Hello and Thanks in advance for any help offered. Sorry for the length but though the info was essential. A quick review of me as a player. I have played Everquest for almost 14 years mostly solo. I looked at EQ2 when it was launched and didn't really like it then so didn't look again until the release of PoP. I now really enjoy it and left Everquest to concentrate on EQ2. I decided to try raiding and so after joining a guild and receiving advice I did my epic 2.0 ect to get ready to raid. The guild I joined asked me to achieve a certain level with gear ect which I did and when I spoke to the raid leader the standard was raised which annoyed me. I was advised to try joining Princess club's raid force, which I did. The amazing thing about that was the help and info they gave me almost doubled my stats within about 2 hours so I joined Princess Guild and have been happy ever since. I play a Necromancer he can be looked at the link below. I do about 2 to 5 billion DPS during raids but I know I should be doing at least 11 Billion. I have had help to achieve what I do atm but unfortunately the players who were helping have left the game for various reasons so I am stuck being mediocre when I want and should be so much better. I am informed that some of my Dps in raids is dependant on other group members buffs and I do seem to be put in groups without certain classes that would help improve my dps, I also know that the higher tier mobs in raids affect the amount of dps but even so I look at our top dps'ers and they don't have such a big drop in dps as I seem to have. https://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/3010789582166 I use snacks and rigged powerlinks and use intelect and thorn potions, I have obtained the upgraded Goblin earring. I put on the best tinkered temp adorns, Crit bonus ones to all my armour, health to waist and wrist's Potency to cloak and rings. I have the blue adorns that increase fervor and I have the adorn's from doomfire air and earth raid zones. I am a Thaumaturgist and have most all at GM (except septic strike II which is expert), and Anti-Life, Bloatfly and Desiccation at ancient. My spell rotation is :- Toxic Life(gm) and Skull focii as tank is pulling Unda, Rot Flesh Bloodcloud, elemental toxicity,. Bloodcoil Pandemic (this is to take advantage of toxic life's and Rot Flesh's buffs) then Mortality mark, Vampire bats, soulrot and lifetap Soul tap( all for the fervor buffs) Then spellbind and all my pet spells Blighted horde Awaken Grave Undead Horde, Vampirism Consumption (this I am told make's pet's last longer) I also cast Shockwave at some point when I have a longish cast time and keep that on cool down as much as possible I then rinse and repeat as I need to. I cast bloatfly and then keep that on cool down and cast my ascension spells when celestial triggers. If I don t feel I am getting enough triggers of celestial I will cast them. The main spells I concentrate on keeping in cool down are Soul rot, life tap, unda and my dots. I cast the pet spells as soon as they are available all through the fight. I don't tend to use the spells from Soul tap unless I need power which means I have cast Bloody ritual as well. I wait to cast my ascensions for celestial to trigger I don't know if this is the right way to use them some players say cast em fast other that I should only cast when celestial triggers and I don't perhaps use Soultap spells correctly. I just don't know. I have been experimenting with a small change, when celestial triggers instead of trying to get 2 ascension spells cast whilst it is active I cast the best one available then drop to casting my normal spells. I am unsure if this is better as I am one of the unfortunate ones as act doesn't work correctly and the act forums cant seem to identify my problem to solve it I hope this info helps you help me I want to be a better dps'er just don't have the knowledge. I also don't have much Plat to spend being a relative new player and infusing taking a huge amount my earned plat.
