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.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Ding level 80! And the final leveling journal...
Well jeez, took me long enough! With school and other real life obligations my leveling rate took a dive after EA weekend (plus I had to keep the site supplied with lots of info :)). But now I'm 80 and a whole new world is open to me, I'll be testing specs, strats etc for you guys in the weeks to come, but for now I'll give you my last few leveling experiences.
Levels covered: 76-80
Feat Build Used: You'll find that HERE
Groupings: Full group or solo.
After hitting 75 I continued to grind the Cohort camps in east Kheshatta, you just can't beat this place if no one is there to disturb you (with the exception of the deathmaster camps. I stayed here until literally one pull before 76 where I was rolled by a group of 2 80's with their app'ed up PLing group. I ran out of the city, where I rezzed, and killed two mobs in the east slums before leveling.
At 76 I actually headed back to Atzel's to finish up a few quests with nice item or xp rewards, particularly the one from King Conan. I got a little over half a level off of grinding various mobs and completing y quests before heading back to Khesh. I was found myself in a DM camps group after a few minutes of searching in OOC, deathmaster camps are the highly contested camps of mobs southeast of Kheshatta city. As anyone who's seen this before knows, the respawns, xp and sheer numbers are to die for! I rolled with this group all of the way to 77 and half way to 78 before they broke up.
Since we had fought off opposing groups, and my group was leaving, I decided to stick around at the camps in 'hide' mode and wait. It was amazing, a good minute went by without anyone passing, all of the mobs respawned around me. I solo'ed this place (and the animals around it when too much resistance showed up) and got my last half of a level in about one hour... which was INSANE.
At 78 my guildies were getting together their OWN death master group, so of course I jumped in! Luckily we had a PoM and so I just stood in the middle storm fielding/healing while the mobs dropped. With relative quickness, I was 79... ready to make the final push.
OVERVIEW
Levels covered: 76-80
Feat Build Used: You'll find that HERE
Groupings: Full group or solo.
After hitting 75 I continued to grind the Cohort camps in east Kheshatta, you just can't beat this place if no one is there to disturb you (with the exception of the deathmaster camps. I stayed here until literally one pull before 76 where I was rolled by a group of 2 80's with their app'ed up PLing group. I ran out of the city, where I rezzed, and killed two mobs in the east slums before leveling.
At 76 I actually headed back to Atzel's to finish up a few quests with nice item or xp rewards, particularly the one from King Conan. I got a little over half a level off of grinding various mobs and completing y quests before heading back to Khesh. I was found myself in a DM camps group after a few minutes of searching in OOC, deathmaster camps are the highly contested camps of mobs southeast of Kheshatta city. As anyone who's seen this before knows, the respawns, xp and sheer numbers are to die for! I rolled with this group all of the way to 77 and half way to 78 before they broke up.
Since we had fought off opposing groups, and my group was leaving, I decided to stick around at the camps in 'hide' mode and wait. It was amazing, a good minute went by without anyone passing, all of the mobs respawned around me. I solo'ed this place (and the animals around it when too much resistance showed up) and got my last half of a level in about one hour... which was INSANE.
At 78 my guildies were getting together their OWN death master group, so of course I jumped in! Luckily we had a PoM and so I just stood in the middle storm fielding/healing while the mobs dropped. With relative quickness, I was 79... ready to make the final push.
The Final Push
The final push for xp from 79-80 was almost exactly divided into two even sections. One, of course, was DM camp grind groups, the other however, took some planning ahead. One thing you'll notice when leveling in Kheshatta is the multitude of quests, save as many as you can. It's tempting to run out and do them for quick levels in your mid 70's (as I did for a few quests :P) but you SHOULd hang on to them. I had saved up lots of quests; Quests to kill Hyenas, quests to kill sentries, quests for gathering quests for freeing captives, quests for freeing horses, I had plenty :). For my last couple bars I, when I was out of quests, I headed down to the south west where some secluded tents of 4-6 mobs are (Not recommended unless no other spots are available as respawns are slow and camps involve a lot of running), until I had just one bar left. At this point I hopped back into a group for the exhausting final 5 minutes of my ToS leveling career. And that was that.
1) I've begun work with many new spec ideas and will share my findings.
2) I'll begin work on a short AoE video tomorrow, my last video of pre-80 footage.
3) I just did my level 80 destiny quest (for an epic ring!), look for a complete guide for this soon.
4) If you have any new ideas for the site, please e-mail me at settar3@live.com
Settar
1) I've begun work with many new spec ideas and will share my findings.
2) I'll begin work on a short AoE video tomorrow, my last video of pre-80 footage.
3) I just did my level 80 destiny quest (for an epic ring!), look for a complete guide for this soon.
4) If you have any new ideas for the site, please e-mail me at settar3@live.com
Settar
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
New Spec and "Content by YOU!"
First of all, here's the LINK
So I've decided to take the advice of an extremely respected ToS community member, Atomik. I'm now a build VERY similar to his leveling build. One difference you may notice is my taking Improved Lightning Strike over Grounding Charge: This is purely for leveling purposes (as the build is intended to be). Grounding charge (at 5/5) gives a 35% chance to root the target, unfortunately this pulls mobs out of the pack while you're AoEing and thus doesn't help much with gathering mobs. In pvp encounters it's arguable, as both feats could be helpful. I believe the tested damage increase on Lightning Strike with Imp. LS maxed was around 6% (not tested since last patch), while not a HUGE increase, it can make the difference between an enemy dying or sprinting away at 2% life to 'hide' and heal up.
I've been very busy lately but promise to get you plenty of new FotD and other write ups soon, (I aim to maintain one new article or video every 1-2 days, so there's always something new). While I have some ongoing write up series' going, installments like the leveling journal (obviously) won't be continuing after 80. In order to maintain a steady flow of content I'd like suggestions from YOU, e-mail me at settar3@live.com and let me know what you think would make for good write ups, movies etc. I look forward to the mail (although with the number of e-mails I've been getting I doubt I can accommodate everyone's request, sorry : /)! If your idea is chosen I'll e-mail you letting you know so you can look for it in the time shortly after, I'll be sure to give credit to the "inventor" of whichever ideas I write about :)
Settar
NEW SPEC
As many of you know I've always been a strong supporter of leveling thunder, and recently went "TLoS" spec for a few days... before it was nerfed. Let's face it, the damage (in groups mostly) was far beyond what it should be. Now the ability applies a ~3.5 second DoT, meaning no real benefit from Life of Set spam. The DoT does about 100 damage each tick (a per second) as opposed to the 150-200 per second it put out pre-fix. I've tried integrating other spells, active blocking etc while the DoT ticks, but it's just not what it used to be...So I've decided to take the advice of an extremely respected ToS community member, Atomik. I'm now a build VERY similar to his leveling build. One difference you may notice is my taking Improved Lightning Strike over Grounding Charge: This is purely for leveling purposes (as the build is intended to be). Grounding charge (at 5/5) gives a 35% chance to root the target, unfortunately this pulls mobs out of the pack while you're AoEing and thus doesn't help much with gathering mobs. In pvp encounters it's arguable, as both feats could be helpful. I believe the tested damage increase on Lightning Strike with Imp. LS maxed was around 6% (not tested since last patch), while not a HUGE increase, it can make the difference between an enemy dying or sprinting away at 2% life to 'hide' and heal up.
Reader Submitted Content!
I've been very busy lately but promise to get you plenty of new FotD and other write ups soon, (I aim to maintain one new article or video every 1-2 days, so there's always something new). While I have some ongoing write up series' going, installments like the leveling journal (obviously) won't be continuing after 80. In order to maintain a steady flow of content I'd like suggestions from YOU, e-mail me at settar3@live.com and let me know what you think would make for good write ups, movies etc. I look forward to the mail (although with the number of e-mails I've been getting I doubt I can accommodate everyone's request, sorry : /)! If your idea is chosen I'll e-mail you letting you know so you can look for it in the time shortly after, I'll be sure to give credit to the "inventor" of whichever ideas I write about :)
Settar
Monday, June 2, 2008
First Movie Pack Released on aocmovies.com! FotD 6!
Hey everyone my first video pack on AoC movies is up! This is a feat of the day video pack packaging the last two videos with a BRAND NEW video! You'll find the video HERE! Also be sure to rate the video (I hope you like it) after you download as I am participating in AoCmovies.com's Gore To Fame Contest! Notes about the video can be found in the video's description! Thanks and let me know what you think :)
P.S. The new FotD video will be posted to youtube later this week, but I suggest you download the high quality packaged movie first :)
Settar
P.S. The new FotD video will be posted to youtube later this week, but I suggest you download the high quality packaged movie first :)
Settar
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Leveling Journal Entry #5!
Hey all time for the next leveling journal!
OVERVIEW
Levels Covered This Session: 70-75
Feat Build: Click HERE
Groupings: Both Large Group and Solo
At 70 I noticed some of my quests were getting more into the orange/yellow range and decided to head off to see what I could get done. At the south end of the Atzel complex I found a quest-giver and a large amount of mammoths. I couldn't get any of his quests yet but had one to get ivory tusks and set out down the ravine blasting my way through. One thing to take note of is that your quest items only drop off of adult and Aged mammoths, anything but the "Young" ones. Since the mobs are non-aggressive you have to hit them to initiate combat, unfortunately their hitboxes are right in the middle of their rather large bodies, so AoE'ing these guys isn't really a good option. I just nuked them down with lightning strike, moving from mob to mob as quick as possible. I was already farily close to 71 from a previous AoE groups (movie coming out next week) and I hit 71 killing my last few mammoths. Since I leveled I was ready to go see what quests the guy I had passed had to offer, but not before grabbing the rez point down here (you'll find it at the bottom of some stone stairs in the ravine with troggs spawned near it). He handed me a request to kill apes and get their heads. I headed past the guy and up the hill to my right, where at the top I was greeted by two paths, I took the right (the left is some undead spawns) and found myself in MINEFIELD of apes. There are tons of them, both around and on the stone ruins in the middle, I spent the entirety of 71-72 grinding these guys, returning to the quest giver when I had completed another part of the ape chain (there are three I believe). If it's clear I strongly suggest grinding at least a level here, and if not try switching instances to find a less contested-for "Ape Field." At 72 I got into a group with three others leveling it Atzels and hit up the fortress again. Pulls are huge, respawn rates are insane, you can loop through this place without ever needing to stop (I was getting just under 1 million xp per hour). After an hour and a half or so, I had hit 73 and decided to move over to Kheshatta in Stygia...
