3) Not directly related to your build, but can you explain exactly how Combat Advantage works? Is Nightmare Wizardry just a waste in group play? The definition on the wiki just states, "When attacking an enemy, if there is an ally attacking the same foe from the opposite direction, both players involved will have Combat Advantage, dealing bonus damage.". In a 5 man group I imagine this should always be the case, so does that make Nightmare Wizardry worthless.
Tank will go in front of mob, rogue will be on his back, and you will have to be on either side. While it sounds easy, thats not always the case. Teleporting mobs with aoe make that a bit more difficult. Nightmare Wizardry just make positioning easier cause then you just have to dodge aoe, instead of seeing how melee position themselves and then teleport to get CA.
Anyway, your question made me to check exactly how big combat advantage damage is, and i still dont know
With 12% more from charisma i get about 14.5%-15% more damage vs no combat advantage. I (or OP maybe ? ) would have to first get to 60, check it again, then buy token for respec and check again without putting any points into charisma. 6% less would get the idea how charisma adds to CA damage.
And before posting that reply i decided to do forum search and it dropped this: http://dnd4.wikia.com/wiki/Combat_advantage
Assuming +2 Bonus to attack rolls would be +2% dmg in NW for CA, that would make above almost true ;P
Unfortunately after some testing I don't think the 20% more cold dmg on chill-less mobs actually works. I believe it works for ray of frost, but I don't think it works for Conduit or Ice Ray, maybe even Chill Strike. =/
Yep. At the moment there are many faults with skilling. Useless powers, powers and feats that don't work. The way the game forces you to pick useless powers to go to the next tier. Respeccing costing way too much and costing real money.
Here's to hoping the developers will fix these issues. I'll give the game a month or so to brew and become better.
The immobilization is short, the AoE is small. Terribad.
Steal Time
A weird ability I havent found useful. Takes time to channel, doesnt do that much damage and the stun is like 1 second. Bad.
Steal Time is actually a very good ability. If you place it on your tab not only do you gain combat effectiveness and share that with your party once you use it around a group of mobs, (plus having arcane mastery stacks increase this buff) you also gain movement speed. I have been able to cap out at 175% movement speed with steal time and full arcane mastery stacks and this will last me around 5 seconds. It's insanely faster than dodging and great for escaping. I encourage you to reconsider your skill usage before bashing them.
Sudden storm is not that great as you think it is, it's a skillshot compared to icy terrain. The immobilization is not that bad on icy terrain and the skill is somewhat glitchy in dungeons (the icy ground will disappear too early, I'm assuming that the game will remove excess graphics to reduce lag) but it will proc your crit passives much more than sudden storm ever will, plus sudden storm is 1 strike while icy terrain has an aoe dot that lasts a couple of seconds and if you do actually have gear that procs more damage while you do damage, icy terrain will always win in terms of damage. With enough recovery you will have this skill up 100% of the time because the skill does last around 9 seconds while the cooldown is 10 seconds, for me anyway.
Just my two cents.
Nessa@gwas - 10,500 Gearscore Control Wizard on Dragon Shard.
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
Steal Time is actually a very good ability. If you place it on your tab not only do you gain combat effectiveness and share that with your party once you use it around a group of mobs, (plus having arcane mastery stacks increase this buff) you also gain movement speed. I have been able to cap out at 175% movement speed with steal time and full arcane mastery stacks and this will last me around 5 seconds. It's insanely faster than dodging and great for escaping. I encourage you to reconsider your skill usage before bashing them.
This guide is written from a pure endgame DPS view and having movement speed doesn't increase damage. For now I've been able to dodge and avoid things without movement speed, will see if in the future there is any need for it. Spell Mastery Ice Strike is still the damage dealing winner by far.
Sudden storm is not that great as you think it is, it's a skillshot compared to icy terrain. The immobilization is not that bad on icy terrain and the skill is somewhat glitchy in dungeons (the icy ground will disappear too early, I'm assuming that the game will remove excess graphics to reduce lag) but it will proc your crit passives much more than sudden storm ever will, plus sudden storm is 1 strike while icy terrain has an aoe dot that lasts a couple of seconds and if you do actually have gear that procs more damage while you do damage, icy terrain will always win in terms of damage. With enough recovery you will have this skill up 100% of the time because the skill does last around 9 seconds while the cooldown is 10 seconds, for me anyway.
