For raiding: Classic: Wizards suck in Classic due to resists and having no real gear to boost their mana pool Kunark/Velious: They get better in Kunark and Velious with better stats and focus effects Luclin: By Luclin Wizards are kings of the raids. They'll top parses on almost every fight except for a couple that are melee oriented where you'll see Monks and Rangers winning. PoP/LDoN: In PoP and LDoN Wizards will start to struggle slightly again, but are still the highest most respectable caster DPS. Typically you'll be around the top of parses, maybe sitting behind Monks, Rogues, and maybe Rangers on most parses. Edit: A lot of this has to do with how fast raid targets die in PoP. In Luclin you can absolutely blow out your mana pool across a single boss fight in Ssra, Seru, or VT and as such dish out a ton of DPS. In a lot of the PoP fights raid targets die before you can truly flex your mana pool. Velious is kinda like Luclin in that respect. For grouping: Wizards still have their place, but they'll be outshined by a mage in most group content. If you're a raid wizard then it won't matter by the end game of Agnar because your Time loot will allow you to sustain any group content without causing downtime if you understand efficiency and spells. I currently have a Wizard at 65 and fully Time geared with LDoN augs/etc on Phinny and I'd be happy with this character locking where it is, because Wizards really start to suck for a bit after PoP. You wouldn't have to worry about that on Agnar tho. TLDR: Wizard for Raiding, Mage for Grouping
This is utterly incorrect. As a wizard you should be topping parses on both dragons, Innoruuk, Yael and do well on CT as well. Sky is awful, but that holds true for all casters.
I'll edit my post. I didn't start my wizard until just before Luclin so I was trying to recall what our Wizards said about classic/etc and clearly I got it wrong. Think I was probably putting too much emphasis on all the I heard about Sky. Edit: Apparently you can only edit your post briefly before it locks or something. Idk, but either way I stand corrected.
On the bright side, when you go back to Sky for random epic stuff in Kunark, with level 60 and Lure spells you get to cast spells on most fights and not just share the Eating DTs role with enchanters.
This is correct. I dont' see where people get off that Wizards are just TERRIBLE in classic, must be P99 people who have no idea. Yes, In Classic your dps as a wizard IS more resist dependent than other expansions and yes it is possible that you will get some bad rolls and do terrible dmg, but that was never the norm for any of the wizards I ever raided with. My wizard frequently topped the parse on Naggy, Vox (Vox is closer cause Mages do better, but they pull agro and die 90% of the time) and Innoruuk. CT is very Iffy but you can do well with Magic nukes. As he said Sky is horrible for all casters. Kunark was actually the worst expansion for my wizard, The resists were high and the fact that most of your spells come in draught/lure form instead of just big nukes (except the 1 big fire nuke, but its limited in use based on resists and cast time because you have to dodge a lot of AE in Kunark). Come Velious+ Wizards should top most if not all parses except the few mobs here or there that are resistant. PoP Wizards do great because the mobs have almost 0 HPS and a good wizard, with a tank worth their salt, can nuke the living crap out of the mob without running OOM and top the parse fairly easily. Wizards are amazing in raids, probably one of my favorite classes and as a raid leader the one I would take most of other than Cleric (We generally ran with 8+ clerics and I would happily take 8+ wizards as well. Grouping they are not quite as uber, but the are serviceable especially Luclin+. But I would be prepared to make your own group most of the time.
On the dragons in Kunark, wizards will do just fine in raids. If you stick to draughts and lures, your damage will be mediocre. Rains work fine on all non-VP dragons, and even on some in VP. The only people who out DPS'd me and wizard guildmates I trained were monks on the fast melt downs. VS you need lures usually, and that little weak dragon in TD gets draughts as he is too small to rain on with out killing your self. It all comes down to knowing each targets weak resists and where to stand to be effective, while keeping your resists high.
Yea, of course wizards do "fine" in Kunark, I was just saying of all the eras from Classic > PoP Kunark is probably the lowest point for wizards, just because while Draughts are fast cast, they don't make up the dps like your bigger nukes in classic do. Doesn't mean wizards are bad, or even mediocre, they are still good but they only get better from Velious on out. The biggest problem with VP is dodging the AE's. Getting that rain/nuke in between the dodge is a critical skill for wizards, if you cannot Rain, Nuke, Dodge properly you will not enjoy VP very much.