couple your orange rune choices are straight bad, couple are wrong. can look at mine, obviously ignore elementalist-relevant ones. https://u.eq2wire.com/soe/character_detail/863289248254 you need to critically think about what they offer to you personally as a thaum. to get u started, paragon and tainted blade do nothing. others left as exercise for you reforging is a mess. sounds like you listened to some bad info here without verifying what you were told (i'm gonna assume this best case scenario). you need 0 strikethru, more than 20accuracy isn't justified, why multiattack on pants. your recovery should be 100. troub gives some groupwide, but being in a casual guild i'ma guess you should just do 100reforge. your doublecast is too low i believe. target % depends on highest tier raid you do, but i think it's higher than 140 even for t1s if memory serves. u get doublecast from castingspeed overcap if you don't know. your spell rotation doesn't rotate, at least as you posted it, which is most likely the core of your issues. write it out on a piece of paper as a timeline with cast-times that include recovery, honest representation of your finger dexterity and mental lag. this wasn't meant as an instructional post, more of a jaded vent, but i guess it's actually a good-enough starting point seeing what i'm reading here. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/necro-spell-rotation.589819/#post-6556784 when do you cast your hat rune. when / how do you send your pet in. consumption is fine pre-pull as thaum as long as you cast it on 1count instead of 10count. bloodcloud, pandemic and vampirism aren't castable spells. bloodcloud barely on 3 targets. vampirism in a few cheeky situations for a fervor stack refresh when u can't lifetap. there are 0 situations where bloody ritual is castable today, you can remove it from your hotbar. mortality mark and consumption doesn't belong that early, you have way higher priority things until about 2min in. consumption isn't perfomance enhancement drugs - it doesn't extenze your dumbfires. you should validate all advice you receive, including mine. you want to put your rotflesh and spellbind under your dumbfires and soulburn, which means you cast them after since duration math. <edit> altho i just noticed you have extended duration of rotflesh so in your case that math is different, but still do that math. your priority is that both dumbfires full duration & soulburn land on top of rotflesh what is "Soul tap"? lifetap is the only justifyable spell for stack generation, i think needs saying. regardless, you need to know how long the fight is going to be as that completely changes priority of lifetap generating fervor stacks. calculate how long it takes u to get to 10stack in a high, medium and low priority setting of lifetap; measure vs duration of the fight remainder. evaluate which priority to choose for upcoming fight. if your ACT isn't working, forget about attempting to time your ascensions around Gate trigger. you'll miss it more than half the time and it'll occupy way too much of your attention you need to focus on your rotation instead. just cast your ascensions as if you don't have Gate, which pretty much means spam them at start and on cooldown. just make sure you, again, critically evaluate which ascensions are worth casting at all. last, but probably most important, question: who told you and why that your dps needed to be 11bil. based on what criteria. on what fight. that's neither a good or a bad goal, it's completely dependent on context as dps this xpac fluctuates in about 1x to 3x range depending on group and target matrix.
Key sentence and good advice. Jump into the mage channel in Discord and ask questions. There are a few bloated trolls but as a whole people will help you and you have the key benefit of having other mages watching to correct bad info. I'm not familiar enough with your class to give advice other than to seek out others that play it. Raid standings will supply you with successful guild names/servers, then you can do a search by guild to find players who play your class and might be willing to have a discussion with you directly. No matter how good you are there's always a trick or tip that can make a difference. I wish you the best of success in your travels, it's good to see someone with the passion to reach out to improve their enjoyment of Norrath. Now I have to find some asprin to help with the TL: DR headache I got from the first 2 posts.....
Thank you to both of you for the advice I will have to work through a lot of it ( some i don't understand ) but i will I have already started to rework my reforging and stats are coming up. The orange runes I will have to work out whats best to replace some with. Thanks again Diminator
I am NOT raider but I can see your gear lacks it's second tier infusions. This took me 6 months to figure out. I don't think it has ever been explained in the forums before. There are three tiers of infusions. You can't even see these stats in the game but it does show up on eq2wire. This is a screenshot from the wire profile you linked above. Your primary weapon doesn't have any 2nd tier infusions along with most of the rest of your gear. Your ranged weapon does have it's 2nd tier for some reason. All your gear should have that 2nd set of stats. Look on the broker for Mastercrafted infusers. Buy them and put them on your gear or craft them with your tradeskiller. It is recommended to start with twark infusers first because they are really cheap. You can keep adding more on top of the twarks after they have been maxed out. First tier infusions come from the deity plat infuser. Second tier infusers come from both quests and player crafted infusing. Third tier infusers are rare and come from only certain quests OR can be purchased in the marketplace. (Picture below is an example of 3rd tier infusion) Not having these infusions is like fighting with one hand behind your back. LOOK at all these extra stats you are missing. The 2nd and 3rd tier infusions need to be on every piece of gear. This is why some players are doing crazy dps and others are not. It is almost like it is a secret or something and nobody wants to talk about it. The first rule of infuser club is don't talk about 3rd tier infusers. Well I break that rule.
