Demon Blazing Scarab?

from level 10 blazing it DOES do more damage (take a look at http://www.ecatomb.net/skillpwi.php and see the difference in dmg from lvl 10 and demon) and it also does it in a shorter time which is good, because your getting more dmg in in less time, and if u keep the fire stacked, it does more dmg over all.

i dont really use this skill often enough to say that its worth BUYING the book, but hey if i got it for free, id use it lol.

Vitenka - Dreamweaver wrote: »

There's no reason to not learn it, I guess; but it's hardly the best skill in the world.

If the DOT lasts the full duration, it's your third best damage spell, after Ironwood and Lucky.

The catch is that the DOT portion of the damage is not multiplied by damage amplifiers (it does benefit from mdef debuffs at the time it was cast). So if your group is regularly piling on lots of damage amps, Venomous can be better to fill the gap between the Ironwood and Lucky.

I mostly use it to time when to re-apply Sage Ironwood (20 sec duration). Ironwood, Blazing, and when Blazing's cooldown is up I know I need to reapply Ironwood. But that won't matter to you since you're Demon.

tweakz wrote: »

How can you say it's third best damage? It doesn't take weapon into account like other skills. As refines/ imbues go up: the other skills do to.

Because the huge 7391 fixed damage (6427 for demon) added to it from the DOT blows away the paltry couple hundred points extra damage you can add with refines or shards. Venomous for example is only 2354 + weapon. You'd have to find a magic weapon with ~5000 weapon attack for Venomous to be competitive. Noxious comes closer (4592 fixed damage + 2x weapon damage), but with typical gear it will do about the same damage as Blazing while taking 1 sec longer to cast and consuming almost 2x as much mana.

blizzypol wrote: »

Demon Frost says hi.

Demon Frost got messed up in the Spark train and should better say goodbye b:shutupb:shockedb:surrender

it doesnt matter the damage as demon. used along with air strand in pvp its a good way to keep others away

tweakz wrote: »

How can you say it's third best damage? It doesn't take weapon into account like other skills. As refines/ imbues go up: the other skills do to.

its like the same problem on my wiz with crown of the flame but basically does much more damage than those spells with 100% weapon and less than those with 300% weapon description

the damage is decent too, can tick someones (weak) charm

MANray_ - Sanctuary wrote: »

Lately i've begun reconsidering wether to level frost since, regardless of the slow and DoT effect, the hit itself may be worth a spark on ocassion. If i'm dealing with multiples and i could take out a sac assault mob in just one hit for instance...

Here are the normalized DPS outputs from my veno from around the mid-80s. Level 10 versions of all spells, unsparked Frost, other spells after 1-sparking.

1.00 Frost
1.02 Lucky
1.00 Ironwood
0.92 Blazing
0.76 Noxious
0.73 Venomous

Using the chi to 1-spark and casting Lucky will get you more damage (instantly too) than using it on Frost. The extra damage from all the other spells you cast afterward just buries Frost even further. Here are the same figures using Sage versions of all spells, veno in the low-90s:

1.00 Frost
0.93 Ironwood
0.88 Lucky
0.87 Blazing
0.69 Venomous
0.69 Noxious

While Frost appears to hold up pretty well at first glance, bear in mind that this metric attributes the entirety of the DOT's damage to just the cast time of the spell. In the 9 sec it takes for Frost's DOT to complete, you could spam out 3-5 more spells while still under the effect of the spark. Each spell cast gains about 0.165 from 1-sparking, so it only takes 3 casts of Venomous or 2 casts of the higher damage spells for 1-sparking to exceed the damage you'd get from using the spark to cast Frost.

I should mention that this is for a heavy build. Sparking is a multiplier for equipment damage in addition to magic, so the higher your magic, the less relative benefit there is from sparking. In other words, Frost for a pure mag build should do better than the above figures show. If a pure mag build can give me their matk unsparked and 1-sparked, their channeling, and equipment attack totals, I can toss it into my spreadsheet and give you pure mag figures.

