test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Stox's PVE CW Thaum DPS guide
stoxforum1
Banned Users Posts: 265 Bounty Hunter
http://nwcalc.com/cw?b=p5q:27fpvk:1galho,13j3cn3:150000:1zu05v:100000&h=1&p=ssm
mod2 updated
This is what I believe to be the most damaging CW setup for PVE. I spend a ridiculous amount of time testing and doing math and will try to answer any questions you may have. I don't claim to be new or innovating anything so please don't harass me in my thread. This is simply the setup I run being posted because I'm asked way too much.
The build is all about stacking debuffs / buffs / and increasing damage.
A few remarks on my sheet:
1. Prioritize INT, each point in INT will give you more damage than a point in CHA. But these are the 2 stats you should focus on. For Human ending up 26 INT / 19 CHA, for Tiefling 26 INT / 21 CHA
2. I choose power over crit. Why? Because it's more damage despite what some people believe
3. I choose pyro bands over ancient slavemaster rings of control. Why? Well recovery wins when it comes to DPS sort of. As in, with a long fight recovery up til about 3500 will win the DPS race, but most fights aren't long. With a good group you don't get a chance to get your cooldowns again before moving on to the next pack, so I front load the damage by sacrificing recovery for more power / crit / arm pen.
4. Yes I know my armor pen seems low, but fact is arm pen doesn't work for a lot of our abilities right now and most of the time even the amount I have is enough for most of the mobs we fight. We're on adds a lot more than we're on elites and bosses.
5. Weapon enchant Vorpal since this really is a max DPS setup, but for party benefit when Plague Fire is fixed that's a great choice as well, but it still won't do the damage of a Vorpal. For armor enchant, because of the bonus from Galeb Duhr come module 2 I'd recommend Soulforged. i.e. barkshield is nice but with lower health you'll actually do more damage with Galeb Duhr. People really need to learn how to calculate vorpal added damage as well, so here you go folks. P. Vorpal = 50% crit severity. This doesn't mean you do 50% more damage or as most people seem to believe 20-30% damage. It is simply your base crit severity 175 (100 + 75% crit severity) + p. vorpal 50 = 225. 225/175 = 1.2857. So this is your damage increase from a perfect vorpal hit, 28.57%. Now you multiply this by your crit chance to get your overall damage increase. Note that because some of our skills do not crit, they do not gain anything from vorpal and you will need to test how much your crit chance is with a parser such as ACT because of Eye of the Storm. Your character sheet number is not reliable. So in my case I show a 28% chance to crit on the character sheet, but because of Eye of the Storm I normally average 48% crits. So damage increase for me with p. vorpal would be 28.57% * .48 = 13.71%.
Weapon Mastery 3/3 - 3% more crit, enough said.
Toughness 3/3 - because I'm squishy enough. lol
Wizard's Wrath 3/3 - because extra damage on every skill in my normal rotation (coi, chill strike tab, shard of the endless avalanche, and steal time, even adds damage to aoe dailies)
Fight On 1/5 - again I'm frontloading a lot of my damage to hit hard, so while reduced cooldowns is nice, I normally won't see cooldowns before going to the next pack.
Arcane Enahncement 3/3 - because shard is our biggest damage spell
Blighting Power 2/3 - because in my normal rotation I don't use a cold power on anything with chill already on it, but for bosses this feat is great or if someone else has put chill on the mobs before you.
I'm human so I have 8 feats in the last column. If I was not human I would go 3/3 Focused Wizardry and 2/5 Learned Spellcaster for the most damage, but as it is I can have my cake and eat it too. I believe human to be the most damaging class over even tieflings because of the feats in this last column. 9% damage to every enounter and daily that I typically use and then on top of that nearly 6% increased damage from Learned Spellcaster on everything. With my roll it's 16% extra damage from INT, so 5% * 1.16 (the 16% bonus) = 5.8% extra damage from Learned Spellcaster to everything with a roll of 26 INT. It's slightly more with campfire bonus.
For the right side:
5/5 Tempest Magic - because extra damage when the mob is low health is nice
5/5 Malevolent Surge - We kill a lot as CWs, so bonus damage when we do.
5/5 Snap Freeze - with the rotation I use which I will explain more in detail below, I get this effect on 2 spells, coi and chill strike.