Never heard Infusions referred to as 1st Tier, 2nd Tier, etc. as listed in a prior post, but perhaps they are called that on another server. That said, I generally use their name, ie. Deity, Physical or Bonus. Fully infusing gear you are going to keep helps immensely. A good write-up on Infusions: https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Equipment_Infusing
nobody wants to talk about "3rd tier" infusers you say? i have a feeling you, sir, are just unaware as you pass by those threads daily without realizing what they're about. 3rd tier infusers is part of the 1-2-3 punch combo that destroyed this game at the competitive level (others being dps-class balance and familiars). any thread that reasonably articulates the problem with putting p2w items on the marketplace is the thread that's talking about these infusers. yes, 2nd tier infusers are important. but this is not why "some players are doing crazy dps and others are not." it'll be around 5-20% difference between full 2nd tier infused and none, depending on where the person is in raiding progression.
you're welcome. if what you don't understand is from my reply, you can pm with specific quotes to clarify if you want. tho, as you said, you should invest in digesting and researching the info gap first, as most likely that'll result in you randomly running into additional new knowledge as byproduct
I had no idea people complaining about p2w where talking the infusers. From the profiles I have inspected on eq2wire not many people use them. Since 3rd tier infusers also come from quests it doesn't make a lot of sense that they are not being used. It does not seem like the average player really knows what 3rd tier or even 2nd tier infusing is about. In my experience going from 1st tier to 2nd tier added at least a 1 billion DPS my parse. Though I am not a mage so my experience may not be applicable to this thread. If you can tell from my signature I play a Bruiser.
in your defense, perhaps you might've been registering that p2w complaining centers on ascensions, because that flavor of p2w complaints pops up more often. unfortunately those people are mostly just insufficiently informed about the game as the majority of ascension upgrades are available thru buying in-game or by playing the game and at a fairly reasonable rate at that. also unfortunately, there are many such insufficiently informed people, and it does a real disservice of taking p2w problems spotlight from the real issues - infusers and familiars. while technically a true statement, it's the opposite of reality and is the heart of the p2w problem. you're either reciting information you've not vetted or your research is sub-par. "3rd tier" infusers (aka Bonus infusers, before Kittanae bops us) are not "available" from quests. between 1-3 non-repeatable quests per expansion award 3rd-tier infusers; usually 1. a. there is the issue that any bonus infusers from previous expansions, while being top-of-the-line for the time, are dwarfed by latest ones, so in reality you're only ever talking about such quests from latest expansion. so now we're down to just 1-3 non-reusable infusers "available". b. it takes more than 1 bonus infuser per item to hit the infusion cap on that item; number fluctuated over xpacs, but lets say 2. c. you change a gear slot on average 3 times per xpac if you raid. infusers aren't reusable. so you need about 70, but only 1 is "available". rest are p2w hopefully this clears up any confusion why this is the awful p2w problem child mechanic for the game, and the ascensions' p2w egregiousness is nowhere near these levels. this isn't to say that ascensions weren't a separately awful class-diluting addition to the game. your reply is worded in a way that makes me think you're countering my 5-20% assessment? it was in reference to 20% for someone just starting to raiding t1, to clarify. if you started at like 70k pot, then yea you might see above-20% deltas. but if i make a reasonable assumption that you were doing a modest 5b dps as a bruiser prior to fully 2nd tier infusing, your 1b post-infusing bump falls into exactly that range...