While some may consider this too low to make the change, I was in need of some different scenery and i DO plan on going back to the zone (tomorrow in fact) to finish up some quests. One thing that may surprise you, as it sharply contrasts the zones you've recently leveled in, quests are EVERWHERE! It's like Tortage all over again, the only deterring factor of this zone is the enormous gank fest (at least on a pvp server). If you can, get a group to help you AoE the battlemaster camps in the south or try soloing some quests. I did a little of both to get me to 74. At 74 I wanted to save my quests for the rough levels ahead so I spent a good few hours grinding out 75. It was kind of boring but there are some good camps of "Set" humanoid mobs, as well as abundant hyena camps on the east border. After my boring (yet fruitful) few hours of grinding these guys, I hit 75 and prepared to head back to Atzel's (lots of new ranks of your abilities at 75 by the way).
Thanks a lot for reading guys, I planned on having videos up for you tonight but they aren't done being approved on aocmovies.com so I thought I'd better put out some reading material. Hopefully the movies will be ready and linked here by tomorrow!
Settar
OVERVIEW
Levels Covered This Session: 70-75
Feat Build: Click HERE
Groupings: Both Large Group and Solo
At 70 I noticed some of my quests were getting more into the orange/yellow range and decided to head off to see what I could get done. At the south end of the Atzel complex I found a quest-giver and a large amount of mammoths. I couldn't get any of his quests yet but had one to get ivory tusks and set out down the ravine blasting my way through. One thing to take note of is that your quest items only drop off of adult and Aged mammoths, anything but the "Young" ones. Since the mobs are non-aggressive you have to hit them to initiate combat, unfortunately their hitboxes are right in the middle of their rather large bodies, so AoE'ing these guys isn't really a good option. I just nuked them down with lightning strike, moving from mob to mob as quick as possible. I was already farily close to 71 from a previous AoE groups (movie coming out next week) and I hit 71 killing my last few mammoths. Since I leveled I was ready to go see what quests the guy I had passed had to offer, but not before grabbing the rez point down here (you'll find it at the bottom of some stone stairs in the ravine with troggs spawned near it). He handed me a request to kill apes and get their heads. I headed past the guy and up the hill to my right, where at the top I was greeted by two paths, I took the right (the left is some undead spawns) and found myself in MINEFIELD of apes. There are tons of them, both around and on the stone ruins in the middle, I spent the entirety of 71-72 grinding these guys, returning to the quest giver when I had completed another part of the ape chain (there are three I believe). If it's clear I strongly suggest grinding at least a level here, and if not try switching instances to find a less contested-for "Ape Field." At 72 I got into a group with three others leveling it Atzels and hit up the fortress again. Pulls are huge, respawn rates are insane, you can loop through this place without ever needing to stop (I was getting just under 1 million xp per hour). After an hour and a half or so, I had hit 73 and decided to move over to Kheshatta in Stygia...
While some may consider this too low to make the change, I was in need of some different scenery and i DO plan on going back to the zone (tomorrow in fact) to finish up some quests. One thing that may surprise you, as it sharply contrasts the zones you've recently leveled in, quests are EVERWHERE! It's like Tortage all over again, the only deterring factor of this zone is the enormous gank fest (at least on a pvp server). If you can, get a group to help you AoE the battlemaster camps in the south or try soloing some quests. I did a little of both to get me to 74. At 74 I wanted to save my quests for the rough levels ahead so I spent a good few hours grinding out 75. It was kind of boring but there are some good camps of "Set" humanoid mobs, as well as abundant hyena camps on the east border. After my boring (yet fruitful) few hours of grinding these guys, I hit 75 and prepared to head back to Atzel's (lots of new ranks of your abilities at 75 by the way).
Thanks a lot for reading guys, I planned on having videos up for you tonight but they aren't done being approved on aocmovies.com so I thought I'd better put out some reading material. Hopefully the movies will be ready and linked here by tomorrow!
Settar
Friday, May 30, 2008
Feat of the Day #5!
Hey all! In today's FotD entry I'll be exploring two more feats down the thunder tree, Set's Life Spark and Empowered Life of Set.
First on the chopping block is Set's Life Spark, the tool tip on this is vague, so let's get some details! First off, know that Set's Life Spark is a buff, just like Set's Armor etc. Once you've applied the buff it will have a 30 minute duration. Now, if you die with the buff applied, you will see it begin to blink up top in your buff bar, instead of choosing a rez point, wait for the buff to expire. You will get a message " wants to resurrect you with Set's Life Spark. Click accept and BAM! There you are with 100% hp and mana (although you will need to re-apply your other buffs). It will be another 30 minutes before you can buff yourself with SLS again. Note: If you do not die in the thirty minutes the buff lasts, you can simply re apply it, you do not have to wait out the 30 minute cooldown until you die once. Also, if you die with the buff on but choose NOT to use it to resurrect and use another method, I.E. team mate rez or rez point, the buff will be removed and a 30 minute cooldown applied.
Empowered Life of Set: With this feat trained, you will gain a "Storm Charge" buff when you cast Life of Set. The buff adds damage to your next storm field pulse, lightning strike, or charged blast. Upon clicking the buff it seems the buff adds 90-167 (non-stacking) damage to the attack. I can't confirm or deny that it's scaling with level but I'll be checking as I continue my grind to 80. This feat is EXTREMELY nice with my TLoS build because while spamming LoS, I permanently have this buff up. That means when my storm field is pulsing every pulse can gain the bonus damage! (More testing will be done to confirm this :))
Thanks a lot for reading and I hope this helped! Also be sure to look for my FotD 6 video up tomorrow. It's unclear at the moment if both of my video ideas will be up this weekend, but I am on track to have FotD 6 (which will focus on tips and details regarding Lightning Cast) packaged with my other feat videos into a "Video-Pack" for high quality download, hopefully helping a bit with reading details not easily depicted in a youtube window.
Settar
First on the chopping block is Set's Life Spark, the tool tip on this is vague, so let's get some details! First off, know that Set's Life Spark is a buff, just like Set's Armor etc. Once you've applied the buff it will have a 30 minute duration. Now, if you die with the buff applied, you will see it begin to blink up top in your buff bar, instead of choosing a rez point, wait for the buff to expire. You will get a message "
Empowered Life of Set: With this feat trained, you will gain a "Storm Charge" buff when you cast Life of Set. The buff adds damage to your next storm field pulse, lightning strike, or charged blast. Upon clicking the buff it seems the buff adds 90-167 (non-stacking) damage to the attack. I can't confirm or deny that it's scaling with level but I'll be checking as I continue my grind to 80. This feat is EXTREMELY nice with my TLoS build because while spamming LoS, I permanently have this buff up. That means when my storm field is pulsing every pulse can gain the bonus damage! (More testing will be done to confirm this :))
Thanks a lot for reading and I hope this helped! Also be sure to look for my FotD 6 video up tomorrow. It's unclear at the moment if both of my video ideas will be up this weekend, but I am on track to have FotD 6 (which will focus on tips and details regarding Lightning Cast) packaged with my other feat videos into a "Video-Pack" for high quality download, hopefully helping a bit with reading details not easily depicted in a youtube window.
Settar
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Leveling Journal Entry #4!
OVERVIEW
Levels Covered: 62-70
Feat Build Click HERE
Played Solo (For the most part)
As I left off heading to Atzel's approach in my last entry, that's where I'll pick up! To get to Atzel's you'll need to run through Lachiesch Plains, I got here by teleporting to my guild city. After you arrive in Lachiesch you'll run west and then north, exiting into the zone of Atzel's Approach. Once I zoned in I noticed a few exclamation points on my mini map, as well as some Wanted Posters, I went through and grabbed any quest I could. First I was off to kill Atzel Conscripts, I found a couple good AoE camps here and no one else was around (surprisingly enough), so I AoE'ed a few bars on the mobs before heading west to kill Troggs for another quest; for this quest you should note that there are VERY few troggs down below where you first see them, you'll want to run along the ridge/ramp above them and into the mountains, where you'll find plenty. Here you can also a VERY decent AoE spot for the 60-62 ish range, the weird naga-snake things :) They come in large packs and some of them, the ones called "Matrons", hit quite hard, so don't be afraid to stun one or root the group and back up to buy your HoTs some time to tick. I stayed here until I levels to 62 and then went south along the ridge until I reached the Troggs. I killed enough for my quest and returned to the quest giver. I went back the same route I had come through, killing snakes along the way, and then returning to the trogg village. Here I torched their settlements for my quest (Thanks to the group that let me complete my quest before setting up their AoE!), and then returned to the quest giver a second time. I soon realized that Atzels might better suit me in a few levels, as all of my quests were red. So just before I hit 63, I headed back through Poitain to Thunder River...