0/5 Frozen Power Transfer - just mentioning this because while it is a nice damage buff, I am frontloading damage and not going to take the time to cast a full rotation of chilling cloud before using encounters.
5/5 Transcended Master - because 15% to our most damaging aoe encounter is ridiculously good
5/5 Elemental Empowerment - this is actually a 10% debuff, thanks for pointing this out Grimah
1/1 Assailing Force - 15% extra damage after using COI.
Going into other trees there are lots of fun choices. I would say there are 2 best options for overall damage though. Severe reaction in oppressor can help with your survivability a lot and reaper's touch is a nice bonus to at wills, but you have to be too close and shouldn't be doing the majority of your damage with at wills. So especially with the upcoming nerf to entangling force, AP gain is going to be critical making Critical Power a very viable option as well. With this if it procs on a multi target ability, say chill strike in tab, you get 25% AP.
Another worthy contender that I did not go with is Nightmare Wizardry. Yes this spell is nice and will increase party damage. But as I said my build is more for DPS racing. A good party will have combat advantage most of the time anyway, so this feat is somewhat nulled but is still a great party DPS increase. I am 5/5 Bitter Cold because it's an increase to my shard damage in my rotation and only benefits me really.
My rotation and an explanation.
CoI > Chill Strike in tab > Shard of the Endless Avalanche > Steal Time.
Sometimes I will go ahead and put the shard down before starting the rotation and then launch it to combo faster.
I normally run Arcane Singularity and Oppressive Force for dailies because sometimes singularity is still needed to make a fight go smoother, for instance there are 3 times during an MC run with some big pulls that I would be using this but otherwise I would use Oppressive. I normally will swap one of these for Ice Knife for boss fights.
I use Eye of the Storm exclusively and that will not leave my bar for dungeon running or for bosses, it is just too good. Now the question of storm spell or evocation is more interesting. With my setup and the debuffs and damage I do, Evocation wins. For others Storm Spell may do more damage. The easiest way to find out is to parse a few runs while running storm spell. Check the damage of abilities affected by Evocation and see how much damage that would have added. If it is more than the damage you got with Storm Spell during the runs, you should be running Evocation instead.
Now if I can get close enough to the mobs I will use Steal Time or a Daily early in the fight for more HV procs and bonus damage, but usually fights are started from a distance and this is not the case.
IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS AND KNOW WHY THIS BUILD IS SO GOOD!!!
**note that due to the math the actual numbers you get will be slightly higher, so say you have debuffs of 25%, you will likely see 26.5% extra damage.
1. CoI is benefitting from Snap Freeze, so 15% more damage on it AND the CoI debuff. So your CoI hits for 30% harder. Note that as you add other debuffs and chill and others add debuffs that this actually goes higher, over 75% in fact.
2. Chill Strike also benefits from Snap Freeze 15% because CoI doesn't actually add chill stacks unless it is in tab, and it is also getting another 15% damage from the CoI debuff and another 15% from Evocation and another 10% from HV stacks on 5 targets, ~55% bonus damage.
3. Shard gets the 15% damage debuff from CoI as well, 15% from evocation, it gets 5% more damage from Bitter Cold, and another 15% more damage from Transcended Master, another 10% from Elemental Empowerment, shard slam adds 1 stack of HV and shardsplosion adds 1 more. This is our hardest hitting encounter and my build and rotation are setup to make it hit that much harder. You're looking at about 90% damage increase to shard, really closer to 100%.
4. Steal Time gets the 15% debuff from CoI, 15% from evocation, 5% from Bitter Cold, and 10% from Elemental Empowerment. With HV stacks this is a 75% increase.
Show me another Tree with CW that can stack debuffs like this that can even come close to the damage a thaum CW can do!
Note I do change up encounters depending on the situation and bosses but that just depends on the situation. If you have a specific scenario you're interested in ask me, but as an example for CN I'd be running this setup until after the second boss then I would switch to Entangling Force on TAB for faster AP gain currently but it's being nerfed, and switch CoI for Shield for bumping off. Then for the final boss I'd be using Repel on TAB and be back to having in CoI instead of Shield. Now I'm sure they will fix the clearing of adds in CN soon, so this is just an example of current methods assuming you're even running the dungeon and not having a TR solo run it. When the adds are cleared in the last fight I would once again be switching skills.
Feywild boons, Power and Crit for the first 2 because this is a damage build after all.