Icy Terrain in its current state will never outdps Sudden Storm. It may have uses in PvP ( don't know, haven't tried. ) Ofcourse if a player cannot hit Sudden Storm, then it might be a different story.
Steal Time in spell mastery is an interesting ability, and VERY hard to judge how useful it is with regards to party combat advantage. Depending on the time you use it they might already all have it, or they might not. I play it safer with AE chill strike as well, that's a much more consistent damage boost.
That said due to steal time granting 5 stacks of arcane mastery it's also always on my bar regardless. But I'm a renegade wizard too.
This guide is written from a pure endgame DPS view and having movement speed doesn't increase damage. For now I've been able to dodge and avoid things without movement speed, will see if in the future there is any need for it. Spell Mastery Ice Strike is still the damage dealing winner by far.
Icy Terrain in its current state will never outdps Sudden Storm. It may have uses in PvP ( don't know, haven't tried. ) Ofcourse if a player cannot hit Sudden Storm, then it might be a different story.
Mobility can sometimes increase your damage, lets say you're channeling skills and you get knocked up, well you have just lost damage because you couldn't move out of the way fast enough or whatever the issue might be. I do agree that Ice Strike on SM is amazing, by far.
But again, the CW is all about CONTROL, DPS is secondary.
Sure, Icy Terrain ALONE will never outdps Sudden Storm, I agree with you there.
If Icy Terrain is buffed by enchantments, passives and feats, then at that point will it become more effective over Sudden Storm.
Effective as in CONTROL/DPS over DPS.
Icy Terrain has an AOE dot which procs the storm passives, you do not get that with Sudden Storm as it is a single strike in a line. (unless SS is in your SM, which makes you lose out on Ice Strike)
Icy Terrain combined with a lightning enchantment on weapon, with Storm Spell and Eye of the storm will proc enough times to do more damage than Sudden Storm.
Lightning enchantment has a chain effect and boosts all damage by 12% iirc.
Sudden Storm has a low CD and a limited range, plus you have to aim and cast, opposed to just casting and having more range since the area dmg is larger and as a CW I hope you have the mobs properly grouped up prior to using Icy Terrain, the damage will hit every mob, opposed to a line of mobs.
More mobs = More dmg
Nessa@gwas - 10,500 Gearscore Control Wizard on Dragon Shard.
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
But again, the CW is all about CONTROL, DPS is secondary.
It really depends on the group set up. I just did a T2 Pirate King and we had two GWFs, a GF, a cleric and my wizard. We wiped the first tries because there was not enough damage. Adds would overwhelm us, so we switched to a strategy where the cleric kited the adds around the mast with one GWF assisting him. The GF, the other GWF and I were on the boss. I used single target DPS, put Enfeebling Ray in the mastery slot (for debuffing) and nuked the whole time, using Ice Knife even (except for one AS when I saw the cleric needed a break). That worked and we killed the Pirate King. Now, if we had had a rogue, I would have cast AS, EF, Steal Time and tabbed Chill Strike the whole time.
Control and damage are thankfully not mutually exclusive in Neverwinter. Steal Time and tabbed Chill Strike are great for CC and they do heaps of damage too. It's impossible to do good damage as a CW even if you focus on CCing. (By T2, every CW probably uses EF on CD.) Not sure how you guys manage without Steal Time. It's absolutely essential for my wizard!
Aslong as I'm topping the charts I consider my CW being about damage, since I do it better than anyone in the group. It doesn't matter what the game tries to describe the class as to me.
When/if I reach a point where I won't be one of the highest damagedealers anymore no matter how I tryhard, I will start focusing on just control ( and ofcourse, on fights that absolutely require it. ) If something is doable without me focusing on crowd control, I won't crowd control. I will DPS.
Will have to disagree on Path of Ice outdamaging Sudden Storm, that's all I got on that.
It really depends on the group set up. I just did a T2 Pirate King and we had two GWFs, a GF, a cleric and my wizard.
Well, in that case you adapted to the situation and were smart enough to do so. Generally speaking I know CW can put out tons of burst damage and has very good single target damage, by no means is the CW weak. I've 1v1'd many rogues and destroyed them.
Regardless, in normal setups where you have 1 of each class in a dungeon, the rogue is mainly going to be on the boss while you control the adds and poke the boss down when you can. If it hadn't been for you, they would have wiped because there was no control at all. AS is almost all you need for T2 Pirates, the adds are dumb.