Once I entered Thunder River I gathered the new quests that had become available and was happy to see a quest log mostly consisting of orange quests. One thing to note about high levels though, is that grinding on efficient pulls of mobs makes up much more of your xp gain than quests. So while in Thunder River I focussed on finding good grind spots, and doing quests only if they weren't too far out of the way. Here in TR I went from 62-65, before heading to Atzel's again. Since TR was almost entirely grind for me, I'll focus on some particularly good grind spots for getting tou through your early/mid 60's. If you head south from the first settlement in TR, you'll go across a series of bridges, once you exit the last bridge you'll have a path leading up to a settlement, and one leading down towards the water. As I was 62 almost 53 when entering, I took the low road and headed down towards the boars. Here there are 3 main spawn points that you can circuit between for VERY efficient xp. I stayed to grind boards until hitting 64, at which point I headed back to the intersection and took the high road. Above you can find a large complex of spawn points for humanoid mobs, as a 64 I went up into the rock/mountain structure where the camps are higher level. They are really good xp with one small problem: casters. Two types of mobs up here are ranged casting mobs which do a good amount of damage. to avoid some frustrating deaths use line of site as your friend, then drag the rest of your pull to where ever the casting mob is at. I ground this out for a couple of hours, got a few bars past 65, then headed back to Atzel's. Note: If this doesn't get you enough xp or you want a change of pace, there are some good camps of slightly higher level mobs (picts) in the eastern region of TR.
New quests and newly available wanted posters everywhere! As a 65 you are in a prime spot to grind this zone right up to 70+ (I'll be staying here until 72 most likely), grab any quests you can and get ready to head to the very northwest of the zone, where EXCELLENT camps of mobs lie waiting for you :) The camp can be difficult to find but to get to it you need to go up to where the snakes were. You'll want to go all the way to the north of the snake camps to the side of a fairly steep hill. they'll be a path-ish place you can run down press up against the mountain face, run down it to get into the Atzel camps. As a bonus you'll notice several quest indicators in the area, can't argue with some bonus xp! At this point I ran around the far northwestern camp (the one you visit for the quest that asks you to "destroy palasides"), the pulls are large so be ready with pots/vitalizing jolt, and don't forget to use Vital Shock if you're specced for it, it can save you! The quests all around this first Atzel's area are great xp and even with a short attention span you can pump out a level or two here without much trouble. After hitting 66 I expanded out to more Atzel mobs, heading towards Atzel's Fortress across the wooden bridge. I ran around in here grinding my way to 67 on various camps (each kill gives A TON of xp). Here you need to be careful of the sentries as they stun you which can be devastating if you wait to long to heal or get something up. Some of these Atzel pulls can be found in my latest video.
After I hit 67 I grouped up for the first time in quite a while, we had a group of 2 ToS's, a PoM and various others that switched in and out. I was at the low end of the food chain for mobs here, and was therefore apprenticed until I'd made a level or two here. The xp and respawn rate here in a group is ridiculous, we were pulling 20-30 mobs per pull and killing them all in just several seconds, the TLoS feat puts out amazing damage when it's coming from 5 other group members that you heal (expect new videos with footage of this to some out sometime this weekend). I AoE'd with the group up to 70 and then logged off, if you need a spot to grind yourself and do not have a group, a hill leading up the mountains from the place where you grind the "sentry" mobs yields a HUGE amount of lynx and bear mobs with good xp and respawn rates.
Coming Soon:
1) FotD 5 Write Up
2) Two new videos to be finished and released this weekend in high quality for download, marking the beginning of my involvement with the folks at www.aocmovies.com
Thanks for your time!
Settar
Levels Covered: 62-70
Feat Build Click HERE
Played Solo (For the most part)
As I left off heading to Atzel's approach in my last entry, that's where I'll pick up! To get to Atzel's you'll need to run through Lachiesch Plains, I got here by teleporting to my guild city. After you arrive in Lachiesch you'll run west and then north, exiting into the zone of Atzel's Approach. Once I zoned in I noticed a few exclamation points on my mini map, as well as some Wanted Posters, I went through and grabbed any quest I could. First I was off to kill Atzel Conscripts, I found a couple good AoE camps here and no one else was around (surprisingly enough), so I AoE'ed a few bars on the mobs before heading west to kill Troggs for another quest; for this quest you should note that there are VERY few troggs down below where you first see them, you'll want to run along the ridge/ramp above them and into the mountains, where you'll find plenty. Here you can also a VERY decent AoE spot for the 60-62 ish range, the weird naga-snake things :) They come in large packs and some of them, the ones called "Matrons", hit quite hard, so don't be afraid to stun one or root the group and back up to buy your HoTs some time to tick. I stayed here until I levels to 62 and then went south along the ridge until I reached the Troggs. I killed enough for my quest and returned to the quest giver. I went back the same route I had come through, killing snakes along the way, and then returning to the trogg village. Here I torched their settlements for my quest (Thanks to the group that let me complete my quest before setting up their AoE!), and then returned to the quest giver a second time. I soon realized that Atzels might better suit me in a few levels, as all of my quests were red. So just before I hit 63, I headed back through Poitain to Thunder River...
Once I entered Thunder River I gathered the new quests that had become available and was happy to see a quest log mostly consisting of orange quests. One thing to note about high levels though, is that grinding on efficient pulls of mobs makes up much more of your xp gain than quests. So while in Thunder River I focussed on finding good grind spots, and doing quests only if they weren't too far out of the way. Here in TR I went from 62-65, before heading to Atzel's again. Since TR was almost entirely grind for me, I'll focus on some particularly good grind spots for getting tou through your early/mid 60's. If you head south from the first settlement in TR, you'll go across a series of bridges, once you exit the last bridge you'll have a path leading up to a settlement, and one leading down towards the water. As I was 62 almost 53 when entering, I took the low road and headed down towards the boars. Here there are 3 main spawn points that you can circuit between for VERY efficient xp. I stayed to grind boards until hitting 64, at which point I headed back to the intersection and took the high road. Above you can find a large complex of spawn points for humanoid mobs, as a 64 I went up into the rock/mountain structure where the camps are higher level. They are really good xp with one small problem: casters. Two types of mobs up here are ranged casting mobs which do a good amount of damage. to avoid some frustrating deaths use line of site as your friend, then drag the rest of your pull to where ever the casting mob is at. I ground this out for a couple of hours, got a few bars past 65, then headed back to Atzel's. Note: If this doesn't get you enough xp or you want a change of pace, there are some good camps of slightly higher level mobs (picts) in the eastern region of TR.
New quests and newly available wanted posters everywhere! As a 65 you are in a prime spot to grind this zone right up to 70+ (I'll be staying here until 72 most likely), grab any quests you can and get ready to head to the very northwest of the zone, where EXCELLENT camps of mobs lie waiting for you :) The camp can be difficult to find but to get to it you need to go up to where the snakes were. You'll want to go all the way to the north of the snake camps to the side of a fairly steep hill. they'll be a path-ish place you can run down press up against the mountain face, run down it to get into the Atzel camps. As a bonus you'll notice several quest indicators in the area, can't argue with some bonus xp! At this point I ran around the far northwestern camp (the one you visit for the quest that asks you to "destroy palasides"), the pulls are large so be ready with pots/vitalizing jolt, and don't forget to use Vital Shock if you're specced for it, it can save you! The quests all around this first Atzel's area are great xp and even with a short attention span you can pump out a level or two here without much trouble. After hitting 66 I expanded out to more Atzel mobs, heading towards Atzel's Fortress across the wooden bridge. I ran around in here grinding my way to 67 on various camps (each kill gives A TON of xp). Here you need to be careful of the sentries as they stun you which can be devastating if you wait to long to heal or get something up. Some of these Atzel pulls can be found in my latest video.
After I hit 67 I grouped up for the first time in quite a while, we had a group of 2 ToS's, a PoM and various others that switched in and out. I was at the low end of the food chain for mobs here, and was therefore apprenticed until I'd made a level or two here. The xp and respawn rate here in a group is ridiculous, we were pulling 20-30 mobs per pull and killing them all in just several seconds, the TLoS feat puts out amazing damage when it's coming from 5 other group members that you heal (expect new videos with footage of this to some out sometime this weekend). I AoE'd with the group up to 70 and then logged off, if you need a spot to grind yourself and do not have a group, a hill leading up the mountains from the place where you grind the "sentry" mobs yields a HUGE amount of lynx and bear mobs with good xp and respawn rates.
Coming Soon:
1) FotD 5 Write Up
2) Two new videos to be finished and released this weekend in high quality for download, marking the beginning of my involvement with the folks at www.aocmovies.com
Thanks for your time!
Settar
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
My New Spec: Video!
Hey everyone, as requested, I've made a video about my recent TLoS spec experiment. You can find the Youtube video here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=TVKqX-BRml0
And my spec here: http://conankave.com/kave_calc/tempe...00033000050010
Also, I make some mistakes in the video, such as talking about idol of set's uses with this spec then not even targeting the idol in my cone heal >< I was focussed on getting the shit and forgot, how embarrassing! Anyways we all make mistakes and you should learn from them :)
Settar
And my spec here: http://conankave.com/kave_calc/tempe...00033000050010
Also, I make some mistakes in the video, such as talking about idol of set's uses with this spec then not even targeting the idol in my cone heal >< I was focussed on getting the shit and forgot, how embarrassing! Anyways we all make mistakes and you should learn from them :)
Settar
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The New Spec!
As many of you know the ToS has been changed a bit, including the fixing of the bugged idols. I think they were a great tool to just use one at a time, so long as they could be moved and come with you. Since the 60 second recast timer has been instated, it is no longer practical to use the idol (in my opinion). Many specs have been posted on the boards lately, including Atomik's leveling spec (which obviously worked out quite well). But in the spirit of testing, I decided to make my own and try out the synergy of using guiding spirit and triumphant life of set to make Life of Set one of your main damage sources. In doing this I also delved deep into the general tree and cut out some of the less necessary points from thunder.
