I always heard that a necro was the most survivable solo, but I see that the conjuror is just like a "Good Necro". I have other characters above lv 40 thru 65.. Shadowknight, Necro, Ranger, Paladin, Beastlord, Assassin, plus 2 lv 100 & 120, Bruiser & Guardian...I have some experience anyway..'My post is about my new Conjuror. 1) I'm trying to figure out the best spell order to use, taking into consideration first, roots, and slow-down spells to start, then the most damage spells..But I'm having a hard time with the best order. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears... 2} IS it worth it to equip a ranged weapon?. Or should I just use my spells to get their attention?
Equip a ranged weapon. It has stats, it does a little damage. I would ignore the roots pretty much for most foes. Go right into your damage. The sooner it's dead, the less it can hit you. Buff your pet, send it in, throw your swarm pets if you have them yet, then spell cast. There is no One True Spell Cast order. It's gonna vary based on the quality of your spells (Apprentice, Journeyman, Adept, Expert, etc.), your stats, and the stats on your gear. the order to cast in is based on spell efficiency, i.e., delivering the most damage possible over a short bit of time. I use an Excel spreadsheet to calculate spell efficiency. If you don't have Excel, use Google Sheets (free!). Only change stuff in the green cells. The yellow cells are doing the work for you. Open your Knowledge Book in game. Examine each spell to get the values for the sheet. If the spell is instant-cast, I put in a "Cast" value of 0.0001. In the AOE column, leve it blank if it's not an AOE, but put in a 5 for a blue AOE and a 4 for a green AOE. I don't bother to calculate what my pet is doing, it always goes first. To figure out how much damage swarm pets are doing, I use ACT and a guild hall training dummy, and average the min and max damages from three or more attacks by that one swarm pet. Once you have all the info in there, sort the rows by decreasing (Z-A) Spell Efficiency (Col L). That's pretty much your casting order. Some things will be used differently in different situations, of course. You aren't rigidly bound to the cast order. When a spell high on the cast order refreshes, go back and use it again immediately.
Wow. Thank You for taking the time with me. You're obviously an intelligent guy. I used to play the original Everquest MANY years ago..I like this one better. The original, if you got killed, EVERYTHING you had, will be where you got killed. ALL your armor, everything that was in your bags, {if I remember that right, and I think your money that you had on you. It was a very tough game. This version is much better. Now, as for the spell, what I do is, usually put a slow-down spell or root first (but I'll take your advice), then I follow with my most damaging spells, and continuing left to right, I keep my AoE spells last, all the way to the right in case I Aggro the area. The "monkey wrench thrown in" here, is some spells time to cast, and there's the recast delay. That's what complicates things a little.. Lately, I've been using an easy area with Green conning enemy and telling my little golem buddy just protect itself so I can build my melle skills with my Bo.. This Conjuror has Monk-like moves with the Bo, and I swivel my view to watch him from the side fight. It's cool to watch. I usually don't operate this way. All my other guys, like my Shadowknight, Ranger, Assassin, just to Kick *** as fast as possble. My Shadowknight with a Mercenary were taking on Orange conning enemy, 3 at a time, and going thru them like a Hot Knife thru butter. Just this Conjuror I made yesterday is now level 20. That's including switching back-n-forth farming new wood, roots, stone, with my tailor, and jeweler, "suiting up" this new Conjuror. Sorry for the long post, and thanks again.
Old lady, in this case If you are pulling a named mob that's pretty tough, then you'd root, nuke, back up two or there steps, root, nuke, back up,etc. That's just standard mage. As a pet class, you can throw your pet at a mob and keep it off of you. Before you pull, cast your stoneskins (level 40+), Vehement Skin on the pet and Stoneskin on you.And Plane Shift (lv. 65+) to buff the pet. As the fight progresses, use Heal Servant (lv.2+) and Master's Intervention (death save, lv. 48) as needed to keep the pet alive. Other than that, you throw your damage spells in order of the spell efficiency. If you are likely to grab aggro you don't want, skip Earthquake (your blue AOE) or Unda Arcanus Spiritus (an AA ability from the Conjuror Prestige tree), but you can still use the green AOEs (Ice Storm lv. 2+ and Shattered Earth lv. 25+) .
