So, I used to swear to RS - VM - CI - SA, with FE and BJ manually added on GCD, and keeping Alliance on cooldown (and of course forgetting spell TC most of the time), but now I have grown very fond of CI - RS - VM - SA According to Kizap (current board favorite name with a vote of 1), they are more or less equal, but the latter should give a few more procs of CI goodies... /em stares intently at the dead horse while reaching for his stick /say Hold my beer...
They're basically the same, don't fret too much. Relentless Servant -> Volley of Many -> Chaotic Inferno -> Spear of Molten Arcronite rotates RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear -> Chaotic -> RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear -> Chaotic -> RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear -> Chaotic, etc. Chaotic Inferno -> Relentless Servant -> Volley of Many -> Spear of Molten Arcronite rotates Chaotic -> RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear -> Chaotic -> RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear -> Chaotic -> RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear -> Chaotic, etc. The only differences that emerge are with 1. The first spell you cast, 2. Syllable of Refreshment procs, and 3. How they interact with lag. 1) The first point is dependent on what you're doing. My general thinking in the past is that you want to get RS out as early as possible, because it takes time to do damage. This is less applicable now that /pet swarm is a thing, although depending on the length in between fights that argument still has weight. On the other hand, proccing Twincast as early in the fight as possible is probably preferable. If you're in a raid and you have an Enchanter, you definitely don't want to use Chaotic first, because it'll probably eat activated Chromatic Haze (if you're burning at the start, which you should do like 99% of the time). How you start a fight in a raid is a bit of a special case though, because you probably then have 5-10 minutes of just continuing your multibind. As such, you certainly could start with RS -> Volley (or any other combo) before swapping to a multibind with Chaotic in the first slot. It's worth noting that after ITC ends, you're probably going to be casting Chaotic, as it's likely RS / Volley are on cooldown. It really doesn't matter which multibind you use for that, the much more important thing is smoothly transitioning to a multibind that rotates in the manner listed above (either of the above multibinds can rotate in the wrong order if your spell cooldowns get thrown off somehow). 2) The second point depends on things. When Chaotic was first introduced, it (and Claw) would frequently bug out when you procced Syllable of Refreshment. Your client would try to cast the spell, but the server would make you wait the 5.25s recast even though the spell should've refreshed. The result was trying to cast Chaotic after a Syllable of Refreshment proc would often cost you damage, making RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear preferable. Anecdotally, this seems to happen much less since the server improvements, but it still can happen. As far as what's better DPS to cast after a Syllable of Refreshment proc assuming nothing bugs out, that depends. RS -> Volley will be more consistent, but Chaotic will be better if it procs Twincast. 3) The third point is important because RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear should cast Chaotic twice per rotation. Sometimes, depending on raid lag, that second cast gets skipped. That's kind of bad, since you'll lose out on Chaotic procs. It's especially bad during Twincast. If you proc Twincast and you're lagging in this way, you'll then cast Spear -> RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear -> RS -> Volley, at which point Twincast wears off. That's only one Chaotic cast in the duration of Twincast, instead of 2-3 if Chaotic cast twice per rotation. As such, you'll end up proccing Twincast significantly less overallMy personal preference is to use both. The general philosophy is you should cast Chaotic as little as possible while proccing Twincast as much as possible. The way to accomplish that is to heavily favor Chaotic during Twincast (by swapping to Chaotic -> RS -> Volley -> Spear), while perhaps favoring RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear outside of Twincast (but making sure Chaotic casts twice per rotation if possible). By doing this I generally achieve a higher Twincast proc rate than most Mages (although not all, /wave Pie) I play with, sometimes while also using Chaotic less. The biggest thing to avoid is using Chaotic too little or too often. I see both mistakes frequently, and either will cost you damage. The former obviously gets you fewer procs, and the latter can make your Twincast periods less effective by not actually casting high damage spells that benefit from Twincast (casting only Chaotics and RS's during Twincast is bad). Basically use whatever you want, just try to be smart about its benefits and limitations and adjust your casting accordingly. Edit: P. S. I was playing around with indentation since I never use it on these forums.
