Wizard DPS in The Broken Mirror

[Celebairn]

I've cribbed sections of this from Manaelil's TDS post. His techniques are basically the same as what i'd recommend, so many thanks to his information which I've expanded on here.

What spells to memorize

Rather than give you my spell loadouts, I'm just going to list off what you absolutely need to keep loaded and then some of the options.

The Core Spells (you should always have these loaded in every situation):
Nukes: Ethereal Fuse, Ethereal Skyblaze, Ethereal Rimeblast, Claw spell (Claw of the Flameweaver or Claw of the Oceanlord)
Buffs: Quiescent Harvest, Twincast
Hate reducer: at least one of Concussive Storm, Synapsefreeze, or Dichotomic Fire (if you're fully AA'd with Concussive Intuition, Mind Crash, and Arcane Whisper, and Silent Casting you might be able to argue you don't need a hate reducer spell)
Shocking Vortex (DD with 100% chance to cause target to take 50-100% more damage for 18 seconds/24 DD nukes)

Other Spells:
Secondary Nukes: Cloudburst Stormstrike is fast dps, but can stop you from moving if you need to for raid mechanics. Be very careful.

AEs: for events we use AEs on, I like
Self Combustion (PBAE with 2-tick 5k dot on caster and 12-25% mana reduction for single target dds. Hits unlimited targets, damage drops off the farther target is from caster, 50' max range)
Funnel of the Frostdeep (Directional AE, chance to stun caster for 2s, 12 targets, 50' range)

Spell priority orders

To keep it simple, start with this standard casting plan... Alternate Eth. Skyblaze and Rimeblast, and hit Ethereal Fuse whenever it comes up and Claw of the Flameweaver and Shocking Vortex as much as you can (see Claw section below).

Claw of the Flameweaver > Shocking Vortex > Ethereal Fuse > Ethereal Skyblaze > Ethereal Rimeblast

In between each cast, you will hit one of your Force of Will/Flame/Ice AAs during the spell gem refresh. They're free damage when used this way, so always use them between casts like this.

DPS Increasers

Shocking Vortex in a raid probably pays off for someone else more often than for the caster, but it helps the raid, so cast it when you can.
Thricewoven Stormstrike pays off 1 in 4 times you cast it by increasing your next nuke by a 150% or so, but one in 20 you get reduced damage for 2 ticks. I don't use it a lot since it's kind of gamble.

Secondary Nukes

You can look at Manaelil's post if you want rigid rules on how to use secondary nukes, I do it more by instinct than he did apparently. It basically comes down to adding in one or both of these variations:

Cloudburst Stormstrike: This spell is the highest DPS spell we have due to instant cast. By casting it with Force abilities in the gem refreshes on either side, you add fast DPS without taking very much time away from our big flashy nukes. ** Warning: Cloudburst Stormstrike roots you when you cast it. If you might need to move for raid mechanics, do not use or even load it. **
Rains: by dropping rains into the mix, you get "free nukes" from the second and third waves of the rain. (In theory... I don't actually like rains much, too many ways to go wrong).

Claw of the Flameweaver

Manaelil's previous post said it already, although he didn't list all the possible beneficial procs:

This spell is so central to wizard dps that I have an entire section devoted to it.

Claw of the Flameweaver always procs beneficial effects. The chances and effects are listed below:

5: 10% Chance to trigger: Twincast
8: 6% Chance to trigger: Syllable of Refreshment

Not only can you proc twincast (twincast is the best thing ever created for casters. You basically spend 1x mana and 1x counter for 2x damage) but you can proc forceful rejuvination which will refresh your harvests.

Note:

One of the most important things about claw is that during ordinary twincast (the 18s to 21s one) it should be spammed as many times as possible. If used consecutively 3x times during twincast there is a 50 percent chance of another twincast. There have been times where I've chained twincasts for an entire raid boss. This doesn't happen often but when the stars align it can be a significant boost to dps.

Burns

Sustained vs Frenzied Devastation: A number of our +critchance lines were merged and renamed in TBM, leaving these two sharing a timer. Max Sustained Devastation increases crit chance of 58 casts by 26% and increases mana cost by 19%. Max Frenzied increases crit chance of 45 casts by 51% and increases mana cost by 50%. On a raid there is essentially no use for Frenzied, because other people's abilities such as Auspice, IoG, Black Wolf, etc will already have you at 100% crit rate using Sustained.

Primary Burn:
Sustained Devastation
Silent Casting
Second Spire of Arcanum
Improved Twincast
Arcane fury
Fury of Kerafyrm
Empowered Focus of Arcanum

Note: Twincast no longer overwrites Improved Twincast, so if you cast Claw, you won't be risking losing your ImpTwincast counters. That said, during primary burn is probably the one time that casting Claw isn't quite as useful.