The Spec: Thunder/General Spec - Click Here
Here's how it works With Guiding Spirit, as many of you know, Life of Set has no cooldown, and is instant cast. With Triumphant Life of Set your LoS deals damage to all mobs around any targets healed by it. At my level it seems to hit for and average of 150 damage on each mob around me when cast, so if you spam it you'll out out an average increase in DPS of about 150. Keep in mind this only supplements stormfield, charged blast, storm crown etc etc. In regards to Saintly Warrior, I took this because my idol restored some mana along with SC, and not having the idol may or may not have left me OOM more often. Upon testing saintly warrior I've concluded it's probably a must for this build, or at least very nice to have. The chance to proc is very high, so nearly every time a mob hits you you're regaining ~ 70 mana. On top of this you get over 100 stamina back for each proc, making leveling quicker in and of itself by enabling you to sprint more for quick roundups or to get away after a Quicksand, without becoming "exhausted" and being debuffed. I also use Vital Shock quite often when vitalizing jolt is down to give me a quick, yet minor, heal. The main thing to remember is to be constantly casting LoS, the damage is very nice. As for Vengeance of the Gods, it is a 20% increase in damage for 30 seconds and is nice in a pinch or when you have an overwhelming pull you need to drop quickly. With VotG and overcharge active I've hit over 2,500 Call Lightnings on mobs my level or slightly above. For questions please post a comment on this post or, if you have access to the US forums, look for the thread about this spec under the ToS sub-forum.
Happy Hunting
Settar
The Spec: Thunder/General Spec - Click Here
Here's how it works With Guiding Spirit, as many of you know, Life of Set has no cooldown, and is instant cast. With Triumphant Life of Set your LoS deals damage to all mobs around any targets healed by it. At my level it seems to hit for and average of 150 damage on each mob around me when cast, so if you spam it you'll out out an average increase in DPS of about 150. Keep in mind this only supplements stormfield, charged blast, storm crown etc etc. In regards to Saintly Warrior, I took this because my idol restored some mana along with SC, and not having the idol may or may not have left me OOM more often. Upon testing saintly warrior I've concluded it's probably a must for this build, or at least very nice to have. The chance to proc is very high, so nearly every time a mob hits you you're regaining ~ 70 mana. On top of this you get over 100 stamina back for each proc, making leveling quicker in and of itself by enabling you to sprint more for quick roundups or to get away after a Quicksand, without becoming "exhausted" and being debuffed. I also use Vital Shock quite often when vitalizing jolt is down to give me a quick, yet minor, heal. The main thing to remember is to be constantly casting LoS, the damage is very nice. As for Vengeance of the Gods, it is a 20% increase in damage for 30 seconds and is nice in a pinch or when you have an overwhelming pull you need to drop quickly. With VotG and overcharge active I've hit over 2,500 Call Lightnings on mobs my level or slightly above. For questions please post a comment on this post or, if you have access to the US forums, look for the thread about this spec under the ToS sub-forum.
Happy Hunting
Settar
Monday, May 26, 2008
Feat of the Day #4 - Video Up!
This video will show and describe in detail Idol of set and the feats that improve it! I'll show you the numbers for each feat, the description, and show how I use idol of set (No exploiting!). Hope you enjoy and feel free to drop a comment or subscribe to my youtube channel if you enjoy it! Also I suggest watching it directly on youtube because the quality and screen space improves.
Settar
A Note on Destiny Quests!
As I leveled in my 30's I, like too many others, disregarded my destiny quest as an inconvienience. But at higher levels, 40, 50 and 60 I began to do them, and the message I want to get across is that they are VERY important. Every ten levels you get a new step of your destiny quest, you'll want to do these for many reasons 1) You get an items such as a ring or some other useful item (They have very decent stats), 2) You gain a ton of experience (over half a level doing the level 60 step at 62), and 3) PERMANENT increases to your characters stats. That's right, every time you complete a step after 40 you'll go back to Shakur and be told to "remember some of your past", in this you can choose to have an increased mana pool, increases mana regen or increased magic rating (damage). I chose mana regen the first time then +to rating the 2nd two times and noticed a difference in the range of damage my spells can cause :)
I hope this helped some of you and you go out and do these soon after you're eligdable. Some of the destiny quests have some "hard to get past" steps if you aren't looking close enough, so if you have any questions about a particular stage of the destiny quest post a comment on this post and I'll reply as soon as I can (it's better to post here rather than e-mail me because other people with the same problem can just read the solution here).
I hope this helped some of you and you go out and do these soon after you're eligdable. Some of the destiny quests have some "hard to get past" steps if you aren't looking close enough, so if you have any questions about a particular stage of the destiny quest post a comment on this post and I'll reply as soon as I can (it's better to post here rather than e-mail me because other people with the same problem can just read the solution here).
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Leveling Journal Entry 3!
Hey everyone welcome to my third leveling journal!
Levels gained this session: 43-61 (I've got a lot of ground to cover).
Feat Spec Used: Click HERE for feat build.
Groupings: Solo
At level 43 I was off to Fields of the Dead, on our server it's also known as "Fields of the Disconnect" due to performance issues in the zone, but I was one of the lucky few to avoid them and enjoy the zone to its fullest. Upon entering I found a couple camps of NPCs near the beginning with some fairly basic quests, "kill 20 of these", "destroy 3 of these" etc... As I moved through the zone I began to mark on my map potentially good grind spots. Questing here is great and the best part of the zone is the amount of mobs on the road. As you run through just grab the wolves, humanoids or whatever you can then stop to put up storm field, and idol and HoT up and watch the XP flow! In the eastern region of the zone, designed for mid to high 40's, you'll find the lookout camp, a settlement with it's own rez point and quests. If you reach the area in the mid 40's as I did, all of the quests may not be open to you, but fear not, you are already nearby a lucrative grinding spot! Head off the back hill of the settlement (carefully) and drop down. You'll find a bunch of 47-49ish mobs named "Atzel Ranger" and "Atzel Thug". These mobs can be a little bit rough at 45-46 so you want to only grab 2-3 at a time. Make sure your heals are all applied before running in then set up quick because you can't outlast the damage forever. Although it can be rough to get the hang of, the re-spawns are quick and each mob can net you nearly or just over 1,000 xp. Tip: If the area is crowded switch instances and go back again for better xp. After I was in my higher 40's I gathered the quests I could from the lookout camp and headed south to complete them, which is where I stayed for quite a while. Here you'll find TONS of werewovles and undead mobs your level. The xp is simply great, between the quests you get here and the grind xp, you'll have no problem raising yourself up to 50 or 51, at which point you'll be ready for...
Eglophian Mountains (or something of similar spelling :))... You'll get to them by leaving via the east side of the FotD map. Once you enter, grab the quest or two at the first camp, do them, then head down the road to the main town. I'll warn you now some of this zone is simply mind numbing, you will grind, and grind a lot, but you're a ToS so who cares?! One thing to note about this zone is that while there ARE some decent quests, many of them are not standard in that they are repeatable, but only give 5,000 xp per turn in as opposed to the 15,000-30,000 one time turn in of other quests. At first I tried to repeat these but I soon realized travel time (or dying and rebuffing time) simply made it not worth the effort. The main rule of this zone: Grind as much as possible and just do quests if they're on your way. The only place I really WENT specifically for quests was the cannibal caves, which turned out to be awsome xp for the low 50's. Here you can complete a couple quests and kill AoE packs of mobs each dropping for 750-850 xp per kill (not including chain kills). For me this zone was a grindfest and as such I'm not going to document every kill but I'll outline many of the major grind spots for my for levels 50-58.
--> Cannibal Caves: mobs of level 54'ish
--> White hand camp just east of cannibal caves, mobs 53-55
--> Apes and random cannibals, mobs of anywhere from 54-59 in a ravine that runs north-south just west of cannibal caves.
--> HUGE Vanir Camp west and southwest of the "Mountain Hunting Lodge" rez point, mobs level 58-60.
These were the main spots I used to get myself up to 58, even though some parts were boring, XP is good and you can blast through this zone in 1 day or less of solid playing.
At 58 it was suggested I head to "Thunder River," and so I did :) To get to Thunder River you must first enter Poitain (I entered this via a teleporter at the outcast camp in the northwest corner of Wild Lands). After entering Poitain follow the main road all the way to the edge of the map to enter Thunder River. Once inside I found myself with only a couple red quests, but fear not, some of the best grinding I've encountered so far is coming up! You can complete these quests solo just by AoEing the mobs needed. After that you are going to want to grind the humanoid mobs near your quests all the way until 60, it may take you a couple of hours but it's worth it and at 60 you get an amazing spell which I'll outline in the highlights section at the end of this. After you are 60 you have 2 choices for this zone, either continue to grind the humanoid mobs, or kill boars. I opted for the boars since the human area was getting cluttered with other players and there was only one instance of the zone. The boars are found down the road from the humans and are level 63-64. They are tough so you'll only want to have a flow of 2-3 at once, any more than that will probably overwhelm you. These boars are excellent because there are several fields of them, the respawn time is fairly quick and they give you a whopping 1600-1700 xp per kill! After hitting 61 I logged off to write this journal, but I now plan to head to Atzel's approach to level up a bit there until more quests open up for me in TR.
HIGHLIGHTS: My spec obviously changed a lot as this journal covers close to 20 levels. My main spell rotation used is still to HoT up, run in before applying storm field, storm crown and dropping an idol. The strategy seems affective and with well placed heals you can manage a good sized pull of mobs above your level. I also received "Vital Shock" from my feats. This spell is a quick cast (1.5 seconds) and not only shocks your target for about 300-400 damage, heals you for a few hundred hp, restores your mana AND restores you stam. It has a 1 min or so cooldown so you can't use it a lot but it's awesome for a close save or finishing a mob off quick.
CALL LIGHTNING: At 60 you gain the spell "Call Lightning," this spell helps a ton and is great for getting chain kills (and thus increased XP). Call lightning takes a couple seconds to cast and is on a cooldown of about 40 seconds. The spell has a chance, (in my experience about 75% for each mob or higher) to hit anyone near you for 600-1500 damage. Wow! The spell is great because now you can take even larger AoE pulls, I use the spell both as a finisher and as a way toget big pulls down quick, making it much easier to keep my HP up above theirs'.
Hope this helped some of you ToS's out there and thanks for reading!
Settar
Levels gained this session: 43-61 (I've got a lot of ground to cover).
Feat Spec Used: Click HERE for feat build.