Nessa@gwas - 10,500 Gearscore Control Wizard on Dragon Shard.
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
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sparkynavMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 2Arc User
edited May 2013
Thanks for posting this! Do you secondary WIS or CHA with this build?
I have Charisma second also for recovery. In harder epic dungeons with a lot of holes...wizards can use repeal to kick all addons to holes .
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sparkynavMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 2Arc User
edited May 2013
CHA across the board? It seems like the benefit from Wis is the action point gain as well as the recovery. You only take one feat that benefits from crits.
Your build is quite similar to the build I used until I got to Mad Dragon, and most t2 dungeons. While I agree this build has damage output I think that renegade is a tad better. Right now in my static five man I can effectively dps adds down by myself while controlling them almost 100% of the time, using many of the features you deem as bad.
I would like to compare builds, but do not want to hijack your thread, if you don't mind I'll post it tomorrow.
Izzibit
"It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously." Peter Ustinov
I don't mind discussion. Which Feats in the Renegade tree do you consider the source of massive DPS? I've tried the tree twice, and it was nothing compared to Thauma when I used it. Here's what I see:
Reapers Touch - Given. Huge increase. Included in the Thauma build.
Critical Power - Works. Lots more Dailies per fight. Also in the Thauma build.
Unrestrained Chaos - Maelstrom of Chaos is just terrible. And these stacks can be gotten with other attacks.
Nightmare Wizardry - The benefit of Combat Advantage in a group is still debatable, and since it can be gotten without this feat, investing 5 points seems like a waste ( to me. )
Energy Recovery - Gaining HP irrelevant to damage, Chilling Cloud loses to Magic Missile.
Phantasmal Destruction - Increases crit damage, so with a decent crit chance this is naturally some damage increase.
Chilling Presence - This can make your Ice Strike crit more. But I guess Renegade Spell Mastery is mostly used for Steal Time?
Masterful Arcane Theft - Ray and Steal Time dealing more damage. Ice Strike still beats both in terms of damage even without a Feat, let alone with one and Spell Masteried. During a Steal Time cast I can do one set of Magic Missiles and a Spell Masteried Ice Strike which deals AOE damage, 30% weapon damage DoT, has 20% increased damage.
Chaos Magic - Obviously increases damage unless you get the healing debuff. Reduces mitigation.
Meanwhile in Thaumaturgy Build:
-10% damage from killing mobs
-10% damage from flashing Storm Pillar at 2 or more mobs ( no need to charge it to gain the buff )
-20% damage to spell masteried Ice Strike ( someone claimed this is not working, will have to wait on that )
-Ice Strike dealing 30% weapon damage to targets hits as a DoT
-Arcane Spells weakening enemy defenses by 10%
-Conduit of Ice weakening enemy mitigation by 15%
-Magic Missile doing 30% more damage
-0 abilities with a channeled Cast Time being used
-Action point gain increased by Renegade & Normal -feat
Or did you just mean you think Renegade is better otherwise than in terms of pure damage output ( say, crowd control for example. ) On that I can agree. This build is all about damage output. And like I said before, when a point is reached where my group cannot advance in dungeons without me focusing fully on crowd control, I will focus fully on crowd control. Still fine in the T2 dungeons by mostly DPS'ing. Perhaps T3 will change that.
Also note the ability reviews are also from the point of pure damage. For example, I deem Shard of the Endless Avalanche bad from a damage point of view, because it is bad, it takes too long and it doesnt do enough. From a control point of view, it might be great. Last time I clarify this, if someone in the future comes saying "omg I can stun with shard of the endless avalanche, its not bad for damage" I will simply ignore such notes.
Controlwise, a lot of the options in the Control Feat -tree seem better to me?
tl;dr: What does Renegade do in damage/control that the Thaumaturgy/Control tree doesnt do?
Thanks for this build. I was running with the renegade doing great in pvp ( most points most kills often) but on dungeons i felt rushed and striving for dps. Took the plunge and respecced and found it an easy style to play with a huge boost in dps.
The debuffs are awesome. I found i was building ap faster too.
Gotta agree with Thauma for best dungeon DPS, at least that's my personal experience so far. It should be noted that many encounter skills are situational, even seemingly useless ones has their uses, and you can even switch skills in combat. If you have a hole, and a bunch of tough mobs, Repel or Shield will save you a lot of time. Managing zombie hulks on Idris, dito, breeze with Repel.