Secondary Burn:
Arcane destruction
Fury of Ro
Twincast (spell)

Note: During secondary burn, cast Claw as much as you can for more Twincast proc chances, and also use an instant-cast nuke to get as many spells as possible cast within your 21 second twincast buff.

Other Types of Burn:

Intensity of the Resolute (7th Year Veteran Reward) - big DPS increase. Perhaps Curmugly has the numbers on when it is best to use it, I usually toss it in with another burn, or with Sorcerer's Blade. Usable about once every 3 hours.

Sorcerer's Blade - Every DPS caster should have one of these player-made Sorcerer's Blade with them and bandoliered for quick access http://lucy.allakhazam.com/item.html?id=87953 The buff from it is the best crit/critsize/damage buff in the game at around 300%. Usable about once every 3 hours.

Procs

Because our Fury AA lines increase the damage of proc crits, spell proc abilities are very valuable to wizards. This has become even more significant with changes over the last 6 months that allow more than one proc to fire from a single cast. This means that you should make sure to have whatever procs you can get. Some options:

a) make sure whatever weapon you are wielding has the best type 4 proc aug you can find.
b) use Ancient Hedgewizard Brew when you can. (http://www.eqtraders.com/items/show_item.php?item=42140&menustr=035000000000)
c) convince Furro we need to do the Neriak: Houses of Thex raid to get this belt: http://items.eqresource.com/items.php?id=94937 and never change your belt again. (** but I call dibs)

Glyphs

Glyph of the Cataclysm is +crit +critdamage when no other burns are running.
Glyph of Lost Secrets improves mana efficiency for 15 min if you have no bard in group.

Familiars

Choose between Improved Familiar and Prismatic Familiar. Prismatic will give you more damage, but the mana regen from Improved is significant, especially if you aren't well-geared or if you just got battle-rezed. If by some miracle you get a Bard in your group, then you should be using Improved.

Harvests

Harvest early, harvest often if you have room for the mana. Just don't waste time harvesting while burn abilities are up. You should definitely be using your AA harvest and Quiescent Harvest, and perhaps the older spell Bucolic Gambit too. Because I don't use as many fast-casting spells these days, I don't load gambit personally anymore.

New in TBM

Dichotomic Fire

This is our new 101 spell in the expansion. It is a special 6-rank spell line that you level up via progression. It deals 100065 (rank1) to 127710 (rank6) damage for 16000ish mana, and drops 25% of the hate the mob has for you. Efficiency wise, it's slightly less mana efficient than ethereals. It crits, but it cannot be twincast.

Especially once you get past about Rank3, Dichotomic Fire is a really great nuke. Big damage, drops agro at the same time. I'd recommend firing it anytime you get a Gift of Mana proc and it is available. Its mana cost is significant compared to other nukes though, so be careful not to run yourself low when you need mana.

Mana Burn

Mana Burn has been relatively useless for a long time, but it has received a major revamp in TBM. Ranks 13-16 have been added, and these ranks have a new effect. Rank 16 costs 60000 mana, does 2.4 million damage (doesn't crit as far as I've seen) and adds a 2-minute buff to the mob that blocks further mana burns and increases the damage of of the next 500 spells to land on the mob by 19200 (excludes lifetaps and resource taps). In a real raid during a DPS burn, the 500 counters lasts less than 10 seconds, maybe around a minute if it's a lower-dps phase.

This means that MB is an extremely potent boost to the overall raid damage output, adding in a total of 12M damage in very short time frames and repeatable by the number of wizards we have around. Since we usually only have one or two wizards, we currently just coordinate timing between ourselves, although it's sometimes being called in DPS assigns. Having to coordinate more MBs more would be a really great problem to have, invite your wizard friends!



Change Log
20151220 - after checking some numbers, removed suggestion that Frenzied is useful.
20160417 - removed Rain spell comments, I haven't been able to show them to be regularly useful. It is possible to eek out some extra DPS with Rains in some situations, but there's too many downsides.
20160417 - Updated new behaviour that prevents twincast and twincast procs from overwriting Improved Twincast.
20160417 - Minor improvements/cleanup.
20160417 - Major update to Mana Burn and Dichotomic Fire sections
20160531 - Update with to add Shocking Vortex, AE spells I like, and details of Dichotomic.

[Raccoo]

Hotkey for bandelier of the Sorcerer's blade

Line 1. /timer 108000,/pause 1,/ba activate nukes
---nukes is the name of your bandelier setup, so you can name it whatever
Line 2. /pause 3,/useitem 13
Line 3. /ba activate default
---where default is your regular setup for primary

[Furro]

Any possibility of updating this to reflect anything new from EoK?  No rush, busy time of the year and all.  Thanks!

