ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited May 2015
I parsed a few runs of ToS this weekend both with and without Spell Twisting (Icy Veins instead) and the loss of damage was pretty substantial, particularly on bosses (when it's needed the most).
And right now the hardest fight in the game is Marrowslake in GWD, and you need to maximize ST DPS to burn down the Stormcallers during the werewolf phase, and then focus fire on her during her human phases, and IV isn't going to help you there.
So I appreciate the responses on IV, but it's all about clearing trash...and if any group is struggling on trash, they have no shot at the bosses, imho.
"Meanwhile in the moderator's lounge..."
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beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
edited May 2015
My perspective was pretty much only to say that a CW optimized for epic dungeons may not be optimized for that whole campaign soloing thing (yes, primarily trash clearing), which is a big concern for a chunk of the game's population right now.
I just hitted lvl 70 with your build, can i use the battlefield or grim executioner itemsfor pve, or should i use the duelists items?
or wich item you suggest for begginers, i still cant enter lostmauch since i dont have the item level above 1600.
Also, do you have a build for pvp?
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited May 2015
Armor Penetration and Critical Strike are you best stats.
I PvP, but not a lot...mostly just for lolz in IWD or GG. If you actually have PvP armor, this spec should rock people pretty hard. Just make sure to put Shield in tab.
"Meanwhile in the moderator's lounge..."
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited May 2015
Working on getting the last couple sections updated. Updated my thoughts on Companions, and per the requests, I stuck some "old" stuff back in at the end for our Xbox One players.
I just wanna say your guide has been awesome, but i am closing in on level 70 now and i would appreciate if you would update the section for powers for levels 60-70. otherwise awesome build/guide!
Thanks
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited June 2015
I'll get a screenshot tonight and update it. The only power I would really worry about post 60 is Disintegrate. All the other stuff is pretty lackluster.
thanks a lot man means a lot, and if u dont mind could you reccomend me what types of enchants i should be using on my utility/offense/defense/weapon/armor/overload? This is my first CW and I am pretty confused on how to fully build it.
Hmm. Pretty jealous of the Zhentarim Warlock. I have been playing with Blink Dog or the Renegade Evoker as my companions with the bonding runestones. Both have attacks that are delayed by 1.2 seconds. The blink dog is nice because the active bonus kinda stacks with the fact that you have CA a lot.
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
thanks a lot man means a lot, and if u dont mind could you reccomend me what types of enchants i should be using on my utility/offense/defense/weapon/armor/overload? This is my first CW and I am pretty confused on how to fully build it.
Thanks!
Go for whatever stats you need. Armor Penertration needs to get close to 60%. Check your character sheet for "Resistances Ignored" for your exact number. You should be getting 3% from boons.
After that start stacking Critical Strike and/or Power. If you're under 10k Critical Strike, I would start there.
If you want to maximize stats, Savage and Brutal Enchantments have more total stats split between Crit/Armor Pen and Crit/Power respectively. But they are more expensive, since they only drop from events.
Hmm. Pretty jealous of the Zhentarim Warlock. I have been playing with Blink Dog or the Renegade Evoker as my companions with the bonding runestones. Both have attacks that are delayed by 1.2 seconds. The blink dog is nice because the active bonus kinda stacks with the fact that you have CA a lot.
Nothing wrong with either of the two. I actually considered the Renegade Evoker at one point because he has three offensive slots and a relatively short CD attack, but I just love the Zhentarim Warlock.
A question about the off-hand artifact class features, Storm Spell + Chilling Presence ( as they are the 2 i have slotted )
You mention the Storm Spell 5% a couple of times, but no mention of the Chilling Presence option.
As chill is relatively easy to apply across the weapon range, would this not give a more consistant bonus as oppose to the more 'random' Storm Spell bonus ?
6 stacks of chill, with this feat, is an additional 3% damage and far easier to lay down rather than hoping for a 5% chance ( which does not equate to a guaranteed 1 in 20 hits, but a 5% chance on each hit which could be 1 in 40+ if you are unlucky.
Trying to get my head around the finer points of my build - which thanks to the time you've put into this guide has been a pleasure so far.
Nothing wrong with either of the two. I actually considered the Renegade Evoker at one point because he has three offensive slots and a relatively short CD attack, but I just love the Zhentarim Warlock.
I agree, I've been testing going with the erinyes as my companion of choice, and even with a 15/1.2s cooldown it's extremely rare that I find myself without two buffs. As IZ touched, an extra offensive slot is probably what I'll be testing out next.
