1st question: The blue rune "warlords insight" says "protects against destructive planar energies" back when I was raiding a few expansions ago, that was critical.. is it still a thing? I'd rather equip "Rageborn insight", but then I'd lose that protection. 2nd question: When I was raiding a couple expansions ago, it was important to not just max out all your ascensions, but to have some good spells in all of them... as you might need to do ascension combos with them... is that still a big thing? I'm maxed out on my main ascension on my 9 main characters..but I'm not certain I have the energy to do it 27 more times ;-) Thanks.
The moon is not a planar zone, so you don't need to protect against planar energies. For blue runes, I currently am using: Celestial Rune of Embers, Ragebourne Insight, and Vindicator's Rune of Greater Mysteries I think this one is purchased in Sanctus Seru, but I am still working on my first cup of coffee). Generally you just need one Ascension, whatever is your favorite. Challenge raids need several Elementalists who can throw Brittle Armor and Glacial Freeze to debuff the mobs. I like Etherealist, because it seems to give me the most damage. I'm a Sage, so I can craft my own Ascension spell upgrades, but thus far I haven't worked on anything other than the Etherealist spells. The Ascension combos still add whatever they add to the fight, but my intuition is that the boost isn't enough to worry about it excessively (I have not sat down with ACT and figured out how much extra damage you get). I am pretty sure that the combo damage hasn't scaled up any. I do have the ACT plug-in that calls Ascension combos, and if I have time and am not in the middle of a DPS chain, I usually will try to toss whatever Ascension spell it's calling for.
Thanks for your always helpful reply. Do you ever level up another ascension? It seems a waste to not do it, but I don't even use my favorite ascension that much, as I'm not raiding at this time.
I raised all mine to 20 basically because I expect an ascension level increase next expansion and having them all maxed seems like it might be helpful. We might not get an ascension level increase and having them maxed might turn out to be not helpful, but raising them while I adventured was basically a passive thing so I expended no real effort.
That Celestial rune of embers.. do I have to do the entire CD timeline to unlock to get that? I know nothing about CD, I skipped that expansion.
It can be purchased from Jaena Billowmix in Myrist, the Great Library, I don't know if there were prerequisites. I got mine as a reward from the Achievement "Triumph: Unmeltable!", which requires you to defeat all the named bosses in Doomfire: The Molten Caldera [Raid] flawlessly. I expect you could two-group the zone these days.
they can be 2 grouped now, if you can catch a guild group doing them, or tag along with folks. I know occasionally there will be a PUR on HOF for this, every couple of months or so.
I"m currently on IOR, where there is a dearth of guilds of any kind. I've still to decide if I want to move any characters to a 'real server'.
