Two valuable bits of very usable feedback in here about my current cast order (very much appreciated!) - animated dagger is a waste unless I have absolutely nothing else up, and I now cast spellbind/soulburn/unda as early and fequently as possible. I disagree on one small point, and have data that backs it up: Taking out shadowstep and shockwave, even on single target, had negative results on dps (not much, but fairly consistent). So my thought is to leave them in as they are zero cast time and do some damage. If you read my cast order, you can see that lifetap is all ready an intergral part of it, just lower priority than my main dots, higher than dumbfires. Tweaking my ranged dps stats through reforging and changing the order (above) has had a positive impact on my test DPS by maybe 100-200k. So... I'm pretty solidly at 1.8-2m dps now, still a far-cry from other necros who can apparently spam whatever in a macro and do ok (5+mill?) dps wise. Maybe it is just gear, after all?
These war runes cost well over 1k plat on my server (AB), so it will take me until, I don't know, forever, to be able to afford that after spending everything I had on mastercrafted gear and jewelry (that I'm ever so slowly replacing). I can see that 25% damage to a group would be hugely beneficial (Obol), but I just can't afford that in the foreseeable future. Yeah, I don't think that's it. Delaying soulburn just enough to get all my dots off first really didn't change the overall DPS *that* much. Taking out some of the free (0 cast time) dps spells actually hurt DPS. I'm looking for something really big, stupid, that I'm doing that would account for a 2-300% improvement. What's coming out of cast order are minor tweaks that are giving me maybe another 100k overall. I think it's something else. Yep. Though I didn't have much in the way of +melee stats before reforging. Again, this yielded a negligable boost to dps, but honestly, my crushing skill is really low, so I don't know that this is going to ever account for much unless I skill it up massively. I actually started out right side until a fellow necro in-game advised me to switch. I've tried both, and for now at least, I'll say for me, personally, dual conversion was a massive improvement in DPS for me. I still manage to do really well on aoe fights. I reverse-joust for the big ranged aoe, and it hits really, really hard.
Wands use focus skill, not crushing skill. If your autoattack skills (either ranged or melee) are low, go beat on an immortal guildhall training dummy for a while.
I play a conjy, so I'm going to focus on your gear instead of your spell rotation: 1) those war runes are huge, and your grp will love you more for it. I have been playing with Relentless Conviction for its higher proc rate over Screams, but you can't go wrong with those. 2) your ring Band of Vile Souls is only adding its counters on heal spells. I played with this one and spammed my pet heal (which does count), but I was only able to get it to a 3, and that was a lot of unnecessary heals. It would be better to swap that out as soon as possible for almost anything else. TheAoM shiny reward and the Brokenskull event ridonculous-rare would be the end goal for the ring slots, but there's plenty of drops in both heroics and events that would be upgrades. 3) The neck is useless in any event where you're fighting the whole time, and almost all heroics where you're ripping through trash. I don't remember exactly how long it takes for it to build up/ discharge that potency, but this is not likely doing you much good. I recommend the newer pet stat neck Chain of the Vile Devout for pure int & stamina as a *reasonably* easy upgrade. The MC neck wouldn't be bad either, as it also clears rez sickness for in-combat dirty rez's. 4) your stats need to aim for: 100% reuse, 200% casting, 75% recovery, then for the melee you want 117haste & 117Multi, ignore completely the ae auto. Reduce your ability mod to ~22k until you have those stats completed. If your spells are like my spells, then you have 3 or 4 that display damage at 60k when you inspect them (i.e. calculated damage, not what they start with unscribed). 5) I agree with the insta-cast damage spells, if you find a lag in your spells you can always macro it onto another one with the same reuse time. 6) you missed out on last expansion's green gems, the caster version having 2% doublecast on each. Currently the AoM greens are only from raid trash, and there's no doublecast version (abmod, dps, and a tanky-tank one). If you can acquire last expac's Essence of Duality ones and level those up, they will do fine until the devs put in heroic-content green adorns (which is on their list of updates)
One other thing I'll mention that kind of adds to what Dronk said above regarding gear is that you may want to change out some of your armor choices a bit. You have a bunch of max hp items that will hamper your reforging. I'm hoping you intend to swap most of those when a better (pot/cb/casting speed) option drops. Also, dump the wdb forearms. (I'd get rid of those immediately even if it meant quest/handcrafted/mastercrafted to put in the slot instead. Oh, and you DEFINITELY want to go to Phantom Seas and buy the double cast rune from the npc (same one that sells malice gems) for your shoulder slot instead of the crit rune you have in there now. Those are 45 Ferrins plus 15-20 plat.
If you are that hurting for plat, instead of buying the latest tier's adorns/war runes/purple adorns, buy last tier's, or beg in chat for someone to make them for you if you give them the raws, etc. That will give you more than 50% of the boost that equipping the new ones would, and probably cost 1/10 of the price. Or it would cost you very little if you leveled up an adorner to make them.