Groupings: Solo
At level 43 I was off to Fields of the Dead, on our server it's also known as "Fields of the Disconnect" due to performance issues in the zone, but I was one of the lucky few to avoid them and enjoy the zone to its fullest. Upon entering I found a couple camps of NPCs near the beginning with some fairly basic quests, "kill 20 of these", "destroy 3 of these" etc... As I moved through the zone I began to mark on my map potentially good grind spots. Questing here is great and the best part of the zone is the amount of mobs on the road. As you run through just grab the wolves, humanoids or whatever you can then stop to put up storm field, and idol and HoT up and watch the XP flow! In the eastern region of the zone, designed for mid to high 40's, you'll find the lookout camp, a settlement with it's own rez point and quests. If you reach the area in the mid 40's as I did, all of the quests may not be open to you, but fear not, you are already nearby a lucrative grinding spot! Head off the back hill of the settlement (carefully) and drop down. You'll find a bunch of 47-49ish mobs named "Atzel Ranger" and "Atzel Thug". These mobs can be a little bit rough at 45-46 so you want to only grab 2-3 at a time. Make sure your heals are all applied before running in then set up quick because you can't outlast the damage forever. Although it can be rough to get the hang of, the re-spawns are quick and each mob can net you nearly or just over 1,000 xp. Tip: If the area is crowded switch instances and go back again for better xp. After I was in my higher 40's I gathered the quests I could from the lookout camp and headed south to complete them, which is where I stayed for quite a while. Here you'll find TONS of werewovles and undead mobs your level. The xp is simply great, between the quests you get here and the grind xp, you'll have no problem raising yourself up to 50 or 51, at which point you'll be ready for...
Eglophian Mountains (or something of similar spelling :))... You'll get to them by leaving via the east side of the FotD map. Once you enter, grab the quest or two at the first camp, do them, then head down the road to the main town. I'll warn you now some of this zone is simply mind numbing, you will grind, and grind a lot, but you're a ToS so who cares?! One thing to note about this zone is that while there ARE some decent quests, many of them are not standard in that they are repeatable, but only give 5,000 xp per turn in as opposed to the 15,000-30,000 one time turn in of other quests. At first I tried to repeat these but I soon realized travel time (or dying and rebuffing time) simply made it not worth the effort. The main rule of this zone: Grind as much as possible and just do quests if they're on your way. The only place I really WENT specifically for quests was the cannibal caves, which turned out to be awsome xp for the low 50's. Here you can complete a couple quests and kill AoE packs of mobs each dropping for 750-850 xp per kill (not including chain kills). For me this zone was a grindfest and as such I'm not going to document every kill but I'll outline many of the major grind spots for my for levels 50-58.
--> Cannibal Caves: mobs of level 54'ish
--> White hand camp just east of cannibal caves, mobs 53-55
--> Apes and random cannibals, mobs of anywhere from 54-59 in a ravine that runs north-south just west of cannibal caves.
--> HUGE Vanir Camp west and southwest of the "Mountain Hunting Lodge" rez point, mobs level 58-60.
These were the main spots I used to get myself up to 58, even though some parts were boring, XP is good and you can blast through this zone in 1 day or less of solid playing.
At 58 it was suggested I head to "Thunder River," and so I did :) To get to Thunder River you must first enter Poitain (I entered this via a teleporter at the outcast camp in the northwest corner of Wild Lands). After entering Poitain follow the main road all the way to the edge of the map to enter Thunder River. Once inside I found myself with only a couple red quests, but fear not, some of the best grinding I've encountered so far is coming up! You can complete these quests solo just by AoEing the mobs needed. After that you are going to want to grind the humanoid mobs near your quests all the way until 60, it may take you a couple of hours but it's worth it and at 60 you get an amazing spell which I'll outline in the highlights section at the end of this. After you are 60 you have 2 choices for this zone, either continue to grind the humanoid mobs, or kill boars. I opted for the boars since the human area was getting cluttered with other players and there was only one instance of the zone. The boars are found down the road from the humans and are level 63-64. They are tough so you'll only want to have a flow of 2-3 at once, any more than that will probably overwhelm you. These boars are excellent because there are several fields of them, the respawn time is fairly quick and they give you a whopping 1600-1700 xp per kill! After hitting 61 I logged off to write this journal, but I now plan to head to Atzel's approach to level up a bit there until more quests open up for me in TR.
HIGHLIGHTS: My spec obviously changed a lot as this journal covers close to 20 levels. My main spell rotation used is still to HoT up, run in before applying storm field, storm crown and dropping an idol. The strategy seems affective and with well placed heals you can manage a good sized pull of mobs above your level. I also received "Vital Shock" from my feats. This spell is a quick cast (1.5 seconds) and not only shocks your target for about 300-400 damage, heals you for a few hundred hp, restores your mana AND restores you stam. It has a 1 min or so cooldown so you can't use it a lot but it's awesome for a close save or finishing a mob off quick.
CALL LIGHTNING: At 60 you gain the spell "Call Lightning," this spell helps a ton and is great for getting chain kills (and thus increased XP). Call lightning takes a couple seconds to cast and is on a cooldown of about 40 seconds. The spell has a chance, (in my experience about 75% for each mob or higher) to hit anyone near you for 600-1500 damage. Wow! The spell is great because now you can take even larger AoE pulls, I use the spell both as a finisher and as a way toget big pulls down quick, making it much easier to keep my HP up above theirs'.
Hope this helped some of you ToS's out there and thanks for reading!
Settar
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Feat(s) of the day #3: "Piercing SC, Storm Throne and Storm Regalia"
Today I'll be clumping three feats together because they all focus on improving one pivotal feat in the Thunder tree: Storm Crown. I'll discuss them each separately to give you an idea of each one's effects and uses, and then explain how they work together.
1) Piercing Storm Crown: This feat directly increases the damage dealt by storm crown by increasing its critical strike chance. Although an exact percentage is not given, 3 points in this will yield a VERY noticeable difference in the damage output of your storm crown. At 57 I level by taking pulls of 3-5 level 60 mobs and each time Storm Crown activates it crits on at least 2 of the mobs I'm fighting.
2) Storm Throne: This feat increases the damage of storm crown, restores the caster mana when it lands, and gives each group member their own "nerfed down" version of Storm Crow... Wow! That's quite a bit for one feat! The damage increase is nice, but minor when compared to the other aspects of this feat. The restore mana on hit is AMAZING, and the damage compliments it because the more damage SC causes, the more mana you get back. Also when Storm Crown is up each party member now has their own mini SC, meaning AoE'ing becomes an even more viable group tactic as your group's damage is increased even more by having more members.
3) Storm Regalia: This feat does each of the following: Increases the electrical damage dealt by the ToS's group members (it's unclear if this increases your own damage or not), gives your group members' attacks a chance to inflict additional lightning damage and restore mana and increases the damage of SC yet again. Again, another great feat jam packed with goodies for any ToS. With this feat it is impossible for a ToS to run out of mana if he keeps SC up while grouping. The amount of mana you get back from your group is insane, and you can know that every time you get mana back, your team mate's attack also caused additional damage!
How do they build on each other? Because the mana restored is a percentage of the damage dealt, every feat that increases the damage of storm crown also increases your mana regeneration. Also when you increases the crit chance with "piercing storm crown" you increase your chance to get mana back in "critical" chunks (each time storm crown crits you regain more mana and a blue "critical strike" message is shown for the mana restore ability). Any build taking storm crown should max each of these feats out, in my personal opinion, to increases the use they get out of storm crown, which is an ability that will carry you all of the way to 80.
The next installment will be a video based around the "Idol of Set" feat (no exploiting!) and will explain damage, uses etc, and I'll most likely group the feats that improve IoS with it in the video.
Thanks for reading,
Settar
1) Piercing Storm Crown: This feat directly increases the damage dealt by storm crown by increasing its critical strike chance. Although an exact percentage is not given, 3 points in this will yield a VERY noticeable difference in the damage output of your storm crown. At 57 I level by taking pulls of 3-5 level 60 mobs and each time Storm Crown activates it crits on at least 2 of the mobs I'm fighting.
2) Storm Throne: This feat increases the damage of storm crown, restores the caster mana when it lands, and gives each group member their own "nerfed down" version of Storm Crow... Wow! That's quite a bit for one feat! The damage increase is nice, but minor when compared to the other aspects of this feat. The restore mana on hit is AMAZING, and the damage compliments it because the more damage SC causes, the more mana you get back. Also when Storm Crown is up each party member now has their own mini SC, meaning AoE'ing becomes an even more viable group tactic as your group's damage is increased even more by having more members.
3) Storm Regalia: This feat does each of the following: Increases the electrical damage dealt by the ToS's group members (it's unclear if this increases your own damage or not), gives your group members' attacks a chance to inflict additional lightning damage and restore mana and increases the damage of SC yet again. Again, another great feat jam packed with goodies for any ToS. With this feat it is impossible for a ToS to run out of mana if he keeps SC up while grouping. The amount of mana you get back from your group is insane, and you can know that every time you get mana back, your team mate's attack also caused additional damage!
How do they build on each other? Because the mana restored is a percentage of the damage dealt, every feat that increases the damage of storm crown also increases your mana regeneration. Also when you increases the crit chance with "piercing storm crown" you increase your chance to get mana back in "critical" chunks (each time storm crown crits you regain more mana and a blue "critical strike" message is shown for the mana restore ability). Any build taking storm crown should max each of these feats out, in my personal opinion, to increases the use they get out of storm crown, which is an ability that will carry you all of the way to 80.
The next installment will be a video based around the "Idol of Set" feat (no exploiting!) and will explain damage, uses etc, and I'll most likely group the feats that improve IoS with it in the video.
