nova stun,
Fireball Barrage, Sear. If he is still standing and pops his big heal + shield, then dot dot and move back to original target,
the healer will right now be crapping himself so much and focused on restoring himself to 100% that you will kill the other target before he gets back to his group job.

A few zealots in there, and it started to become ridiculous. However it just became necessary to get 2-3 Bright Wizards to target the zealots first. 3x Fireballs hitting someone is GG. This is all without using any other little toys like the rank 3 morale, and the anti healer spell (playing with fire??) which I don’t spec.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love this class. And I guess that’s the problem, I know its overpowered, and id be terrified to play against it, especially is melee.

On a side note, RVR is still utterly dominated by range.

Mastery Tree Review

Incineration

This seems still far and away the best spec for a BW if you want to blow things up.
Fireball Barrage is just crazy good, and fun as hell to boot (who can’t love multiple fireballs raining from the sky in quick succession?). I don’t think it in and of itself is overpowered, it’s the matter of the stacking damage add procs. I also like that channeling ceases when the target goes out of LOS/range (which is what we Order all complained about Shadow Knives last phase, and you guys fixed….kudos!). I have noticed that the animation goes kind of wonky if the first hit is disrupted. Instead of getting the six quick graphical hits, you get more like pause, hit, pause, pause, hit, hit.

I think the tactic to make Sear heal for 25% damage 25% of the time should really be made 100% of the time to make it attractive. It might actually be worth using a tactic slot on then, as right now I think every BW pretty much stacks INT tactics, or maybe rarely takes the +AP on crit one (I do usually when Conflag specced).

Immolation

This line feels like it should have more potential than it does. Detonate is a fun spell, though frustrating when it gets disrupted since you can’t try again for 10 seconds. Also, since DoTs have been changed to not tick until 3 seconds after application, is there any chance we can get the 3s recast removed? It’s frustrating when you want to use an ability that requires the target to be hexed, you hit Ignite, and it’s disrupted (and Boiling Blood is on cooldown). Now you have to wait 3 seconds to try and hex again to use another ability that requires it.

Withering Heat feels underpowered compared to
Fireball Barrage. First off it channels 6 hits in 6 seconds instead of 6 hits in 3 seconds, and each hit is much, much less than FbB. The snare is nice, but even chain casting it on a mob, it takes like 4-5 withering heats to kill the mob, and it’s easily in my face after the second or 3rd. Channeling in one spot for 6 seconds is an eternity in RvR though.

Conflagration

Spreading Flames feels like it could use a bit of a damage boost since player HP were raised (not necessarily double, maybe 25-50%). It’s a fun spell, but really no more of an annoyance right now.

Annihilate is oh so much fun if you can pull it off, especially if you’re using it with Funnel Power (though you better have a healer watching you!). The channeling aspect kind of sucks though when you have to be such close range to use it, it’s too easy for people to hit you and (in the future) knock back your channeling. I’ll repeat what I said about spells like this in previous phases though, I hope you can find some way to make them not go through walls. I would hate to see keep sieges devolving into who can bring more AoE/PBAoE to bear on the door through the walls.

Choking Smoke is also nice, though the cast time feels kind of long, and the graphic is much smaller than the effect I believe (which is also a problem with Pit of Shades). This may be intentional to tone down graphic lag, however it’s probably pretty frustrating for people who suddenly find themselves silenced and never saw an effect to show it. Disable effects in general actually aren’t communicated real clearly, I frequently find myself disabled in a fight and have no idea what I was hit with to cause it (and mouse over debuff icons in the heat of battle isn’t really practical).