That said, I would like to start a discussion. This guide is aimed at new/midlevel players that should be looking at the relative increase in character power per AD spent. (I realize I'm talking traditional minmaxing here but with the current inflation, and how hard it is to get AD for a new player, bear with me as I get this out there.)
With the price of upgrading the companion and the 65% bonding stones being well over 2m at the moment it's a pretty low increase per AD spent when compared to getting a "cheap" augment kitted.
Unless I'm doing math like a 2 year old, the increase is not worth that steep of an ad cost until you're pretty well geared and have your epic companions sorted.
A question about the off-hand artifact class features, Storm Spell + Chilling Presence ( as they are the 2 i have slotted )
You mention the Storm Spell 5% a couple of times, but no mention of the Chilling Presence option.
As chill is relatively easy to apply across the weapon range, would this not give a more consistant bonus as oppose to the more 'random' Storm Spell bonus ?
6 stacks of chill, with this feat, is an additional 3% damage and far easier to lay down rather than hoping for a 5% chance ( which does not equate to a guaranteed 1 in 20 hits, but a 5% chance on each hit which could be 1 in 40+ if you are unlucky.
Trying to get my head around the finer points of my build - which thanks to the time you've put into this guide has been a pleasure so far.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the guide actually has a few chilling presence discussions, have a look at 1: Why choose the Spellstorm Renegade path? and 4: Stats. CTRL+F chilling and you'll see he made excellent posts on chilling presence and chilling advantage.
EDIT: If it's only the offhand bonus you're talking about, I've been testing it but can't seem to get a decent damage increase out of that option. The procs from the 5% seem to benefit from at least some multipliers after the initial damage has been calculated. I'm getting procs that have higher damage values than the storm spell it procced from. Would love th hear what people come up with though.
This was tested in mod 5 but I somehow doubt it changed.
"Ok, I've done some more in depth testing.
I've done two tests of training dummies testing of 16 minutes each. The only spell used was ray of frost and it was non stop channeling.
First test is without the storm spell feature and the second is with.
On the test without, I've had a total of 1728 ray of frost ticks of which 848 were critical strikes (49% crit rate).
I've had 310 storm spell procs (36,55% proc rate). 100% of the storm spell procs were critical strikes.
Second test is with the storm spell feature. The test was a little shorter due to having trouble making the mouse autocast but it's not by much.
I had 1597 ray of frost ticks and 3 arcane missile hit (accident but not relevant enough to alter the test). So 1600 hits. Out of those 1600 hits, 870 were critical hits (54,375% crit rate).
There was 579 registered storm spell procs. Out of those 579 procs (66,5% proc rate!), 132 did 0 damage. If you remove those bogus hits, it makes 447 storm spell procs (51,38% proc rate). Now, not all of the procs registered as critical strike. 71 of them registered as normal hits and is most likely caused by the off hand feature. If you extrapolate the average crit chance to this, it would mean that the 71 normal hits represent 43,625% of the hits, which would mean about 162 storm spell procs caused by the off hand feature. This would give 279 storm spell procs from the normal class feature and 162 from the artifact off hand feature.
What it means is that the off hand features do NOT alter the way storm spell act on its own (you won't lose damage) but the numbers I'm getting are very odd.
There might still be a bug going on with it which make it stronger than it's supposed to be (unless I got one hell of a godly rng run)."
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beatannierMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 692Arc User
A question about the off-hand artifact class features, Storm Spell + Chilling Presence ( as they are the 2 i have slotted )
You mention the Storm Spell 5% a couple of times, but no mention of the Chilling Presence option.
As chill is relatively easy to apply across the weapon range, would this not give a more consistant bonus as oppose to the more 'random' Storm Spell bonus ?
6 stacks of chill, with this feat, is an additional 3% damage and far easier to lay down rather than hoping for a 5% chance ( which does not equate to a guaranteed 1 in 20 hits, but a 5% chance on each hit which could be 1 in 40+ if you are unlucky.
Trying to get my head around the finer points of my build - which thanks to the time you've put into this guide has been a pleasure so far.
To piggyback on what Smulch said above, we discuss this quite a bit during Module 5, and I think we came to the consensus that both were good options. Ultimately, the difference is going to be less than a % (I would guess) if you took the time to do all the math on it.
What the Storm Spell feature actually does is give Storm Spell a 5% chance to proc on ALL damage, not just critical hits. Whether or not this was intended, who knows? That's why when you slot the Storm Spell passive on the offhand, you start to see non-critical hits appear with Storm Spell...you could get bonus procs on a critical hit, or not.
