So last night our guild did Tantor differently than normal. Usually we have some break off to kill bunnies, some stay on named, and do this all the way to the end (spoiler alert). We decided last night to burn named all the way down to like 10 or something, and then everyone broke off and AOE'ed the bunnies. Which got me thinking about beams for us. I generally don't use beams (or rains) that much if at all, but I do see potential in beams and maximizing my overall DPS in a situation like that. So... 1. How many mobs should a beam hit for it to be viable to use? I would guess six mobs, but wondering if 4-5 is still useful (compared to spears). 2. When you get into a situation with 6+ (or whatever the minimum is) mobs, what becomes the rotation both group and raid? From a raid perspective, normally I do RS- Storm- Chaotic- Spear- Chaotic. Do you weave chaotic inbetween beam casts? Do you use RS? Thanks magician community in advance
The general break points are roughly: You can replace Spear in your rotation with Fire Beam at 4 mobs. You can completely swap to Fire Beam at 7 mobs. With Thaumaturge's Focus, you can replace Spear with Magic Beam at 3 mobs. With Thaumaturge's Focus, you can completely swap to Magic Beam at 5 mobs. If burning, you should save Thaumaturge's Focus for it, in which case you can swap completely to Magic Beam with 3 mobs (RS -> Of Many -> Magic Beam is also viable with 3 mobs; Magic Beam becomes strictly better 4+). A few things to note: Exact breakpoints obviously depend on a lot of variables; in general, Beam weaves scale better than RS weaves with spell ADPS. Beams are getting smaller increases than single target spells this year (same as in ToV), meaning the mob thresholds may increase at 120. Tantor specifically will pad Beam DPS because of tantorlings, but if your strat is not to kill them, assessing Beam viability ought to exclude them.
I noticed that the magician PBAE did get the 37.8% upgrade that most single target dds got. Does the increase make it plausible for large piles of mobs now or is it still too far behind for magicians?
Not really, unfortunately. The breakpoint vs Fire Beam has decreased slightly (from 14 to 13 on my spreadsheet, but scenario dependent), but the breakpoint vs Magic Beam has increased slightly (from 19 to 20, again variable dependent) because of the additional ranks of Thaumaturge's Focus. Conceivably there could be a scenario with that many adds to AE, but it doesn't appear we'll get anywhere close in ToL raids (nor do any CoV, ToV, etc. raids have a use case for it). This is especially true given the 25' AE range, which, in conjunction with the high threshold, makes it very difficult to confirm in real time that you're hitting a sufficient number of mobs. Even in scenarios where it could be useful, I imagine most would opt to save the spell slot given the recast + heightened execution risk it presents for a relatively poor damage gain as is.
