Hello All, Was wondering at what point does quinting become worthwhile or better than charming/swarm charming? I am currently swarm charming gators in BD. I tried a quint kite in the new EW and it seemed like a lot more work to get them nuked down. I am guessing it is my gear and aa, but just wondering at what point does it become worthwhile to switch back to quinting? I like the more relaxed style of quinting for xp vs swarm charming. Here is my magelo, don't laugh! http://eq.magelo.com/profile/2359565
I'm not sure when it switches over, probably at 97, when you get Frosthowl Chill and are able to chain 4 AEs. Your gear only really matters for mana pool, savings and return. Since the AEs can't be focused for damage. For kiting I have a bandolier with my spec evoc aug and mana return procs. Damage procs just don't come close to tonic, aura or storm strike chip damage, so I'd rather have the mana for my NF clump. I like having my mobs be a bit more clumped than EW provides, SL was my favorite spot before T3 came out. Northern area, the Frostcoat braxi have a nice kiting area just below them. I'd kill the beetles while waiting on respawn, or gate back to GH if i was trying to maximize a lesson and wait on disc timers. Not having black wolf maxed and hastened is a major loss in dps and mana for kiting, those are some of the most important AAs druids have. Nature's Fury is really mana hungry for kiting, not sure if your gear would even support it to blow up a pack of 10. ITC and TC should be good to blow up a pack of 10-15, though.
Maybe I kite in a different area of EW, but I go there because its the only spot I know where I never run out of mobs and because I can get them so clumped up. I get mad when I have less than 10 mobs in my kite at a time. In Evantil and Shards Landing I eventually run out of mobs or have to start moving in large areas to find more. In EW I will always have 10-30 mobs in my kite ( because of the constant path-ers ) until about an hour or so later when I fade to med up.
My current spot is Corrupted Ahkevans in PoShadows. The room and respawn works out well for a 16 mob ITC cluster, then an 11 mob NF cluster, med up and repeat.
Sorry for the newb question, but with a 5 hit limit on our nukes, what is the reason for a 10-30 mob cluster?
Time. It takes time to gather up another 5 mobs. I easily have the mana to ae nuke down 10-30 mobs. If I have them all ready to go, when 5 are down, another 5 are being hit instantly. Factor in not all mobs die at the same time, due to crits, the occasional resist, etc, and at the end you may only have 1-3 out of the original "5" still getting hit. If you only pulled 5 then that is now wasted nuke-age. If you have 10+, then a new mob will be getting hit as previous ones die. I can typically get about 80 aas in a lesson burn solo quinting if I am in "super focused" mode with a little bit of set up. My spot in EW ends up looking like a rather nifty animal graveyard.
Thanks all for the help. I will give it another try this weekend after I grind out a few more levels of black wolf.
I get around 50 from my spot in PoShadows, so I gave EW a try and it does work out pretty well. A bit different from the usual 'try to find a safe area to kite in', instead try to find the area with the most roamers to keep your cluster well stocked with targets. And instead of using aura/SS chip damage to balance down hps, use it on the oldest mob in xtar to make sure snare doesn't wear off. Might be worthwhile using glyph of lost secrets to stretch out time before having to med, too.
Do note that the Spell Damage modstat does improve targeted AoE spell damage, and it does so at a favorable conversion ratio for most of them, since the ratio applies fully to every target the spell hits, and the ratio is higher to begin with on spells with slow cast times and/or long cooldowns (which TAoEs generally have). So if you're serious about squeezing out every bit of damage you can while quinting, you may find optimizing gear and augments for Spell Damage to be (mildly) useful if you aren't doing that already. On my level 90 druid the stat accounts for about 15% of the total damage on my rain spell -- not sure how that compares at level 100 though, as I'm not sure how fast the Spell Damage on gear scales upward.
I usually pull 5 mobs quick and start AEing them as I pull more to my stack. This will eventually ( usually ) pushes my targets ( of the AE nukes ) to other ones I pulled, as the 5 targets of the AE nukes sorta " reset " or have a chance to reset or something quirky I just accept as norm every time a new mob is added to the pile. By the time I get my 20 or so mobs, almost all of them can be down to the 50% or less if I am lucky. I continue nuking until I see the first group get to about 5%. I then pop my burn discs, twincast, crits, etc and lessons at the same time. My next ae nuke normally finishes off 5, and my follow ups will burn down another 10 in the opening 30-45 seconds of lessons. From there I have about 5-10 left all partly hit, ideally 50% or less and I continue to snag more with snare as I chain the 4 AE nukes. And yeah, I do the same thing with SS, to try to make sure the oldest mob dies first. If I am lucky I can find someone botting or afking in the hall to pop into my group so I can get LAAs to watch snare tick down. Other times its fun just to wing it and play the omgomgomgnukefastersnareisupanysecond game. Between CoB and EW, its easily been about 8k aas for me. I pretty much took out a lease in CoB during VoA and rented an apartment there. I miss there really being that "chaser" item CoB had with the purity augs. When I'd get to the point I don't need AAs, like now, I'd still go kite for an hour or so and just find some random guy hitting lfg in genchat to lettem soak up XP and check my corpses as long as they passed the purity augs to me. EW just doesn't seem to have that same chaser appeal CoB had. As always the most important buff for this is preincarnation. So many times I've had a slight hiccup because of the number of mobs stacked and its saved me.