Excepting Hoshkar, you can pretty much stay in AE range on all of the VP dragons with bard songs & decent gearing. We would put up some monster (wiz) parses on some of the VP dragons. Hoshkar you dodge, and can still put up some good parses with draughts x2 before a dodge if you were fast. On fast burns, ie VS and Trak with higher #'s, you'd move down the parse list. Mnk/SK were top parsers in burns (Rogs a distinct bit behind), but Wiz didn't do bad. If Trak was a bit longer of a fight, you could move up - had more than a few top 3 parses on Trak for example. VS as resistant as he was, you'd crack top 10 with just lures, but fight was to fast to do much more than 3k dmg. PD was always a pretty bad fight due to resists. Classic - You should be #1 or #2 on anything except CT (can still do well), and PoSky.
Yea, I just wanted to make the point that wizards are never "bad" on TLP servers, not at any point on the server. There was alot of talk on the first page, from who I assume are P99ers trying to impart knowledge that is incorrect, that Wizards were considered sub par or bad, and that is just 100% false on TLP servers. Wizards are one of the top classes in 5 out of 6 expansions on Agnarr, and they are above average/good on 1 (Kunark IMO). Far as VP goes, I always dodged Hoshkar, Nexona (Mostly just to conserve healer mana), and Xygoz (No fun being stunned half of every dps round). Depending on my healer that night I might dodge Druushk or at least partially. Gear all depends on guild. I guess if your in a LC guild that funnels gear to wizards you could stay in for a lot more, but in a DKP guild the gear gets spread around quite a bit more and it is harder to get those max stats your looking for to be able to stay in for every AE. I know, even as the top DKP earner during this time period in one of the top 5 guilds, I never had the gear on my Wizard to just sit in for every single AE, and bards all depends on the guild, if your guild has 6 bards sure you will probably get one, but if they have 2-3 or as we had at the time, it was harder to get them down into the Wizard groups vs the tank/melee groups. I also parsed well on Trak, but it all depended mostly on the luck of how quickly tanks got ported. If the tanks stayed up for a decent amount of time I could nuke more and get up on the parse, but if the tanks got ported left and right dying was a possibility from agro or you would have to slow DPS. Too many variables on Trak to really say who is going to parse top imo.
Haha yea, as a wiz, if you wanna make top parse, you gotta ride the agro pony on Trak. Tons of fun. With some experience, you get a good idea of agro gen and fight length and can generally come up with an optimal fairly-safe spell weave. I opened with a rain+2x concussions, and went from there if I recall. I never got to experiment as much as I wanted with rain+jylls in the mix - the main problem was having to move closer to trak to hit jyll's and back out to rain, but you do get some interesting dps values from jyll's+draughts with no rains on him (one guy who did this consistently made top 10, albeit never in top 5). I suspect i"d probably lean towards an opening rain, then moving in to do jyll's+draughts nowadays. Jyll's loses you some efficiency (mana isnt a problem though), and it's your fastest casting dmg, so it has a use in certain circumstances. Hoshkar - yea, dodge, the trick is 2x draughts on each dodge, very tricky, timing is so close. Nexona was the most fun, resist rate is decent with a ton of FR, enough that I would just dispell (or have a bard dispell) the dot in the top slot and stay in. Didn't take much healer mana if you did that. Could put up 15-18k dmg parses. Xygoz - yea, a bit of a pain, totally not worth it unless your resists are the best possible. Still can do pretty well if you time your rains and in/out right. Druushk - for some reason his ae seemed to land more than I expected, so yea, bit of a mana drainer, but not too bad from what i remember. Anyways, good stuff in your post Trev, I do miss my wiz on Ragefire, was a blast.
Heh I dunno how fast your Trak kills went but an avg trak kill for our guild was about 40 seconds depending on ports (we had a policy that we only did raids the "correct" way that was intended by developers so we never pulled him to the port room like so many do, always fought in his room) So for us since the fight was only about 40 seconds I would just run in and go ham cause at 40 seconds your looking at most what 5 or 6 nukes depending on if ya resist the dot or not. For our raids I eventually just settled on going all out with Sunstrike cause it was fairly reliable on him and when you only have 40 seconds finding range for Rain just took too long, by the time you got that range exact without nuking yourself (Cause his placement was always slightly different) he would be half dead or more. So for us, just running under his belly and spamming Sunstrike would get me in top 5 most of the time, unless that first SS pulled agro, which it did probably 25% of the time...and then I was a dead wizard...but that's the game you play with Trak! Thing is its all so relative to whatever guild your in and how fast they do content and how much DPS they have. If the fights last a little longer and your able to nuke more then your dps goes up to a point of running OOM then you lose DPS, if the fight is super short then we tend to fall short of Monks/Sks as you said. I honestly think most time names are the perfect length of Wizards. You can nuke enough to get to 20-40% mana, but you don't generally go OOM on most mobs. I would argue time may be one of if not the best for Wizard's parses. I dunno, that's debatable I guess.
