As much as it hurts to say it, I'm out, I'm done, it's over. I've really enjoyed getting to know community members and being able to help those I've come in contact with, but I can't play any longer. The game simply didn't engage me, even at 80 after having *some* memorable PVP encounters :) My main problem though, is not the game, but is more closely knit with my publicity and community involvement. I've tried to maintain my site, make interesting videos for you, post on many different message boards including the official boards, answer questions in every form of message possible, and I had even planned to write an all-encompassing ToS guide for the class (all of this on top of, you know, maybe actually playing the game a bit) :P I had a two part problem: If i stayed and tried to maintain the site and all of my "duties", i became stressed and overworked, but if I just played the game and ignored these things, I felt depressed when I wasn't responding to the numerous messages etc that I was getting. The only way to escape these opposites was to quit : / I don't know if I'll return, what I'll do if I do return etc, but right now even thinking about the reputation etc that I'm throwing away is very saddening. If any of you 'veteran readers' wish to stay in contact feel free to e-mail me (settar3@live.com).
I want to thank everyone who visited my site for their time and support, goodbye and thank you again!
Settar
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Settar's Predicament...
While I have enjoyed writing and receiving the positive responses from the community, I've built myself up a burden. I hope you will all understand that while I will try to continue to add to the community's ideas on the forums and such, I can't be as active out-of-game as I previously was, I haven't yet decided the fate of this blog, most likely I'll bring my posts to 1-2 per week, but the possibility for cutting off postings completely is still there. Feel free to drop your ideas/comments, I'll update you guys later, thanks!
Friday, June 13, 2008
Spellweaving!
Hey everybody, as many of you know spellweaving is now "working" for us Tempests. This post is intended to give a breakdown of the buffs and effects of spellweaving. This not a "how to" guide as honestly I haven't used it much and it seems impractical in most situations.
First of all you get MANY smalls buffs from it, such as crits bonus modifier, crit chance, overall damage, AoE radius etc.
What's unfortunate, however, is the lack of "weaving," realyl what you do is click one button to gain it's effect while in spellweaving mode. Below I'll list the options for buffs.
1) Arcane Renewal, choosing this buff increases your stam regen by 199/3 seconds for 6 seconds
2) Arcane Surge causes all of your spells to inflict maximum damage for 10 seconds.
3) Set's Rebuke, for 12 seconds you have a chance when hit to send out a bolt of lightning at your attacker, hitting anyone in it's path.
4) Power Surge gives you a +50% damage multiplier for 10 seconds, but increases your cast times by 25% for the duration.
For each each stage of spellweaving you reach (each drains more and more hp/stam) you will get more and more damage benefits, every time you reach a new stage (or so it seems, every 15 seconds) you get to chose another buff to apply from the above list.
While spellweaving has some really neat effects, the only place I can see this being effective is in raids, if you have other team members healing you and restoring your stam you could stay in a spellweaving state and pump out some insane damage. Unfortunately it really has no place in pvp. Once you enter spellweave state you have to stay in it for 10 seconds before leaving. While it DOES make you immune to knockbacks as of today's patch, you effectively CC yourself in a root for 10 seconds. While the buffs may be neat, the fact that you'll get injured from it and the fact that a good player will simply run out of your stationary range, makes it lackluster in most situations that I've been in / can think of.
Thanks for reading everyone hopefully you have a little better idea about it now :)
Settar
First of all you get MANY smalls buffs from it, such as crits bonus modifier, crit chance, overall damage, AoE radius etc.
What's unfortunate, however, is the lack of "weaving," realyl what you do is click one button to gain it's effect while in spellweaving mode. Below I'll list the options for buffs.
1) Arcane Renewal, choosing this buff increases your stam regen by 199/3 seconds for 6 seconds
2) Arcane Surge causes all of your spells to inflict maximum damage for 10 seconds.