The Third tier was a personal choice, yes 2% more AP gain will give you more damage, but really that's every 50 singularities or OF you cast, you will get 1 extra. I chose the 700 hp here instead.
4th Tier, the one that does damage to enemies, note either has a 1 minute cooldown.
5th Tier, I feel a lot of people miss out on how good this is, but Elvish Fury refreshes itself when you kill a mob in it's timer. In a fast group that means you will always have a bonus 600 power when running through a dungeon after you have the stacks built.
That's about it. As I said this is what I run. If there is something better in all of my testing I have yet to find it. I have played around with the fire path coming in module 2 and needless to say, as of now nothing in my build will be changed. Any questions just ask me here or in game @stoxbox2.
MODULE 2 ARTIFACTS:
1. Lantern of Revelation
Legendary is 300 crit, 300 arm pen, 300 combat advantage.
2. Shard of Valindra's Crown
Legendary is 300 Power, 300 life steal, 400 control bonus
3. I would say Bloodcrystal Raven Skull or Waters of Elah'zad, or just wait. On the test shard prior to module 2 they had a class specific artifact that would have been better. They will add these eventually.
Module 2 Companions:
1. Ioun Stone of Allure for the stats obviously.
2. Fire Archon, 5% more damage to targets at less than 30% health. Assuming an even distribution of damage this would be about 1.5% extra damage, though in practice it will likely be less.
3. Galeb Duhr gives 10% bonus damage based on how much damage you have taken. i.e at 90% health you do 1% more damage, at 50% health you do 5% more damage, etc. I normally am the first one into the fights and getting hit, so this will be a few % to my overall damage I'm sure.
4 and 5. This is the tough one in my opinion, Dancing Blade at epic gives 5% crit severity. This may sound good but when you have a p. vorpal for instance, it's 230 severity / 225 severity or 1.022 * your crit%, likely ~50% with eye of the storm, so it's about 1.1% damage increase. Blink Dog seems to be the popular choice giving 5% combat advantage damage at epic, but I also believe Vicious Dire Wolf for 5% chance to interrupt target and Wild Hunt Rider for a 5% chance for encounters to increase your damage by 10% to be a great choice as well. The reason the others are viable choices IMO is that blink dog gives me an effective damage increase of 0.75%, it's not really that great. Dire Wolf interrupt seems to proc off every hit of everything, so a few CWs running this could chain interrupt enemies. It appears that Wild Hunt Rider procs the damage increase from each target hit as well and will likely be my go to companion for this last slot. Every tick of CoI seems to be able to proc it, the same for icy terrain and all 6 hits of steal time as well, the slow ticks and not just the damage.
mod2 updated
This is what I believe to be the most damaging CW setup for PVE. I spend a ridiculous amount of time testing and doing math and will try to answer any questions you may have. I don't claim to be new or innovating anything so please don't harass me in my thread. This is simply the setup I run being posted because I'm asked way too much.
The build is all about stacking debuffs / buffs / and increasing damage.
A few remarks on my sheet:
1. Prioritize INT, each point in INT will give you more damage than a point in CHA. But these are the 2 stats you should focus on. For Human ending up 26 INT / 19 CHA, for Tiefling 26 INT / 21 CHA
2. I choose power over crit. Why? Because it's more damage despite what some people believe
3. I choose pyro bands over ancient slavemaster rings of control. Why? Well recovery wins when it comes to DPS sort of. As in, with a long fight recovery up til about 3500 will win the DPS race, but most fights aren't long. With a good group you don't get a chance to get your cooldowns again before moving on to the next pack, so I front load the damage by sacrificing recovery for more power / crit / arm pen.
4. Yes I know my armor pen seems low, but fact is arm pen doesn't work for a lot of our abilities right now and most of the time even the amount I have is enough for most of the mobs we fight. We're on adds a lot more than we're on elites and bosses.