I maxed out black wolf and group black wolf for my level. This still seems to be not quite the place for me. I got maybe 14-16 aa before I ran out of mana. I had a constant stream of 20-30 mobs, but just not enough mana to make this good for a lesson burn yet. Maybe there is a lower level zone with mobs with less HP that I can use instead of EW? Where was the last quint spot for 90-95 if anyone knows?
City of Bronze was my go-to quint spot before RoF. The area in front of the gate is pretty dense mob-wise while still giving a decent enough clearing to kite, but really anywhere will do. You just have to watch out for the few nameds that spawn out there. You can even grab Alaran citizens from inside ( not the guards ) to get some Tear evolving XP if that floats your boat. Other spots I am not personally familiar with but heard people say they do well in are Beasts Domain ( gorillas I think ) and Windsong ( typically in an instance, in the center ).
You should go get a Tweyne's Stone of Evocation, since you're on FV, it shouldn't be too hard to pick a piece of raid gear to stick it in. Also, try to pick up weapons and augs with mana return procs to use while kiting. EW is more limited by your mana pool, since there's no real limitation on the lower hp, low exp mobs. Going in with mana regen buffs and mod rods makes a big difference because you never want to hit ooc. Using NF might not be worthwhile because of mana penalty may remove more total damage from your pool. PoS is mob limited, but they're tougher and give better exp. It's more of a dps check on the X mobs available to get through respawn cycles with a chance for ooc while waiting., igving you a chance to use NF because you'll get back to fm anyways.
Thanks for the good info here. I currently quint in EW, although PoShadows sounds interesting. Some quick comments and questions: 1. From time to time, my clump breaks up and/or walks away from me and goes oor until I chase it down. If I stay closer to the clump, this kind of pathing seems less likely to occur but I don't understand exactly why the issue arises in the first place. 2. Preincarnation and the other DI-type aa line has never saved me from the clump. I'm guessing that this is due to a one-shot kind of deal so there's no check since my hp go from 100% to 0 instantly, but my sample size is small and I'd like to know if your experiences are different. The only time it seems to proc is when I don't need or want it to. 3. 80AA on a lesson burn seems incredible but doable. My aa's are maxed w/respect to wolf/crit/dmg/hastened twincast etc. and I barely get half that during my lesson so I guess it might make sense to guildlobby to allow discs to repop, although squeezing out every last xp point is not a huge thing for me. On the other hand, maybe I'm missing something w/respect to mob type and should try a new location. Mana is fine unless I use NF (and have no rod or voice) which I sometimes click towards the end of the lesson. I can see how NF plus spire plus wolf plus imptwincast could be really nice though. 4. When pulling mobs I currently use AA Ensnare so it takes awhile to get things going. Is anyone using ae root/snare? My thinking is that agroing a lot of mobs at once would speed things up, and cheetah might allow those mobs to be positioned and then ae parked or snared very quickly, but I haven;t summoned the courage to test this theory. 5. Shard info is really good. I can use some older gear while xping and keep my current shard line-up (mostly heals) as is. Thanks for that.
1. I'm 99% sure that is a Z-axis issue. You are levitating too high above your pack so they take stupid pathing to try to get to you. If you drop down they stop doing that. 2. I've been saved a few times from the pack, just a roll of the dice whether you do or not :/. 3. I do about 50 I think? I still have VoA quality raid gear so my Spell DMG isn't quite as high and my mana pool is lower. I could see 55-60? Maybe doable. 80 I think you would have to "banner burn" and port in a heavily trafficked area with IT running. 4. Originally in Windsong I used Wall of Wind exclusively for snaring. Now in EW my trains often exceed the hit limit on WoW - side note why is there even a bit limit on that - PoShadows I like for different reasons. PoS is more flexible in allowing you to kill 10-15 then med up. EW you always aggro more and then you get 3 that you weren't planning on killing down to 50% at which point you HAVE to finish them! (Atleast I feel like I do). Also PoS mobs drop a collectors set exclusive to them. Meaning you can stock up and sell full sets of the relatively 'rare' set or use them for alt AAs etc. I think I will end up putting my tertiary bind in PoS and Secondary in EW until I'm maxed on AAs. Variety makes it not get boring so quick.
Good luck on binding in PoShadows. Campfires and bind were disabled initially, then in a patch that was supposed to turn both on, only campfires were enabled.
... and even then, campfires were only enabled in the static zone. In PoS instances, you still get the joy of running back and forth to the quest dude to hand in items. A campfire would remove all that joy, so its not permitted.
[23521] Wall of Wind Classes: DRU/254 Target: Directional AE (300 to 60 Degrees) Range: 200', AE Range: 100' Resist: Disease -35 Reflectable: No Casting: 1s Duration: 2.2m (22 ticks), Dispelable: No, Allow Fast Regen: No Push: 18' Up: 2' Max Targets: 8 1: Increase Curse Counter by 9 2: Decrease Movement Speed by 75% Text: A diseased wind causes you to sneeze. So, Max Targets is 8. Learned something new myself. Then again, I don't think I have even cast Wall of Wind 8 times.
