I started a new wizard to try some different configurations with mercs. the damage caster merc. this is the bomb for ae lovers. at lower levels, you can pull a horde of blues. at 7 i was pulling the entire front yard of crushbone with the merc on passive then switching to ae burn. i was killing 10 to 15 at a time. as you get a little higher you have to switch to mostly green. and even higher you can do the low light blues to green. this is the best option for gathering loot. for xp, not so much. first there is the down time for respawns. and even if you find a place that can give you more than one pull, you will go through over half a bar of mana on each pull so there is the down time for mana recovery. healer merc. you can not tank even at 10 to 15. root and blast. snare and blast. totally pointless. tank merc. this is the best option for xp and surviveability. up to level 50 your little merc tank can hold 3 to 4 even to yellow mobs and survivve long enough to kill them all. in addition it is doing damage as well. this is the go anywhere, do anything option. sebillis, sol-b lower guk, velks, anything you want to do. The wizard is also the best class for indicating at what point players start falling behind in power compared to the monsters. 43 to 45 for the wizard. After that point you become progressively weaker compared to the monsters each level you gain. Example, at level 43 you get a spell called conflaguration. it does 900 dd damage. up to and through level 55 you do not get another spell that does even as much damage. You gain damage through focus gear with the defiant armor but your core damage does not increase after level 43 for the next 10 or more levels. you do get 8 or more new damage spells, but they are not as strong as the one you get at level 43. For the first 43 to 45 levels you can shave off a little over a third of a monsters hitpoints with a single spell. you are a damage dealing god. you still need to watch the aggro meter which governs how often you can cast it. By level 55 you are chipping away at mobs 3 and 4 percent at a time with your best damage spells. You are still doing more damage than a melee class who is chipping away 1 percent at a time but you no longer "feel" powerfull. now the fights have gone from lasting less than a minute to lasting more than 3 minutes even for yard trash. your aggro still flies to the top when you cast, but the damage is just not there anymore. and this is the best damage class in the game for a single fight. i say single because a necro can sustain a higher damage rate in an xp grind than a wizard can by stacking dots then medding while they work. you are better off with a necro in a xp group than a wizard and the opposite in a raid.
These levels were the age of AE's and kiting before SOE decided they didn't want us playing that way and stopped giving us upgrades. Grab your ae snare and kite for mobs, best AEs are Pillars, they may do less damage than 1 single cast of Conflag but they land on upto 4 mobs at the same time. So will Pillar of Frost - level 51 spell you can do 755 on upto 4 mobs at the same time. The wizzy isn't lacking that much if you play how the game was played 12 - 14 years ago.
i played 10 years ago. i remember doing the quest to get ice commet. i remember going into lower guk and terminating the froggies at half life with one spell. that is how it was played 10 to 12 years ago. now it is just chipping away like a melee class after mid 50ish. The hitpoints on the mobs soar, the damage mobs dish out soar, the wizard damage spells dont start going up after level 43 untill after 55. i am sure there is some formula they are following that controlls the dps any particular class can dish out. i am sure it is working as intended. What soe missed in their perfect formula is...fun. great world, great classes, but they turned the fighting into something bordering mental pain. not challenging, just tedious. dungons and dragons online had the best fighting action in my opinion. star wars galaxie had the worst. a button smashing spam fest. rofl, it was horible. EQ2 was like the top end of eq, sawing wood with a hand saw. WoW is mindless whack a mole but soe could learn some lessons from them on how to get people to group. gona make a few more classes and play them to 55. but i parked my 87 main for the last time tonight. not going to waste one more hour sitting in HoT begging for a group. Not going to solo light blues for miniscule gains. not going to grind a few thousand aa's so i CAN solo something more than light blues. great job on the first half of the game with the mercs and defiant armor. loved it. but the high end game was built for grouping and there is very little of it going on.
wizard is fun at any level. in the lower levels, wizards can quad / AE very well. even with just a merc. ( tank then switching to healer as mobs get harder ) at higher levels kiting is best. our snare / root becomes very good and nukes are more powerful. at the high-end / high AA wizards have become very good. we can fade and have powerful nukes able to solo very well. though wizards cannot solo quite as well as necro / mages, imo wizards are more fun. mercs and defient have made the lower levels easy to progress through. as for groups - yes the old "pick-up" grouping is kind of rare - a lot of folks can easily box now or using mercs. - join a guild. in-guild groups are very common. the game has gotten a lot easier. - gear is easy to aquire , plat is easy to accumulate , and xp / aaxp has been greatly boosted. the new zones and may features have greatly made the game a lot easier. as well as provide lots of tasks / new things to do and see. the devs have seemed to have taken a bit of kindness to wizards and hope they continue to help us out. I still play wizard - my only toon after 10 years. and look forward to what devs design for the game. and my class.
Up until 55-60 all class abilities are moot. Your tank merc will take you to the 50s, a tank + healer merc will take you to 65+. You don't really need to do anything past aggroing mobs. Heck, you can even AFK your way to 50s and 60s outside of moving to the next zone.
The op made some good points. Nostalgia is a killer! I loved see Conflagration wipe out a giant chunk of a monster, or 3-4 mobs fall from that last pillar in CS or Maidens Eyes. Ice Comet was a bomb but criting Strike of Solusek for ~10k was a jaw dropper. Instants came and enemies just hit the floor, grab a strong magic focus and you would eat thru mana and enemies HPs. Twincasting made us virtually unkillable in SoD and well in UF even again in HoT. For wizards the class and the game evolve and it needs to do so again. I keep up with these forums, how the class is played and it still for the most part, seems the same as it has been since SoD. The splash AEs and Self Immos added some flair but never took off, same with a few other useless spell lines. Havoc added some chance but it still looks like rotate your big nukes over and over. I've been pushed from MMORPGs and back onto the consoles. Keep in mind you are paying far more for EQ than you are for any console game. (40+12x15= 220 vs 60 a pop, even less if you are patient and buy used, and after 2 years of EQ, you've purchased a new console, some games and an online sub) God of War for example, you start off weak and get stronger with more hps/magic/weapons/skills. Sequel comes out and its the same thing but at least there is a hard restart so you have to earn the stuff again, inc nostalgia from the first game you loved so much. The same holds true to most games, Mass Effect, Infamous, Uncharted, Resident Evil, Mario, Mario Party, Bioshock, Xenoblade series and even the Maddens. With EQ, and many other MMOs, there is no restart and you use the same actions over and over and the spells are mindlessly renamed into some sort of ethereal soandso. Its ultra monotonous, no nostalgia, no reworking your skill set to get better, nothing innovative or not gimmicky. The devs have an insanely large set of spells/skills a wizard can use and learn to figure out how they would apply in the new expansion but they always run into the cycle a couple nukes and let the player get his loot because in the end thats all EQ is. A slightly graphically superior diablo 2 loot fest with a whole buttload of chat options. EQ, however, has one edge over almost all of the console games in that you can make some real friendships that last. So the new wizard, especially the truly noob wizard, won't see how the class evolved over 15 years of play. The new wizard will see a stale form of its greatness.