Thanks for reading,
Settar
Friday, May 23, 2008
Feat of the Day #2 "Storm Crown"
Today I'll be talking about storm crown, the first feat you'll want to grab after maxing out growing storm. Storm crown admittedly starts out fairly weak, proccing infrequently and for small amounts of damage. You should not discard it, however because the three feats attached to it improve it to be a tool you'll use all the way up to 80. How do you use it? Well you'll have to apply it every thirty seconds which is obnoxious, but it's instant cast and can be applied as you run. Once on it will pulse around you and hit mobs; in my experiences storm crown procs when you are attacking something with your weapon, hitting it with spell damage, or when you yourself are hit. At level 51 the spell hits a mob for 150-200 with 300-400 crits (Which occur quite often since later feats improve crit chance). Also each proc restores mana, which can be 150+ per proc meaning the feat alone nearly eliminates downtime. For any spec, thunder, primarily lightning or any other hybrid you may come up with, grabbing and improving this feat will do you wonders :)
Thanks for reading,
Settar
Thanks for reading,
Settar
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Feat of the Day #1 - "Growing Storm Video"
Hey all, the first installment of the series is up in all of it's video glory on youtube! It's a brief movie with an overview of the "Growing Storm" feat and has some clips of my grinding in the background to save you from my endless blabbing :) If you like what you see and want to be alerted when the next video is out, subscribe to my youtube channel at www.youtube.com/user/RASettar You can find the video up HERE or below this post.
In regards to the Idol of Set video
Hey everyone, unfortunately I have need to remove my video from youtube for the sake of our guild's reputation. While this video was shot and made before the "exploit" was supposed to be fixed, some viewers don't watch the video all the way through and realize that I recognize that it's a bug and that it's not how I normally level. While I appreciate the subscriptions, comments and messages the video generated, I'll have to remove it. I'll be sure to bring up videos for you soon so your subscriptions don't go to waste! Any videos in the future will be clearly explained and hopefully not as open to misinterpretation.
Settar
Settar
First Level 80 in the World!
Congratulations to my guildmate Atomik of Rising Arms. He is now not only the first level 80 on the Tyranny server but also in the world! A whole new segment of the game has just begun for Atomik and many of us hope to join him soon!
May 21, the day of 2,500 views!
Wow everyone, the response to this blog has been overwhelming and for that I thank everyone that stops by. Today the site had over 2,500 views, 1,500 of which were brand new users and 1,000 of which were previous readers returning! I appreciate all of the messages I've been getting and even without those, well, the numbers speak for themselves. Thanks again and I'll continue to strive to build a site up to the expectations of the readers!
Also I know feats specs are always relevant and talked about, so to fill space in between videos and large write ups I'll be posting a "Feat of the day paragraph" each day in which I explain one feat from my spec each day, give numbers and reasoning behind my choices etc... I'll start at the first tier and work my way down starting tomorrow :)
Settar - Tyranny
(Rising Arms)
Also I know feats specs are always relevant and talked about, so to fill space in between videos and large write ups I'll be posting a "Feat of the day paragraph" each day in which I explain one feat from my spec each day, give numbers and reasoning behind my choices etc... I'll start at the first tier and work my way down starting tomorrow :)
Settar - Tyranny
(Rising Arms)
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Leveling Journal Entry 2
Hey everyone it's time for entry 2 of my leveling journal series, thanks in advance to everyone reading :)
OVERVIEW
Levels gained this session: 31-43
Feat Spec. Used: Thunder - Click Here for build
Groupings Used: Solo
I started this session just after hitting 31 and headed to the wild lands of Zelata as I hadn't touched the zone yet. Upon entering I gathered the first quests at the beginning of the first town, called Tesso. Most of these quests were kill quests and as a tempest that sounded great to me! Since you receive Storm Field at 30 and I already had my Storm Crown feat buffed to the max, these quests were fast and I stayed at each site longer than required to grind out some extra XP (as I've said before, kill xp is very important!). My main strategy here was to drop an Idol, put up SF and SC and rush into mobs bringing them back to the idol. as my AoEs killed them I HoT'ed myself up. Wild Lands is an EXTREMELY useful zone if you can save it until the thirties, there's an abundance of quests and it you don't have to look far to find EXCELLENT AoE grind spots (Which I'll list at the end). After making it to 33 in Wild Lands, I headed to the Border Ranges, and instanced zone off of Wild Lands with it's own quests. ..
Since the zone is instanced to your character, you are standing in a gold mine of uninterrupted experience flow once you enter the zone. There are quite a few minions mixed in with tons of normal mobs in the zone, this is great because they hit for nothing, and each give you an extra 40-50 xp when they die on top of the xp from your pull of normal mobs. I would suggest clearing this entire zone a couple times to maximize xp as quests start to run slim in wild lands. I finished up the zone, turned in my quest and wow: I'd made 2 levels in under 2 hours here!
As I was now 35, I headed to Outflow Tunnels in Old Tarantia. As many of you know, this provided a generous amount of grind xp as well as the one or two quests for the zone. Here I would set up large groups of totems and pull rooms of the level 35 mobs back to them, rinse and repeat. Every run through took 15-25 minutes for a full clear and gave nearly a half a level of xp! This is the kind of place a ToS dreams of when they want to grind :) A summarizing video of my Outflow Tunnels adventures was release the other day and can be found on my site at the top of the page or on youtube by clicking HERE. A spent a couple hours in here to quickly get from 35-38 and prepare for my first instance which was....
Sanctum of the Burning Souls! At 38 I gathered the 5 quests I could find for the zone and got together a group from my guild. As we had a PoM along assisting on heals, I got to get my first taste of instancing and aggro control in general. I kept the same spell rotation as when soloing with the exception of letting our tank get some aggro first, and throwing heals in when needed. We completed the instance without incident, but nothing good loot-wise dropped for me : / At the end I had 6 quests to turn in (I had picked up another on the inside of tSoBS) each clocking in at 9800-12500 xp per turn in. I had made 39 and half way to 40.
Now I headed to the Noble District in Old T. I grabbed the first quests inside and went to town taking out the Nemedian rebels overrunning the land there! After the first few quests I had dinged 40 and moved deeper into the zone, opening up a treasure trove of new quests. Unfortunately many were bugged, and I temporairily left the zone to hit 40 elsewhere and make some of the quests more doable. I went to Wild Lands again and headed down to the valley in front of the Sanctum entrance. Here are camps of many level 38 NPCs as well as the area in which you complete two quests from the Outcast Camp in Northwest Wild Lands. I completed the quests and continued to grind until I was one bar away from 41. I did this because the quests were green at the time and I didn't want to level too quickly and gray them out, else they would provide significantly less xp. After turn ins I returned to the Noble District and was delighted to find that the "Villa quests" were available to me now :)
Levels 41-43 were done in the Villas. What are they you might ask? You get quests from various NPC's in the noble district for the Villas, each one is a different house that is instanced and holds many tightly packed together level 40-42 NPCs. These houses are heaven for AoEing and I suggest you let leave after clearing them and let them reset before turning in the quests you can grind them again, each more will give 600+ xp per kill. Once you're done turn in the quests and you'll be pleasantly rewarded by turn in xp of 25,000 to 30,000 PER QUEST. BAM! Now you're 43 :) For my next write up I'll be heading to fields of the dead, and I'll be able to confirm or deny that the zone lives up to it's reputation for AoE grinding experience!
Most Used spells: Storm Field, Storm Crown, and Idol of Set.
SUGGESTED AOE SPOTS LIST:
1) Instanced Border Ranges: mobs level 32-34
2) Outflow Tunnels, with mobs of level 35
3) Valley of Nemidian NPC's in east Wild Lands, mobs of level 38
4) Instanced Villas in Noble District, mobs level 40-42
Thanks a lot everyone for reading, as always I appreciate feedback so feel free to e-mail me or comment on the blog. Also if you havn't seen it yet check out the Outflow Tunnels video for examples of the AoE pulls there :)
Until next time!
Settar - Tyranny
P.S. I won't be making many videos while leveling, but the positive response to my last one encouraged an idea. I'll be making a short video on spellweaving and possibly some other AoE clips once my character hits level 50, so stayed tuned and subscrube to my youtube channel to be the first to be notified! :)
OVERVIEW
Levels gained this session: 31-43
Feat Spec. Used: Thunder - Click Here for build
Groupings Used: Solo
I started this session just after hitting 31 and headed to the wild lands of Zelata as I hadn't touched the zone yet. Upon entering I gathered the first quests at the beginning of the first town, called Tesso. Most of these quests were kill quests and as a tempest that sounded great to me! Since you receive Storm Field at 30 and I already had my Storm Crown feat buffed to the max, these quests were fast and I stayed at each site longer than required to grind out some extra XP (as I've said before, kill xp is very important!). My main strategy here was to drop an Idol, put up SF and SC and rush into mobs bringing them back to the idol. as my AoEs killed them I HoT'ed myself up. Wild Lands is an EXTREMELY useful zone if you can save it until the thirties, there's an abundance of quests and it you don't have to look far to find EXCELLENT AoE grind spots (Which I'll list at the end). After making it to 33 in Wild Lands, I headed to the Border Ranges, and instanced zone off of Wild Lands with it's own quests. ..
Since the zone is instanced to your character, you are standing in a gold mine of uninterrupted experience flow once you enter the zone. There are quite a few minions mixed in with tons of normal mobs in the zone, this is great because they hit for nothing, and each give you an extra 40-50 xp when they die on top of the xp from your pull of normal mobs. I would suggest clearing this entire zone a couple times to maximize xp as quests start to run slim in wild lands. I finished up the zone, turned in my quest and wow: I'd made 2 levels in under 2 hours here!
As I was now 35, I headed to Outflow Tunnels in Old Tarantia. As many of you know, this provided a generous amount of grind xp as well as the one or two quests for the zone. Here I would set up large groups of totems and pull rooms of the level 35 mobs back to them, rinse and repeat. Every run through took 15-25 minutes for a full clear and gave nearly a half a level of xp! This is the kind of place a ToS dreams of when they want to grind :) A summarizing video of my Outflow Tunnels adventures was release the other day and can be found on my site at the top of the page or on youtube by clicking HERE. A spent a couple hours in here to quickly get from 35-38 and prepare for my first instance which was....