5. Weapon enchant Vorpal since this really is a max DPS setup, but for party benefit when Plague Fire is fixed that's a great choice as well, but it still won't do the damage of a Vorpal. For armor enchant, because of the bonus from Galeb Duhr come module 2 I'd recommend Soulforged. i.e. barkshield is nice but with lower health you'll actually do more damage with Galeb Duhr. People really need to learn how to calculate vorpal added damage as well, so here you go folks. P. Vorpal = 50% crit severity. This doesn't mean you do 50% more damage or as most people seem to believe 20-30% damage. It is simply your base crit severity 175 (100 + 75% crit severity) + p. vorpal 50 = 225. 225/175 = 1.2857. So this is your damage increase from a perfect vorpal hit, 28.57%. Now you multiply this by your crit chance to get your overall damage increase. Note that because some of our skills do not crit, they do not gain anything from vorpal and you will need to test how much your crit chance is with a parser such as ACT because of Eye of the Storm. Your character sheet number is not reliable. So in my case I show a 28% chance to crit on the character sheet, but because of Eye of the Storm I normally average 48% crits. So damage increase for me with p. vorpal would be 28.57% * .48 = 13.71%.
Weapon Mastery 3/3 - 3% more crit, enough said.
Toughness 3/3 - because I'm squishy enough. lol
Wizard's Wrath 3/3 - because extra damage on every skill in my normal rotation (coi, chill strike tab, shard of the endless avalanche, and steal time, even adds damage to aoe dailies)
Fight On 1/5 - again I'm frontloading a lot of my damage to hit hard, so while reduced cooldowns is nice, I normally won't see cooldowns before going to the next pack.
Arcane Enahncement 3/3 - because shard is our biggest damage spell
Blighting Power 2/3 - because in my normal rotation I don't use a cold power on anything with chill already on it, but for bosses this feat is great or if someone else has put chill on the mobs before you.
I'm human so I have 8 feats in the last column. If I was not human I would go 3/3 Focused Wizardry and 2/5 Learned Spellcaster for the most damage, but as it is I can have my cake and eat it too. I believe human to be the most damaging class over even tieflings because of the feats in this last column. 9% damage to every enounter and daily that I typically use and then on top of that nearly 6% increased damage from Learned Spellcaster on everything. With my roll it's 16% extra damage from INT, so 5% * 1.16 (the 16% bonus) = 5.8% extra damage from Learned Spellcaster to everything with a roll of 26 INT. It's slightly more with campfire bonus.
For the right side:
5/5 Tempest Magic - because extra damage when the mob is low health is nice
5/5 Malevolent Surge - We kill a lot as CWs, so bonus damage when we do.
5/5 Snap Freeze - with the rotation I use which I will explain more in detail below, I get this effect on 2 spells, coi and chill strike.
0/5 Frozen Power Transfer - just mentioning this because while it is a nice damage buff, I am frontloading damage and not going to take the time to cast a full rotation of chilling cloud before using encounters.
5/5 Transcended Master - because 15% to our most damaging aoe encounter is ridiculously good
5/5 Elemental Empowerment - this is actually a 10% debuff, thanks for pointing this out Grimah
1/1 Assailing Force - 15% extra damage after using COI.
Going into other trees there are lots of fun choices. I would say there are 2 best options for overall damage though. Severe reaction in oppressor can help with your survivability a lot and reaper's touch is a nice bonus to at wills, but you have to be too close and shouldn't be doing the majority of your damage with at wills. So especially with the upcoming nerf to entangling force, AP gain is going to be critical making Critical Power a very viable option as well. With this if it procs on a multi target ability, say chill strike in tab, you get 25% AP.
Another worthy contender that I did not go with is Nightmare Wizardry. Yes this spell is nice and will increase party damage. But as I said my build is more for DPS racing. A good party will have combat advantage most of the time anyway, so this feat is somewhat nulled but is still a great party DPS increase. I am 5/5 Bitter Cold because it's an increase to my shard damage in my rotation and only benefits me really.
My rotation and an explanation.
CoI > Chill Strike in tab > Shard of the Endless Avalanche > Steal Time.
Sometimes I will go ahead and put the shard down before starting the rotation and then launch it to combo faster.
I normally run Arcane Singularity and Oppressive Force for dailies because sometimes singularity is still needed to make a fight go smoother, for instance there are 3 times during an MC run with some big pulls that I would be using this but otherwise I would use Oppressive. I normally will swap one of these for Ice Knife for boss fights.
I use Eye of the Storm exclusively and that will not leave my bar for dungeon running or for bosses, it is just too good. Now the question of storm spell or evocation is more interesting. With my setup and the debuffs and damage I do, Evocation wins. For others Storm Spell may do more damage. The easiest way to find out is to parse a few runs while running storm spell. Check the damage of abilities affected by Evocation and see how much damage that would have added. If it is more than the damage you got with Storm Spell during the runs, you should be running Evocation instead.