3) Set's Rebuke, for 12 seconds you have a chance when hit to send out a bolt of lightning at your attacker, hitting anyone in it's path.
4) Power Surge gives you a +50% damage multiplier for 10 seconds, but increases your cast times by 25% for the duration.
For each each stage of spellweaving you reach (each drains more and more hp/stam) you will get more and more damage benefits, every time you reach a new stage (or so it seems, every 15 seconds) you get to chose another buff to apply from the above list.
While spellweaving has some really neat effects, the only place I can see this being effective is in raids, if you have other team members healing you and restoring your stam you could stay in a spellweaving state and pump out some insane damage. Unfortunately it really has no place in pvp. Once you enter spellweave state you have to stay in it for 10 seconds before leaving. While it DOES make you immune to knockbacks as of today's patch, you effectively CC yourself in a root for 10 seconds. While the buffs may be neat, the fact that you'll get injured from it and the fact that a good player will simply run out of your stationary range, makes it lackluster in most situations that I've been in / can think of.
Thanks for reading everyone hopefully you have a little better idea about it now :)
Settar
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Settar's Leveling Build
O.K. everyone, after looking into many specs an testing ability after ability, THIS is what I've come up with as my final build. Before it's pointed out, of COURSE I've drawn on previous builds I've seen for this, Atomik's build was definately an influence, but I wanted to make some tweaks that made more sense (to me). The build is purely meant to expedite solo (and small group) leveling and as such you should take the points in an order that makes the most sense for solo'ing. Because you don't have the means to AoE effieciently until higher levels, I would suggest going down thunder/general first, and then filling in the lightning feats, you may choose to take points out of general or thunder in a high level respec to grab all of the improved storm field.
Questions:
1) Why get Power/Wrath of the Serpent Ring? This will help you with tough pulls and mobs, you'll find a detailed explanation of these feats in a post right below this one.
2) Why did you neglect a lot of lightning strike feats? Because when you're leveling, it's only a pulling technique (sometimes) and if you're on a PVP servers, for the random pvp encounters. Otherwise you'll be using storm field, healing, active blocking etc and the points won't be very "well spent" for leveling
3) Why do somethings only have a couple points in them? These were points I put in to allow me to move on to the next tier when the next feat I wanted required "X amount of feat points spent in Y" tree.
4) Why saintly warrior, instead of getting more magic resists in general? Because the amount of stam and mana returned from this feat is EXCELLENT and you fight alot more melee mobs opposed to casters while AoE'ing (and leveling in general).
5) Why did you take "the building storm"? Even for leveling, this feat is a great one to have for when you hop into a group for large scale grinding or instancing. You won't run out of mana if you're taking the hits, but in instances where a take needs to have aggro you'll enjoy the mana regen, and hey it's only one point.
More questions and answers can be added as they are brought to my attention,
Settar
Questions:
1) Why get Power/Wrath of the Serpent Ring? This will help you with tough pulls and mobs, you'll find a detailed explanation of these feats in a post right below this one.
2) Why did you neglect a lot of lightning strike feats? Because when you're leveling, it's only a pulling technique (sometimes) and if you're on a PVP servers, for the random pvp encounters. Otherwise you'll be using storm field, healing, active blocking etc and the points won't be very "well spent" for leveling
3) Why do somethings only have a couple points in them? These were points I put in to allow me to move on to the next tier when the next feat I wanted required "X amount of feat points spent in Y" tree.
4) Why saintly warrior, instead of getting more magic resists in general? Because the amount of stam and mana returned from this feat is EXCELLENT and you fight alot more melee mobs opposed to casters while AoE'ing (and leveling in general).
5) Why did you take "the building storm"? Even for leveling, this feat is a great one to have for when you hop into a group for large scale grinding or instancing. You won't run out of mana if you're taking the hits, but in instances where a take needs to have aggro you'll enjoy the mana regen, and hey it's only one point.
