The player you're quoting knows more about the game and the vast majority of classes that the game has than 99% of the player population.
It could be happening! All I'm saying is it's definitely not happening by the means asserted. There's a whole lot of space between observed phenomenon & mistaken fundamentals for an actual cause to maybe exist.
And yet something that has worked this way for at least a decade is news to you guys. All of our clerics use combo, they have for years for this reason. Ask your clerics or as I keep saying check it yourself. It's effect is overtly obvious. I feel like I am debating Flat-Earthers; except they are usually better researched.
Thing is I did check. Ran a couple times each with both set of buffs and the only outlier was a streak of ~10 extra Gift of Mana during one of the runs. Takes roughly 250 group heal casts in roughly 17 minutes to empty out my cleric's mana pool. I get a couple more casts if Clairvoyance comes in hot, and as many more casts as I get GoM above expectation. Fizzles don't use dex, that's casting skill. There is no such thing as a Specialization check, let alone one that uses dex.
From the Kunark Guide(I misplaced my original box set guide.) If you remember the original class descriptions before the game automatically assigned stats. The Wizards second most important stat is Dex; for this reason. I believe it was the second stat for Necromancers too, but I didn't play one back then. If physical evidence from the developers is not proof enough for you, then you explain why clerics last 20pct(or more) longer using combo over armour/righteousness?
why your cleric's did? I don't know. Mine sure didn't. The differences between test runs were small, arbitrarily "favoring" one set up or the other in a minor way attributable via a quick log search to Gift of Mana & Clairvoyance randomness. Mana preservation is also random, but over the course of my 250 casts I'm comfortable that it would have evened out enough to ignore. It appears your tests run 3x faster than mine due to less character development, maybe re-run yours a bunch to see if the observation holds. Or look at the logs, maybe your result was skewed in a large way by "lucky" Gift/clair streaks. You could try extending your tests by improving your character - raid mana pres ring with a Tome of Manipulation in, a hammer with Alleviating proc instead of a HoHV one and with a Helping Hand aug in, or just plain more mana pool (you can probably match my 250k mana pool easily if you acquire and equip hWis type5s. I'm on hSta ones for raid survival.)
I guess everyone has just been imagining it for all these years... Not sure why my post above will only show the picture when I first put it up, but not now... https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?attachments/dex-png.61/
you are not everyone. Those sorts of game engine effects all cut out at 255, we've capped out their influence for most of two decades. And it still doesn't list fizzles & specialization.
Because I was curious, I loaded a 115 max AA betabuffed Cleric up on Beta and spammed heals until the first "Insufficient mana" message. No Buffs Start: 14:37:17 End: 14:49:57 Duration: 00:12:40 Mana: 193576 Combat Mana Regen: 156 Clairvoyance: 2747 Dexterity: 1632 (880 + 752) Heroic Dexterity: 752 Casts: 295 Fizzles: 0 GoM Procs: 30 Self Buffs (Righteousness, Armor of Sincerity Rk 2) Start: 15:08:58 End: 15:24:05 Duration: 00:15:07 Mana: 193576 Combat Mana Regen: 266 Clairvoyance: 2747 Dexterity: 1632 (880 + 752) Heroic Dexterity: 752 Casts: 351 Fizzles: 0 GoM Procs: 37 "Full" Buffs (Shaman Unity, Druid Skin, Cleric Symbol) Start: 15:43:27 End: 15:57:28 Duration: 00:13:01 Mana: 193576 Combat Mana Regen: 240 Clairvoyance: 2747 Dexterity: 2113 (1361 + 752) Heroic Dexterity: 752 Casts: 327 Fizzles: 0 GoM Procs: 29 Initial conclusion? Combination of more GoM procs and highest standing mana regen made Self Buff test last longer. Increased standing mana regen made "Full" buffs last longer. No change on fizzle rate. Ultimate conclusion? Test samples are too small to remove random variability.
Clairvoyance stat not changing I suppose is something to observe, but you didn't report the number of Clairvoyance procs. Presuming Clairvoyance isn't 0, casting any spell has a 2% chance of returning half the Clairvoyance stat in mana (so up to 1374 per proc, for your betabuff), capped at the cost of the spell (one presumes you weren't casting spells that cost less than 1374). Just search log for "clair". The full line is ^You experience a moment of clairvoyance\.$
Didn't know Clairvoyance had a proc message, neat. (Or, if I did, I forgot about it, either way..) Clairvoyance procs No buffs: 1 Self buffs: 8 Full buffs: 4
An increase in spell casting specialization lowers mana cost for those spells. Just look at the before and after mana costs when you get a buff or equip an item that affects the specialization. No parsing is involved. Just look at the spell info in the window.
Specialization is a fixed value that always is checked. This is easy to check by removing your mana preservation focus item and casting the same spell over and over. Barring a Clairvoyance or Gift of Mana proc, you will consume the same amount of mana every cast. There is no such thing as a specialization check. It has always been this way, even if the developers didn't fully understand it at the time. The original description of the Spell Casting Mastery AA was a good example of the developers not even understanding their own game. Original description from Luclin launch: Current description: At no point did the functionality of this AA ever change. It always did the bottom description. This was known even back in 2002: http://thedruidsgrove.org/archive/eq/t-3888.html
There are only 2 SPA that affect fizzle rate. 112 - Adjust Casting Skill (Fizzles) 265 - NoFizzle SPA 112 is not available to druids (or clerics) outside of enchanter buffs (Intellectual Superiority) and obsolete Brilliance of Ro focus items. I suggest testing with e.g. Crown of Energy to measure any mana savings from reduced fizzles. SPA 265 is Mastery of the Past AA.
You the man Darchon, I actually thought specialization checks were causing the mana preservation all this time... It doesn't change the results from my clerics mana lasting longer repeatedly using focus instead of armour. I might think that my clerics bad gear was possibly the answer to why he has a more noticeable effect than others, but other(raid geared) clerics have the expected 20pct difference in mana retention. So not sure what is up with the two guys who got different results. I say to anyone else, test it yourself.
The casting skill is an actual stat used in several EQ formula. This is another reason i am RETENTIVE about keeping Intellectual Superiority on casters, as you know. My RETENTIVENESS came in handy in EoK when multiple mobs had that pre-nerf AE fizzle makers that just slaughtered people left and right in Overthere, and my guys were still able to get some spells off. I still carry The Scepter of Calekor, although I have carried it for years on the "in case of" raid mechanics like the used in Anguish, where everyone got a spell casting reduction debuff. Fizzles are still based at least in part on dex however, and you can use your enchanter to test this. You have much less fizzles with focus. Your Fizzle parse results change from a bell pattern to a teardrop pattern, much the same as unbuffed vs buffed ATK or unbuffed vs buffed AC or undebuffed vs debuffed mobs... It suggests a sliding scale baseline, that they repeatedly use in most of EQ. Edited for @#$% RETENTIVENESS being censored for some reason.