I don't think that's true. Late in beta I retested that and filled all 97 slots on a dummy with the help of the test detrimental extension buff. Once I couldn't fit DoTs on anymore, I tried alliance. Didn't work. Your Malevolent Alliance Rk. II spell did not take hold on Test One Hundred Three. My guess would be that there's a buff/song window distinction for NPCs, but it already overflows excess debuffs to it by default or something, so 97 is the sum of Buff and Song windows for NPCs. That or the NPC song window isn't set to have any space. Unfortunately I don't think that test can be repeated easily in the future. That extender is only on the beta server, and one would think the DoT revamp will hit Necs before the next beta rolls around. Meaning no class will have enough stacking debuffs to fill the whole mob unassisted. The song window tag might've been an attempt to prevent a bloat to debuff slots, but I don't think it succeeded.
Can you point me to the place it's posted or suggested that the necro dot update will happen around March? I haven't seen any such thing posted by a DB employee, but it's certainly possible I've missed it. Then again, you didn't say March of what year.
But they also said: Yet here we are almost nine months later. Its unlikely that they revamp shaman, druid, shadow knight and necromancer dots all at once. We are probably looking a 2 classes revamped in January/February then the other 2 in March/April at best. Especially if they want to evaluate how the revamps impact shaman/shadow knights considering all the dot tools they have before then over a year after starting getting around to the class that should have been revamped first.
The spell could have been better, yes. I get this spell to work a lot on raids and when I have another wiz in group content. I would say 8 out of 10 cast yield a nuke. Considering it hits for 3 million damage and you can cast it almost five time vs. manaburn, granted there isn't any ADPS but it's still a ton of DPS vs the risk. What I hate is that Zerkers are out DPSing wizards by nearly x2
If you want to get into it, I guess we can. What twelve spells are you filling your spell bar with that you cast more times than 1/minute (and I cast Alliance way more than 1/minute if Claw refreshes cooperate)? Here I'll go first; I raid with : Cloudburst Claw Fuse Skyblaze Rimeblast Dicho Vortex ______ (Wildmagic sometimes) Twincast Gambit ______ (been loading Alliance here) Consequence Pretty rare to use both Cloudburst & Wildmagic in the same event, or even within an event so dynamically that I couldn't just /mems swap them, but I don't know what else I'd even put there.
I use this on both t1 events in EOK. Works wonders for quickly takeing out some of the more problimatic adds. I would go more into detail but progression is still goin on. Also works wonders on the golem in lady of life, the minies in Sul 2, and I'm sure will be a very nice tool in EOK t2. Spoilers throughout the history of Everquest there have been a number of mobs that spawn based on time.
So did some checking on if this spell is blocked or not when the debuff window is full. It lands and triggers for sure if the window is full. As far as if it will land when the mob is already stacked with the max 90some debuffs I do not know. The spell has proven to be very useful now that my initial concern has been wiped away. I will stop just short of saying it is nessesary for end game EoK raiding.
Alliance is an amazing spell. It requires a bit of coordination but as far as I can tell it always does the same amount of dmg as long as it is triggered. This is incredibly useful when not burning which is something like 80-90% of the time since they slashed our main disc in half by making twincast consume 2 counters instead of one. Ethereals take 3.5s to cast including GCD so a wiz casting nothing but ethereals will cast 5 spells during the 18s time period. This means with 3 wizards on a raid fulmination should always be triggering. Rk III. fulmination properly utilized raises wiz dps by 45k. It is a bit of a parsing shortcoming that this dps can't be detected but ultimately real damage is what matters not whats detected by a parser. Alliance and AoE are our the only weapons in our arsenal left against zerker dps.
If it can't be detected, how do you know the fulmination is actually firing? I watched this on tonight's raid. Wizard casts alliance, debuff icon appears on mob, watch as it ticks down from 18s to 6s, debuff poofs. So far, so good. Unfortunately there's no damage reported for it and no frostbound alliance is fulfilled message. Are we just taking this on faith?
[Mon Jan 23 21:21:58 2017] Wizard01 begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. III> [Mon Jan 23 21:22:00 2017] High Bokon Boromas becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:22:12 2017] High Bokon Boromas's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:22:50 2017] Hotpants begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. II> [Mon Jan 23 21:22:52 2017] High Bokon Boromas becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:22:59 2017] High Bokon Boromas's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:24:22 2017] Hotpants begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. II> [Mon Jan 23 21:24:24 2017] High Bokon Boromas becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:24:28 2017] High Bokon Boromas's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:43:51 2017] Hotpants begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. II> [Mon Jan 23 21:43:53 2017] Anashti Sul, Lady of Life becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:44:02 2017] Anashti Sul, Lady of Life's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:44:21 2017] Hotpants begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. II> [Mon Jan 23 21:44:23 2017] Anashti Sul, Damsel of Decay becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:44:29 2017] Anashti Sul, Damsel of Decay's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:47:07 2017] Hotpants begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. II> [Mon Jan 23 21:47:10 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:47:23 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:47:28 2017] Wizard01 begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. III> [Mon Jan 23 21:47:30 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:47:36 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:48:12 2017] Hotpants begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. II> [Mon Jan 23 21:48:14 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:48:23 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul's frostbound alliance is fulfilled. [Mon Jan 23 21:49:04 2017] Hotpants begins to cast a spell. <Frostbound Alliance Rk. II> [Mon Jan 23 21:49:07 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul becomes the target of a frostbound alliance. [Mon Jan 23 21:49:13 2017] Enraged Guardian of Sul has been slain by NotHotpants! <-- no fulmination, #sosad
If you're not getting a fulfilled message, check out your in-game chat filters to make sure you're seeing NPC spells