Nevertheless, my recommendation remains unchanged. Leave Frost at level 1 unless you need the slow effect for some reason. The only use I've heard of for the L10 version of Frost is when you're spam-healing against a boss and have enough time to squeeze out a non-heal now and then. Since you're building up free chi from the heals and don't have time to spark, Frost can be a good way to use the chi for extra damage. Demon venos may wish to get the Demon version for the freeze.

Thank you Solandri, i do apreciate the info. And the numbers do certainly make Frost much more unattractive, although it may still be an interesting choice on some scenarios since pets don't benefit from a Spark's small invincibility effect and you've still got the DoT in case you miscalculate on a fire and forget type of situation. Also, the slow effect may come in handy when trying to get a mob off a fleeing squad mate.

I certainly will not make it any sort of priority but having the option available may not be so bad, especially considering the limited use of many other skills for a caster veno. The foxform curses (other than Amp) are practically useless until you can get Sage Soul Degeneration. So, while i certainly would not make it a priority over skills with even specialized uses i may consider leveling it through 8x. I'm very strongly on the side that skills you will only use rarely should be maxed since it is precisely on those ocassions that you want whatever you're using to be effective. Skills i don't use at all (such as Wallop and Befuddling) i don't bother placing on my tool bar, which i do try to keep as streamlined as posible (only hotkeys and an extra bar). Since i recently figured how to save some space by eliminating Venomous and Ironwood (which are the opening skills to both my macros) and have already accounted for sufficient room for 79 skills i can certainly afford to experiment a bit, and Frost may just be able to deliver on some rare scenarios.

tweakz wrote: »

Why do you do that? You know that Venomous is only 100% weapon damage and also leave out that it has longer cast time than Noxious. (as -ch gears go up: Noxious improves) You then throw in the "typical gear" clause for a fall back when I was clearly indicating that it has diminishing value as gears are improved. In other words: It may not pay for itself by the time it loses value.

Because your initial objection was just a blanket statement questioning my placement of the spell at #3, as if any improvement in weapon damage would invalidate that ranking:

How can you say it's third best damage? It doesn't take weapon into account like other skills. As refines/ imbues go up: the other skills do to.

You did not specify what type of gear or what spells would do better (in fact, you seemed to imply that any spell would do better). I simply clarified that for typical equipment most people are likely to have, the effect you're pointing out is not significant enough to drop Blazing from the #3 spot. If you want to put together an uber-build which makes Blazing #4, I have no problem with that and might even run some theoretical numbers for you if you ask nicely. But I tailored my reply to be of use to most of the players reading this forum, not to the few people out there running around with +10 Nirvana weapons.

Also, I should point out that Venomous always has a shorter cast time than Noxious. Channeling reduces Noxious (2.5 sec) by a greater amount than Venomous (1.5 sec), but since both are reduced by the same percentage it's never enough to make Noxious faster.

We should also consider the chi gained from sage venomous or the wood debuff from demon that won't help that fire DoT at all.

Chi gain from Sage Venomous averages out to 10 per cast. Chi gain from Blazing is 15 (20?) per cast. So on average you'll gain more chi casting Blazing instead of Venomous. And the OP was Demon anyway.

The wood debuff from Demon Venomous not helping the fire DOT is a really good point.

To further consider it's value, we should look at how frequently it can be used in a fight as well as how frequently it would be wasted or have it's duration interrupted.

Yes. The very first thing I typed in my first post on this topic was "If the DOT lasts the full duration".

In practice, I see how much lighter it hits initially and I see how little it does over time. (More like less than 3k dmg for DoT while other spells hit initially for almost 3k more).

I got tired of trying to guess how much damage my spells were doing on average by watching the damage numbers in the game. So I started calculating them.

Here's some data for you Solandri. I'm not pure mag because I have 38 points misspent from lower levels before I knew better, but I'm fairly close. I've got 483 mag and my weapon is 1075-1094 magic attack with two sapphire gems in it so that should be 1234.5 weapon damage. Oh, and my channeling is 36%.