Now if I can get close enough to the mobs I will use Steal Time or a Daily early in the fight for more HV procs and bonus damage, but usually fights are started from a distance and this is not the case.
IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS AND KNOW WHY THIS BUILD IS SO GOOD!!!
**note that due to the math the actual numbers you get will be slightly higher, so say you have debuffs of 25%, you will likely see 26.5% extra damage.
1. CoI is benefitting from Snap Freeze, so 15% more damage on it AND the CoI debuff. So your CoI hits for 30% harder. Note that as you add other debuffs and chill and others add debuffs that this actually goes higher, over 75% in fact.
2. Chill Strike also benefits from Snap Freeze 15% because CoI doesn't actually add chill stacks unless it is in tab, and it is also getting another 15% damage from the CoI debuff and another 15% from Evocation and another 10% from HV stacks on 5 targets, ~55% bonus damage.
3. Shard gets the 15% damage debuff from CoI as well, 15% from evocation, it gets 5% more damage from Bitter Cold, and another 15% more damage from Transcended Master, another 10% from Elemental Empowerment, shard slam adds 1 stack of HV and shardsplosion adds 1 more. This is our hardest hitting encounter and my build and rotation are setup to make it hit that much harder. You're looking at about 90% damage increase to shard, really closer to 100%.
4. Steal Time gets the 15% debuff from CoI, 15% from evocation, 5% from Bitter Cold, and 10% from Elemental Empowerment. With HV stacks this is a 75% increase.
Show me another Tree with CW that can stack debuffs like this that can even come close to the damage a thaum CW can do!
Note I do change up encounters depending on the situation and bosses but that just depends on the situation. If you have a specific scenario you're interested in ask me, but as an example for CN I'd be running this setup until after the second boss then I would switch to Entangling Force on TAB for faster AP gain currently but it's being nerfed, and switch CoI for Shield for bumping off. Then for the final boss I'd be using Repel on TAB and be back to having in CoI instead of Shield. Now I'm sure they will fix the clearing of adds in CN soon, so this is just an example of current methods assuming you're even running the dungeon and not having a TR solo run it. When the adds are cleared in the last fight I would once again be switching skills.
Feywild boons, Power and Crit for the first 2 because this is a damage build after all.
The Third tier was a personal choice, yes 2% more AP gain will give you more damage, but really that's every 50 singularities or OF you cast, you will get 1 extra. I chose the 700 hp here instead.
4th Tier, the one that does damage to enemies, note either has a 1 minute cooldown.
5th Tier, I feel a lot of people miss out on how good this is, but Elvish Fury refreshes itself when you kill a mob in it's timer. In a fast group that means you will always have a bonus 600 power when running through a dungeon after you have the stacks built.
That's about it. As I said this is what I run. If there is something better in all of my testing I have yet to find it. I have played around with the fire path coming in module 2 and needless to say, as of now nothing in my build will be changed. Any questions just ask me here or in game @stoxbox2.
MODULE 2 ARTIFACTS:
1. Lantern of Revelation
Legendary is 300 crit, 300 arm pen, 300 combat advantage.
2. Shard of Valindra's Crown
Legendary is 300 Power, 300 life steal, 400 control bonus
3. I would say Bloodcrystal Raven Skull or Waters of Elah'zad, or just wait. On the test shard prior to module 2 they had a class specific artifact that would have been better. They will add these eventually.
Module 2 Companions:
1. Ioun Stone of Allure for the stats obviously.
2. Fire Archon, 5% more damage to targets at less than 30% health. Assuming an even distribution of damage this would be about 1.5% extra damage, though in practice it will likely be less.
3. Galeb Duhr gives 10% bonus damage based on how much damage you have taken. i.e at 90% health you do 1% more damage, at 50% health you do 5% more damage, etc. I normally am the first one into the fights and getting hit, so this will be a few % to my overall damage I'm sure.