Sanctum of the Burning Souls! At 38 I gathered the 5 quests I could find for the zone and got together a group from my guild. As we had a PoM along assisting on heals, I got to get my first taste of instancing and aggro control in general. I kept the same spell rotation as when soloing with the exception of letting our tank get some aggro first, and throwing heals in when needed. We completed the instance without incident, but nothing good loot-wise dropped for me : / At the end I had 6 quests to turn in (I had picked up another on the inside of tSoBS) each clocking in at 9800-12500 xp per turn in. I had made 39 and half way to 40.
Now I headed to the Noble District in Old T. I grabbed the first quests inside and went to town taking out the Nemedian rebels overrunning the land there! After the first few quests I had dinged 40 and moved deeper into the zone, opening up a treasure trove of new quests. Unfortunately many were bugged, and I temporairily left the zone to hit 40 elsewhere and make some of the quests more doable. I went to Wild Lands again and headed down to the valley in front of the Sanctum entrance. Here are camps of many level 38 NPCs as well as the area in which you complete two quests from the Outcast Camp in Northwest Wild Lands. I completed the quests and continued to grind until I was one bar away from 41. I did this because the quests were green at the time and I didn't want to level too quickly and gray them out, else they would provide significantly less xp. After turn ins I returned to the Noble District and was delighted to find that the "Villa quests" were available to me now :)
Levels 41-43 were done in the Villas. What are they you might ask? You get quests from various NPC's in the noble district for the Villas, each one is a different house that is instanced and holds many tightly packed together level 40-42 NPCs. These houses are heaven for AoEing and I suggest you let leave after clearing them and let them reset before turning in the quests you can grind them again, each more will give 600+ xp per kill. Once you're done turn in the quests and you'll be pleasantly rewarded by turn in xp of 25,000 to 30,000 PER QUEST. BAM! Now you're 43 :) For my next write up I'll be heading to fields of the dead, and I'll be able to confirm or deny that the zone lives up to it's reputation for AoE grinding experience!
Most Used spells: Storm Field, Storm Crown, and Idol of Set.
SUGGESTED AOE SPOTS LIST:
1) Instanced Border Ranges: mobs level 32-34
2) Outflow Tunnels, with mobs of level 35
3) Valley of Nemidian NPC's in east Wild Lands, mobs of level 38
4) Instanced Villas in Noble District, mobs level 40-42
Thanks a lot everyone for reading, as always I appreciate feedback so feel free to e-mail me or comment on the blog. Also if you havn't seen it yet check out the Outflow Tunnels video for examples of the AoE pulls there :)
Until next time!
Settar - Tyranny
P.S. I won't be making many videos while leveling, but the positive response to my last one encouraged an idea. I'll be making a short video on spellweaving and possibly some other AoE clips once my character hits level 50, so stayed tuned and subscrube to my youtube channel to be the first to be notified! :)
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Leveling Journal 2 Coming Soon... What's the scoop?
Hey everyone been pretty busy and as such I havn't gained many levels since the last entry, I'm 41 now and I promise at 45 or 46 I'll get the 2nd write up posted. Thanks for everyone who's checked in to both my youtube channel and the site!
Tortage Leveling Guide!
Hey there guys, I know a lot of "new blood" is entering Hyboria today and I wanted to put up a little tortage guide for the masses. This is brief but hopefully it can help some people know where they should be at what times and give them an outline. It was requested via e-mail but the user "Pensoso" sothanks to him/her as well :)
First 5 levels you'll do in that first area, kill everything in there, go off the paths to kill the mini-bosses etc. Once out you'll be at tortage city, here you want to talk to the smith standing outside and do his quest, he'll break your shackles and allow entry into the city. Once you can get into tortage city, grab all of the quests available to you, in the inn, down by the docks, etc. Once everything's rounded up go and do any that are yellow and orange that you can do to squeeze a couple more levels out of the way. After you're done with this head into the in and talk to the NPC to go into night time mode. Now you're in single player and the quest you obtain will be your destiny quest, you probably wanna start this in the 8-10 level range, the destiny quest should get you a few levels and more a lot more quests on tortage will open, so after a few steps of the destiny quest to where it's getting to difficult, head back to daytime mode. Gather any new quests and examine you're log, you'll have some basic quests now around Tortage as well as three main questing areas: The Underhalls, The Ruins, and White Sands Isle. Now just look at which quests are around your level and do your best to do large circuits and get a few done at once. Your goal here is to get to level 16-17 from daytime mode, because from there on it's smooth sailing to 20-21 with your destiny quests. Anyways, now that you're on the move you'll probably want to hit up the ruins and what you can do in white sands first, as many of the underhalls quests are more difficult. Quest on these up to 17, or 16 if you feel yourself spread thin. Then go ahead and enter nightime mode and stick with your destiny quest to 20. As I have said before the MOST IMPORTANT thing to do when leveling, is kill everything on the way from quest to quest, don't try and avoid mobs, just slaughter them if they're in your way. Otherwise with pure questing you usually find yourself short of where you want to be, so the kill xp does add up :)
Settar - Tyranny
First 5 levels you'll do in that first area, kill everything in there, go off the paths to kill the mini-bosses etc. Once out you'll be at tortage city, here you want to talk to the smith standing outside and do his quest, he'll break your shackles and allow entry into the city. Once you can get into tortage city, grab all of the quests available to you, in the inn, down by the docks, etc. Once everything's rounded up go and do any that are yellow and orange that you can do to squeeze a couple more levels out of the way. After you're done with this head into the in and talk to the NPC to go into night time mode. Now you're in single player and the quest you obtain will be your destiny quest, you probably wanna start this in the 8-10 level range, the destiny quest should get you a few levels and more a lot more quests on tortage will open, so after a few steps of the destiny quest to where it's getting to difficult, head back to daytime mode. Gather any new quests and examine you're log, you'll have some basic quests now around Tortage as well as three main questing areas: The Underhalls, The Ruins, and White Sands Isle. Now just look at which quests are around your level and do your best to do large circuits and get a few done at once. Your goal here is to get to level 16-17 from daytime mode, because from there on it's smooth sailing to 20-21 with your destiny quests. Anyways, now that you're on the move you'll probably want to hit up the ruins and what you can do in white sands first, as many of the underhalls quests are more difficult. Quest on these up to 17, or 16 if you feel yourself spread thin. Then go ahead and enter nightime mode and stick with your destiny quest to 20. As I have said before the MOST IMPORTANT thing to do when leveling, is kill everything on the way from quest to quest, don't try and avoid mobs, just slaughter them if they're in your way. Otherwise with pure questing you usually find yourself short of where you want to be, so the kill xp does add up :)
Settar - Tyranny
Monday, May 19, 2008
First Video Released!
Alright everyone I figured I should get a video up as I've been so busy with both RL and the leveling of my character. This is a fairly simple video just to give people a taste of how I'm leveling. Also the voice pieces I recorded for it were not rehearsed so there's some time filling blab I will admit :P Also be sure to subscribe if you like it, drop a comment etc.. It was my first time making a voice over for a video and making anything using Sony Vegas, but I look forward to getting better. Also I plan to host a high quality version on filefront later tonight. You can view the video directly HERE or via this page (it will be up soon).
Sunday, May 18, 2008
New Resource Added
Hey everyone head on over to SATIAH's Blog for great information and commentary on the class we love! Be sure to check out the Spellbook tab too for details on ToS spells. =)
Leveling Journal: Entry 1
Hey everyone the time has come for my first ToS leveling journal. Early Access has been exceptional and just now we're entering the first period of downtime, so way to go Funcom on that! :)
Alright anyways, I'll break this up into a few different parts that were relative to my leveling experiences.
OVERVIEW
Levels gained this session: 1-31
Feat spec used: Click To View - A Primarily Thunder Build
Groups Used
1-20: Group of 5 (ToS x2, HoX x1, Bear Shammy x1, Conq. x1)
20-25: Group of 2 (Conq. + Myself)
25-31: Solo
1-20: As you can see I made sure to try different sized groups to see how I contributed on my character with my mainly Thunder specialization. In the 5 man group I focussed on keeping my HoT's up, mainly using 'Life of Set', and throwing in my "Lightning Strike" nuke whenever our enemies were clumped up and thus would eat the AoE. As I began to spec into "Lightning Crown" I was sure to pick up the feat that enabled my group to have a similar pulsing AoE to my own on each member. This was when the Thunder spec really started to support the large group gameplay, with an AoE field on each group member, area of effect pulls in general became much cleaner and more efficient. I mainly used lightning strike for damage here, suplemented by Charged Blast when off cooldown. Storm crown seems really beneficial but I didn't get the hang of keeping it applied until the mid 20's, since you have to apply it every 30 seconds it can easily expire unnoticed.
20-25: During these levels I duo'ed with a conqueror from my guild mainly questing in the Khopshev Province of Stygia. This zone provides an abundance of quests for all levels 20-30ish but seems to do a better job than the other two in providing fast XP in the LOW twenties.
Duo'ing seemed much more efficient in straight up grinding out levels not only duo to the straight XP ratios but also to the fact that you lose time when coordinating the quests and locations of everyone in a 5 to 6 man group, not to mention collection quests are atrocious with a big group. I would heal my conq., Hurx, and let him get aggro on a large camp of mobs before running in, applying storm crown, and beginning to cast Lightning Strike. This method was very effective for kill quests and we were able to tear through any quest we had short of a couple red "Group" tagged quests. In these levels I was maxing out my feats that improved lightning crown and this shot my damage WAY up improving my AoE capabilities quite a bit.
25-31: At this point I broke off in the wee hours of morning for a power nap and awoke to find my leveling partner offline. Now it was time for the real test, to see how I could fair on my own. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that my level rates went insane as a soloing Tempest of Set. I leveled in a progression of zones for these levels as follows: Conal's Valley > Khopshev Province > Wild Lands of Zelata (started the Wilds right before servers went down).