On regular AoE rotation, as Thauma, I couldn't survive without Steal Time though. It's really good, give it a chance if you haven't.
I'd love to see a better use for some skills, which currently feel underpowered. I've really tried to enjoy Shard of Endless Avalanche for example. I want to like this skill. But I just can't, not in the spell mastery slot, and not in a regular slot. I hope at some point we'll get to see a redesign of some skills, like that one.
I am curious about the Heroic feat: Learned Spellcaster - Increase the amount of bonus damage intelligence gives you by 1-5%
How does that work? is it 26 int +5% or is it 16 int+5% of that? or how does that work, just want to know if it is a huge DPS boost or the +9% AoE damage would be competitive enoughto take that.
best combo i did is Arcane Singularity-->Conduit of Ice-->chill strike--> Steal Time
steal time is an op skill on dungeons, think is the second best skill of CW (after Ray of Enfeeblement)
This is my go to combo. Everytime I see a CW without Arcane Singularity slotted, just using Ice Storm at the worst typical time (usually just when I pop Singularity ) I die a little inside. Nothing like the beauty of seeing consecutive, well timed Singularities holding down an entire room of mobs in one little spot.
After reading this thread, I am thinking of giving Icy Terrain a chance though, replacing Sudden Storm.
This is my go to combo. Everytime I see a CW without Arcane Singularity slotted, just using Ice Storm at the worst typical time (usually just when I pop Singularity ) I die a little inside. Nothing like the beauty of seeing consecutive, well timed Singularities holding down an entire room of mobs in one little spot.
After reading this thread, I am thinking of giving Icy Terrain a chance though, replacing Sudden Storm.
I honestly tried using Sudden Storm and it feels so buggy, also since I usually play with other people that have AOE suck/knockbacks, I don't always hit the skillshot. Icy Terrain feels more useful IMO.
Nessa@gwas - 10,500 Gearscore Control Wizard on Dragon Shard.
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
Cant wait to get 151k AD to respec and try this. Im currently half renegade half thauma and while it works for me i dont think its really optimal for dungeons as its based around Critting for Combat advantage and crit severity which i dont think anyone else gets but i could be wrong.
Well, the point of a control wizard is to keep the mobs from rushing the healer or other weaker members of the team, unless it's just for PVP and solo in which case I congratulate you for it
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insaniqMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 2Arc User
edited May 2013
Have more or less similar build, but noticed that mastered conduit of ice + icy terrain and placing yourself on top of the boss and/or cleric.
Adds freeze Fast - good cc, allows for max dmg with maxed chilled stacks.
4 Set gladiator helps too, reducing the mastered CD by 25%
Well, the point of a control wizard is to keep the mobs from rushing the healer or other weaker members of the team, unless it's just for PVP and solo in which case I congratulate you for it
Allright, you go do that. I'll keep DPS'ing and controlling as/when needed.
Thanks to everyone for the vaurious discussions and thank yous. Here's to hoping soon we can experiment with builds without Zen.
Nice guide, although I admit I was hoping for a little more directly stated info..ie Magic Missile 3/3, Storm Pillar 0/3 and so on. But overall very helpful guide and info. The info on power then crit was very important for me as I had been wondering about this. Where does armor penetration fit in, if at all?
Also I was wondering about what you aim for stat wise at the end. Do you throw everything into INT? I just sort of want an idea of what the three class stats should end up as at level 60.
Again, really nice guide and so informative. I have read the renegade guide but it is for pvp and so not really as helpful for me as I don't pvp. So this helped clear up a few things and set me on a better track. Just those couple of questions if you get a chance to answer them, and I would feel very confident.
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sinfelleMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 3Arc User
edited May 2013
Thank you very much for this guide.
I've read the Renegade guide, which I think is a good build, but inevitably in many of these MMO's you get the same debate... crit build vs. power build. In my experience, usually the power build ends up better for PvE dungeons. I guess we'll find out as more testing occurs.
Also, coming from a TR background. I built my TR around a full stealth build. Very high "control" and really nice for solo play. However, in a dungeon, there are so many mobs/adds that the finesse "control" style just doesn't work. Sure you can solo that one mob by yourself pretty well, but you're way down on the dps meters and in the end many of the boss fights are a struggle to clear adds to chip away at the boss before the next wave comes. With this playstyle, I felt frustrated at not being able to better clear adds and get back to the boss in a timely matter.