4 and 5. This is the tough one in my opinion, Dancing Blade at epic gives 5% crit severity. This may sound good but when you have a p. vorpal for instance, it's 230 severity / 225 severity or 1.022 * your crit%, likely ~50% with eye of the storm, so it's about 1.1% damage increase. Blink Dog seems to be the popular choice giving 5% combat advantage damage at epic, but I also believe Vicious Dire Wolf for 5% chance to interrupt target and Wild Hunt Rider for a 5% chance for encounters to increase your damage by 10% to be a great choice as well. The reason the others are viable choices IMO is that blink dog gives me an effective damage increase of 0.75%, it's not really that great. Dire Wolf interrupt seems to proc off every hit of everything, so a few CWs running this could chain interrupt enemies. It appears that Wild Hunt Rider procs the damage increase from each target hit as well and will likely be my go to companion for this last slot. Every tick of CoI seems to be able to proc it, the same for icy terrain and all 6 hits of steal time as well, the slow ticks and not just the damage.
Post edited by stoxforum1 on
0
Comments
1. Why max out Icy Rays? Is that just a PVP thing? Also, why max out Icy Terrain?
2. Why max out Chilling Presence if you don't plan on using it? Might these points be better spent in, say, Shield, or in Ice Storm (which, while typically rarely used, is still used more frequently than Chilling Presence)?
3. You have three at-wills maxed out, so which two do you use regularly, and why do you max out the third?
4. Your offensive enchants, they are all Radiants I presume, with such a huge power stat? What rank are they?
I might also add that for purposes of soloing, slotting Sudden Storm instead of CoI might be a better choice, so I would max out Sudden Storm.
Thank you for your contribution. I am planning on respeccing and this gives me something else to think about.
1. Yeah icy rays was for PVP more than anything and sometimes for bosses (last fight in MC,) but I don't really PVP on this character anymore because it's just not ideal. Icy Terrain is for stacking chill, as in CoI tab and Icy terrain for lots of control and also for fast stacking chill on bosses which leads to #2.
2. I slot chilling presence for boss encounters where I'm more on the boss than adds. A CW stacking chill can do a lot of single target damage.
3. Chilling Cloud if multiple enemies are left after encounters (or nothing else to do during singularity) or magic missile if just 1 or 2. Ray of Frost again slotted for bosses or certain conditions when I was pvping.
4. Mostly radiants, a few darks.
And as far as Sudden Storm for solo, I could kind of see that. But for party play you're giving up a 15% debuff for a spell that only does slightly more damage (of note is that if you use storm spell, CoI with the added storm spell procs usually outdamages sudden storm,) and sudden storm is a lot harder to position for to hit everything, and it does not hit targets in singularity. It does have the advantage of a higher target cap and the damage is immediate rather than a DoT.
Firstly, I will highlight on the DPS output on both thau mages. A crit-build thau mage max out more damage than a wisdom( recovery) thau mage. For all, those who argued that they have seen a high recovery mage top the dps chart, I am gonna tell u that most of them are Oppressors from those I know, which allows them to perform control and dps effectively. Oppressors are able to singularity a lot even with low recovery. U maybe a 4 or 5k recovery thau mage but it is hard to "sing" a lot faster than a 3k recovery oppressors.
Secondly, end-game combat has little room for thau mage. From my point of view, thau mage is only good for debuffing. Why? With HV set and elemental empowerment feat plus thau mage's last COI migitation feat and enfeeble in tab, u are quite a heavy debuffer even without plaguefire enchantment. As u have mentioned, CW is squishy. Some of the end-game epic dungeon elite mobs hit u extremely hard. It could be 1 hit = 25% or 1/3 hp loss. Also, u do not often get a party with 1 guardian fighter that can hold aggro properly because the tanking and aggro-holding mechanism is kinda broken or poorly-developed from my point of view. (<---I have a GF character too.) In short, u will be careful not to aoe as freely as u want (exception on steal time) on a group of mobs as there will be some loose mobs that is not attacked by your teammates and you do not want to aoe and get 3 or 4 loose mobs jump onto you and rip u. Imagine a group without GF, unless u pull the mobs together for gwf or tr to hit first and gain more threat, you bound to get gang-HAMSTER when u recklessly aoe without someone pulling the mobs aggro away from u. In addition, by the time, the threat is built up for few seconds, the mobs would be dying and the one cleaning up that mob before u AOE would be TR or GWF who saves their powerful skills for the finishing blow. In short, u will lose the chance to increase your dps. That is what I have experienced. U have damaging spells and feats to combine and use but the situation is not safe for u to cast them. It is a chain effect on thau mage due to the poor aggro or threat system in the game. Your potential is "contained".
