I play a high end Magician and raid frequently tackling raids in ToV and, as such, I have full raid gear, it's not all Velium empowered but I'm working on it. On raids, I parse anywhere from 4-10 but I want to improve and contribute more DPS on raids and in groups. Just for reference, raid buffed I have 364K HP and 285K mana my spell damage is about 2850 and my attack is around 4600.I have about 38,000 AA's and only lack some of the focus AA's on spells I don't use and the tradeskill ones. I have spoken to many other top Magicians and use their exact spell set, so there isn't much improvement I can do in that regard. Similarly, I use potions all the time, tribute, guild tribute, trophies, ect; essentially what I'm trying to stress is that my mechanics are pretty much as good as they can get, or so I believe. The other day I looked on Magelo to see the kind of stats the number one Magician in EQ has; some of the stats were really surprising and significantly better than my own. Particularly, AC, ATK, and spell damage but also HP and mana. This Magician had better gear than me, virtually all of it was Velium enhanced/Velium empowered along with a finished Rallos Zek ear and the four rare evolving items from TBL but the difference in our stats seemed so great that I didn't think that the discrepancy in gear completely explained it all. Below I will list all of the shortcomings of my character and I'd like to know if I remedied all of the items below would I have the stats of that Magician I saw on Magelo OR am I missing some component that I've overlooked or somehow am unaware of. - Not full Velium empowered/enhanced gear (working on it) - Do not have all of the hero AA's (took many breaks from EQ but I'm working on older progression daily) - Do not have the Rallos Zek earring or the artisan's prize (I was never a fan of tradeskills but I'm slowly making progress) - Do not have ANY of the four rare evolving items from TBL (again, I will make my way through the expansion and then plan on getting these items) - Only have 4 trophy slots (I've been amassing collectibles and will soon be done with a few more expansion's worth of collections)
I recently started a mage this year during anniversary and have been able to raid him a few times on the xegony open raids. I won’t pretend to be a know-it-all on the subject of pure caster dps. From what I’ve gathered from Sancus’ posts on TOV mages http://forums.eqfreelance.net/index.php?topic=16654.0 Gear will give you obviously more hp/mana allowing you to possibly survive situations that you otherwise would not have but if you don’t find yourself dying during raids unless the raid itself wipes, gear outside of focus will not really impact your dps one way or another, and from what I’ve gathered hero AA will not contribute much at all to an overall gain in dps, is it something to do on your spare time? Sure but I wouldn’t make it a chore if you don’t enjoy going back and doing that content. One thing I did notice is you don’t have any of the evolving items... you CAN gain dps through these with the type 18/19 casting magic/fire (tbl - requires casting that type of spell for it to proc) or casting ice (TOV - procs off any spell type) augs and the assaulting proc augs (you mentioned your atk rating suggesting that you melee (good). My mage for instance is a baby and having already evolved about a dozen tbl items last year and 3 earrings this year I just didn’t wanna do it again so I grabbed a pair of torn efreeti boots and tossed in a casting fire aug. I lost some hp/mana/heroics but gained dps due to the aug. Little sacrifices like this may be worth it if you’re looking to squeeze out some extra dps. Aside from that what I’ve read is +spell damage is kinda meh and doesn’t contribute all that much extra damage in the grand scheme of things. I’d personally suggest going after 1-2 evolving items and finding a few casting/assaulting augs and playing around with that and seeing if you notice any significant difference in your overall dps. One last thing on the subject of Magelo, very very few people that sit #1-5 are using 100% of the gear/augs they post... I don’t want to make a blanket statement that everyone in the top 5 of each class is faking it.. however many many people swap out complete sets of augs etc to give them an artificial boost to land higher on the rankings. A good friend of mine let’s just say an SK in the top 5 normally uses full Hdex augs however every time he updates magelo he swaps to an entire set of Hagi just to rank in the top 5. Just my two cents. Good luck!