When questing in these zones I noticed that most quests had a good deal of walking distance between their givers and their objectives, so here is the MOST IMPORTANT piece of leveling advice I can give so far: Kill everything. What I mean to say is, don't just walk from place to place, stray from the roads and use your amazing AoE powers to take a few mobs at a time, zig-zag back and forth over the path and kill anything within a few levels of you. The difference is HUGE, it all adds up and it's worth your time to take a little longer to get to a questing area if it means you gain a few thousand XP along the way.
Anyways, during this time your spec really begins to mature, as your storm crown becomes more potent and you begin to invest into Idol of set. Oh and a note on Idol of Set, whether intended or not, you can summon unlimited Idols right now (pictured on the right side of my page) and it seems a little overpowered as you can solo some pretty rough pulls with an army of totems :P Also when you hit 30, you gain STORM FIELD and your troubled days are over, storm field constantly pulses aoe damage around you, at this point you are an AoE machine and I expect to fly through 31-40. At this point you'll have Storm Crown, Storm Field and your Idol(s) of Set all pulsing lightning damage out around you... At this point leveling becomes a blast as you blow through large camps for kills quests and find yourself pulling ahead of many other classes in XP/hour. Just remember to keep those HoT's up and use your CC if needed (Quicksand the AoE root and Cobra Stare the 5 second stun have saved my butt more times than I can count).
Notes on PVP for this entry: Even when minding your own business (wink wink) PvP on a PvP server is ever present. After 45 pvp encounters thus far (30 kills to 15 deaths) I think the most important thing to do is to not rush yourself. When you are about to engage someone you should be fully HoT'ed and rather than straight up nuking, begin setting up camp. Apply storm crown, place your Idol of Set and apply storm field, the pulsing AoE damage is far superior to straight up nuking in pvp because if you aren't actively casting a spell, you are free to heal, melee, quickly CC etc. whereas if you were in the middle of lightning strike you would have to cancel it and begin casting another spell to switch gears. So in review, HoT up get your pulsing AoE's up and get in their face, make sure you use your weapon too in between casts, it helps!
That's all for today everyone,
Set'tar
P.S. I'll be getting some fun screenshots up for you guys that highlight some points made in this post as soon as the servers are back up, so keep checking back in as the day goes on! :) Also I'd love to hear what people think of the write up or site in general, either leave a comment on this post or e-mail me at settar3@live.com or even contact me via my youtube channel with any questions or comments.
Alright anyways, I'll break this up into a few different parts that were relative to my leveling experiences.
OVERVIEW
Levels gained this session: 1-31
Feat spec used: Click To View - A Primarily Thunder Build
Groups Used
1-20: Group of 5 (ToS x2, HoX x1, Bear Shammy x1, Conq. x1)
20-25: Group of 2 (Conq. + Myself)
25-31: Solo
1-20: As you can see I made sure to try different sized groups to see how I contributed on my character with my mainly Thunder specialization. In the 5 man group I focussed on keeping my HoT's up, mainly using 'Life of Set', and throwing in my "Lightning Strike" nuke whenever our enemies were clumped up and thus would eat the AoE. As I began to spec into "Lightning Crown" I was sure to pick up the feat that enabled my group to have a similar pulsing AoE to my own on each member. This was when the Thunder spec really started to support the large group gameplay, with an AoE field on each group member, area of effect pulls in general became much cleaner and more efficient. I mainly used lightning strike for damage here, suplemented by Charged Blast when off cooldown. Storm crown seems really beneficial but I didn't get the hang of keeping it applied until the mid 20's, since you have to apply it every 30 seconds it can easily expire unnoticed.
20-25: During these levels I duo'ed with a conqueror from my guild mainly questing in the Khopshev Province of Stygia. This zone provides an abundance of quests for all levels 20-30ish but seems to do a better job than the other two in providing fast XP in the LOW twenties.
Duo'ing seemed much more efficient in straight up grinding out levels not only duo to the straight XP ratios but also to the fact that you lose time when coordinating the quests and locations of everyone in a 5 to 6 man group, not to mention collection quests are atrocious with a big group. I would heal my conq., Hurx, and let him get aggro on a large camp of mobs before running in, applying storm crown, and beginning to cast Lightning Strike. This method was very effective for kill quests and we were able to tear through any quest we had short of a couple red "Group" tagged quests. In these levels I was maxing out my feats that improved lightning crown and this shot my damage WAY up improving my AoE capabilities quite a bit.
25-31: At this point I broke off in the wee hours of morning for a power nap and awoke to find my leveling partner offline. Now it was time for the real test, to see how I could fair on my own. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that my level rates went insane as a soloing Tempest of Set. I leveled in a progression of zones for these levels as follows: Conal's Valley > Khopshev Province > Wild Lands of Zelata (started the Wilds right before servers went down).
When questing in these zones I noticed that most quests had a good deal of walking distance between their givers and their objectives, so here is the MOST IMPORTANT piece of leveling advice I can give so far: Kill everything. What I mean to say is, don't just walk from place to place, stray from the roads and use your amazing AoE powers to take a few mobs at a time, zig-zag back and forth over the path and kill anything within a few levels of you. The difference is HUGE, it all adds up and it's worth your time to take a little longer to get to a questing area if it means you gain a few thousand XP along the way.
Anyways, during this time your spec really begins to mature, as your storm crown becomes more potent and you begin to invest into Idol of set. Oh and a note on Idol of Set, whether intended or not, you can summon unlimited Idols right now (pictured on the right side of my page) and it seems a little overpowered as you can solo some pretty rough pulls with an army of totems :P Also when you hit 30, you gain STORM FIELD and your troubled days are over, storm field constantly pulses aoe damage around you, at this point you are an AoE machine and I expect to fly through 31-40. At this point you'll have Storm Crown, Storm Field and your Idol(s) of Set all pulsing lightning damage out around you... At this point leveling becomes a blast as you blow through large camps for kills quests and find yourself pulling ahead of many other classes in XP/hour. Just remember to keep those HoT's up and use your CC if needed (Quicksand the AoE root and Cobra Stare the 5 second stun have saved my butt more times than I can count).
Notes on PVP for this entry: Even when minding your own business (wink wink) PvP on a PvP server is ever present. After 45 pvp encounters thus far (30 kills to 15 deaths) I think the most important thing to do is to not rush yourself. When you are about to engage someone you should be fully HoT'ed and rather than straight up nuking, begin setting up camp. Apply storm crown, place your Idol of Set and apply storm field, the pulsing AoE damage is far superior to straight up nuking in pvp because if you aren't actively casting a spell, you are free to heal, melee, quickly CC etc. whereas if you were in the middle of lightning strike you would have to cancel it and begin casting another spell to switch gears. So in review, HoT up get your pulsing AoE's up and get in their face, make sure you use your weapon too in between casts, it helps!
That's all for today everyone,
Set'tar
P.S. I'll be getting some fun screenshots up for you guys that highlight some points made in this post as soon as the servers are back up, so keep checking back in as the day goes on! :) Also I'd love to hear what people think of the write up or site in general, either leave a comment on this post or e-mail me at settar3@live.com or even contact me via my youtube channel with any questions or comments.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Early Access Delayed... What shall we do?
Well, turns out we have two and a half more hours to wait until we get to log in... Oh well, what else can be expected of a launch day? :) Until then I'll be re-watching the 1984 "Conan The Barbarian" film and reading up on my lore book that came with my game box. Hope everyone has some good distractions planned, because even the optimist should anticipate some downtime over the next few days. In case you need some ideas, Here are some things I've found around the interwebs to keep people busy :)
1) Defend Your Castle - Addicting flash game :)
2) HERE is a little screen-shot compilation by the Youtube user 'hjjjoo'
3) A REALLY COOL SONG
4) A nice overview of LORE from the AoC-Wiki
1) Defend Your Castle - Addicting flash game :)
2) HERE is a little screen-shot compilation by the Youtube user 'hjjjoo'
3) A REALLY COOL SONG
4) A nice overview of LORE from the AoC-Wiki
Friday, May 16, 2008
Launch Is Upon Us!
Hey everyone, just a good nights sleep away from the opening of Early Release servers! After my first day of experiences I'll be posting a write up for my leveling etc so there's something decent to read here. Until then however, I'd like to share the feta spec I'll be aiming for for my first 35 levels or so. This build should give me good damage power as I'll need it leveling in an AoE based group. After the mid thirties I'll probably be switching to thunder, and I'll be sure to write up my reasoning for feat changes whenever I switch things around. Anywho, HERE is about what I'll be aiming for for the first 35 levels of play. If I were to continue in the lightning tree I'd pick up the Auto-crit feat and the mana restore ones, but as I said before, I'll probably be switching around this time. Oh, and it has been decided that I'll be rolling on the TYRANNY server with my guild, have fun all!
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Servers Announced!
Alright everyone we can finally see what server names were chosen for release :) Click HERE to check it out!
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
New Resources Added!
A few new resources were added today:
>>>AoC Wiki's Tempest of Set page<<<
>>>ToS Feat Calculator<<<
>>>Ten Ton Hammer's Official ToS Class Interview<<<
The links to these pages and more can be found at the top of this page, listed in alphabetical order.
>>>AoC Wiki's Tempest of Set page<<<
>>>ToS Feat Calculator<<<
>>>Ten Ton Hammer's Official ToS Class Interview<<<
The links to these pages and more can be found at the top of this page, listed in alphabetical order.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Pre-Launch
Hello all I'm Set'tar from the Rising Arms guild of Age of Conan. I'm getting quite excited as launch (3 day headstart for me) is less than a week away! I'll be rolling a Tempest of Set, as my blog title implies, on a Free for All PVP server. I'll be using this page to blog about the Tempest of Set class to give tips and progress updates on pvp and leveling to anyone interested.
See you all on the battlefield!
See you all on the battlefield!
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