But also keep in mind that the number of chill stacks you have up actually swings from 1-6 as they stack, freeze and get cleared, so the actual up-time on chill stacks outside of boss fights is highly variable as well. So that bonus is far from consistent as well.
And even to that point, I don't consider "luck" relevant to these builds. Over a long enough timeline, everything smooths out. So over the course of a dungeon run or boss fight, you'll seem ups and downs. So the potential streakiness of Storm Spell doesn't bother me that much because I'm doing everything I can with this build to ensure consistent (and powerful) hits to the extent that those can be controlled.
Done. Powers after 60-70 was incredibly difficult, but I think I managed to figure it out
Yeah - it was already told on that guy just before he asked for a ss.
On another note - have you(or someone) tried Imprisonment on some mid bosses or their pets ? Like first in eLoL or his drake when he let it roam free or 2 scorps after to split them on distance, or drakes in SoT skirm final boss, or on other similar mini bosses and elites ?
BTW Gratz for MoH logo on the header :cool:
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited June 2015
Imprisonement was one of those spells that I had really high hopes for, but it just doesn't do it for me.
It only works on regular non-CC immune targets, so there's nothing special about it, and the cool down is really long for it's actual duration. So I prefer to keep my regular spells slotted, and just mix in stunning and freezing as I burn away. If I really need to CC a single target, I'll just go back to the old stand by of Entangling Force.
If Imprisonment worked better so that the cooldown started after you cast it (instead of after it ends), or it was a special spell that could be used on non-boss, but otherwise CC immune targets (so it hit 100% and lasted for it's stated duration) it would be a different story.
But until Cryptic changes their philosophy and starts letting Control Wizards really shine with control spells, anything that's 100% control with no damage component is lackluster in the practice (even if it looks cool on paper).
Yeah what a waste. Small not very cc resistant single targets does not need to be controlled for that long, otherwise they cannot die for the duration, which is 3-5 or more times longer than their general lifespan in battle.
I am really starting to hate this abnormal mobs behavior. Looks like Cryptic has incorporated in them some advanced alien technology from their other game - STO (star trek online). Some kind of multi-vector targeting system and mind reading skills so they can target you even before you get there !
Mobs do not follow you - they go where you must be when their attack is rdy to execute. They do that independently of everything else and even ignoring some/most effects. For example - even when you daze them with OF they still go where you wanna go before you, almost completely ignoring the daze effect. I say almost because they cannot attack you before it wears off, but they are beside you and rdy to hit as soon as it is done. In reality is like to evade your image in the mirror. But guess what - do you know how to successfully fight something like that - shut the light off !
So yeah lets get back to the ironzerg79's topic and MoH logo on the header :cool:
Shut their lights off before they shut off yours, because Death Is The Best Crowd Control
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thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
edited June 2015
SS just got heavily nerfed...might be time to look into replacing it. (Ill call it, might be swapping it out with arcane presence/evocation, or we will be seeing a large increase in the number of MoF's)
ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited June 2015
Hah. I knew something was coming, we'll have to see how it actually plays out.
I don't mind that much. When one door is closed, a new one is opened!
But I have no intention of switching out of this build. Even with the damage nerf to SS, the group buffs in the Renegade tree are something I just can't live without
"Meanwhile in the moderator's lounge..."
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thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
edited June 2015
Im betting you may be switching to MoF though...that or using arcane presence instead of storm spell I think the devs read the title of your build and thought to themselves..."hmmmm...death is the best form of cc, really? This class needs to be controlled a bit, so lets kill their damage to do so" To be fair, I don't really mind, as a class, we are very adaptable and lets show ourselves to be a bit more mature then the other classes when facing a nerf by finding a way to cope with it, without making lots of complaints
To be fair, I don't really mind, as a class, we are very adaptable and lets show ourselves to be a bit more mature then the other classes when facing a nerf by finding a way to cope with it, without making lots of complaints
This is it exactly.
And let's keep this in perspective. A class feature doing 40%+ of your damage...we knew that was going to get tweaked. I'm going to see how bad the change actually is before abandoning Stormspell all together.
Even if it's a 50% cut to the damage of Spellstorm, having a class feature buff your damage by 20% is nothing to sneeze at
"Meanwhile in the moderator's lounge..."
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thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
And let's keep this in perspective. A class feature doing 40%+ of your damage...we knew that was going to get tweaked. I'm going to see how bad the change actually is before abandoning Stormspell all together.
Even if it's a 50% cut to the damage of Spellstorm, having a class feature buff your damage by 20% is nothing to sneeze at
You mean Evocation?
