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My sorry character
shadrakt2
Member Posts: 151 Arc User
Let me start by getting this out of the way: my character blows. I recently reached level 60, and I always end up on 4th or 5th place in almost every category that counts on multiplayer skirmishes. That didn't use to bother me that much, cause control wizards are supposed to be more of a support role, blah blah blah. The fact that I sometimes freeze a few enemies doesn't seem to make up for the fact that I usually do less than half the damage of the next weakest player. But whatever.
What recently put me over the edge was when another control wizard 3 levels lower than me ranked two positions higher on almost every category in a recent skirmish. What gives??!! Can anyone offer any advice to make this character suck a little less?
What recently put me over the edge was when another control wizard 3 levels lower than me ranked two positions higher on almost every category in a recent skirmish. What gives??!! Can anyone offer any advice to make this character suck a little less?
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First off, at least buy a cheap T1 set (Archmage for example) on the auction house, they're VERY cheap compared to back then. Then buy a purple neck and purple rings, and also a purple belt OR artifact belt. Then buy BLUE gemmed shirt and pants.
Once that's done. Enchant every single one of your equipment pieces with a rank 5 enchantment. You'll easily have at least 10K GS.
Also work on your boons: Sharandar, Dread Ring, Icewind Dale, Tyranny of Dragons, Well of Dragons.
PS: You chose a terrible artifact. Amass enough AD to buy a lantern of waters, they're 3X cheaper than back then.
One of the many Control Wizards that misses Shard Of The Endless Avalanche. RIP Shard (Beta-Mod3)
Then there's your gear. You should be in all level 60 blues by level 60, while working towards your Tier 1 and Tier 2 gear. For a level 60 character, your ratings are awfully low. Your Ability Scores look decent though, but I would not have went past 8-10 in Strength when rolling the character up.
In addition to the advice above:
You probably also need to work on getting your enchants up. They should all be at minimum, Rank 5 enchants. Try to get around 2500 Armor pen, 2000+ Crit, 2000+ recovery, and keep working up Power beyond 3500 or so. Power has the least diminishing returns, so once you have your other stats around what I said, work to keep pumping that and perhaps Life Steal if you're a life steal spec, or a nice bit of defence.
Update: Since some expressed concern over me seeking advice also here, I've removed such posts from here and put them in their own thread. Some posts have been edited to reflect this.
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I'm just going to tie it all together: your stacked stats and gear plays as big, if not bigger, role in your damage output than your level.
As Zeb pointed out you have no armor penetration and that's the major glaring issue.
Seeing your gear stats also makes me wonder about your character build as well. You need to have synergy.
Look at feats and powers to see if you can get some effect combo's. For example if you are trying to be a frost wizard then consider how you can use feats and powers to do more damage when creatures are frozen or effected by chill stacks or increase the rate of chill stacks.
A picture is worth 1000 words, so here's one. Go to the AH (either in game or on the Gateway) and select these filters. You're looking for level 60 Control Wizard gear with Armor Penetration and Power:
For example, that Forgotten Soulforge Skullcap has great stats. Power, Recovery, Armor Penetration, Defense...they're all helpful. For your purposes right now, prioritize Armor Penetration, then Power, then Lifesteal, then Critical Strike, then Recovery.
You want to get your Armor Penetration rating to about 2200-2500. That's your sweet spot. If you can get there, we can talk more once we see what you're wearing.
Also, your feats and powers matter. Since you're a Spellstorm Mage, I have a guide to the Renegade Paragon path. You might not be able to respec right now, but there should be some good information that might help you play better, too.
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?819531-Spellstorm-Renegade-Guide-Death-is-the-Best-Crowd-Control
Regardless of what your feats are, you should be using Eye of the Storm and Storm Spell as your class features (for now). Typically the best all around loadout is Conduit of Ice in your Arcane Mastery (tab) slot. Steal Time, Sudden Storm and Icy Terrain should be your other encounters. Oppressive Force is your go-to Daily power. For you at-wills, Chilling Cloud is an excellent all around spell.
Digest that information and let me know how it goes. I'll be in game later tonight, so you can always friend me (@ironzerg) and I can give you some more personal information when I check out your toon in game.
Thanks for all your advice. I'll post back when I think I've made some progress.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some shopping to do.
In other words, on the first tab, make the Zen box (right one) a value of 50, and then say you wanted to transfer 50000 AD, you'd set the first AD box (left one) at a value of 1000. So, in effect, you'd be selling 100,000 AD for 50 Zen per, a price no one in their right mind would pay. If they did, BONUS!
Then switch chars, go into the AD Exchange again, third tab this time and cancel the listing, then go back to the first tab and withdraw it from the AD Exchange Balance.
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Not necessarily. It depends on what his starting stat rolls are and where he allocated points.
Even with a bad stat roll, you can still make a gosh darn good CW. Not everything has to be perfect.
I love it when, after playing a game for over 250 hours, you realize you have barely scratched the surface...
Don't worry about it. You don't have any worthwhile gear on it and getting to 60 is easy
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Make sure you read chemboy and ironzerg's tomes -- or at least the part about starting stat rolls, because that is the most expensive thing to fix.
I was dancing between 3 characters. So I was like "This one will choose Aurora, this one will choose Waters, this one will choose Lantern".
I don't really regret it, it's at epic level right now. And I surprise people when they're out of injury kits or potions in dungeons. Nobody expects a 21K GS to pull out an Epic catalogue from nowhere.