0 sparks - 8343-8453, 8398 average
1 spark - 11205-11353, 11279 average
2 sparks - 14067-14253, 14160 average
3 sparks - 21222-21503, 21362.5 average

Assuming I calculated these correct I come to
Unsparked frost vs 1 sparked others
1.29 Ironwood
1.20 Noxious
1.00 Frost
0.99 Lucky
0.96 Blazing
0.90 Venomous

Though I am comparing sage versions of skills there. If you compare triple sparks it's even more against frost. Infact, I'll do it right now:
3.15 Ironwood
2.61 Noxious
1.96 Lucky
1.87 Venomous
1.48 Blazing
1.00 Frost

That means a single triple sparked IW does more damage than three casts of frost scarab (and does it faster), in addition to the extra 5-7 skills you get to use during the triple spark.

Also, I should point out that Venomous always has a shorter cast time than Noxious. Channeling reduces Noxious (2.5 sec) by a greater amount than Venomous (1.5 sec), but since both are reduced by the same percentage it's never enough to make Noxious faster.

For 99.9999% of people out there this is true, but at 80% channeling their channel+cast times become equal. So with an 81%+ channeling setup Noxious is actually the faster skill. As far as PWE servers go though, that setup is still theoretical, and is going to be out of reach of just about everyone for a long time to come since it basically requires a full set of 12% channel gear in addition to a few other items.

Chi gain from Sage Venomous averages out to 10 per cast. Chi gain from Blazing is 15 (20?) per cast. So on average you'll gain more chi casting Blazing instead of Venomous. And the OP was Demon anyway.

The wood debuff from Demon Venomous not helping the fire DOT is a really good point.

I think you messed your numbers up here. Venomous gives 10 chi normally, but under sage there's a 20% chance to gain 30 additional chi. So the average chi is actually 16 per cast (10+30*.2). Blazing gives 20. Not that this really matters for a demon comparison, but there you go.

Oh and since it was brought up, you can apply that same logic about the wood debuff to frost just as well as it can be applied to blazing. Though it doesn't hurt frost quite as badly.

If skill lasts 30s and ticks 1 per sec, then multiply 30*tick? Even on metal mobs it appears I'm losing dps by using sage blazing.

Ticks are every 3 seconds. How long the metal mob lives will determine if blazing is worth it for you or not. I only use blazing in two situations, bosses and eden card boss runs, those are the only times that I run into mobs which live long enough for me to gain damage with it, and in eden's case that's more because I'm solo and they're wood mobs than it being a place where blazing really shines. You can apply the same logic to solo Abaddon runs as well. But again, that's sage... I don't think there's any situation for a demon where blazing is worth using due to the wood debuff.

tweakz wrote: »

My weapon is only a +10 TT99, and pretty easy to obtain lately. Anyone that gets L11 Blazing is already close to getting some long term gear worth refining to +10. My contention is that Blazing may not be worth getting for that short period of time that it might benefit. Putting the coin into an earlier weapon refine and spirit into a genie would likely be wiser.

Refining a weapon to +10 will cost you ~90 mil on average using an optimal strategy of mirages, tienkangs, tishas, and dragon orbs with mirages at 10k and gold at 430k. If you can afford to refine your weapon to +10, the cost to buy and learn Sage/Demon Blazing is pocket change. (Using dragon orbs, the cost is ~151 million.)

No, Noxious has .8s cast time while venomous has a full 1. Their DPS will not be synchronous as -ch goes up.

You have to get over 80% channeling before that becomes a factor. I think it's safe to say that unless they release some new items, 99.999% of the playerbase will never attain that. Again, I'm writing my replies to be useful and relevant to the bulk of the players out there. And for them, Noxious will never be faster than Venomous.