Somebody call back chem, he would be having a great time with these changes... Also, I predict beatannier will have some stuff to say
If I'm not misremembering, Storm Spell is currently the only thing in the build that is paragon-specific.
That, too. This is NOT a Storm Spell build. It's going to work perfectly fine after tomorrow's patch, and still be a very viable build as is. However, I'm already considering some tweaks that could be made.
Heck, it might turn out to be BETTER....wouldn't the rest of the classes be a little peeved to see THAT happen
Comments
And right now the hardest fight in the game is Marrowslake in GWD, and you need to maximize ST DPS to burn down the Stormcallers during the werewolf phase, and then focus fire on her during her human phases, and IV isn't going to help you there.
So I appreciate the responses on IV, but it's all about clearing trash...and if any group is struggling on trash, they have no shot at the bosses, imho.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
or wich item you suggest for begginers, i still cant enter lostmauch since i dont have the item level above 1600.
Also, do you have a build for pvp?
I PvP, but not a lot...mostly just for lolz in IWD or GG. If you actually have PvP armor, this spec should rock people pretty hard. Just make sure to put Shield in tab.
Thanks
Thanks!
Go for whatever stats you need. Armor Penertration needs to get close to 60%. Check your character sheet for "Resistances Ignored" for your exact number. You should be getting 3% from boons.
After that start stacking Critical Strike and/or Power. If you're under 10k Critical Strike, I would start there.
If you want to maximize stats, Savage and Brutal Enchantments have more total stats split between Crit/Armor Pen and Crit/Power respectively. But they are more expensive, since they only drop from events.
Nothing wrong with either of the two. I actually considered the Renegade Evoker at one point because he has three offensive slots and a relatively short CD attack, but I just love the Zhentarim Warlock.
"I find your leadership...adequate."
It's like she really knows me
You mention the Storm Spell 5% a couple of times, but no mention of the Chilling Presence option.
As chill is relatively easy to apply across the weapon range, would this not give a more consistant bonus as oppose to the more 'random' Storm Spell bonus ?
6 stacks of chill, with this feat, is an additional 3% damage and far easier to lay down rather than hoping for a 5% chance ( which does not equate to a guaranteed 1 in 20 hits, but a 5% chance on each hit which could be 1 in 40+ if you are unlucky.
Trying to get my head around the finer points of my build - which thanks to the time you've put into this guide has been a pleasure so far.
I agree, I've been testing going with the erinyes as my companion of choice, and even with a 15/1.2s cooldown it's extremely rare that I find myself without two buffs. As IZ touched, an extra offensive slot is probably what I'll be testing out next.
That said, I would like to start a discussion. This guide is aimed at new/midlevel players that should be looking at the relative increase in character power per AD spent. (I realize I'm talking traditional minmaxing here but with the current inflation, and how hard it is to get AD for a new player, bear with me as I get this out there.)
With the price of upgrading the companion and the 65% bonding stones being well over 2m at the moment it's a pretty low increase per AD spent when compared to getting a "cheap" augment kitted.
Unless I'm doing math like a 2 year old, the increase is not worth that steep of an ad cost until you're pretty well geared and have your epic companions sorted.
Thoughts?
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the guide actually has a few chilling presence discussions, have a look at 1: Why choose the Spellstorm Renegade path? and 4: Stats. CTRL+F chilling and you'll see he made excellent posts on chilling presence and chilling advantage.
EDIT: If it's only the offhand bonus you're talking about, I've been testing it but can't seem to get a decent damage increase out of that option. The procs from the 5% seem to benefit from at least some multipliers after the initial damage has been calculated. I'm getting procs that have higher damage values than the storm spell it procced from. Would love th hear what people come up with though.
"Ok, I've done some more in depth testing.
I've done two tests of training dummies testing of 16 minutes each. The only spell used was ray of frost and it was non stop channeling.
First test is without the storm spell feature and the second is with.
On the test without, I've had a total of 1728 ray of frost ticks of which 848 were critical strikes (49% crit rate).
I've had 310 storm spell procs (36,55% proc rate). 100% of the storm spell procs were critical strikes.
Second test is with the storm spell feature. The test was a little shorter due to having trouble making the mouse autocast but it's not by much.
I had 1597 ray of frost ticks and 3 arcane missile hit (accident but not relevant enough to alter the test). So 1600 hits. Out of those 1600 hits, 870 were critical hits (54,375% crit rate).