Later,
-F

[kizant]

I forgot all about this forum but someone linked to it recently from the main EQ forums. It would be cool if this got updated. It would nice to send people to one place and right now I don't know of any single public guide that covers enough things well enough. So, without getting into too many complicated/advanced things here's my suggestions:

1. Shocking Vortex was changed to ignore procs and with synergy in EoK it's even more useful than ever. It's really a must for all wizards to use.

2. The note about Thricewoven Stormstrike should really be removed. It's a terrible line and always has been.

3. The concept of a primary and second burn is simple and used to make a lot more sense with all the old stacking issues but I think it's better to get away from that line of thinking. It's hard to explain to someone new but how about this? A better way to think about it is use FD/AD when your raid isn't doing a main burn. If you know you're getting auspice/bw/iog at the start then don't use FD/AD. Wait for at least auspice to finish. Keep the crit rate high. It's up to you to be aware of what you're benefiting from and how your raid handles each event. Use GINA to make it easier to keep track. Also, I really do mean that FD/AD should be used together right now. Maybe one of your wiz can check that out if they think it sounds strange. Oh and never use sustained. I'm kind of surprised that's even listed.

4. I don't see why Claw of the Oceanlord is ever an option unless you're dealing with a mob that resists fire and that should be a separate note and doesn't really apply much at this point anyway.

5. With hole in space and AAs for reducing agro you should never ever mem any form of spell concussion or especially synapse freeze. If you really have that bad of an agro problem you need to replace your tanks. Always save room for at least shield of consequence. If you're dead you're not doing DPS but only AEs and auras and things should ever be a serious concern.

6. With EoK upgrades fury of kera/fury of ro now last 10m so use em both together unless you're in for a really long fight. Again be aware of how your events proceed. I can't stress that enough.

7. Cloudburst really needs to be in the main spell line up. Claw, vortex, fuse, cloudburst, skyblaze is better for 'starters'. And if you have ITC/FD/AD running then sure just stick with vortex, fuse, skyblaze, rimeblast. Definitely don't use claw until ITC finishes regardless of the twincast change. And just be smart about it. If you're doing EoS orQueen and the aura was just up 20 seconds ago then hey don't cast cloudburst until you get the next one. Hit Netherstep AA if you mess up somewhere.

8. EoK also came with a new version of Gambit that should be your main harvest not Quiescent Harvest. Definitely use it as much and as soon as possible.

9. The belt link https://items.eqresource.com/items.php?id=94937 should be replaced with https://items.eqresource.com/items.php?id=147558

10. The glyph recommendation should really be to use Cataclysm every time its up IF you have a high crit rate. If you're doing AD/FD then use it (and use 2nd spire too obviously). If someone hits auspice and it's back up then use another Cataclysm if you can. Really any event that's like 10mins long you should plan on getting in more than one 2nd spire and cataclysm. Lost Secrets? ugh maybe as a last resort. And yeah maybe this whole ADPS topic could be covered in full with a list of what to look out for from other classes. Things like GINA triggers for chromatic haze so you don't accidentally hit claw when you have it, etc.

11. If someone is 'really' having mana issues then they could try switching to a fleshburner and infused tome of obulus. Or if anyone is reading this while HH Seb is available. The trak tooth disease proc *should* work with fury of kera like other disease weapon procs although I don't have one to verify. That would be better than a fleshburner. Otherwise, the eok 2h is a must. It's a huge DPS increase over any TBM weapon. The tome always may solve agro problems from not having good tanks. It'll be lower DPS but better than the alternatives.

12. Add Distilled Mana Tonic as a must potion to use.

13. EOK Alliance spells should be used as much as possible but everyone should make a macro for telling a wiz channel when they're casting to avoid getting blocked.

14. Make good use of forced rejuvenation. Try and line up alliance, dicho, fuse, gambit, and claw all in a row and use forced rejuv. Basically try and get the most out of it you can. (also those AE nukes on long timers)

15. The type 3 DPS augs aren't called out. I guess it's just assumed everyone knows to get those?

16. There's a number of mobs in EOK that reflect spells. It's probably not even that useful to account for at this point but it would be good to list out all the spells which can't be reflected for those scenarios. Force nukes, shocking vortex, rimeblast cascade/hoarfrost cascade, and the self combustion spell all work fine against those flame assaulters. There might be others I'm forgetting. Any spell on eqresource that has 0 listed as the reflectable value.

17. Magmatic Burst is still useful if you don't have anything running to increase your crit rate. It's efficient and still better than Skyblaze. Plus on some events you can get the actual AE benefit like Prince or with AD adds, etc.

[Shallon]

After the AA merge the main burn needs to be updated, we no longer have frenzied and sustained devastation, only frenzied.

Also, the mini burn setup no longer works as the associated aa are not longer there. If anyone has a decent way of doing a mini burn please post it. The only alternative I can find is using a magic based spell rotation which requires you to switch a few spells out for it. I will post what I found when I am in game next.