Tying this in with the CW discussion, I feel the same applies to this class. All the "control" options are great for solo play, but in a dungeon you need to put away the finesse game and just bring a bigger stick. I think the concept of a ranged control wizard and a melee trickster rogue are great, but in the end, really builds for the solo game. Most cc does not work on bosses so we are talking about cc'ing adds or just dpsing them down faster. I'm falling in the camp of dpsing them down faster. So despite the label of control wizard, I would agree that you build against the grain for as pure dps as you can get.
Quick question... my read on the Learned Spellcaster feat is that it would be 5% of the INT bonus. Well if INT end-game is 26, that's a 16% damage bonus from INT. So 5% of 16% would be roughly 0.7% damage bonus from the feat, no? While any damage bonus is great, this seems pretty small for 5 feat points. How would this compare with 3/3 Prestidigitation and 2 more points into either Wizards wrath (4% more AOE damage) or into Controlling Action (more AP gen) instead?
Comments
All the powers described being in my toolbars in the guide are maxed, and the only ones relevant to this guide. The rest really don't matter.
I have Entangling Force, Ray of Frost maxed if more CC is required, and Shield just for the random PvP, which I don't do much, because its so plain.
Tank will go in front of mob, rogue will be on his back, and you will have to be on either side. While it sounds easy, thats not always the case. Teleporting mobs with aoe make that a bit more difficult. Nightmare Wizardry just make positioning easier cause then you just have to dodge aoe, instead of seeing how melee position themselves and then teleport to get CA.
Anyway, your question made me to check exactly how big combat advantage damage is, and i still dont know
With 12% more from charisma i get about 14.5%-15% more damage vs no combat advantage. I (or OP maybe ?
And before posting that reply i decided to do forum search and it dropped this: http://dnd4.wikia.com/wiki/Combat_advantage
Assuming +2 Bonus to attack rolls would be +2% dmg in NW for CA, that would make above almost true ;P
Same for the 20% dmg on Ice Ray feat.
CW has too many useless spells. Icy Terrain is a good example. Deals no damage and does hardly to near none cc.
Here's to hoping the developers will fix these issues. I'll give the game a month or so to brew and become better.
Steal Time is actually a very good ability. If you place it on your tab not only do you gain combat effectiveness and share that with your party once you use it around a group of mobs, (plus having arcane mastery stacks increase this buff) you also gain movement speed. I have been able to cap out at 175% movement speed with steal time and full arcane mastery stacks and this will last me around 5 seconds. It's insanely faster than dodging and great for escaping. I encourage you to reconsider your skill usage before bashing them.
Sudden storm is not that great as you think it is, it's a skillshot compared to icy terrain. The immobilization is not that bad on icy terrain and the skill is somewhat glitchy in dungeons (the icy ground will disappear too early, I'm assuming that the game will remove excess graphics to reduce lag) but it will proc your crit passives much more than sudden storm ever will, plus sudden storm is 1 strike while icy terrain has an aoe dot that lasts a couple of seconds and if you do actually have gear that procs more damage while you do damage, icy terrain will always win in terms of damage. With enough recovery you will have this skill up 100% of the time because the skill does last around 9 seconds while the cooldown is 10 seconds, for me anyway.
Just my two cents.
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
This guide is written from a pure endgame DPS view and having movement speed doesn't increase damage. For now I've been able to dodge and avoid things without movement speed, will see if in the future there is any need for it. Spell Mastery Ice Strike is still the damage dealing winner by far.
Icy Terrain in its current state will never outdps Sudden Storm. It may have uses in PvP ( don't know, haven't tried. ) Ofcourse if a player cannot hit Sudden Storm, then it might be a different story.
That said due to steal time granting 5 stacks of arcane mastery it's also always on my bar regardless. But I'm a renegade wizard too.
Mobility can sometimes increase your damage, lets say you're channeling skills and you get knocked up, well you have just lost damage because you couldn't move out of the way fast enough or whatever the issue might be. I do agree that Ice Strike on SM is amazing, by far.
But again, the CW is all about CONTROL, DPS is secondary.
Sure, Icy Terrain ALONE will never outdps Sudden Storm, I agree with you there.
If Icy Terrain is buffed by enchantments, passives and feats, then at that point will it become more effective over Sudden Storm.
Effective as in CONTROL/DPS over DPS.