Brael - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Unsparked frost vs 1 sparked others
1.29 Ironwood
1.20 Noxious
1.00 Frost
0.99 Lucky
0.96 Blazing
0.90 Venomous

Are these DPS or DPC (damage per cast)? The high placement of Noxious makes me think it's DPC. Nothing wrong with that, it's a valid metric, but really only useful for opening spells and 1- or 2-shot kills. In terms of DPS, I get:

1.00 Frost
0.97 Ironwood
0.93 Lucky
0.91 Blazing
0.80 Noxious
0.75 Venomous

But the cast time for Lucky and Frost are the same, so we should be getting the same ratio of the two. The formula I have are (Sage versions):
Frost = wood_mastery*(matk+watk+5135) + 0.8*5135
Lucky = wood_mastery*(matk+watk+4320)
Blazing = wood_mastery*matk + 6427
wood_mastery = 1.25 (Sage)

If you compare triple sparks it's even more against frost. Infact, I'll do it right now:
3.15 Ironwood
2.61 Noxious
1.96 Lucky
1.87 Venomous
1.48 Blazing
1.00 Frost

If these are also DPC, something's wrong. All spells are 100% matk + x00% watk + fixed. Sparking only affects matk, so all spells gain the same amount of damage per cast from sparking. e.g. If Blazing gains 0.54 from triple sparking (goes from 0.96 to 1.48), then Ironwood must also gain 0.54 from triple sparking (goes from 1.29 to 1.83).

I think you messed your numbers up here. Venomous gives 10 chi normally, but under sage there's a 20% chance to gain 30 additional chi. So the average chi is actually 16 per cast (10+30*.2). Blazing gives 20. Not that this really matters for a demon comparison, but there you go.

Thanks. I could've sworn when I tested it it only gave 30 chi when it triggered, but I just tested it again and it does indeed give 40. Average gain is still less than Blazing. (Also, I'm going to have to do some frequency tests on it at some point. It took me 18 casts before it triggered once, which is way longer than you would expect with a 20% trigger rate.)

Ticks are every 3 seconds. How long the metal mob lives will determine if blazing is worth it for you or not. I only use blazing in two situations, bosses and eden card boss runs, those are the only times that I run into mobs which live long enough for me to gain damage with it.

Right. Even as a timing mechanism for re-casting Sage Ironwood, it's unnecessary on regular mobs since they don't live long enough to need Ironwood recast.

tweakz wrote: »

There's a possibility it may be useful if you aggro two mobs with Herc, and put the DoT on the one getting just reflect dmg, but not sure I'd even use it for that.

I've generally found this to be a bad idea. The DOT damage can cause you to pull aggro, which is not a pleasant thing when your herc is busy attacking another mob and the squad is counting on the herc to hold aggro on that mob.

You will have to train Demon Blazing Scarab if you want to have all the demon skills. And why not, it's fun seeing all your hotkeys with purple borders b:pleased

I figure if you're going to cast it for chi anyway, who not do double the damage in less time. If coin and spirit are such a concern for you at your level, then wait till after you get your gear. Eventually you'll have enough extra to train it and you'll be happy you did.

Solandri - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Are these DPS or DPC (damage per cast)? The high placement of Noxious makes me think it's DPC. Nothing wrong with that, it's a valid metric, but really only useful for opening spells and 1- or 2-shot kills. In terms of DPS, I get:

I was going by dpc. Thinking about it though, I probably should have gone with dps as blazing whether it's sage or demon is only going to be used during long fights. For general situations though, I think dpc is a more accurate number as soloing normal mobs or doing things such as bh's with a squad both result in very fast kills against all but bosses.

But the cast time for Lucky and Frost are the same, so we should be getting the same ratio of the two. The formula I have are (Sage versions):
Frost = wood_mastery*(matk+watk+5135) + 0.8*5135
Lucky = wood_mastery*(matk+watk+4320)
Blazing = wood_mastery*matk + 6427
wood_mastery = 1.25 (Sage)

I found my error, it was modifying weapon damage and magic attack. So skills without weapon damage like blazing were getting less benefit and ironwood was getting a huge one.