One of the many Control Wizards that misses Shard Of The Endless Avalanche. RIP Shard (Beta-Mod3)
As stated already, buy some purple set. Even T1 just to get GS enough to get into newest campaigns zones.
You can always check available sets in game, just open your collections tab and search for epic equipment.
2nd artifact
PvP a bit and since you will get 24k glory, exchange it for Blood Crystal Raven Skull artifact. It will both give you nice stats boost and will help you to survive at these hard beginning times.
Even if you will completelly suck (what is obvious at this level), queue for PvP GG, then queue for Fardelver's Crypt to gain some Grym Coins that you will exchange for Glory. Every half hour Dungeon Delves (GG 3rd phase) session you should be able to end about 4–6 runs, gaining 4–6 Grym Coins every run, what gives you 800–1800 Glory. Togheter with Complimentary Glory Booster you got on lvl 60 and daily PvP 2–3× 500 base Glory you should get it in a week or less.
Campaigns
Make campaigns, they takes some time, but rewards in huge and permanent stat boosts.
Companions
Get some companions, even green weak companions for the very stat only.
5th, active companion, should be one of augment pets, but I suggest you to buy the one, you will want to stick with for a longer (they are not so cheap). I made some summary comparation of them.
Artifact belt
Consider buying Owlbear Leather Belt of Intelligence from AH as its currently BIS artifact belt, that is both cheap and you will propably stick with him for a long until you will go into some custom, non–standard build.
Rest artifact gear
Finally, since you hit 10k, progress in newest campaigns to get your "free" main–hand and win Tiamat 15 times to get off–hand/cloak. Doing Tiamat, you should earn a few valuable items you can sell or use (like Dragon Cult Pack).
Dragonborn
And, for the long term, you really need to reroll your base stats. The suggested way is to become dragonborn (I spent less than 1m AD for it).
The stat rolls I can suggest to you (as Dragonborn with INT & WIS chosen as Ability Scores from Racial Traits) are:
INT / WIS / CHA / STR / CON / DEX
20 / 15 / 13 / 8 / 10 / 10
19 / 16 / 13 / 10 / 10 / 10
18 / 18 / 12 / 10 / 10 / 10
Sometimes people fall in love with totally ineffective spells. Some spells which seem weak at first actually work really well in unison with other spells. Knowing which spells to use and in what sequence can make a huge difference in damage output.
On occasion I'll grab one of my prayer-bots who has virtually no worthwhile gear and is a CW and will run some skirmishes or dungeons. I can easily out-damage most CW's with significantly higher GS just because I've learned the class mechanics and know what spells to use when.
A good basic spell rotation to use is Steal time, Icy Terrain, Conduit of Ice (tabbed) then Sudden Storm. Use Eye of the Storm and Storm Spell as passive class features. Use Oppressive Force as a Daily and Ice Knife for single targets. If you're using sub-optimal damage spells like Chill Strike, Shard of the Endless Avalanche, Shield, Entangling Force, Repel, et al., then you're going to wind up doing significantly less damage than you are capable of.
Also, it was mentioned but is worth repeating. There is a preview server. You can copy your character over to it. You can respec your character for free there (totally rebuild it from the ground up). Then you can test out different builds to see what works for you. It is absolutely worth doing while you're trying to figure things out. If you want to test out someone's advice but don't want to blow the AD you'd need on a respec token that's the place to go.
One more thing, if you have 170k AD saved up then you can afford a High Vizier armor set. There is nothing, nothing at all you can do to boost your damage more then spend that AD on a High Vizier set.
When it comes to rotations, for maximum DPS I'd recommend using a mix of these spells: Conduit of Ice, Spell Storm, Icy Terrain, Steal Time, Shatter Strike(spell mastery slot only).
I made the same mistake as you with the artifact on my first 4 characters -> The cheapest way to get better artifacts is to get two characters through the Vault of Nine quest for the free class artifacts. The GWF and DC artifacts are currently the best ones, so that is what I would recommend to any new player.
Gear.... High Vizier, there is no question about it. You can also get the Dread Legion Weapon set eventually by running VT and getting it from the end chest, but you aren't quite ready for that yet. Artifact gear is yes, way better than that, but it doesn't sound like you are going to be getting the offhand any time soon, and refining is a challenge of its own.
Oh, and get a Stone or Augment companion at some point, those help out a lot.
Good luck, and the most important thing is to find a build that is fun for you!
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It is down to approx 80k
Don't worry, many people level up their alts as quickly as possible, by equipping them with overpowered gear.
Well there is a standard CW build, played by 95% of the CWs around, always the same:
- Conduit of Ice in Tab
- Sudden storm, steal time, icy terrain for the other encounters
- Storm spell as the passive, the other passive hardly matters.
And that's it? Yes, that's it.
I haven't ever picked it from the quest, but I did buy a large number of them on the AH when they got stupid-cheap for a while. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm in the process of converting them into refining fodder for more appropriate artifacts.
It would be less problematic if every use of the Catalogue didn't lock you out from being able to use your normal artifact setup until it comes off cooldown.
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She's up to level 12 now, so I haven't invested AD on her gear yet, but I frequently spend coins on whatever the best available equipment is. She'll be expecting a big AD deposit from her big sister soon.
Yesterday for the first time I was number 1 Paingiver in a skirmish, so I was happy.
Thank you all so much for your suggestions. I'll be referring back to this thread a lot as I level up. Hopefully soon I'll have a level 60 CW that I'm proud to post here.
That is a different case since people will buy those up in order to feed them to actual good artifacts that have the same type.