My lev 91 casters are getting demolished by the J5 wiz merc

So finally breaking into VoA on necro/mage, taking a crack against mobs in Arghath. The lev 91 pet with EM14 and max pet AA can tank 1-2 dark blues at a time fairly ok. Against 2 those 8k swings get spiky & if I don't pop an AA timer there's a chance he could drop. 3 dark blues would destroy the 91 air pet.

Anywho, so I noticed the mobs have quite an annoyingly large hp pool. While I could do HoT and UF with just cleric merc, these guys were takin a while longer so I decided to try a j5 wizard and Mother of God....it's like Saruman on steroids. My dps casters have raid gear and 1800 well-placed (I'd hope) AA, and they stand no chance against Megatron Wizard merc. I killed with it for about 45min at 20-30 seconds/mob and it's mana never dipped below 80%

The downside is that it rips aggro on burn. Well that's if you START him on Burn. Instead I like on some DoTs and switch to burn at mob 60%ish health and it's face is going to be melted off by Terminator Merc of Doom in like 20 seconds and merc won't rip aggro then

This is fun but it's makin me sorta re-think my class choice. Seeing how difficult it will be to compare to that kinda dps, I should have rolled casters with more utility, like chanter/druid, but I guess I'd lose the pet tank, although the j5 merc tank can tank those, it just actually creates a mana concern for j5 merc eventually with chai pulls.

Well a merc isn't boxing itself and trying to chain cast on 2 characters at the same time to keep up.

Are the wizard mercs very powerful? Sure, but they can be beaten by someone utilizing their class properly.

Dump the box or just live with the fact that the robot merc is better than you.

Well yea the micro does totally matter if I'm trying like a named or have adds, and it can make things really hectic. But vs singles my dps would not be THAT improved without tabbing, due to major Mage mana constraints, and that's with raid lv 10 KotP and like 25ish ranks of the mana regen AA. So I'm killing about as fast as I can on singles. But yea robot wizards are very strong. I'll enjoy the help

Well, if you have 1800 AA's on your Mage your either lacking pet defensives or DPS AAs.

If your lacking DPS AAs, then of course the wizzy should demolish your Mage. Comes down to your boxing and your low on AAs. Are you burning Fire Core and Elemental Union whenever they are up?

Also, Argath mobs have pretty low HP when you consider the HP levels in the T4 zones.

Best thing to do is AA and level up, you will pull ahead.

Ah, actually yea his defensives are maxed, just topped off the last few ranks of the 91 Alaran knowledge AA's on him. But pet flurry and crit AA are I think only rank 18th-ish, so a few away. And frenzied and fortify need a few more, cause i prioritized "Hastened" in interest of grinding. Um, but I am fairly positive the sustained dps gain from these last few hundred AA are fairly small, and not going to close the gap on that Galactus (I'm gonn name my merc Galactus)

Crap! Fire Core! Forgot I need that. I stopped @ Heart of Flames. His lv 90 rII bolts still tax him quick though, can only bolt 1-2 per mob if I don't want to oom eventually (as in dont want to have to stop, assuming using gather potential ASAP)

you asking for more nerf there ?? , we got enough nerf lately...........
a good caster with the right aa's will destroy a caster merc ,

Naw no nerf, but it'd be nice if the tank could be brought to the wizard's level of performance. I have always wanted to try an enc/dru duo also someday, but don't like how the j5 tank is performing already :/

edit: I've seen big jumps in damage from grouping with level 100 dps classes, I'm sure I'll easily pass the wiz merc in the mid 90's, esp once I can strap on lev 95 gear

Trying to figure out a better dps rotation, does Scent of Terris stack with Malosinete? (icons do). Worth doubling up the debuff? I don't understand why spend points in malosinete AA when the lev 91 spell comes with +8% damage taken from magic. Question though, does this boost all inc spell dmg or just those with magic type, aka necro's mortal coil line?

Lastly, is there a concrete formula to how many call of many "hits" you get per pet? Usually with just Skeleton crush spell + Garg +2 Caster's pets I get 3 hits on CoM, usually 1-2 critz in these so 8-12k damage fast cast, fairly cheap mana-wise. But obviously when I use swarm AA's I get more hits, but sometimes these are really low. Does this work off Magic focus? (Head)

Malo AA is very hard to resist (-200 resist check), and it doesn't interfere with the global refresh, so you can start casting immediately after it, or if you cast it in between other spells, 1.5 seconds of its' cast time comes out of the global refresh anyway, when you couldn't be casting a different spell. It is also a prerequisite for Wind of Malosinete, which is unresistable. The AA, too, makes it easier to land regular spell malo, with the damage mod, if something is being really resistant.
Regular malo only boosts magic-based damage, so your blade spells, necro magic dots/tap dots/mana taps, et cetera.

For your many line, raidloot is a better resource to find out what spells actually do than lucy (or in game ). If you click that link and search for "of many" it will bring them all up- you can see how the Many nukes have changed at the same time, for that matter.

Yes, Scent stacks with Malo.

