Well, I use Elemental Conversion first, then the AA group rod, and with bard and enchanter, I can use my preferred nuke sequence (RS many chaotic spear) which is both very strong as well as kind on mana. On my new mage that has less AA and worse gear, I sometimes use gather, but that is very rare, and I do it during combat. It would require too much attention to reclaim pet, I prefer not to stop killing (I box). As mentioned above, I think, my problem is with my enchanter, whom I do not master sufficiently to keep with enough mana. I haven’t reclaimed a pet in a decade. I am jokingly with Fransisco on the #stopmurderingpetsformana wagon, but when I start raiding again, I might indeed take it up again, it is by the numbers obviously the better option for time invested.
On your enchanter, start every fight with your biggest dot (The mana tap one, I can't remember the name now). Using that, robe, and 2nd spire keeps my enchanter in business (I dont use a mana aura)
Mind Storm/Tempest for high levels, he's got a good point about spamming mod rods and using chanter Second Spire instead of Third. If you can afford to pull more than one target, you could always just hit multiple targets with dot and that's a lot of mana back or in a group environment with high DPS - make use of the Slash/Sunder nuke chain (need 1 more nuke in there) and ignore Strangulate (DPS loss but you'll never run out of mana).
is it complex? beam hits for 14k base, regular nukes are 36k. So 3 hits to be about even on DPS (at a major efficiency gain), 4 hits to start going a little nuts?
In the strictest sense, no. The answer is pretty much 4 and has been for a few years (since I last did extensive Beam testing). But in terms of implementing Beams into your gameplay, yeah, it's a little bit more complicated when thinking how/when. I'm doing this as much (probably moreso) for myself than this thread, but I've been putting it off since the Beam fix and I figured this would give me some motivation.
So this is going to be a long post, apologies in advance. I will definitely put a TL; DR at the bottom, but I will try to be fairly thorough. I'll also note that this post is mainly aimed at Beaming in a group setting, but I probably will talk about raids a bit. First, I think it's important to know why using Beams is a bit more complicated than it might seem. There are a few reasons, most of which appeared in EoK: Chaotic: Chaotic makes everything more complicated. Its ability to proc twincast makes it attractive even in an AE situation, but it is much more difficult to model than pretty much any other spell. It's the reason I opted for parsing instead of relying heavily on math in this exploration. It's also worth noting Flames of Power. It doesn't matter for the duration of Heart of Flames, but outside of that it is going to be a factor in spell damage. Unfortunately for Beams, each counter will only focus one hit of a Beam (this is a trend I'll discuss more below). That means Flames of Power is significantly more potent in conjunction with higher base damage spells, and does not scale well with AEs. RS: With the ability to redirect swarm pets, RS has become much more relevant in situations where mobs die fast. It also got a pretty sizable upgrade with RoS's level increase and EoK's Theft of Essence, which makes it really strong against group mobs if leveraged properly. What this means is it might only take 3 or 4 mobs for Beam to outpace Spear in terms of DPS, but it could take quite a few more for Beam to out DPS RS. ADPS: This is a huge issue for Beams in my mind. Since the addition of Gift of Chromatic Haze in TDS, the devs have added quite a few single charge procs (mainly synergies). These procs only focus one line of Beam, and as such they greatly favor high base damage spells. This includes Conjurer's Synergy, Flames of Power, Beguiler's Synergy, Gift of Chromatic Haze, and Chromatic Haze (the activated one). While these aren't huge boosts individually, collectively they contribute pretty significantly to DPS. This means that the more access you have to those kinds of procs, the longer you'll need to wait to use Beams. It's also really difficult to model and account for exactly because there are so many different group configurations that will yield a different number of each proc. It's worth noting that, with the exception of AA Chromatic Haze, this issue is a little bit less severe during burns. This is because Elemental Union is stronger than Beguiler's Synergy and Heart of Flames is stronger than Flames of Power. As such, Beams aren't quite as disadvantaged in this area while those are running. Because of the variability of ADPS, it's pretty much impossible to give a single number of mobs for when one should start Beaming. Therefore the best way to handle it IMO is to find the number without all of those ADPS factors. As long as you're aware of what factors decrease the usefulness of Beams, you can at least know that you might need a mob or two more before you start swapping over. With all of that in mind, on to parses. All of the parses I did with Chaotic were around 8-10 hours. Those without Chaotic (just Beam) were much shorter (about half an hour) because Beam averages out very quickly. First, I just ran a baseline parse of Chaotic -> RS -> Spear -> Spear. I approximated the damage per cast of RS at 600,000. Obviously changing that will change the overall DPS; quite frankly I think that's an underestimate but it will depend a lot on the content, mob duration, and gaps in between pulls. With that all said, that yielded 121,826 DPS. Next, I ran parses of just spamming Beam with 1 - 5 dummies. Unfortunately on test you can't have more than 5 dummies up at a time, so I extrapolated out to 10. Thankfully Beams scale perfectly linearly, so this wasn't hard to do. Here's the graph: At 4 dummies it