Icy Terrain has an AOE dot which procs the storm passives, you do not get that with Sudden Storm as it is a single strike in a line. (unless SS is in your SM, which makes you lose out on Ice Strike)
Icy Terrain combined with a lightning enchantment on weapon, with Storm Spell and Eye of the storm will proc enough times to do more damage than Sudden Storm.
Lightning enchantment has a chain effect and boosts all damage by 12% iirc.
Sudden Storm has a low CD and a limited range, plus you have to aim and cast, opposed to just casting and having more range since the area dmg is larger and as a CW I hope you have the mobs properly grouped up prior to using Icy Terrain, the damage will hit every mob, opposed to a line of mobs.
More mobs = More dmg
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
It really depends on the group set up. I just did a T2 Pirate King and we had two GWFs, a GF, a cleric and my wizard. We wiped the first tries because there was not enough damage. Adds would overwhelm us, so we switched to a strategy where the cleric kited the adds around the mast with one GWF assisting him. The GF, the other GWF and I were on the boss. I used single target DPS, put Enfeebling Ray in the mastery slot (for debuffing) and nuked the whole time, using Ice Knife even (except for one AS when I saw the cleric needed a break). That worked and we killed the Pirate King. Now, if we had had a rogue, I would have cast AS, EF, Steal Time and tabbed Chill Strike the whole time.
Control and damage are thankfully not mutually exclusive in Neverwinter. Steal Time and tabbed Chill Strike are great for CC and they do heaps of damage too. It's impossible to do good damage as a CW even if you focus on CCing. (By T2, every CW probably uses EF on CD.) Not sure how you guys manage without Steal Time. It's absolutely essential for my wizard!
When/if I reach a point where I won't be one of the highest damagedealers anymore no matter how I tryhard, I will start focusing on just control ( and ofcourse, on fights that absolutely require it. ) If something is doable without me focusing on crowd control, I won't crowd control. I will DPS.
Will have to disagree on Path of Ice outdamaging Sudden Storm, that's all I got on that.
Well, in that case you adapted to the situation and were smart enough to do so. Generally speaking I know CW can put out tons of burst damage and has very good single target damage, by no means is the CW weak. I've 1v1'd many rogues and destroyed them.
Regardless, in normal setups where you have 1 of each class in a dungeon, the rogue is mainly going to be on the boss while you control the adds and poke the boss down when you can. If it hadn't been for you, they would have wiped because there was no control at all. AS is almost all you need for T2 Pirates, the adds are dumb.
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
I would like to compare builds, but do not want to hijack your thread, if you don't mind I'll post it tomorrow.
Izzibit
Reapers Touch - Given. Huge increase. Included in the Thauma build.
Critical Power - Works. Lots more Dailies per fight. Also in the Thauma build.
Unrestrained Chaos - Maelstrom of Chaos is just terrible. And these stacks can be gotten with other attacks.
Nightmare Wizardry - The benefit of Combat Advantage in a group is still debatable, and since it can be gotten without this feat, investing 5 points seems like a waste ( to me. )
Energy Recovery - Gaining HP irrelevant to damage, Chilling Cloud loses to Magic Missile.
Phantasmal Destruction - Increases crit damage, so with a decent crit chance this is naturally some damage increase.
Chilling Presence - This can make your Ice Strike crit more. But I guess Renegade Spell Mastery is mostly used for Steal Time?
Masterful Arcane Theft - Ray and Steal Time dealing more damage. Ice Strike still beats both in terms of damage even without a Feat, let alone with one and Spell Masteried. During a Steal Time cast I can do one set of Magic Missiles and a Spell Masteried Ice Strike which deals AOE damage, 30% weapon damage DoT, has 20% increased damage.
Chaos Magic - Obviously increases damage unless you get the healing debuff. Reduces mitigation.
Meanwhile in Thaumaturgy Build:
-10% damage from killing mobs
-10% damage from flashing Storm Pillar at 2 or more mobs ( no need to charge it to gain the buff )
-20% damage to spell masteried Ice Strike ( someone claimed this is not working, will have to wait on that )
-Ice Strike dealing 30% weapon damage to targets hits as a DoT
-Arcane Spells weakening enemy defenses by 10%
-Conduit of Ice weakening enemy mitigation by 15%
-Magic Missile doing 30% more damage
-0 abilities with a channeled Cast Time being used
-Action point gain increased by Renegade & Normal -feat
Or did you just mean you think Renegade is better otherwise than in terms of pure damage output ( say, crowd control for example. ) On that I can agree. This build is all about damage output. And like I said before, when a point is reached where my group cannot advance in dungeons without me focusing fully on crowd control, I will focus fully on crowd control. Still fine in the T2 dungeons by mostly DPS'ing. Perhaps T3 will change that.
