Fireball (in General)

I think we can all agree that FB is the least utilized DD right now. This in particular comes from its utter low damage and the fact that friendly fire does 1/3 of the damage to your own minions.

Would you guys agree that FB friendly fire should be removed or at least severely reduced? I mean, the SoD doesn't do friendly fire damage during melee, so why would FB?

I think the damage reduction should be reversed. Melee damage wouldn't be a problem if FB would do it's job in ranged.

I will agree that it's not necessarily ridiculous to have friendly fire.. but 1/3 of the damage is way too much. This is just an observation I've had from the people on my fight list using fireball.

I don't agree with reducing or removing the friendly fire. I think what should be done with it is reducing or removing the ranged damage penalty that FB faces. Currently it has 2 penalties one of 40% and then another of 30% which slowly ramps down to 0% in the last round of ranged.

This is my position on it as well. FB should simply be better in ranged. MM does very similar damage, but is less vulnerable to GA and doesn't have the friendly fire in melee - why would anyone choose FB over MM for a ranged spell?

The singular reason is for a DM Shotgun setup, or hunting other single FB mages.

No one believes that doing 1/3 of the damage to your own minions is excessive when no other damage form has any severe repercussions like that?

No, I agree that it is excessive in proportion to the damage dealt during ranged

But we're talking about altering the damage range of the spell, whereas you are talking about altering the spell mechanics

Why do you feel that it is better to keep FB damage where it is at and simply reduce the friendly fire?

Because the damage seems to me like in accordance with other DD damages. Like it was said above me, MM does similar damage. The main difference for me is that the friendly fire seems to be excessive. If that were resolved, then FB would be a viable option for people who aren't super low MPR.

That would also remove its uniqueness. I think it would be better to have a fundamentally different spell than just a weaker version of CoC that fires in ranged as well.

Well I have advocated for both and in retrospect I believe I will side a bit with both to be honest.

If a mage is halfway worth his salt he would aim at his target and honestly it's a huge freaking ball of fire.....kinda hard to miss your target ya know so honestly why so much ranged penalty? Reduce it by Half I would say.

Maybe set it up to where it gets a reduced penalty the higher it is trained. I do not see why this couldn't be the deal the more you train at something the better you get and the more incentive to get players to strive for making their char bigger and better.


As far as the Friendly fire well I would say reduce it too but only for the Caster maybe down to 1/4th (you should be able to take what you deal at least partially) everyone else gets the full 1/3rd blast >:-)

caster doesn't get hit Zenai

Err? That shouldn't be! Rescale!!!!!!

if you don't even know the spell why would you propose changes to it...

this sounds like a good problem and the answer i have is to introduce an item for the other minions to get protection from FB :P

other than that i have no useful input sorry.

Um because the basics of it are quite simple to see. Beside I have not seen your suggestion just a post attempting to discredit mine. Add something positive to the thread wouldja?

On the NCB I ran before this one I had a SF and a single minion training FB. My SF always put out considerably more damage against most people on my fight list, despite having a similar level of DD trained (sometimes double the damage XD).

To put it simply, if your target has any combination of decent HP/AMF/GA then FB feels more like holding a candle in the wind then a tough DD spell.

The spread damage should be improved considerably. I think FB should be at its strongest when its hitting multiple minions and be less effective then MM against single minions.

True. After thinking about it I realize that the friendly fire isn't as much of the problem as the incredibly weak damage. It is incredibly weak to GA and AMF, more so than any other DD, and perhaps increasing its damage output would help with those things.

Redid my char Kronic Z and am using FB and GA.....the GA was doing more damage with less trained. I did a few Retrains and had the option to up either GA or FB.....I upped GA.....

To make a long story short make GA a bit weaker by dropping it's effectiveness proportionately overall. In all honesty a TON of people have vied for this for quite a while, I have no idea why it has not been addressed yet.

As far as AMF. Killing FB. I would suggest NSCs the higher the better.

Even after NSC even an AMF as little as .1 hurts FB (especially against 4 and 5 minions). I remember cringing at some of my fightlogs since the spread damage against that many targets was laughable.

I wish I saved those fightlogs but I was doing around 50k damage on a 5 minion spread and then slamming a 400k MM in the back (with the MM being roughly the same size, both about 1.6 mil lvls iirc). Doesn't seem fair that FB is weaker then MM when under those circumstances FB should be blowing people away.

I think a good fix for GA would be to just make it physical damage instead of only being reduced by the + on the armor. As it is now it eats single minions alive when combined with decay :)

A plus for heavy melee tanks? I'm all for it!!