@Sigrdrifa I'm still looking at this spreadsheet, as well, and have a couple questions: What is CB%? Do we put in "Recovery Time" or is it a constant 0.001? Where do you get the information for the spells? As an IT guy who has done a ton of complicated spreadsheets, how did you arrive at your formulas? Also, as a gamer, those numbers just look absolutely ridiculous. 1 TRILLION 205 billion 252 million 077 thousand 142!!! Wow, that's some damage inflation that cannot be sustainable. Personally, I think they should adopt non-numeric balloons with different colors to indicate damage: Whiff! (miss) Biff! Boff! Bap! Whoa! (et al., eg.) I mean, they could use different names, but you get the idea. Instead of character stats, that literally mean nothing (I want someone to picture a single pencil... now picture 5 pencils, then 10 - and now one billion pencils, I mean actually picture them and not in the aggregate, but each individual pencil up to a billion - as far as we know, it cannot be done). These numbers are tremendously stupid and really need to be scaled back. But, from a forum post I've read, the person managing DBG (or somebody in a position of authority, not sure who) has stated that they are committed to keeping the numbers... but, I digress. I took a 30 minute break to write python code to count 1 billion, wow - at first, I was piping the results, real time, to a text file, but somewhere around 600,000,000, the file was 6GB in size. So, I then tried an echo/print to command line and it was going fairly slow. So, I finally just set a start time, printed it to command line, did the while loop and printed the difference between start and the final number; my system just finished counting to 1 billion and it took 58.09864 seconds. Now, I have other things going, but dang, that's a long time in computing terms. To get to 1 trillion, that would take roughly 1 year, 329 days and 10 hours. Now, my code is not optimized, even though it's simple, and I have X11 running, so the system is not at all configured for number crunching... but damn, that's insane. How in the hell does DBG have the tech overhead to crunch trillions in damage in any given single fight, let alone hundreds, if not thousands, of fights at any given time? Waaay off topic, now. So revenons à nos moutons; I'm interested in the math used to create the sheet
An "IT Guy" LMAO! It never ceases to amaze me that the math nerds that created all things IT do not understand that the end goal is complete automation. LOL! No wonder this world is so messed up...math nerds still exist......funny as hell!!! "my code is not optimized for math??????? What the hell is it optimized for? It probably took so long because you were trying to pound a square peg through a round hole....boo!
The response above, while seemingly in depth and well thought out, is absolutely outdated and wrong. THERE IS MOST CERTAINLY A CASTING ORDER .....for every class that I've ever played, including healers Those types of spell efficiency spreadsheets were good for the early game, before AAs got out of hand. Now there are so many AAs that modify abilities and dictate the best order for casting those abilities. Example AA: X ability has a Z% chance to finish the reuse on Y ability. Would you cast X before casting Y, because it has a higher arbitrary number from a spreadsheet? NO, you'd cast Y, then X, then Y again. Planeshift - Consuming Inferno (or Fiery Annihilation if you don't have Inferno yet) - Communion - Elemental Blast - Blazing Avatar - Aqueous Swarm, that's your opener. Fill in with everything else, based on highest damage first. You can root/slow up front as well, to add in any debuffs those spells have and to give time before the mob reaches you.
Here's an ACT parse from a conjuror that actually knows how to play the class. As you can see, NONE of that spreadsheets "most efficient" spells are anywhere near the top damaging abilities.
Best thing you can do, Ask a few conji's on your server, most of the guys who've been playing the class long enough can tell what spells are worth casting, what spells are not worth even keeping on hot bar (because there's a few) You'll find vast majority of people are happy to help and answer questions.
CritBonus % Now it's a constant, rendered as a tiny number just so we don't have any division by zero happening. Used to be a thing. In game, open your Knowledgebook. Go to your Spells or Combat Arts tab, and then right click and examine each spell. I actually inherited this spreadsheet from an older version of these forums. Take that up with DBG. At east now they put commas in the numbers!