was just behind the single target lineup, at 118,980 DPS. It took 5 dummies for this lineup to do significantly more than the single target lineup, at 147,049 DPS. So at this basic level, you need 5 dummies to gain DPS by switching to Beam spam. My next set of parses, and this was one of my main goals for this project, were with Chaotic. This is just a multibind with Chaotic -> Beam. The unfortunate part about Chaotic is that it has a huge amount of variability, which required very long parses for each data point. The other complication is that, because of Flames of Power, it will only have linear scaling after 2 Beam hits. In hindsight I could've still run a parse with 2 dummies because it should scale the same amount going from 2 to 3 as 3 to 4 and 4 to 5, but I don't have another 8-10 hours at the moment. What that means is I have to extrapolate from only 3 data points, which is not awesome. That said, the parses are long enough that I think this should still be reasonable. The main thing worth noting is that the DPS for 3, 4, and 5 combat dummies is higher than with just Beam spam. However, it has a slightly lower slope. This makes sense; you're spending about 1/3 of your time casting Chaotic, and you're only getting about 26.7% more Beam hits (going from 5% TC chance to ~33%). Chaotic obviously contributes damage on its own, but eventually that damage is eclipsed by extra Beam damage. What this basically says is that, at 4 targets, you can swap to Chaotic -> Beam and do more DPS than a standard single target lineup, but you still need 5 targets to see a large increase. At ~7 targets Beam spam becomes slightly higher DPS on paper. It's probably closer to 8 or 9, though, because Firebound Orb would also benefit from the increased Twincast chance but it's not included in these parses. Putting all of this together, here's a graph of overall scaling of DPS with these three lineups (again, keep in mind you'll probably actually stick with Chaotic -> Beam for longer). So what does this actually mean for using Beams? Well the obvious is that at 4 mobs, you can start rotating Chaotic -> Beam instead of Chaotic -> RS -> Spear -> Spear. I used that as a basic single target lineup. If you're using Rains, they are going to perform quite well with 2+ mobs outside of burns. You'll have to wait for at least 5 mobs to start using Chaotic -> Beam in that scenario. Similarly if you're rotating RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Spear and have at least 10 pets, you're going to wait until 5 mobs to start using Chaotic -> Beam. I think the most interesting use of Beams that this doesn't really capture is using Beam to replace only Spear in a lineup. Rotating RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Beam -> Chaotic would have a slight bit of dead time, but it would allow you to replace Spear (which is quite a low damage nuke) without losing out on the benefits of Chaotic / RS / Volley. That's somewhat niche because it assumes you have enough pets on a single target for Volley but also enough mobs to AE. That said, a lot of boss fights with adds open themselves up to this possibility, as you could stay on the boss but Beam adds instead of casting a Spear. I think that would beat out the Chaotic -> Beam rotation until perhaps 7 or 8 mobs (that's a guesstimate). In situations without Volley you could use something like Chaotic -> RS -> Beam -> Chaotic -> Beam -> (Beam?) -> Chaotic. That would depend heavily on how much DPS RS is doing, but there's probably a sweet spot where that outpaces a Rain lineup while RS is still viable. One of the implications of these parses for me is that, in raids, I'm probably not going to rotate Chaotic very often when using Beams unless I'm still using RS / Volley as described above. That's because the window to AE in many raids is quite small, and the balance of probabilities is you're not going to proc TC in the 30s or however long you're AEing. Over 1,000 runs of the raid or w/e you might do more damage keeping Chaotic in, but to do so you're sacrificing consistency. Personally I'd rather have a good parse every time I do a raid than have a mediocre one most times and then a spectacular one occasionally. Even if I did use Chaotic I'd only cast it a couple of times before stopping (since proccing 18s of Twincast when you only have 5s left of AEing is not that helpful). Another important thing to consider when Beaming is that Beams scale better with most burns than a single target lineup does. RS doesn't benefit at all from burns, and Chaotic is significantly less powerful during ITC. EU/Heart of Flames not stacking with certain procs also reduce the scaling of our single target lineups with burns relative to Beams. With all of this in mind, there's a lot to be said for burning while you can Beam, and then relying on single target DPS more when you can't. In the future, I'd like a better way to approximate the effectiveness of Beams vs single target spells when including more ADPS procs. I'd also like parses with Twincast Aura, since those are more directly relevant to raids. Both of those are harder to achieve when I also need 8-10 hour parses for Chaotic to even out. I won't run them soon, but I have a plan to run them eventually (when I have access to 2 PC's with EverQuest that both have programmable keyboards). Beams would also be quite easy to add into the web app, which probably would make much of this easier. So that also would be nice. I like having parses to substantiate what the web app says, though, so hopefully that functionality would just be an additional confirmation of the information I already have. TL; DR: When there are 5 mobs start rotating Chaotic -> Beam. If you can still use Volley, you can try rotating RS -> Volley -> Chaotic -> Beam -> Chaotic if there are <8. By 10 or so mobs you should drop Chaotic.