Horseguy, GA returns whatever damage you attack with, I don't see a problem with this. ( So, Exile, melee tanks would have no benefit from his suggestion. )

That is old school GA. From the wiki:

GA damage is reduced by AC due to enchantment, not base AC; GA damage type is GA. --The damage type was revealed to be of its own type by NS on Feb 19th, 2010. This was revealed in chat and posted to the community in message 00309w. (Long Live message 00309w!

I'm gonna need to have Nightstrike reconfirm that, b/c that's not what I've seen empirically.

Wow, with High AC that's really easy to test. That is indeed right. Well I'm all for that change. I don't really understand why GA gets to be it's own damage form to begin with.

Fireball doesn't really seem to have a niche. What if it only hit up to 3 targets, only splashed in melee if you had less than 3 opposing targets, but did damage more comparable to cone of cold. Downsides being it can hit less people, and can hit your guys. Upside being it hits in ranged and can put out more total damage than magic missile.

If it hit 3 people it'd also add a new dimension to where you hide people in the 4 minion groups. Though not a super deep one. But you could use a familiar to hide someone between the final guy (magic missile) and the front three (fireball). Would just add more possibilities to the game.

The listed effect will asymptotically approach 13% of the spell level, and represents the maximum damage applied to each minion in a five-minion spread. - wiki

Why not just have FB hit 39% of its level all the time no matter how many minions there are? I get the impression it is designed for that purpose anyways. To rip through multi-minion teams but not be so great on single minions.

If it hit for full all the time it would be the best of both worlds right?

Hitting for 100% all the time could be quite overpowered, but it certainly needs a boost.

First and I think the best boost is to reduce the Penalties in Ranged. I think with this you would undoubtedly see an elevated damage success rate.

That is an easy question to answer Titan......so it won't attack itself. Imagine Battles where all you ever see is GAs retaliating on each other. To make it work it needed to be unique in that respect.

Now if you really wanted to nerf GA it's as simple as lowering its effective level. Personally I think 50% is a good number but that is just me.

This. And against GA the same problem comes up: it does so little damage that it's impossible not to get the full 60% retaliation.

The only thing that really has a chance of overcoming the 60% is SG.

Even against one target the damage is pretty bad, my exbow out damages your fireball.

GA seems powerful because it was never reduced when Jon did the damage rescale.

Just a matter of programming it, wouldn't be hard to stop the infinite loop.

Or just keep it unique and add all AC to the reduction.

That only addresses part of the problem. Its low damage makes it a very unappealing option for a DD.

then why do you use it?

Maybe he's like me, and likes certain attributes of the game even if they are unloved

xP

I'm using it too and it seems to do the job for me with hardly any CBD investment

Damage is relative to size of Weapon and Trained DD. On a whole though I would say this coming from one of the lower end Damage Weapons that is just plain sad.


Hmmm need to read some but I think you are right.


Ahh at first that would seem to be the readily apparent and easy solution. Problem is we don't know the back end of the SQL Coding of CB until then we cannot truly say it's not a hard thing to do.


Low end it is lovely, high end it sucks the big time just like UC. Like I said before FB needs a Rescale.

It would be TCL here, SQL has to do with databasing. And I'm certain it's possible. If we wanted to make it that simple we could set up a counter( read counter, 1,2,3,4, not a "counter" for GA) for GA return. I could program this part, so I'm certain Fex or NS could.

Yeah, I just like to play around with certain strats even though I lose people off of my fight list. With my previous RoBF strat I had Mikel and Bast on my fight list. With this one, they pwn me pretty badly, but I'm still sticking with it.

TCL hehe

You wouldn't need to change the GA damage type, keep everything as is and just make all AC effect it. That would be much much easier.

Fireball:: Level: 1,815,421 //Raw Level:1,680,946 //Effect:142,398 //Raw Effect:131,850

This is the Bang I get for my 19,767,689 of Exp Invested.

I still get a better turnout from my

Guardian Angel:: Level:3,279,037// Raw Level: 3,390,938// Effect: ?//Raw Effect: ?

With 39,877,195 Exp Invested I get almost 6 Times the Damage output/return overall....that is SICK!

Whoa jumped the gun a bit there. It's only about 3 times the Damage return overall dependent on opponent. However I have Noticed that Familiars get absolutely rocked by FB while GA is minimal.....weird.

Its why I scrapped the armored familiar idea I was trying in favour of the RoS/GA. It does waaaay more damage then the familiar did, and any damage GA does is against anything doing damage to me. A nice combination if you ask me :)

These are my favourite kind of battle logs:

Damage Inflicted 390,111/968,683 65,734/657,671 432,847/668,170

GA does most of the work and all my lame damage sources mop up any pesky enchanters.