Thanks. I could've sworn when I tested it it only gave 30 chi when it triggered, but I just tested it again and it does indeed give 40. Average gain is still less than Blazing. (Also, I'm going to have to do some frequency tests on it at some point. It took me 18 casts before it triggered once, which is way longer than you would expect with a 20% trigger rate.)

There's still a 1.15% chance of that happening. For what it's worth, I just got 3 casts in a row with the bonus chi. I've never tested it to be certain it's a 20% chance, but it's always felt right to me.

If it's every 3 seconds, then it's much worse than I previously thought.

30 ticks 1 second apart and 10 ticks 3 seconds apart are more or less the same thing. The only real difference is in how big of a number you see. Which usually drives home the point of how much damage you're losing to resists. On this Celestial Eido Hare at the beginning of Eden my blazing hits for 468 a tick. Since it should hit for 739 it means I'm losing 36.67% of my damage to resists. Of course, since a hare is a non elemental mob it means I'm losing that percentage on my wood nukes too.

I also do Eden card boss runs and mobs tend to last about half the duration Blazing would take, and there's also the trouble of figuring out when to use it in a string like s.soul degen -> s.amp -> s.ironwood -> s Noxious -> s.Lucky -> s.venomous. My guess is that demon would have a similar dilemma since by the time you'd want to use it: the mob would be half dead. I understand that not everyone kills as quickly but this is what they may face in the future.

Secondary mobs are where blazing will give you some benefit. I tested blazing against some individual mobs since I'm doing Eden right now. Since they're solo it means amp and soul degeneration on each one.
Celestial Rhinodrake - 3 ticks
Heavenly Oddfoot - 5 ticks
Heavenly Rhinorex - 3 ticks
Celestial Sting - 5 ticks (interestingly stunning blow didn't change the number of ticks, I was certain I would get more ticks without it)
Celestial Antelope - 3 ticks

All of these were with 0 crits in the fight. A crit was worth around -1 tick. My casting pattern was fox, SD, amp, stunning blow (antelopes and stings only), fox, blazing, ironwood, then venomous to finish the fight. I stayed away from lucky due to the aggro, and the fact it would make stings/antelopes run again.

I stopped at Stone Brain so I didn't get to the Dranites to test them but from the pattern I would say 6 ticks based on them being wood mobs, and slightly more durable than the stings which died 1 second or so before the next tick in every test.

Against Increased life/defense/magic resist mobs you'll get a few more ticks as well. I didn't run into too many of those this run so my testing there is limited but what I can say is an increased magic resist Celestial Eido Hare took 109 per tick compared to 468 for a normal one (both were before I started counting total ticks). An increased defense Celestial Rhinodrake took 9 ticks before dying. I could have ended that fight faster but when I took aggro I backed off to let my pet take it again (ended up tanking from ticks 3 to 8). I also fought two increased defense Celestial Antelopes, on the first I messed up like against the Rhinodrake and overaggroed and blazing lasted 8 ticks. On the second I held back a little more and blazing went for 6 ticks.

There's a possibility it may be useful if you aggro two mobs with Herc, and put the DoT on the one getting just reflect dmg, but not sure I'd even use it for that.

It certainly has that use, on the second mob you're not getting SD+amp so you can expect something that gets 3 ticks to instead take 5 and something that takes 5 to take 8. So if you're fighting two 3 tick mobs you're going to get 8 ticks of blazing on that second mob, or a 3+5 you'll get the full 10 on the second mob. The problem is, I think that atleast in Eden you won't use it much in practice (I realize there are other spots, but since I brought up Eden as somewhere that I get some use out of it due to the high number of wood mobs, I might as well stick with it) because there just aren't that many sets of mobs where it's beneficial.

I did fight one set which was a sting+oddfoot and blazing wore off the oddfoot at about half life (I killed the sting first). But I'm not really sold on fighting multiples at once being effective.