There was 579 registered storm spell procs. Out of those 579 procs (66,5% proc rate!), 132 did 0 damage. If you remove those bogus hits, it makes 447 storm spell procs (51,38% proc rate). Now, not all of the procs registered as critical strike. 71 of them registered as normal hits and is most likely caused by the off hand feature. If you extrapolate the average crit chance to this, it would mean that the 71 normal hits represent 43,625% of the hits, which would mean about 162 storm spell procs caused by the off hand feature. This would give 279 storm spell procs from the normal class feature and 162 from the artifact off hand feature.
What it means is that the off hand features do NOT alter the way storm spell act on its own (you won't lose damage) but the numbers I'm getting are very odd.
There might still be a bug going on with it which make it stronger than it's supposed to be (unless I got one hell of a godly rng run)."
Chilling Presence off-hand Artifact Class Feature is not working at all.
Simple test: Freeze the enemy using RoF, then throw Doohickey.
In my case, damage is increased by 101% (5% from Bitter Cold, so its plain 96%).
To piggyback on what Smulch said above, we discuss this quite a bit during Module 5, and I think we came to the consensus that both were good options. Ultimately, the difference is going to be less than a % (I would guess) if you took the time to do all the math on it.
What the Storm Spell feature actually does is give Storm Spell a 5% chance to proc on ALL damage, not just critical hits. Whether or not this was intended, who knows? That's why when you slot the Storm Spell passive on the offhand, you start to see non-critical hits appear with Storm Spell...you could get bonus procs on a critical hit, or not.
But also keep in mind that the number of chill stacks you have up actually swings from 1-6 as they stack, freeze and get cleared, so the actual up-time on chill stacks outside of boss fights is highly variable as well. So that bonus is far from consistent as well.
And even to that point, I don't consider "luck" relevant to these builds. Over a long enough timeline, everything smooths out. So over the course of a dungeon run or boss fight, you'll seem ups and downs. So the potential streakiness of Storm Spell doesn't bother me that much because I'm doing everything I can with this build to ensure consistent (and powerful) hits to the extent that those can be controlled.
It was purely the off-hand arti feature i was asking about, and you have cleared any doubt i had.
Time to buy a stack of Augment Cubes !!
Thanks
Also, I'm going to update the gear section soon, and I have plans to provide a "budget" build for new and aspiring CWs.
Yeah - it was already told on that guy just before he asked for a ss.
On another note - have you(or someone) tried Imprisonment on some mid bosses or their pets ? Like first in eLoL or his drake when he let it roam free or 2 scorps after to split them on distance, or drakes in SoT skirm final boss, or on other similar mini bosses and elites ?
BTW Gratz for MoH logo on the header :cool:
It only works on regular non-CC immune targets, so there's nothing special about it, and the cool down is really long for it's actual duration. So I prefer to keep my regular spells slotted, and just mix in stunning and freezing as I burn away. If I really need to CC a single target, I'll just go back to the old stand by of Entangling Force.
If Imprisonment worked better so that the cooldown started after you cast it (instead of after it ends), or it was a special spell that could be used on non-boss, but otherwise CC immune targets (so it hit 100% and lasted for it's stated duration) it would be a different story.
But until Cryptic changes their philosophy and starts letting Control Wizards really shine with control spells, anything that's 100% control with no damage component is lackluster in the practice (even if it looks cool on paper).
Mobs do not follow you - they go where you must be when their attack is rdy to execute. They do that independently of everything else and even ignoring some/most effects. For example - even when you daze them with OF they still go where you wanna go before you, almost completely ignoring the daze effect. I say almost because they cannot attack you before it wears off, but they are beside you and rdy to hit as soon as it is done. In reality is like to evade your image in the mirror. But guess what - do you know how to successfully fight something like that - shut the light off !
So yeah lets get back to the ironzerg79's topic and MoH logo on the header :cool:
Shut their lights off before they shut off yours, because Death Is The Best Crowd Control
I don't mind that much. When one door is closed, a new one is opened!
But I have no intention of switching out of this build. Even with the damage nerf to SS, the group buffs in the Renegade tree are something I just can't live without
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
This is it exactly.
And let's keep this in perspective. A class feature doing 40%+ of your damage...we knew that was going to get tweaked. I'm going to see how bad the change actually is before abandoning Stormspell all together.
Even if it's a 50% cut to the damage of Spellstorm, having a class feature buff your damage by 20% is nothing to sneeze at
Somebody call back chem, he would be having a great time with these changes... Also, I predict beatannier will have some stuff to say
That, too. This is NOT a Storm Spell build. It's going to work perfectly fine after tomorrow's patch, and still be a very viable build as is. However, I'm already considering some tweaks that could be made.
Heck, it might turn out to be BETTER....wouldn't the rest of the classes be a little peeved to see THAT happen