Wow! I really, really appreciate the feedback and super helpful suggestions. With my gear as-is (it's the best item in each slot that I could afford on broker, quest for, or loot off a heroic instance, etc.), refining my casting order and really tweaking my timing, I'm doing 2-3 million dps consistently now (solo, on the training dummy), and performing at the level of other Necros I'm grouping with, even if they have somewhat better gear options. I did manage to grand master a few spells, and that helped a bit over the expert and master versions I had up. But I think the difference really is getting off more soulburns and more than one lifeburn in a fight; when that happens, my dps goes through the roof. Now, gear. I put those green melee mage forearms because I had nothing "melee" on at all. I plan to dump/upgrade everything as better comes available, but my plan was to mix cb/pot gear with max health gear. I'm a necro, after all; maybe that's the EQ1 necro in me (I always had more sta than int in eq1)... but I tend to go towards balancing survivability and maximizing dps. After all, my max effective DPS when dead is zero. The problem I'm seeing now, on my server anyway, is that everyone has rolled a necro now. Seriously, zero tanks or healers LFG, then a stream of 5-7 "100 Necro LFG" go by...
The issue at the moment is people rush from lvl 1 to 95 or 100 so fast, that they don't know how to play their class (tanks and insert any class here). And some zones in this expansion requires some basic knowledge like "Tanking 101" "Hate 102" "Leadership 101". Anyways, people doesn't want to do PuGs because the group can fail, it could be the tank, or the lack of heals, or the lack of dps. So I would recommend to use the guild recruitment too ingame "U" on the menu or check the guild recruitment forums to join and give time hang out with guildies. I'm not saying this is 100% on all the servers but the majority wants to do some decent runs but people lacks the gear or experience and since you need to run heroics to get gear, its a bit complicated. You can read some threads on the forums about how hard is the expansion or how easy, depends the PoV or about the lack of gear, etc, etc. Just give sometime and have fun.
I make a macro with my soulrot to include shadowstep, the pair can be cast simultaneously. I also add /pet attack to the macro so my pet doesn't have to wait for me to release that spell to start attacking.
Except... Bloodcoil should be your very first spell, and thus the /pet attack is best macroed with it. And it just so happens that you should be spreading coil on most AE fights, conveniently priming your pet to be in combat with those targets
That's a great suggestion Twisty. I use a macro that casts Bloodcoil followed by SoulRot. I'll think about adding the insta-casts and /pet attack to those as well. One question: doesn't having your pet set to /assist accomplish this as well? Might spamming attack during a fight have a negative impact on DPS if your pet stops casting something to switch targets?
not digging the Soulrot attached to Bloodcoil - seems rigid without any good reason. having your pet on auto-aggro mode, if that's what you mean by /assist, is the quickest route to getting kicked from raid. and even then the response time is worse than forcing pet to attack a new target on-demand. i haven't checked this in a long time, but don't recall pet stopping mid-cast if changing targets, just like you can change targets mid-cast
Pet attack should be macro'd to soulrot not bloodcoil. You don't want your pet hitting a less-debuffed target if you're spreading coils. You also don't want it to potentially whiff a Soulburn in case there's a pebble on the ground between it and the target you just queued coil on. I'm also 85% sure vampire bats is still complete trash and shouldn't ever be cast. You don't need that long of a "cast list". Your essentials are rotating Bloodcoil -> Soulrot -> Pandemic -> Soulrot throwing in Bewilderment when it's up and/or needed, and a chain of soulburn/rot flesh/dumbfires every 30 seconds. Lifeburn/Horde when appropriate, and any neat tricks you try to do won't increase/decrease your dps more than 2% either direction. After that it's solely your gear/adorns/reforge choices.
Several expansions ago, it was identified that the Level 14 Defensive Stance Grandmaster was the best level spell stance for the Necro Mage pet. Is this still true in the current expansion or have all of the changes made this spell and the advantages it gave us at that time obsolete?
It's not. If you look at your pet window, there are icons for "auto aggro", 2 of them actually, for defend you and defend yourself. Next to them is another round icon that puts the pet into "auto assist" mode. My typical setup is to have the defends off, but auto assist enabled, so my pet instantly attacks anything I've attacked. There is also the pet assist command, that I have not played around with much, but appears to send your pet against whatever the %target is fighting. Hope this helps.
My reasoning for it is that Soulrot is always available and I try to keep it constantly hitting the mob. Since I'm not playing an EQ1 bard, I try to simplify things slightly by combining soulrot with each dot I cast (in a macro), so it automatically goes up directly after the "main" DOT goes up, and stays up constantly. Is prioritizing Soulrot like this, making it the defacto highest piority follow up to a DOT, hurting my DPS? I know it's a moderately efficient but always available spell. How often do other folks cast Soulrot these days?
Soulrot should be your top 3 dps on a parse. If you really want to push out the max dps that you can, you have to get away from the macro system. It's hard to predict the behavior of your casting especially with macro with a lot of abilities tied to it. You can macro temps for burst abilities, but necro doesn't have much in term of burst dmg. If you can't keep up the pace with single casting, you can always use devices like razer naga to help you out. If that doesn't help, then maybe macros will be more beneficial to you. But unfortunately, you probably won't be able to put out the max potential dps using macros.
Pet hitting less-debuffed mob in the encounter for short duration (and only slightly with most debuffs being AE) is preferred to having to explicitly send it after next target once ur current dies. Obviously you switch back to main target as soon as you done spreading coils. To easily have pet switch back tie it to Soulburn as well - u can hit it mid-cast of something else since Soulburn is always down. And certainly beats wasting pet dps on inc while you get to ur soulrot, which you wouldn't even get to on many AE fights Position better, pet summon, profit. Only possibly a concern in Temple atm anyway You're 85% out of the loop