WTF 1.5 recast time so you literally do spam just 1 spell? Mages are so broken. I had 15mins for a break so I threw the two beams in. Assuming a lot of the AE restrictions for rains are the same then it might be pretty close. There's only the 1 input box for number of hits that's shared for all AE spells so you can't really combine rains and beams at the moment. And I didn't add wizard ones or anything.
The question is... how often are you going to be in situations where you are fighting 5+ mobs at once to utilize beam? If I am solo, or boxing with the bard, I prefer killing 1-2 mobs at once. Earth pet is not able to tank 5+ ROS mobs at once. If I am on a raid, it is the discretion of the raid leader. I am wondering which events in ROS would beam be practical? Possibly T2.3 if double set of adds are up. Maybe T3.3 when you reach the raptors. It is going to be guild/raid situational. If you group with a tank that is constantly tanking 5+ mobs at once in the group game, sure beam. How often are you doing that? After reading Sancus' War and Peace, my views of beam still has not changed. I do not use it because I am generally not in situations where I am allowed to attack 5+ mobs at once...
Unless your raid leader knows Mages better than you then you need to make the decisions. T1.2 is where I beam in RoS and in EoK you had Queen, Lcea, and parts of the last raid. Especially Queen since there was a HUGE AoE bonus on warcasters. When I was doing xp groups in RoS our tanks didn't have a problem with 5+ mobs. So, I guess it depends on your group. Drogba doesn't seem happy unless he's tanking 12 mobs and almost dies every 5 minutes. I think the Mage problem was wasting hits on pets which is something I never had to deal with. Without that limitation they seem like they're pretty great in the right situation.
For RoS raids: Overthere if there are enough adds up Skyfire for most of the waves before the boss You can get a beam or two off in T2.1 if you face the right way and don't blow up coffins T2.3 if you have enough adds T3.3 on raptors and Drakes It's situational for sure, but a huge part of the class is properly managing situational abilities. We're very far from a one button class, quite frankly it's a bit ridiculous how many different lineups are viable in specific situations. That's how you max DPS though. As far as group content, I use them a ton when in real groups. Like kizant said, tanks can handle quite a few more than 5, so not really sure why I wouldn't use them. In EoK they could pull way more since T1 was so easy and such good XP. If you don't encounter situations with 5+ mobs, yeah, don't use them. But if everyone around you is pushing themselves you probably should, at least occasionally.
Yeah, I was pretty shocked the first time I realized you could basically just spam the same beam endlessly. And this is post nerf with the 12 target cap. Before you could hit an unlimited # of mebs? Heh Sancusjr thanks ye, sir <3
Yeah. I knew what some mages used to do but never really looked at the spells. Figured they weren't too different than the wizard version. I like our instant casts but we can't spam. Almost seems like a bug.
Plus the mage variants don’t have stupid side effects of your instants like blind root etc. The only negative in comparison is the cast time but 1.5 isn’t long and the fact that there’s essentially no recast timer is pretty darn strong heh.
That's because wizards were beam kiting in secrets of faydwer with them. Disrupting the entire zone lol.
Yeah let's not trade instant casts away lol. But we could use a change to have a decent AE rotation. It's a mess atm.
Oh I remember, it was fun times. Zoning into Icefall Glacier in TSS and having the zone be so laggy I’d rubberband endlessly and it’d take 5 minutes to run up the hill to valde/fc.