The difference between a well played wizard and one that isn't is astronomical. For instance, you wouldn't imagine the amount of wizards I met that didn't know you could nuke while your rain waves are going off...which if your not weaving correctly your dps will be SIGNIFICANTLY less than a correctly weaving Wizard. And lets not get started on Conc use...You cant Conc between 10 nukes...you will die. The key to a good wizard imo: Correct Spell Choice (You have many more nukes than other classes and each has their place and time of use) Mana Management Weaving Positioning (This is SUPER important for weaving, especially on belly dragons but also on dodging ae) liberal conc use (depending on the mob and which tank was tanking I could go from 1 conc every 2-3 spells to 2-3 concs between EACH nuke) The wizard is actually a fairly involved class to play if you do it at a high level. People play a wizard to just stand up throw a nuke and sit down but those people are just bad wizards. A correctly played wizard actually takes quite a bit of knowledge of hit boxes and spell ranges to get right and I knew a lot of people who just were not adept enough at those things to play a wizard at high efficiency. Furthermore, Knowing which spell to use on which mob is SUPER important. If you start a fight with the wrong nukes memmed (say you have fire memmed on a fire immune mob and you need Magic up) your dps will plummet as you change your spells out. The wizards we had had a wizard channel where we would always remind each other which spells work on which mobs (this is very evident in places like NToV where Spell choice can change almost every single mob sometimes).
The length of the fight varied a bit, this was on Ragefire in TL (I was a bard for Phin in this era), if we had a 4am spawn turnout and fight length would be alot different than a primetime spawn. Mostly agro limited regardless, some fights were really short, as you said, it was like, 2 rains and 2-4 draughts, some fights were a bit longer. I'd look for some of my Ragefire screenshots with the parses in chat for fight length, but it's all on my other laptop. I probably had alot more time to experiment on Trak than most other wizards - we were getting 7-8 kills a week instead of 1/week, and yea, we always fought at his spawn. That's part of the fun - rushing the lair! I think some of our classic fights were a better length, I remember a couple of off-hours Vox and Nags where the fight was timed perfectly for going oom, or where I'd med a few ticks under the dragon to get that last rain in. Classic mana pools usually turned into 10-12k Vox/Nags at most, and Kunark on Nexona or Druushk was probably 15-18k max. One of the genuine surprised I had going into TLP servers is just how strong SK's are. In retrospect, the ingredients were all there, but they're just a great class. The other was just how fun wizzies are (altho my p99 experience with my wiz there on raids gave a glimpse) on raids. Memnarch - It's not a complex class really (you really just nuke things), but it's putting it together well that makes it fun. This is why most raid wizards will say raids are a blast (and groups suck). Trevlon summed it up pretty well, although I'd probably use the term fight length rather than mana management, but it's almost the same thing. You can almost work backwards as a wizard using your mana pool on optimizing dps if you have a rough idea of the fight's length, the limit after that is agro. Viola, you have an idea of the spell weave, and the rest is really just fine tuning. Without agro meters being in, you just really need to develop a good grasp (with some trial & error) on where you're at on an agro list, and learn how to ride it without being an over-agroing schmuck. You also don't want to just blow through a mana pool on a long fight - when I knew a fight was going to be long you'd just start with pure rains & sitting on med ticks, if your mana was lasting a bit better than the mob's hp, you could mix in a draught or such, or worry less about med ticks. Anyways, figuring this out is part of the fun (as is binding in fear during Kunark till you get the golem!). PS - If you really want to top parses in Luclin or such as a mage or wiz, you'll want some necro buddies or boxes in your group - pretty amazing what you can end up doing on some fights with mindwracks going. PSS - Flux Staff is amazing.
While I agree, its still a question of how many resists you get with your mana pool. Sky wizards are just sacrifices and I cry every time about it :')
Technically, but I was plagued with more resists in sky even while using the correct spells on targets. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly but sky was just annoying in general.
Yea, it still sucks, but I'd dump my mana on the mobs that I could land spells on, and med for the ones I couldn't. Ie, lower level trash on gorg isle, first horsies pre-split on pegasus, easier spirocs on spiroc, pre-split bees, heartsbane/spirits/sphinxes on drake isle.