There was a problem with Wizard Mercs using spells that wizards don't normally get and one of them was really overpowered. No idea if it was ever fixed or what level mercs it affects.

I play a enc/dru duo with tank and healer mercs. I'm very happy with the mercs' performance at 91+. I usually do content a few levels below me (for faster kills and less swearing), and the mercs are right about where they need to be.

I've been playing mostly with melee DPS mercs and I'm a bit underwhelmed by their performance. I'll have a swap to caster DPS and see how they compare.

My group consists of a lvl 85 bard playing war march and storm strike, most fights are vs level 84-86 mobs in Pellucid Grotto.

level 83 A5 Melee DPS Merc - ~700 DPS (belonging to mage doing ~1800 DPS, which could probably top 2.5k with more attention)
level 85 A5 Melee DPS Merc - ~800 DPS (belonging to bard doing ~800 DPS)
level 88 J5 Tank Merc - 1800 DPS

I'm using the apprentice mercs on those due to being on F2P accounts. I'm not sure how much better a J5 merc would work out.

J5 is insanely better. Comparing the two is like comparing a naked toon versus a fully equip'd one.

Either way I would still think the wiz will blow the melee out of the water. Just /melody songs that boost spell damage instead.

One other thing to keep in mind. You're at level 83-85 on those apprentice mercs. If it works the same for apprentice like it does for journeyman, you probably noticed a huge increase in ability for the tank merc to handle things when it hit lvl 86. The 1st level of new level raising expansions, the mercs get insanely better.

So it might be worth leveling the bard to 86 and check the DPS of that melee DPS merc first before looking to invest in a gold account. (Least it's an idea since you're so close anyway).

It's one spell, and it hasn't been fixed. It isn't really OP though. Its a low damage spell line.

The level 95 mercs were made a lot better due to some player input in spell line ups. They can still be destroyed by a real wizard playing. As easy as it is to play a Wizard, you are going to suffer if your attention is split between other characters.

At level 91 that nuke screams in (after Malo AA) at 55k damage...I don't have access to log on though but I coulda swore it was non-crit. My mage with 4 pieces raid gear and maxed Nuke crit/damage will crit his lev 90 rII bolt for like 48k-ish? Regular hit is like 20-22k I believe. I guess that kind of lines up because pet is swinging at 1100 a hit, and gets off like 4-5 of these hits per round, plus Garg is used every pull and that hits for 2.2k-ish(?) quad hits. All totaled I guess it's competitive, my mage vs the merc. The necro it's hard to compare because singles wouldn't last enough for necro's sustained to really get rolling. I should run a parse I guess to really compare sometime though.

I know that my mage with me as a player on "BURN", as in popping DPS AA's and cooldowns, would beat the wizard mercs burn. However, even if these didn't require cooldowns (which it does), my mage would OOM doing this in probably 5 mobs or less. The wiz merc can sit on this setting indefinitely pretty much. The only trade-off is that he can't really sit on BURN all the time, cause his first 1-2 nukes will ALWAYS rip aggro then unless you let him sit there for a while idle on passive. In my opinion starting him in balanced and switching to burn is safest. A single blue con can kill him straight through the Reactive heals of a J5 cleric merc

Then you are talking about a different nuke than I am. Also, your nukes should be doing less per since you are a magician. A large amount of your dps is from pets.

I can do a printscreen, I know the mage numbers well since I've been grinding for like 10ish hours at 91 over the last 2 days

What skews it is that there is the lv 90 RII bolt spell that is significantly more mana and hits much harder than the 91 RII upgrade for some reason (I haven't checked successive bolt spells). I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, but that's why his personal DPS numbers seems high. He is also *very* geared, keep in mind I'm on FV...

We do not get a Bolt spell at 90, you get those at 86 and 91. We get a Spear, which does more DMG for a greatly increased mana cost.

SOE decided it would be kewl to increase the HoT Spear by like 300 points of DMG for around 600 more mana, making it incredibly draining on our mana pools.

They are 2 different spell lines. You are coming into a bad period for Magician's and mana costs. During HoT and Veil of Alaris we had one of the worst if not the worst mana recovery rates of any caster. A lot of which comes from our high mana costs on spells. It is merely something you need to power through.

When you hit 96+ you will get much more efficient Rain spells to use, a Spell mod rod and an increased Water form for mana regen. It is pretty much night and day in terms of mana usage.

Thanks for the input, as it happened I levelled up last night but I didn't really see much of an increase.

level 84 A5 Melee DPS Merc - ~750 DPS
level 86 A5 Melee DPS Merc - ~1k DPS

I ended up swapping to a lvl 86 healer merc and using my 88 druid as DPS instead (~4k DPS). At 86 the A5 healer can now cope with pellucid healing which they couldn't at 85 without ending up out of mana every 10 mins. Also as I'm not focusing healing myself I've been able to the mage DPS to over 3k as well.

With the druid and mage nuking I'm going to swap to a caster merc and fire pet and play more caster focus songs. Longer term my thoughts were to go with a full caster group and use a mage pet as the tank (although I would loose the bard melee dps in that case). Perhaps once I get the mage to 86 the new air pet will be the time to move that way.