I think you've either mixed up things by mistake, either you're very wrong. Thaum is arguably best trash clearing AoE spec, although Renegade in the hands of skilled player is the same. Oppressors will never-ever top any DPS charts against thaum/rene, also I have no idea why you think Oppressors can spam sing better than others.
End game has plenty of room for thaum CWs. Please don't mislead forum readers.
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ Gankdalf The Icehole █ ▇ ▆ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁
Here would be my reasoning and this applies to the recovery stat as well. But let's compare apples to apples here, it's 3 points in Fight on or 3 in Wizard's Wrath, so 6% extra damage or 6% off cooldowns. I think with the cooldowns you'll find you're .1 seconds not where you calculate because of rounding at times. Also wizard's wrath adds to third hit of chilling cloud and to your AOE dailies, whereas these have no CD so Fight On has no effect. So really the damage difference is negligible when you break it down for encounters and advantage Wizard's Wrath because of dailies and chilling cloud.
Then on top of that, at the start of the fight you have all your cooldowns already, so Fight On has no effect. Then as a fight progresses to actually get the benefit of Fight On you would have to use encounters the moment they are up which is impossible and usually wasteful (why am I going to use shard with 1 mob left?) Sometimes you're moving to the blue circle, or in the middle of a round of at-wills you don't want to break, it just isn't feasible to rely on that, so Wizard's Wrath wins.
I love Icy Rays, also for PvE bosses. And at draco I run with repel on tab, coi + st + icy rays until the adds are gone. Why, try it
I wonder what your average dps is in a CN run? But I will try your build
Edited:
- Why did you not choose Elemental Empowerment instead of Bitter Cold? Because Chill Strike and Conduit of Ice are both cold encounter spells which will do 30% weapon dmg over time.
Black Lotus
http://nl.twitch.tv/wixardofoz
Well, no. It's either 3 points in Fight On, or 3 points in any other heroic feat in Tiers 2-4.
I can choose both Fight On and Wizard's Wrath, if I am willing to forego, say, Blighting Power.
And since your build seems to be mostly arcane-based anyway, might this yield a better result?
But for standard pve stuff, the 10% mitigation works on shard too so instead of just getting 15% you get 10% for 3 seconds and it will work on both shard + steal time, (and entangle if you have it on mastery)
and also the featured satirical comedic adventure "A Call for Heroes".
You can change this if you would like, but there is a reason that I will not discuss on public forum for a boss fight strategy involving cold powers.
Love you Grimah and all you do for the community. You are absolutely correct and I'm not sure how I missed this. I actually like both and have updated my build and respecced after I tested on the PTS.
U seem to read only half what I have typed. I agreed with you the thau has the best clearing trash spec or feats. The latter part of what u did not quote from me highlights some of the situations thau mage must faced in Epic T2 dungeons and what leads to my conclusion. Focusman's reply in this thread clearly explains why Oppressors are able to AS more.
Thau mage is excellent for questing but dungeon-wise, normal dungeons are extremely easy but epic dungeons where everyone went in to get their purples would be another story. Take Epic dread vault for example. In normal dread vault, u can spam shards, steal time and other skills u have in place but Epic dread vault? Not really the case, trying to aoe spells could spell doom for your team as u lure a bunch of mindflayers with daze effects on you, preventing from casting spells to control while the other mobs deal lots of damage to you. You bring trouble for DC because luring them means DC gets aggro when healing u and if your DC gets dazed and can't heal. U are the downfall of the team. Other T2 dungeons are manageable once u know how to work in team.
Your comment seems to address only regular questing or normal dungeons with theoretical guess based on what u see on the description for feats. Back then, there was a post by a DC saying that a CW is a CONTROL wizard, u are supposed to control mobs. Thau mage is a mage that sees killing mobs fast as another control alternative. However, to tell u the truth, that only applies for weak mobs. Why do Neverwinter mentioned about pushing mobs off the cliff in gameplay? Some of the mobs have too thick of a hp to kill with aoe that repelling saves the time. Why do u see in epic FH videos that devoted cleric or tank needs to kite the mobs? If a thau mage is truly AOE-powered, the mobs should take only slightly longer time than the same normal mode to clear, isn't it? What I am telling u is that the current state of a thau mage's power in end-game epic dungeons are kinda limited by cooldowns, aggro and a bunch of other stuffs.
