So basically, your answer to everything is "backline blahblah".
You seriously need to go and look at things a little more. Just how does being capable of reducing an enemies hp by 5-10% over half a minute equal to pressure exactly? Sure, it might not get people to use their healing spells, but that is because it is no threat to them. That is not pressure, that is an annoyance at best, and at worst it is something I can ignore or just pop a regen potion to totally negate (and over heal).
I have talked to plenty of Magus about this, and some of them above level 30, though they can get "impressive" damage numbers, that damage is useless because it is not helping anyone, it is not lethal or a threat in anyway.
It is like I said in a previous post. A skill that deals 10 damage to 100 people deals 1000 damage in total, and looks impressive in terms of damage dealt. But how much "pressure" or a threat is 10 damage to someone who probably has over 1000 Hp?
As for spike damage being easy to handle... Hahaha. Have you ever seen an army of Bright Wizards all casting the same spell on the same target, all ready to deal some insane crits? It's happened to me plenty of times, and it can drop a person instantly and no amount of healing can prevent it. Go play PVP in the Chaos zones, where Bright Wizards make up half of the enemies you'll be fighting. They will kill you, a lot and regardless of what support you have.
On the reverse hand, damage from a Magus (or Engineer) is easy to heal, pop a HOT and ignore it, or use whatever rapid fire heal you have. War Priests don't even need to worry about it, their ability to heal allies while dealing damage negates and heals over the damage. Around the middle of tier 2 healers also get an AOE heal. You can put pressure on every enemy you can see, but with this single spell all that pressure is instantly removes and over healed by a significant amount.
When I was playing as a healer I had to heal like crazy to stop a Bright Wizard from killing someone and it was not an easy thing to do. I don't remember an Engineer (couner part to Magus, just as weak with just as low and useless damage) ever being a problem to heal, pop a HOT and run along.
As for combat being "slow and deliberate". It isn't at level 24, and from what the level 30+ people have been telling me, it isn't at the end of the game either. The only time combat goes slow is when you get runners, or people who are too scared to fight and try to stay within their attack range only just and hit you from a distance. Otherwise a skirmish in a scenario at these levels with all players present rarely lasts for more than say... 30 seconds? And the last 10 seconds of that is usually the losing side trying to flee for their life as they realise they have already lost.
The comparison between Glean Magic and Shattering Shadows was also accurate. And Shattering Shadows can really screw up enemy groups.
Glean Magic is not healed, because it's damage is too low to warrant healing.
Shattering Shadows on a group of 3-5 enemies can worry healers. Due to the 1.5s global cooldown on all spells a healer can at best heal 2 people during that time, after which another Shattering Shadow can come their way. Unless the group has multiple healers it would be impossible to a healer to out heal a barrage of Shattering Shadow until they get their AOE heal. Even then, that has a 10s cooldown, making it still very difficult to out heal Shattering Shadows unless there is several healers.
You're delusional or something. Magus are crap at what they do. Sorry, but eating away at 5% of the enemy groups health over 20 seconds might give you a high damage number, but you're contributing very little, if anything to the actual fight. I'd have much rather that space you're taking up in the party be filled in by a useful class!
Until they either start doing threatening damage or get some other use (which they do not have at the moment) then that wont change. I'd sooner take a Sorcerer which can do insane damage, provide excellent support, debuff enemies and eat away at them in more ways that just Hp/Ap. (Seriously, go take a look at some of the abilities a Sorcerer gets, they start off getting nothing but damage with the occasional utility spell, but by level 25 they are getting almost nothing but utility spells).
And, I have sieged and done a lot of RVR. They get boring after a while :[ There ][/ There] amount of moster" or "interact with
- amount of objects", or a mixture of both, stage 2 is killing more monsters or interacting with more objects, but the monsters you fight are champions (and interacting with the objects summons a champion monster), stage 3 is fighting a boss.
That is what chapter 1 and 2 were like, chapters 6, 7, and 8 were the same, and chapter 16 or whatever it is I am on now is just the same.
I've never fought a major boss of any type yet, but all the bosses in PQs require no stratergy at all, make sure you have someone tanking them and just pound on them. Fight might last a minute at most.
I know WoW has been out for like 5 years now, but in WoW I don't need to get to the very end of the game to do stuff in it other than grind and quest (though WoW has more than it's fair share of crappy end game dungeons). In WAR it seems like I do apparently!
And you have to admit, currently the game does feel really clunky to play... And it is so full of bugs that it could have done with a good few more months in the testing phase (no joke, after about rank 10 half of the Magus skills are totally bugged and don't work as intended. An example is Surge of Insanity, if you use it on someone close to you it will also interrupt you from casting the spell as well), of the 10 or so bugs I reported during open beta only 1 of them was fixed (the "you cannot attack this enemy" bug). And most of those were stupidly obvious bugs that are harder to avoid than find :[
Could be a good game, but the bugs are really starting to annoy me and need fixing, and the game needs a lot more content. Because after rank 14 or so I'd done everything avaliable to me and have been grinding for the past 10 levels (whether than is RVR, scenarios, PQs or just normal quests, it is all grinding in the end). :[
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