A lot of the questions you have can either be answered by reading ability descriptions or by looking at a spell parser like raidloot. Edit: I don't mean that to be harsh, it's great to ask questions (a lot of people don't). A big part of succeeding in EQ is having the tools to answer those questions yourself, though. Blazing Jet is just a nuke. Target the mob and click your Firebound Orb, it will do damage.
Which is weird because I did that and it didn't appear that anything happened--I assume nothing happened because the counter did not go down. And I know I have a lot of questions, I'm really sorry, I do try to answer them on my own before plaguing the forums with them.
I have both on my mouse, and was swapping back and forth on TC, but then I got hooked. Syllable got a GINA to remind me to recast Alliance, and the satisfaction of jaming in another Alliance is quite big . I made a quick speculative estimate: 5% Syllable —> 5% x +1 Alliance x 1/2 (On average, I will be halfways on the Alli refresh, so this is the avg shortening I get of the refresh timer... ) —> about +50.000 flat dam benefit on the CI cast from Syllable alone. But then there is aggro management, Flames, and TC.... I bet I am suffering from some kind of gambling addiction effect: just one more proc, COME ON! *rolls dice*
Yeah, the RNG with Chaotic can be fun (or annoying, depending on how much you value consistency ) That analysis is missing a few things, though. First, Alliance has a cast time, which means there's an opportunity cost to casting it. Your average spell cast with no activated abilities is upwards of 600,000 damage on a raid (with Dru/Enc), and adding in abilities with significant uptime (Heart, GBW, Epic/FE, etc) increase that average cast damage by quite a bit. The net gain from casting Alliance, assuming a Fulmination, is probably less than 1.7 million damage, and could be below 1 mil on a burn. Second, there's some chance another Mage's Alliance is on the mob already, and also a chance (albeit smaller) that another Mage directly follows that previous Mage's Alliance. While a lot of the time that isn't the case, on average it decreases the benefit of Syllable of Refreshment if you sometimes have to wait to cast yours. Thirdly, there's always some chance your Alliance bounces or doesn't fulminate, either due to debuff slots, another Mage casting Alliance at the exact same time, not having enough mages on the target (one swapped targets or died or w/e), etc. It's definitely possible to minimize these risks with GINA triggers or rotations, but it seems very unlikely that every single Alliance cast is going to fulminate. The Syllable proc is nice, but it probably doesn't contribute enough on average realistically to make much difference. In terms of raw contribution, Twincast is where it's at.
I made an AT for this and it's been fantastic for casting another RS pet or, in the case of an undergeared mage, my mana refresh spell!
No worries, I like answering questions! I just also know it's a lot more powerful to have the tools to figure stuff out on your own (descriptions, spell parsers, Gamparse, old posts, etc.) than to be beholden to someone answering here. "Teach a man to fish..." or something like that. Anyways, that's odd. Sometimes item counters in the UI bug out a little bit, if that's where you're looking. I'd also make sure you're using Firebound Orb and not Coronal Orb. It's definitely just a nuke though, a la Blazing Orb.
Are you aware of the summon/reclaim technique? store pet, (Summon Monster, click reclaim item) <--repeat until full, un-store pet. It is very useful, and a lot faster than the slow gather spells.
I made custom sound bites for the words "Gift" and "Refresh" and "Twin". I use in-game triggers for Syllable of Refreshment, and Gift of Mana, and Twincast. GINA's fabulous for its flexibility, but for responsiveness - when you may want to change the plan on which spell to cast 1.5s from now - the game engine itself literally can't be beat.
I find this intriguing. Do in-game triggers delay at all depending on your log interval? I'm pretty good at seeing things proc, but one thing I really want as much advanced notice as possible is for Alliance (so I don't waste my own). Testing in the guild hall, with /logint 1, my GINA trigger and the in-game AT occured simultaneously, but I'm curious if being in a high lag raid significantly changes that. I'll try to test that.
Since game triggers don't depend on a log file existing at all, I've presumed there was no delay whatsoever. In particular, though, in-game triggers don't require the kludge of GINA's "interrupt speech" toggle to get out in a timely fashion rather than queue behind other messages -- which then has the entirely anticipable boondoggle of causing misses on event stuff.
Yes, a friend did tell me about this technique, although for a variety of reasons I haven't tried it out yet.