More questions and answers can be added as they are brought to my attention,
Settar
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Feat of the Day #7 Analysis of Power/Wrath of the Serpent Ring
Today I'm going to be talking about 8 points in the right hand side of the thunder tree, both Power of the Serpent Ring and Wrath of the Serpent Ring.
Power of the Serpent Ring, I'll refer to it as PSR in the rest of this article, is currently broken in terms of how it is supposed to work. It SHOULD make you immune (or near immune) to spells for three seconds. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work right now, you have to have it up BEFORE they begin casting their spell (or so it seems) for any damage to be mitigated, but with a 3 second duration, you're likely not to catch anything with this feat. Then why would you want to take it?
For Wrath of the Serpent Ring, or WSR. With 5 points in this feat you'll get a great damage increase (30%!) for 10 seconds, while 10 seconds may not seem like A LOT of time, it's plenty for column lightning, lightning strike or storm field pulses etc, you'll have plenty of time to get a few solid casts off. The best thing about this feat, as I mentioned in a previous write up, is it has a ONE minutes cooldown. Now, you won't have it up every time it's off CD, but in theory you're spending 1/6 of your pvp encounters with a 30% damage increase; thus an approximate 5% overall damage increase (30% divided by 6).
This is also a great feat for PVP specs that are built around burst, once someone gets low in, stun them and then throw this up to ensure your finishing blow does indeed finish them. Because of the amount of feat points needed (8) it's difficult to work this into a leveling build, but if you're leveling thunder you could skip the idol feats (since the CD and its being stationary makes it inefficient for leveling) and grab this, meaning you could burn mobs down quicker and take larger pulls when it's up!
Thanks for reading, if you have any questions about this let me know!
Settar
P.S. Look for my leveling build sometime tomorrow, I'll be posting it up tomorrow and explaining my choices for those ToS's not yet 80 (and from those who are 80, your input is welcome)!
Power of the Serpent Ring, I'll refer to it as PSR in the rest of this article, is currently broken in terms of how it is supposed to work. It SHOULD make you immune (or near immune) to spells for three seconds. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work right now, you have to have it up BEFORE they begin casting their spell (or so it seems) for any damage to be mitigated, but with a 3 second duration, you're likely not to catch anything with this feat. Then why would you want to take it?
For Wrath of the Serpent Ring, or WSR. With 5 points in this feat you'll get a great damage increase (30%!) for 10 seconds, while 10 seconds may not seem like A LOT of time, it's plenty for column lightning, lightning strike or storm field pulses etc, you'll have plenty of time to get a few solid casts off. The best thing about this feat, as I mentioned in a previous write up, is it has a ONE minutes cooldown. Now, you won't have it up every time it's off CD, but in theory you're spending 1/6 of your pvp encounters with a 30% damage increase; thus an approximate 5% overall damage increase (30% divided by 6).
This is also a great feat for PVP specs that are built around burst, once someone gets low in, stun them and then throw this up to ensure your finishing blow does indeed finish them. Because of the amount of feat points needed (8) it's difficult to work this into a leveling build, but if you're leveling thunder you could skip the idol feats (since the CD and its being stationary makes it inefficient for leveling) and grab this, meaning you could burn mobs down quicker and take larger pulls when it's up!
Thanks for reading, if you have any questions about this let me know!
Settar
P.S. Look for my leveling build sometime tomorrow, I'll be posting it up tomorrow and explaining my choices for those ToS's not yet 80 (and from those who are 80, your input is welcome)!
Monday, June 9, 2008
Latest Movie! : AoE Grinding Group Edition Now available on aocmovies.com
Hey everyone! Check out my latest movie of group AoE grinding (footage of my old spec in action before I hit 80). It's my last 'leveling footage' I'll post and I've included an explanation of the spec for those who missed it before the patch. Also, please note I've attatched the original AoE video for any who missed it, enjoy! Click HERE for the movie :)
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Settar's Raid Spec
Hey everyone, feat build discussion was requested in several e-mails so I'd like to start out with THIS one. The above is a tri-spec meant purely for high level pve endeavors, offering a lot of STEADY damage, +to electrical, and of course utility.