So taking all this data. We know from blazings damage that I have a 36.67% resist rate and that with an Eido Hare's resists I should have a 39.82% resist rate. So, mobs are resisting 3.15% less than they should, due to the 14 levels I have on them.

So taking this data the resist rates of the other mobs would be:

Name			Wood	Fire
Celestial Rhinodrake	24.71	36.67
Heavenly Oddfoot	48.67	36.68
Heavenly Rhinorex	24.70	36.68
Celestial Sting		48.68	36.68
Celestial Antelope	36.68	36.68

Converting fire resist rates to damage/tick and multiplying by how many ticks blazing was generating on each type of mob we come up with:

Celestial Rhinodrake	1404
Heavenly Oddfoot	2335
Heavenly Rhinorex	1401
Celestial Sting		2335
Celestial Antelope	1401

Now, calculating my average venomous/iw/blazing damage per cast factoring in resists and adding in the dot damage from blazing you get

Name            	Venomous	Ironwood	Blazing
Celestial Rhinodrake	9160.07		11196.65	7726.8
Heavenly Oddfoot	6245.01		7633.48		6645.66
Heavenly Rhinorex	9160.88		11197.63	7724.35
Celestial Sting		6244.24		7632.53		6645.12
Celestial Antelope	7703.3		9415.98		6718.25

There's still a little damage from IW not accounted for due to the defense buff but this is close enough. It basically shows that against wood mobs you'll get a little more damage if you cast blazing as your first spell once you're back in human form and if you do decide to fight two at once (I think it's a bad idea myself when you can avoid it), reflect damage will keep the mob on your herc, and blazing on that second mob will get you quite a bit more additional damage

Edit: The above chart actually isn't right. I forgot to include amp damage. I'll just add it in since the other data is still useful.

Name            	Venomous	Ironwood	Blazing
Celestial Rhinodrake	10992.09	13435.98	8991.35
Heavenly Oddfoot	7494.02		9160.17		7507.79
Heavenly Rhinorex	10993.06	13437.16	8989.02
Celestial Sting		7493.09		9159.04		7507.15
Celestial Antelope	9243.95		11299.18	7781.7

That gives blazing a pretty minor benefit even against wood mobs, and that's using normal amp not sage. Throw in sage amp and even against wood mobs, venomous comes out to more damage. The only real benefit is against multiples.

tweakz wrote: »

Are you basing that on your build which isn't typical? What about something like:
http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=9520a9d904dd0082

-except the actual mag on that is 564 and the matk: 11464-12820 ch is -54%

That's -48% channel reduction. The -channel gems decrease by 3% each. The +crit arrow works only for bows.

It's possible to get -3% channel through nirvana archangel leggings and -3% for wearing a pair of archangel items (would suggest sleeves + boots). rank 6 magic sword decreases channel by 10%. still unsure about rank 9 though. If the venomancer weapon is a wand then there's 20% chance to craft with 10% channel reduction. If it's a pataka the channel reduction in not avaiable.

The build you follow is a lot better to wizards than venos as there are plenty of powerful spells with disgustingly long channel but short cast time.

Concerning the argument cast vs. channel there are spells which allow immense DPS increase by equipping -channel items but some either allow minimal change or no change at all. Venomous allows up to 33% channel reduction while blazing, ironwood and lucky scarab will achieve the highest possible DPS with -47% channel and noxious can only match cast time with -68% channel reduction which is nearly impossible to get. The comparison is easier to understand with wizard spells though. Gush has 1s channel and 1s cast so there's absolutely no way to increase its DPS through channel reduction. Stone Rain has 2s channel and 1.4s cast, allowing 30% channel reduction, which makes the spell a lot better. Demon Divine Pyrogram has 1s cast but 2.5s channel (sage and lvl10 versions come with 3s channel) so with 60% channel reduction it's possible to gain massive DPS. The main problem with channel reduction is that cooldown time forces the player to switch to other spells which don't work as nicely with channel reduction. So no matter how good (or bad) are noxious, blazing or lucky scarab, venomous is still the primary attack for a Venomancer.