Hey all. Throughout many TLP's (Agnarr, Mangler, Aradune, which I've played), I've heard a lot of people ask about SK aggro spells and which ones generate the most threat. I decided to test this out, and here are my results: [COLOR=var(--ytcp-link-color)]https://youtu.be/lCRj5agm5SM[/COLOR] TLDR of this video if you don't want to watch the whole thing: - I used my Shaman to cast Blood of Saryrn, and that was the only threat done - I waited until the dot finished, then ONLY casted one spell until I pulled aggro Results: - Cascading Darkness + Festering Darkness 6 casts - Clinging Darkness + Dooming Darkness + Engulfing Darkness 7 casts - Asystole + Heart Flutter 9 casts - Terror 12 casts - Disease Cloud (over 20 casts and I couldn't pull aggro so I stopped trying b/c my shaman was going to die) Efficiency: Dooming Darkness wins. 840 mana over 7 casts vs. Terror 720 mana over 12 casts. However, it took 23 seconds to cast Dooming 7 times, vs 1 min 20 seconds to cast Terror 12 times. TLDR: Dooming Darkness is the best aggro tool an SK has. Problem with Cascading and Festering and Heart Flutter were the recast times were long. Ditto w/ Terror. Off video: I tested against a Brann (which is not resistant to disease like the jord giants are) just to see if the disease resist on the jord's were skewing the results. Against a brann, in which disease lands, it was equivalent to Dooming Darkness.
Some critiques: If you wanted to have a proper go of it, the correct response would be testcopy a high level SK over to Test ( Miragul server is great for this end), and then cast one of their static aggro spells on a mob to establish a guaranteed baseline of threat generated. Generally they come in 5 or 10k aggro variants, which are nice easy numbers to work off of. Test server also has aggro meters which allows you to see and generate exact amount of aggro per cast in actual numbers. It's also worth noting that debuffs generate more/less aggro depending on overall mob HP. So things like Asystole may generate more or less aggro than darkness or whatever else depending on how much HP a mob has. Finally, I find aggro per cast to be a slightly meaningless metric. If Clinging generated say, 1k aggro per cast and Cascading was 1200 aggro per cast, Clinging would still generate more overall aggro by virtue of having a cast time half as long as Cascading. If you really wanted to nail down which spells were best used for raw aggro, you'd generate a static value of threat, and then time how long each ability takes to reach said value.
I applaud that you did testing, but why only use 1 of the ranks of Terror? Downranking and keeping 2-3 on the bar basically means 1 is always available to instant cast vs a 2.5-3s channel of Dooming which reduces the aggro you generate from autoswings.
Yep! Once the terror line comes in, when doing any tanking you suck up 3 spell gems for terror, but pretty much trivializes agro. Terror ranks in gems 1,2,3 with a spammable "AGRO" macro: /cast 1 /cast 2 /cast 3 Depending on the situation of course and the need for other spell sets, you could swap the macro for only 1 or 2 agro ranks as well
you said dooming was best aggro, but festering and cascading took less casts... so not sure why you said that unless a typo we use clinging because it basically cost no mana, fast, and generally the same aggro. add 2 terrors, this allows you to clinging, terror, terror (terrors are cheap as well) (to be fair the terrors arent as good of aggro as asystole, but they are instant, which doesnt get interrupted and allows you to kite on horse, situationally valuable) clinging is enough of an aggro jump to warrant being number one. it will pull aggro off a tashed mob, terror wont.... but terror gets better in GoD
As mentioned above, if you want to do proper aggro tests, do it on Test, use known value aggro spells such as from a high level SK, and use a 3rd account (preferrably a chanter or cleric) to do inital aggro as there are bonuses that get applied that you'll want to avoid. Chanter/cleric is also good so you can memblur the mob and start over on the same mob, thereby keeping all variables the same as much as possible. FWIW, it's been years since I did any aggro parses but last I did, clinging was ~300 hate per cast iirc.
Dooming sucks because Clinging is almost 6 times as mana efficient. This a really big deal in Classic-SoL. Terrors have the advantage of being instant cast which means you can't be interrupted and you will riposte more, can't riposte while casting. Terrors are also more mana efficient. Also they're much better for kiting. Fear is also an a really nice agro spells on mobs that are immune to it because of level ect. Diamondskin is also i believe still secret OP for AoE DS PLs
Been playing this game for 20 years and still doesn't know about hybrid casting https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=103711 /dab
True, I always forget Hybrid spellcasting is a thing. Also why does it apply so weirdly? When combined with 15% det haste Dooming is actually faster than Clinging. Thanks brad.
Exactly so Dooming Darkness goes from 3s to 1.65s and Clinging Darkness stays at 1.75 (see attached picture)
I use and recommend clinging because it's sustainable over long periods which matters, particularly in the early expacs with smaller mana pools and less mana regen. Luclin and beyond you can change it up because access to KEI, Mental corruption, FT gear etc makes higher mana cost spells sustainable.
The Terror line doesn't surpass the snare line for threat generation until OoW. So it really doesn't get used unless kiting.
Terrors are also unresistable. Generally speaking, hate is front-loaded on casting. Meaning regardless of whether the spell lands or resists the hate is calculated when the spell finishes casting and the hate generated would be the same in either case. However this is not the case when talking about mobs flagged Belly Casters. The belly caster check seems to be performed before the base resist check and all spells cast from outside of belly cast range will end up being worth only 1 hate. That is of course except unresistable spells like Terrors or Tashan. So if you ever need to generate hate a belly caster mob out of belly caster range, Terrors are the best option.
Well, I tested this, and you can cycle 4 terrors. 3 gives you about .5 sec where you're not casting. I tested the same thing and found: - cycling 4 terrors = 16 casts (4 cycles), which cost me 784 mana and took 31 seconds - dooming darkness = 7 casts, 820 mana, and took 23 seconds So to pull aggro, dooming is faster but slightly less mana efficient. To be fair, this test is only about which spells generate more aggro. So while cascading and festering seem to be slightly more aggro than Dooming, I think dooming is better (more cost efficient + faster recast). This doesn't take into account melee swings, proc'ing stuff like pestilence shock, etc. I'll probably play around more with this. However, if all I'm doing is trying to pull aggro w/ spells, I think that dooming is still the way to go more than spamming terrors on cd (see above).