Normal dungeons or quest dungeons are nothing to a thau mage.
And as someone recently, wrote: if you're to lazy to type, I'm to lazy to read (proberly).
Pers3phone, regulary runs MC and CN, therefore I'm quite sure he knows how to do T2 dungeons
You're again very wrong overall. I would not have responded to your post, I think everybody should play as they enjoy, but you said that thaum has no place in endgame, which had to be countered, as it can mislead newer players in thinking thaum is a bad endgame spec.
Thaumaturge is not only very good at AoE clearing trash, but performs admirably in single target as well. Icy Rays hit harder than other specs, RoE is still there a bit worse than the rene version because of feat, chill strike, CoI -15% mitigation.
As for Epic DV, I only did it 3 times because it's pretty pointless. You can bet I spammed my shard and Steal Time even as I was renegade back then and it went JUST FINE.
I avoid pushing mobs off cliff usually and prefer burning them. There was a time when I didn't have enough dps for this to work properly but things changed. FH mobs are kited by GF because CW's time is best spent on boss.
Also I usually mean CN but MC as well when I talk about doing dungeons. And yes, dead mobs are better than controlled mobs, not to forget my Steal Time and shard are very good CC as well as dps.
BTW, the Alacrity feat? So you gonna spam more tabbed EF (why oh why put this spell on tab anyway when most parties have 3 CWs and plenty of daily action) and more sings? Still almost useless IMO. I build lots of AP from my crits, and I crit a lot. CoI on tab builds a lot of AP as well, so I can spam my dailies (which will probably be OF not AS) rather often. Tabbed EF will be useless in 6 days or so anyway...
The oppressor tree is very nice, but for PvP. For PvE, I like burning things down fast and moving on to the next big pack faster.
You are wrong. We do CN with 4 players without any problems with 2xCW (thaum), 1xTR and 1xDC. We also do DV epic and all the other Epic dungeons without any problems. We have plenty of control and huge damage both in single target and AoE. But I guess u need a good DC, but even the best CWs no matter what build can fail if the DC is doing a bad job and it works both ways ofc.
We did CN in 18 min (including draco fight). But that was before they fixed the HV set.
BTW EF is supernerfed in Module 2 regarding AP gain. It will be useless. But it dont really matter for me since I dont use it in pve.
▁ ▂ ▄ ▅ ▆ ▇ █ Gankdalf The Icehole █ ▇ ▆ ▅ ▄ ▂ ▁
Oh for heaven's sake. So you chose Blighting Power only in order to use an exploit?
I thought this build was supposed to be the best AOE DPS build evah.
So in the absence of this particular exploit (which I frankly have no interest in, since whatever exploit you are referring to will be fixed anyway and then I'll have to fight this boss the hard way anyway) would you choose Blighting Power or not?
I would still take it over fight on, yes.
I haven't been out damaged since I was leveling back in beta, and I finish every dungeon several million ahead of the next person, including other good CWs. I can't give up feats like Fight On and Frozen Power Transfer because I'm always the dps and the tank and carrying my group. I rely on my CC being available more often to stay alive, and the Chilling Cloud buff helps a lot on my 2nd round of encounters to clear faster.
Your build is very smart because of your guild, but I think people with less elite groups will benefit less from it.
EDIT: Fight On is much less beneficial than I thought it was, I only lose .5-.7s on my CDs dropping to 1/5. Thanks for the tip! I still can't give up Frozen Power Transfer for Snap Freeze tho ;o.
Black Lotus
http://nl.twitch.tv/wixardofoz
EF wont give u extra ap for additional targets u hit with it!
Thanks a lot for the updated information. Very interesting build. You tempted me to respec my Renegade CW and try out your build (especially, as I may change my Thaumaturge from Spellstorm to Master of Flame
I'm just wondering in what situations you're using Magic Missle (I would guess single target), Ray of Frost (PvP?) and Icy Terrain?
Edit: I'm new to the game and trying to find a build that I really like. I really like the idea of utilising the more AoE-heavy burst abilities but I just want to make sure that they will actually be affected. ^^
Steal time and shard are definitely both affected, but CoI is not.
I really appreciate you to prepare this build.Just because you examined lots of things, you explained lots of spells' engine.Tousands of Cws around here but just Grimah and you do that rightfully.
Thank you for that