Also note the ability reviews are also from the point of pure damage. For example, I deem Shard of the Endless Avalanche bad from a damage point of view, because it is bad, it takes too long and it doesnt do enough. From a control point of view, it might be great. Last time I clarify this, if someone in the future comes saying "omg I can stun with shard of the endless avalanche, its not bad for damage" I will simply ignore such notes.
Controlwise, a lot of the options in the Control Feat -tree seem better to me?
tl;dr: What does Renegade do in damage/control that the Thaumaturgy/Control tree doesnt do?
The debuffs are awesome. I found i was building ap faster too.
Edited to add about ap gains
On regular AoE rotation, as Thauma, I couldn't survive without Steal Time though. It's really good, give it a chance if you haven't.
I'd love to see a better use for some skills, which currently feel underpowered. I've really tried to enjoy Shard of Endless Avalanche for example. I want to like this skill.
steal time is an op skill on dungeons, think is the second best skill of CW (after Ray of Enfeeblement)
How does that work? is it 26 int +5% or is it 16 int+5% of that? or how does that work, just want to know if it is a huge DPS boost or the +9% AoE damage would be competitive enoughto take that.
This is my go to combo. Everytime I see a CW without Arcane Singularity slotted, just using Ice Storm at the worst typical time (usually just when I pop Singularity
After reading this thread, I am thinking of giving Icy Terrain a chance though, replacing Sudden Storm.
I honestly tried using Sudden Storm and it feels so buggy, also since I usually play with other people that have AOE suck/knockbacks, I don't always hit the skillshot. Icy Terrain feels more useful IMO.
4/4 Castle Never legit. 4/4 Shadow Weaver set. 1/2 Ancient Court Magister.
Adds freeze Fast - good cc, allows for max dmg with maxed chilled stacks.
4 Set gladiator helps too, reducing the mastered CD by 25%
Allright, you go do that. I'll keep DPS'ing and controlling as/when needed.
Thanks to everyone for the vaurious discussions and thank yous. Here's to hoping soon we can experiment with builds without Zen.
Also I was wondering about what you aim for stat wise at the end. Do you throw everything into INT? I just sort of want an idea of what the three class stats should end up as at level 60.
Again, really nice guide and so informative. I have read the renegade guide but it is for pvp and so not really as helpful for me as I don't pvp. So this helped clear up a few things and set me on a better track. Just those couple of questions if you get a chance to answer them, and I would feel very confident.
I've read the Renegade guide, which I think is a good build, but inevitably in many of these MMO's you get the same debate... crit build vs. power build. In my experience, usually the power build ends up better for PvE dungeons. I guess we'll find out as more testing occurs.
Also, coming from a TR background. I built my TR around a full stealth build. Very high "control" and really nice for solo play. However, in a dungeon, there are so many mobs/adds that the finesse "control" style just doesn't work. Sure you can solo that one mob by yourself pretty well, but you're way down on the dps meters and in the end many of the boss fights are a struggle to clear adds to chip away at the boss before the next wave comes. With this playstyle, I felt frustrated at not being able to better clear adds and get back to the boss in a timely matter.
Tying this in with the CW discussion, I feel the same applies to this class. All the "control" options are great for solo play, but in a dungeon you need to put away the finesse game and just bring a bigger stick. I think the concept of a ranged control wizard and a melee trickster rogue are great, but in the end, really builds for the solo game. Most cc does not work on bosses so we are talking about cc'ing adds or just dpsing them down faster. I'm falling in the camp of dpsing them down faster. So despite the label of control wizard, I would agree that you build against the grain for as pure dps as you can get.
Quick question... my read on the Learned Spellcaster feat is that it would be 5% of the INT bonus. Well if INT end-game is 26, that's a 16% damage bonus from INT. So 5% of 16% would be roughly 0.7% damage bonus from the feat, no? While any damage bonus is great, this seems pretty small for 5 feat points. How would this compare with 3/3 Prestidigitation and 2 more points into either Wizards wrath (4% more AOE damage) or into Controlling Action (more AP gen) instead?