Assuming you aren't running out of mana on raids and not dying to AE rampage/effects, stats mean little ... even spell damage (it's a straight add at the end of the damage calculation ... rounding error on today's parses). You don't mention if you have finished DoN progression to Sanctity of the Keeper (5/5) ... if not, that should be on your list. On raids, good adps and good adps rotations can make a solid difference on parsing. My mage friends tell me that they are a little less susceptible to specific adps rotations, but at the very least you want to be in the habit of firing early and often for burns (events are long and almost all you can get 2 burns in each event ... waiting until the end means you only get one). If there will be a target for you during most of an adps click ... it should be clicked, not saved for "best possible use times". Magelo is a great way to get ideas about gear ... it's horrible to emulate exactly since most/all of the top ones are specially designed sets of gear and augs that no one wears in practice. Don't be so surprised about someone having the ear and the 4 TBL chase and being much better in stats that you ... those items are still best in slot (the ear should be still best in next expansion). There are ways to setup the 18/19 augs for max stats on a Magelo profile. And the Artisan's Prize is better than probably 10+ of your type 7 augs on its own. As far as how to better yourself gearwise - by not having the ear and at least one of the four TBL chase, you are missing 5 casting proc augs ... which are probably the biggest single gain you can do for your character. Just the ToV ear alone will give you access to 3 (2 plus a special type 7/8 proc aug) plus enable you to cram one of the TBL proc augs in as well (the ear has 3 18/19 slots). And if you are a good mage and melee as much as possible, that can expand to 4 additional melee proc augs as well. Top mages are going with as many as *9* more proc augs than you into raids. Wizards are slightly different than mages, but I'm getting ~10 percent of my raid cycle damage from those procs. Hero AAs and added trophies are nice and can be a good stat boost so those are great to work on as well. But your primary goal is dps (at least I think that's what you want). If you like your rotations and your adps is fine on raids, proc augs are pretty much it for what you can add to see boosts on the parse.
I'd like to touch on this a bit. As others have mentioned, the benefit of gear is pretty marginal once you have raid gear in a few key slots. Proc augs are the exception. Cumulatively over our last T2/T3 clear, the eight proc augs in my evo items were 4.46% of my total damage, which is notable. Spell Damage does crit (it's not flat damage added on the end), but the SD differential between different pieces is too low to see significant gains from it. Luck differences are pretty negligible at this point too. Everything else (e.g. Hero AAs or other stats) is going to have no impact on your DPS. There's a decent difference between a baseline toon and a maxed one, but not between different tiers of raid gear. That said, I would argue that there are very few characters who can't realize improvements via better spell/ability volume/selection. Over the course of a ToV clear, I use eight spell weaves and three additional situational DD spells that I don't include in weaves. The benefits of some of these are extremely marginal, but the benefits of others are substantial (e.g. Beam). There's a lot one can do to maximize DPS through play that goes beyond having the same core sustained multibind as another Mage. If you want specific suggestions, I'd be happy to look through logs (you're welcome to PM me or something). Over most raid clears there's something I feel I could've done differently or executed better to improve my DPS, even when I'm really on top of things (which I'm honestly often not during farm). There are very few people who are at a point where they'd see larger gains through small gear upgrades than by adjusting what they're doing.
So - with the spell set? and the other stuff? there's 13 spell gems, but while there are some options for filling them in, they're largely irrelevant to discussions of performance. For discussion, one can plainly pretend that two casters have exactly matching spell sets. Ditto gear, aa, etc. There still can still be (indeed very likely will be) enormous performance differences based on play. Spell casting volume is the best first metric along which to compare two spell casters, and then casting priority for which of those 13 spells are actually being cast most, and then the tactical deployment of them with burns & events. The strategic level of changing up spell sets feels to me like a Red Herring except in super odd events (Dru's Vault, Reparm in the case of mages).
Push more buttons. Also, create hotkeys for your ADPS. I don't care how good someone is, everyone can mess up. Make sure you are keeping track of their timers as well as yours. I have 8 different hotkeys requesting various ADPS buffs. What do you parse, let's say on Kael? That's a pretty parse friendly raid zone. If you're not doing 470k+ DPS sustained for either event, you may want to look at what you're casting and when. AoW is probably the easiest of the two events to really get a good parse on, should be able to do 500k+DPS sustained pretty easily, depending on raid setup and ADPS. Gear shouldn't hinder your performance, you've essentially got the same amount of HP and close to the same mana as I do.