The main purpose of this build is to keep your mana up, and let's face it with all of the mana tap, natural regen, and the additional restoratives of Ether Discharge. You'll also notice "Building Storm" which, and this is my opinion, I would consider NECESSARY for any strong PVE spec...
Building Storm: Building Storm is, as the description mention, a channeled spell which you place on one teammate. That team member will recieve a 10% damage increase AND you will regenerate mana, in addition to this, after you finish channeling your nukes are reduced in mana cost by 100 mana for 10 seconds. But that's not the best part, no, a ONE MINUTE cooldown is what really want this. Now let's face it, with this build, you'll have cushy mana regen and you probably aren't going to need regen every minute, but spamming your Lightning Cast nuke once your heals are up can drain you pretty quick just due to its steep cost. And if you're out of mana, why just regen when you could be buffing someone else's damage AND regenerating at the same time? This is always a plus.
The main backing for this spec is the sheer electrical damage you recieve, look at it this way, you've got +57 elec damage in the general tree and +62 in lightning. Then you have idol of set, for each of your 6 group members (including yourself) you'll get +13 or so damage (stacking), then you'll get another 50 (I believe) from Idol of Set's Supremacy. In a large raid the one minute cooldown is hardly an inconvenience as most of the trash mobs take 30 seconds+ per pull.
Threat Feats: You'll see I have several feats to mitigate threat, one being and AoE, one being single target, they both have seperate 5 minute cooldowns. Another aggro feat is Grace, reducing hate by 3%. Now, it's difficult to test this to see if the tooltip is correct, or if it's even worth getting, but because of all of your lightning damage and say a large inner charge crit I picked this up to help me manage my hate. Also the feat Vindicator let's your tanks generate aggro faster while in defensive stance, unfortunately no number is given for this (unless I missed it) but it is unclear if the threat increase is significant or not.
Controversial Choice(s): I'd say that Power/Wrath of the Serpent Ring are largely underestimated. While PotSR is buggy (have to use before a spell is being cast) you take it for Wrath of the Serpent Ring, a 30% damage increase for 10 seconds, best part about this feat? Yet again, a 1 minute cooldown. Combined with Vengence of the Gods, call lightning buff, idol feats, overcharge + inner charge you can hit like a truck deep into long fights when aggro is secured on a tank.
QUESTIONS (I'll add the answers to other questions asked in comments or e-mails to this section):
1) Why no Storm Crown? Storm Crown is great, but in long range fights, it can't out damage the 30% increase for 10 seconds of each minute that WotSR can. The mana restorative is great, but this build already has enough mana regen/tap by far.
2) No Blood Mana? Again, mana regen that is not needed, you won't be running out enough to make use of this (Building Storm will be a better option with a lower CD anyways).
3) No Empowered Life of Set? Well, this one I'm not 100% on. While the extra 100-160 or so damage buff it gives your next attack are nice, you won't be spamming LoS (only when it isnt up yet) and so the overall damage increase in minimal, not worth it IMO.
4) Why Inner Charge? While the build does focus around steady damage, for just one point a guaranteed crit is a no brainer. You just have to be smart about when you use it, and if you're unsure if the tank has enough hate either A) Don't use it, or B) be smart and have your hate reducing abilities ready.
5) Why no Faithful of Set? This was included originally in my raid spec but upon testing I realized that even with 3 stacks of the buff up, it only increased the ticks of my HoTs by litterally just a few points, not worth it, I swapped the points out of this into inner charge and Coalesce Ether.
Thanks for reading and I hope some of you PVE'ers can take something from this, be sure to post questions, corrections and comments on this topic :)
P.S. As some of you know I'm more of a pvp guy, but with the pvp system not yet implemented I thought I'd share some pve ideas as this build seems to perform exceptionally in level 80 content.
