Hello,

I totally agree with Blaykes post, he had a very good point there.
I as well appreciate all the new stuff which has been coded in to the game.
I would like to say few words about the guild tune issues too, IMO we have a
big problem with magician backround guilds aswell.

As most of us already know, mages have the best sp/damage ratio in the game
and conjurers are essential in eq making. In most of the cases it doesn't
matter if the monster is good or evil, good/decent mage does nowadays the same
damage as priests/nuns do, with less spcost.

Besides mage and conjurer guilds, there are two other magical backround guilds
to choose: psionicists and channellers. To my understanding there are like 2
active full channellers and 1 active full psionicist(The Seppä) in the game at
the moment..and the rest of players are mageconjus with only few psi levels.
Offcourse it would be more fun if there were more vartiation between these
guilds. It would be more fun to see magepsiis and magechannellers also in the
backrow instead of 4-5 mageconjus.

There are some problems with these guilds. First IMO mages are a bit too
powerfull. The guild is fun to play now with mage staves and reputation
system, but still sp/dam ratio rule too much compared to any other guild. Yes,
offtanks are even more out of tune when making exp, but thats a whole
different story. The mages will probably remain as the primary guild for
magical backround because of the type variations, but the problem is that
psiis and channellers doesnt seem to offer you enough benefit to choose them
over conjurers.

There are some new fancy spells in psionicists which are fine, but still
something more should be done. I'm not sure what is it to get psionicists on
the same line with conjurers, but there could be something. I also dont know
if it is a good thing that Armour of Aether is essential and playing such a
big role in the game. This forces every exp party to use conjurers.

Then theres this channellers guild which is totally useless IMO at the moment.
With chan aura you tick close to nothing, replenish ally is totally useless
compared to druid mana transfer and influx makes it even more wasted. Also
those blasts can be replaced for expample with gem fire. The replenish should
be influx free and with good ratio, aura shouldnt reduce spr that much and
maybe there could be also a real reputation system to make the guild more
interesting. Yeah I was told that the guild is for newbies, but if I had 10
megs of exp or so I would still choose 1 type mage before channeller.

I bet that players do know about these issues, and so do most of the wizards.
Players are happy to choose mageconjus because of they rock so much compared
to something else. I dont know if the wizards arent aware of these problems or
are out of ideas or lazy or what, but maybe some tweaks could be done.

-Cola

While I mostly agree with Blayke and Cola, Id like to
point out a couple of things:

- Yes, chans and psis don't have their uses in topend
eq parties, but they are very viable choices for
low-exp players who wish to play magical.
So, when thinking balance, think newbies also.
- When players want "balance" or "tuning", they mean
"uptune <guild>". Unfortunately uptunes affect
the entire game. Downtunes would only affect
1-2 guilds, but who really wants downtunes?
- Overall, we have a fairly good balance currently.
This balance will change once military, archers
and whatnot arrive. Maybe then is a better time
to have this discussion again.