The main purpose of this build is to keep your mana up, and let's face it with all of the mana tap, natural regen, and the additional restoratives of Ether Discharge. You'll also notice "Building Storm" which, and this is my opinion, I would consider NECESSARY for any strong PVE spec...
Building Storm: Building Storm is, as the description mention, a channeled spell which you place on one teammate. That team member will recieve a 10% damage increase AND you will regenerate mana, in addition to this, after you finish channeling your nukes are reduced in mana cost by 100 mana for 10 seconds. But that's not the best part, no, a ONE MINUTE cooldown is what really want this. Now let's face it, with this build, you'll have cushy mana regen and you probably aren't going to need regen every minute, but spamming your Lightning Cast nuke once your heals are up can drain you pretty quick just due to its steep cost. And if you're out of mana, why just regen when you could be buffing someone else's damage AND regenerating at the same time? This is always a plus.
The main backing for this spec is the sheer electrical damage you recieve, look at it this way, you've got +57 elec damage in the general tree and +62 in lightning. Then you have idol of set, for each of your 6 group members (including yourself) you'll get +13 or so damage (stacking), then you'll get another 50 (I believe) from Idol of Set's Supremacy. In a large raid the one minute cooldown is hardly an inconvenience as most of the trash mobs take 30 seconds+ per pull.
Threat Feats: You'll see I have several feats to mitigate threat, one being and AoE, one being single target, they both have seperate 5 minute cooldowns. Another aggro feat is Grace, reducing hate by 3%. Now, it's difficult to test this to see if the tooltip is correct, or if it's even worth getting, but because of all of your lightning damage and say a large inner charge crit I picked this up to help me manage my hate. Also the feat Vindicator let's your tanks generate aggro faster while in defensive stance, unfortunately no number is given for this (unless I missed it) but it is unclear if the threat increase is significant or not.
Controversial Choice(s): I'd say that Power/Wrath of the Serpent Ring are largely underestimated. While PotSR is buggy (have to use before a spell is being cast) you take it for Wrath of the Serpent Ring, a 30% damage increase for 10 seconds, best part about this feat? Yet again, a 1 minute cooldown. Combined with Vengence of the Gods, call lightning buff, idol feats, overcharge + inner charge you can hit like a truck deep into long fights when aggro is secured on a tank.
QUESTIONS (I'll add the answers to other questions asked in comments or e-mails to this section):
1) Why no Storm Crown? Storm Crown is great, but in long range fights, it can't out damage the 30% increase for 10 seconds of each minute that WotSR can. The mana restorative is great, but this build already has enough mana regen/tap by far.
2) No Blood Mana? Again, mana regen that is not needed, you won't be running out enough to make use of this (Building Storm will be a better option with a lower CD anyways).
3) No Empowered Life of Set? Well, this one I'm not 100% on. While the extra 100-160 or so damage buff it gives your next attack are nice, you won't be spamming LoS (only when it isnt up yet) and so the overall damage increase in minimal, not worth it IMO.
4) Why Inner Charge? While the build does focus around steady damage, for just one point a guaranteed crit is a no brainer. You just have to be smart about when you use it, and if you're unsure if the tank has enough hate either A) Don't use it, or B) be smart and have your hate reducing abilities ready.
5) Why no Faithful of Set? This was included originally in my raid spec but upon testing I realized that even with 3 stacks of the buff up, it only increased the ticks of my HoTs by litterally just a few points, not worth it, I swapped the points out of this into inner charge and Coalesce Ether.
Thanks for reading and I hope some of you PVE'ers can take something from this, be sure to post questions, corrections and comments on this topic :)
P.S. As some of you know I'm more of a pvp guy, but with the pvp system not yet implemented I thought I'd share some pve ideas as this build seems to perform exceptionally in level 80 content.
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